Down the Mother Lode Part 3

"Mine Host" came quickly forward. "It is not permitted, senora, that you--"

Rosa smiled cynically. "I, the silken hawk, came not to flutter your nest of doves, senor. I came but for a little hour to meet a man who--Ah, he is coming now. Sheriff Paul, I have that to tell you which--"

The sheriff offered his arm ceremoniously and they pa.s.sed out of the ballroom. Tender hearted Elena was conscience stricken. She dropped her lover's arm and darted after them through the big doors.

"Oh, I am sorry, I did not mean--please, Sheriff Paul, she may have the dress, poor thing! But for her, I should have had no man to marry on my wedding day next week."

Sheriff Paul turned quickly. Elena, frightened, clapped two little hands over her mouth. Rosa shrugged indifferently, and tipping back her small, black head, listened to the music in the ballroom.

"Madam," to Rosa, "you sent for me, making strange promises which, for the safety of this community, I hope that you are now pleased to keep."

Without lowering her chin she looked at him through sinister, narrowed eyelids, and a smile of triumphant malice touched her face.

"Senor, I make no promises which I fail to keep," she answered, "and there is also a promise which I made Senor Tom Bell--"

"There is some one knocking at the cellar door," said Tom Bell to Phillips. "See who is there, and be careful that you let no one in without the bullet and the pa.s.sword."

"Tom, I'm afraid," whined Driscoll "that Spanish devil's promised to get you hung more than once lately, and last night I know she sent that Mexican Jose of hers out somewhere with a string and bullet. I saw them--"

"What! Why didn't you tell me before? Listen! Phillips is in trouble!

Go help him! Call the boys! Hurry!" As Jim Driscoll, with a halt in his walk, left him, Tom Bell stole quietly to one of the tunnels and ran to the trap-door which opened into an outhouse.

He found the corral full of saddle-horses and the Mountaineer House completely surrounded by Sheriff Paul's, posse.

"Come on, boys," said a voice.

"Did he get in?"

"Ye-ah--put his hand in with the bullet on a string, got his foot in the door, gave the pa.s.sword and heaved the door wide open. Come on, now, and there's orders not to take the woman, remember."

Bell stole a rawboned roan from the corral and was far from the frightful battle at Mountaineer House before he dared burst forth into the vituperation which he heaped upon the name of Rosa Phillips.

Rosa sat strumming her guitar idly, and musing upon the events of the past few months. Jack Phillips was serving a term in prison. Driscoll had also been sent to the penitentiary. One day a rumor reached her that he was threatening to turn state's evidence, and to divulge the truth in regard to Rosenthal.

Three days later an iron bar was accidentally(?) dropped on his head; through some mysterious agent he was given poison, and died. At the memory of it Rosa smiled her enigmatic and implacable smile. Tom Bell was at large somewhere far to the north and she--she was rich now and she would go back to Monterey, perhaps. She drew her guitar closer and sang:

"The far distant sound of a harp's soft strings--an echo on the air, The hidden page may be full of sweet things, of things that once were fair.

There's a turned down page in each life, and mine--a story might unfold, But the end was sad of the dream divine. It better rests untold."

It was time for Harlan to arrive. Charlie Harlan, the man whom she hoped to cajole into buying Mountaineer House. She strolled out into the garden as Harlan rode up and tied his horse under one of the trees.

A happy pair pa.s.sed. A delicate girl mounted upon a little mule and a st.u.r.dy youth walking in the dust, his hand upon the beast's shoulder.

With their serene and joy-illumined faces they somehow suggested the holy family, symbolical of all that was divine in a sordid world.

The girl smiled and waved to Rosa, but the young man doffed his hat coldly and hastened by.

"The sweet little Elena," said Rosa to herself, "and her lover-husband.

I wear the silken wedding gown which no lover sees, but she travels the way in calico with the man she loves. May the Blessed Virgin grant that she shall have no turned down pages in her life," and forcing her proud and bitter mouth into a provocative smile, she went forward to welcome Harlan.

