As Sam Lewiston backed the horse into the shafts of his backboard and began hitching the tugs to the whiffletree, his wife came out from the kitchen door of the house and drew near, and stood for some time at the horse’s head, her arms folded and her apron rolled around them. For a long moment neither spoke. They had talked over the situation so long and so comprehensively the night before that there seemed to be nothing more to say.

The time was late in the summer, the place a ranch in southwestern Kansas, and Lewiston and his wife were two of a vast population of farmers, wheat growers, who at that moment were passing through a crisis — a crisis that at any moment might culminate in tragedy. Wheat was down to sixty-six.

At length Emma Lewiston spoke.

“Well,” she hazarded, looking vaguely out across the ranch toward the horizon, leagues distant; “well, Sam, there’s always that offer of brother Joe’s. We can quit — and go to Chicago — if the worst comes.”

“And give up!” exclaimed Lewiston, running the lines through the torets. “Leave the ranch! Give up! After all these years!”

His wife made no reply for the moment. Lewiston climbed into the buckboard and gathered up the lines. “Well, here goes for the last try, Emmie,” he said. “Good-by, girl. Maybe things will look better in town to-day.”

“Maybe,” she said gravely. She kissed her husband good-by and stood for some time looking after the buckboard traveling toward the town in a moving pillar of dust.

“I don’t know,” she murmured at length; “I don’t know just how we’re going to make out.”

When he reached town, Lewiston tied the horse to the iron railing in front of the Odd Fellows’ Hall, the ground floor of which was occupied by the post-office, and went across the street and up the stairway of a building of brick and granite — quite the most pretentious structure of the town — and knocked at a door upon the first landing. The door was furnished with a pane of frosted glass, on which, in gold letters, was inscribed, “Bridges & Co., Grain Dealers.”

Bridges himself, a middle-aged man who wore a velvet skull-cap and who was smoking a Pittsburg stogie, met the farmer at the counter and the two exchanged perfunctory greetings.

“Well,” said Lewiston, tentatively, after awhile.

“Well, Lewiston,” said the other, “I can’t take that wheat of yours at any better than sixty-two.”

“Sixty-two.”

“It’s the Chicago price that does it, Lewiston. Truslow is bearing the stuff for all he’s worth. It’s Truslow and the bear clique that stick the knife into us. The price broke again this morning. We’ve just got a wire.”

“Good heavens,” murmured Lewiston, looking vaguely from side to side. “That — that ruins me. I can’t carry my grain any longer — what with storage charges and — and — Bridges, I don’t see just how I’m going to make out. Sixty-two cents a bushel! Why, man, what with this and with that it’s cost me nearly a dollar a bushel to raise that wheat, and now Truslow—”

He turned away abruptly with a quick gesture of infinite discouragement.

He went down the stairs, and making his way to where his buckboard was hitched, got in, and, with eyes vacant, the reins slipping and sliding in his limp, half-open hands, drove slowly back to the ranch. His wife had seen him coming, and met him as he drew up before the barn.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Emmie,” he said as he got out of the buckboard, laying his arm across her shoulder, “Emmie, I guess we’ll take up with Joe’s offer. We’ll go to Chicago. We’re cleaned out!”

… —— and said Party of the Second Part further covenants and agrees to merchandise such wheat in foreign ports, it being understood and agreed between the Party of the First Part and the Party of the Second Part that the wheat hereinbefore mentioned is released and sold to the Party of the Second Part for export purposes only, and not for consumption or distribution within the boundaries of the United States of America or of Canada.

“Now, Mr. Gates, if you will sign for Mr. Truslow I guess that’ll be all,” remarked Hornung when he had finished reading.

Hornung affixed his signature to the two documents and passed them over to Gates, who signed for his principal and client, Truslow — or, as he had been called ever since he had gone into the fight against Hornung’s corner — the Great Bear. Hornung’s secretary was called in and witnessed the signatures, and Gates thrust the contract into his Gladstone bag and stood up, smoothing his hat.

