From Sand Hill to Pine Part 15

"I came to see my father because I wanted to," she said, with equal bluntness.

"And I came to see him though I DIDN'T want to," he said, with a cynical laugh.

She turned, and fixed her brown eyes inquiringly upon him.

"Why did you come, then?"

"I was ordered by my directors."

"Then you did not believe he was a thief?" she asked, her eyes softening.

"It would ill become me to accuse your father or my directors," he answered diplomatically.

She was quick enough to detect the suggestion of moral superiority in his tone, but woman enough to forgive it. "You're no friend of Windibrook," she said, "I know."

"I am not," he replied frankly.

"If you would like to see my popper, I can manage it," she said hesitatingly. "He'll do anything for me," she added, with a touch of her old pride.

"Who could blame him?" returned Masterton gravely. "But if he is a free man now, and able to go where he likes, and to see whom he likes, he may not care to give an audience to a mere messenger."

"You wait and let me see him first," said the girl quickly. Then, as the sound of sleigh-bells came from the road outside, she added, "Here he is. I'll get your clothes; they are out here drying by the fire in the shed." She disappeared through a back door, and returned presently bearing his dried garments. "Dress yourself while I take popper into the shed," she said quickly, and ran out into the road.

Masterton dressed himself with difficulty. Although circulation was now restored, and he felt a glow through his warmed clothes, he had been sorely bruised and shaken by his fall. He had scarcely finished dressing when Montagu Trixit entered from the shed. Masterton looked at him with a new interest and a respect he had never felt before. There certainly was little of the daughter in this keen-faced, resolute-lipped man, though his brown eyes, like hers, had the same frank, steadfast audacity. With a business brevity that was hurried but not unkindly, he hoped Masterton had fully recovered.

"Thanks to your daughter, I'm all right now," said Masterton. "I need not tell you that I believe I owe my life to her energy and courage, for I think you have experienced what she can do in that way. But YOU have had the advantage of those who have only enjoyed her social acquaintance in knowing all the time what she was capable of," he added significantly.

"She is a good girl," said Trixit briefly, yet with a slight rise in color on his dark, sallow cheek, and a sudden wavering of his steadfast eyes. "She tells me you have a message from your directors. I think I know what it is, but we won't discuss it now. As I am going directly to Sacramento, I shall not see them, but I will give you an answer to take to them when we reach the station. I am going to give you a lift there when my daughter is ready. And here she is."

It was the old Cissy that stepped into the room, dressed as she was when she left her father's house two days before. Oddly enough, he fancied that something of her old conscious manner had returned with her clothes, and as he stepped with her into the back seat of the covered sleigh in waiting, he could not help saying, "I really think I understand you better in your other clothes."

A slight blush mounted to Cissy's cheek, but her eyes were still audacious. "All the same, I don't think you'd like to walk down Main Street with me in that rig, although you once thought nothing of taking me over your old mill in your blue blouse and overalls." And having apparently greatly relieved her proud little heart by this enigmatic statement, she grew so chatty and confidential that the young man was satisfied that he had been in love with her from the first!

When they reached the station, Trixit drew him aside. Taking an envelope marked "Private Contracts" from his pocket, he opened it and displayed some papers. "These are the securities. Tell your directors that you have seen them safe in my hands, and that no one else has seen them.

Tell them that if they will send me their renewed notes, dated from to-day, to Sacramento within the next three days, I will return the securities. That is my message."

The young man bowed. But before the coach started he managed to draw near to Cissy. "You are not returning to Canada City," he said.

The young girl made a gesture of indignation. "No! I am never going there again. I go with my popper to Sacramento."

"Then I suppose I must say 'good-by.'"

The girl looked at him in surprise. "Popper says you are coming to Sacramento in three days!"

"Am I?"

He looked at her fixedly. She returned his glance audaciously, steadfastly.

"You are," she said, in her low but distinct voice.

"I will."

And he did.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE FONDA

PART I

"Well!" said the editor of the "Mountain Clarion," looking up impatiently from his copy. "What's the matter now?"

The intruder in his sanctum was his foreman. He was also acting as pressman, as might be seen from his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves spattered with ink, rolled up over the arm that had just been working "the Archimedian lever that moves the world," which was the editor's favorite allusion to the hand-press that strict economy obliged the "Clarion" to use. His braces, slipped from his shoulders during his work, were looped negligently on either side, their functions being replaced by one hand, which occasionally hitched up his trousers to a securer position. A pair of down-at-heel slippers--dear to the country printer--completed his negligee.

But the editor knew that the ink-spattered arm was sinewy and ready, that a stout and loyal heart beat under the soiled s.h.i.+rt, and that the slipshod slippers did not prevent its owner's foot from being "put down"

very firmly on occasion. He accordingly met the shrewd, good-humored blue eyes of his faithful henchman with an interrogating smile.

"I won't keep you long," said the foreman, glancing at the editor's copy with his habitual half humorous toleration of that work, it being his general conviction that news and advertis.e.m.e.nts were the only valuable features of a newspaper; "I only wanted to talk to you a minute about makin' suthin more o' this yer accident to Colonel Starbottle."

"Well, we've a full report of it in, haven't we?" said the editor wonderingly. "I have even made an editorial para. about the frequency of these accidents, and called attention to the danger of riding those half broken Spanish mustangs."

"Yes, ye did that," said the foreman tolerantly; "but ye see, thar's some folks around here that allow it warn't no accident. There's a heap of them believe that no runaway hoss ever mauled the colonel ez HE got mauled."

"But I heard it from the colonel's own lips," said the editor, "and HE surely ought to know."

"He mout know and he moutn't, and if he DID know, he wouldn't tell,"

said the foreman musingly, rubbing his chin with the cleaner side of his arm. "Ye didn't see him when he was picked up, did ye?"

"No," said the editor. "Only after the doctor had attended him. Why?"

"Jake Parmlee, ez picked him up outer the ditch, says that he was half choked, and his black silk neck-handkercher was pulled tight around his throat. There was a mark on his nose ez ef some one had tried to gouge out his eye, and his left ear was chawed ez ef he'd bin down in a reg'lar rough-and-tumble clinch."

"He told me his horse bolted, buck-jumped, threw him, and he lost consciousness," said the editor positively. "He had no reason for lying, and a man like Starbottle, who carries a Derringer and is a dead shot, would have left his mark on somebody if he'd been attacked."

"That's what the boys say is just the reason why he lied. He was TOOK SUDDENT, don't ye see,--he'd no show--and don't like to confess it. See?

A man like HIM ain't goin' to advertise that he kin be tackled and left senseless and no one else got hurt by it! His political influence would be ruined here!"

The editor was momentarily staggered at this large truth.

"Nonsense!" he said, with a laugh. "Who would attack Colonel Starbottle in that fas.h.i.+on? He might have been shot on sight by some political enemy with whom he had quarreled--but not BEATEN."

"S'pose it warn't no political enemy?" said the foreman doggedly.

"Then who else could it be?" demanded the editor impatiently.

"That's jest for the press to find out and expose," returned the foreman, with a significant glance at the editor's desk. "I reckon that's whar the 'Clarion' ought to come in."