The Hanging of Charlie Price

III

"He goes to the well, And he stands on the brink, And stops for a spell Jest to listen and think: Let's see--well, that forty-foot grave wasn't his, sir, that day, anyhow."

--Bret Harte.

Everywhere in the foothills of the Sierras there are still evidences of gold mining. High cliffs face the rivers, all that is left of hills torn down at the point of the powerful hydraulic nozzles, with great heaps of cobbles at their base which Mother Nature, even in seventy years has been unable to change or cover.

At the mouth of nearly every ravine there are countless little mounds which marked the end, or dump of the sluice-box in the placer mining.

When the mound got the proper height the sluice was simply lengthened, like putting another joint onto a caterpillar--and there you were! The sluice-boxes have long since been moved away or rotted to mould but the little mounds remain, to be mansions for hustling colonies of small black ants.

The country, in various localities, is pitted with prospect holes, and the hills are pierced with drift tunnels and abandoned mines. Some of the prospect holes are mere gra.s.sy cups, others are very deep and partly filled with water.

Some of the most engrossing days of my childhood were spent in exploring these places with my two boy companions. We would fell an oak sapling across the mouth of the hole, tie a rope, usually my pony's lariat, to the tree and slide down it to explore the depths below. If we came to a side drift we would swing into it, light our candle-lanterns and go looking for gold. We were always sure that we should yet find a forgotten cache of gold--perhaps guarded by a lonely skeleton--but we never did!

About all we ever got out of it was snake-frights (naturally, sans alcoholic origin), until we were sure, the snakes were not rattlers; baby bats, which invariably tried to bite us; swallows' eggs, wet feet, and a good spanking if the family happened to find out what we had been up to.

I suppose that it really was a very dangerous pastime, for although sometimes the drift tunnel led us to a sunlit opening on the hillside, more often we reached a blind end and were forced to return to the main shaft and to "s.h.i.+n" up the rope, with from ten to forty feet of inky water waiting to catch us if we fell.

Or we went up the river to "swing the rocker" for old Ali Quong. He always pretended to drive us away, bellowing fiercely as soon as he caught sight of us, "Wha.s.sa malla you? Alle time you come see Ali Quong!

Ketchem too-oo much tlouble for po-or old Chinaman"--the whole time with his wrinkled, brown face wreathed in smiles.

There we stayed the long summer afternoon, swinging the rocker while Quong shoveled in the pebbly dirt, watching him take the black sand, which held the gold, off the canvas with his little spade-like scoop, and panning it for him in the heavy iron pan, fascinated to see what we should find. Usually only a few small nuggets in a group of colors (flake gold), but once we found a good sized nugget which Quong gallantly gave me for a "Chinese New Year" gift. At dusk he sent us home, each with a bar of brown barley sugar--smelling to the blue of opium--which he fished out of one of his numerous jumpers with his long-fingered, sensitive hands.

They are dead, long ago--Ah Quong, old Sing, Shotgun-Chinaman--and gone to the blessed region of the Five Immortals, I know, but every true Californian will understand the regard the pioneer families had for these faithful Chinese servitors who took as much loving pride in the aristocratic and unblemished names of their "familees" as the white persons who bore them. Four generations of my family, old Sing lived to serve--but I must get on with my forty-niner's tale of the hanging of Charlie Price!

"Eh, mon, but the spring is here again," said Jim "Hutch" (Hutchinson) to Old Man Greeley.

"Is it so, now?" returned the little man, gazing off through the sunny, velvet air to a world which had been painted clean, new green. His shrewd, blue eyes returned to the ponderous Scotchman.

"And how came you to realize that it was spring?" he asked maliciously.

"How came you to lick Sandy McArthur-r-r?" Hutchinson came back at him.

"Tell me that."

"Well, but whisper, man," said old Jimmie plaintively, "what else could a man be after doin'? Me boots were on, an' I could not run away an'

climb a tree, so I used them on McArthur."

"Ye're a wild fightin' Irishman with no regard for the Sabbath,"