“You will deliver the warehouse receipts for the grain,” began Gates.

“I’ll send a messenger to Truslow’s office before noon,” interrupted Hornung. “You can pay by certified check through the Illinois Trust people.”

When the other had taken himself off, Hornung sat for some moments gazing abstractedly toward his office windows, thinking over the whole matter. He had just agreed to release to Truslow, at the rate of one dollar and ten cents per bushel, one hundred thousand out of the two million and odd bushels of wheat that he, Hornung, controlled, or actually owned. And for the moment he was wondering if, after all, he had done wisely in not goring the Great Bear to actual financial death. He had made him pay one hundred thousand dollars. Truslow was good for this amount. Would it not have been better to have put a prohibitive figure on the grain and forced the Bear into bankruptcy? True, Hornung would then be without his enemy’s money, but Truslow would have been eliminated from the situation, and that — so Hornung told himself — was always a consummation most devoutly, strenuously and diligently to be striven for. Truslow once dead was dead, but the Bear was never more dangerous than when desperate.

“But so long as he can’t get wheat,” muttered Hornung at the end of his reflections, “he can’t hurt me. And he can’t get it. That I know.”

For Hornung controlled the situation. So far back as the February of that year an “unknown bull” had been making his presence felt on the floor of the Board of Trade. By the middle of March the commercial reports of the daily press had begun to speak of “the powerful bull clique”; a few weeks later that legendary condition of affairs implied and epitomized in the magic words “Dollar Wheat” had been attained, and by the first of April, when the price had been boosted to one dollar and ten cents a bushel, Hornung had disclosed his hand, and in place of mere rumours, the definite and authoritative news that May wheat had been cornered in the Chicago pit went flashing around the world from Liverpool to Odessa and from Duluth to Buenos Ayres.

It was — so the veteran operators were persuaded — Truslow himself who had made Hornung’s corner possible. The Great Bear had for once over-reached himself, and, believing himself all-powerful, had hammered the price just the fatal fraction too far down. Wheat had gone to sixty-two — for the time, and under the circumstances, an abnormal price.

When the reaction came it was tremendous. Hornung saw his chance, seized it, and in a few months had turned the tables, had cornered the product, and virtually driven the bear clique out of the pit.

On the same day that the delivery of the hundred thousand bushels was made to Truslow, Hornung met his broker at his lunch club.

“Well,” said the latter, “I see you let go that line of stuff to Truslow.”

Hornung nodded; but the broker added:

“Remember, I was against it from the very beginning. I know we’ve cleared up over a hundred thou’. I would have fifty times preferred to have lost twice that and smashed Truslow dead. Bet you what you like he makes us pay for it somehow.”

“Huh!” grunted his principal. “How about insurance, and warehouse charges, and carrying expenses on that lot? Guess we’d have had to pay those, too, if we’d held on.”

But the other put up his chin, unwilling to be persuaded. “I won’t sleep easy,” he declared, “till Truslow is busted.”

Just as Going mounted the steps on the edge of the pit the great gong struck, a roar of a hundred voices developed with the swiftness of successive explosions, the rush of a hundred men surging downward to the centre of the pit filled the air with the stamp and grind of feet, a hundred hands in eager strenuous gestures tossed upward from out the brown of the crowd, the official reporter in his cage on the margin of the pit leaned far forward with straining ear to catch the opening bid, and another day of battle was begun.

Since the sale of the hundred thousand bushels of wheat to Truslow the “Hornung crowd” had steadily shouldered the price higher until on this particular morning it stood at one dollar and a half. That was Hornung’s price. No one else had any grain to sell.

But not ten minutes after the opening, Going was surprised out of all countenance to hear shouted from the other side of the pit these words:

“Sell May at one-fifty.”

Going was for the moment touching elbows with Kimbark on one side and with Merriam on the other, all three belonging to the “Hornung crowd.” Their answering challenge of “Sold” was as the voice of one man. They did not pause to reflect upon the strangeness of the circumstance. (That was for afterward.) Their response to the offer was as unconscious, as reflex action and almost as rapid, and before the pit was well aware of what had happened the transaction of one thousand bushels was down upon Going’s trading-card and fifteen hundred dollars had changed hands. But here was a marvel — the whole available supply of wheat cornered, Hornung master of the situation, invincible, unassailable; yet behold a man willing to sell, a Bear bold enough to raise his head.

“That was Kennedy, wasn’t it, who made that offer?” asked Kimbark, as Going noted down the trade— “Kennedy, that new man?”

“Yes; who do you suppose he’s selling for; who’s willing to go short at this stage of the game?”

“Maybe he ain’t short.”

“Short! Great heavens, man; where’d he get the stuff?”

“Blamed if I know. We can account for every handful of May. Steady! Oh, there he goes again.”

“Sell a thousand May at one-fifty,” vociferated the bear-broker, throwing out his hand, one finger raised to indicate the number of “contracts” offered. This time it was evident that he was attacking the Hornung crowd deliberately, for, ignoring the jam of traders that swept toward him, he looked across the pit to where Going and Kimbark were shouting “Sold! Sold!” and nodded his head.

A second time Going made memoranda of the trade, and either the Hornung holdings were increased by two thousand bushels of May wheat or the Hornung bank account swelled by at least three thousand dollars of some unknown short’s money.

Of late — so sure was the bull crowd of its position — no one had even thought of glancing at the inspection sheet on the bulletin board. But now one of Going’s messengers hurried up to him with the announcement that this sheet showed receipts at Chicago for that morning of twenty-five thousand bushels, and not credited to Hornung. Some one had got hold of a line of wheat overlooked by the “clique” and was dumping it upon them.

“Wire the Chief,” said Going over his shoulder to Merriam. This one struggled out of the crowd, and on a telegraph blank scribbled:

“Strong bear movement — New man — Kennedy — Selling in lots of five contracts — Chicago receipts twenty-five thousand.”

The message was despatched, and in a few moments the answer came back, laconic, of military terseness:

“Support the market.”

And Going obeyed, Merriam and Kimbark following, the new broker fairly throwing the wheat at them in thousand-bushel lots.

“Sell May at ‘fifty; sell May; sell May.” A moment’s indecision, an instant’s hesitation, the first faint suggestion of weakness, and the market would have broken under them. But for the better part of four hours they stood their ground, taking all that was offered, in constant communication with the Chief, and from time to time stimulated and steadied by his brief, unvarying command:

“Support the market.”

At the close of the session they had bought in the twenty-five thousand bushels of May. Hornung’s position was as stable as a rock, and the price closed even with the opening figure — one dollar and a half.

But the morning’s work was the talk of all La Salle Street. Who was back of the raid?

What was the meaning of this unexpected selling? For weeks the pit trading had been merely nominal. Truslow, the Great Bear, from whom the most serious attack might have been expected, had gone to his country seat at Geneva Lake, in Wisconsin, declaring himself to be out of the market entirely. He went bass-fishing every day.

On a certain day toward the middle of the month, at a time when the mysterious Bear had unloaded some eighty thousand bushels upon Hornung, a conference was held in the library of Hornung’s home. His broker attended it, and also a clean-faced, bright-eyed individual whose name of Cyrus Ryder might have been found upon the pay-roll of a rather well-known detective agency. For upward of half an hour after the conference began the detective spoke, the other two listening attentively, gravely.

“Then, last of all,” concluded Ryder, “I made out I was a hobo, and began stealing rides on the Belt Line Railroad. Know the road? It just circles Chicago. Truslow owns it. Yes? Well, then I began to catch on. I noticed that cars of certain numbers — thirty-one nought thirty-four, thirty-two one ninety — well, the numbers don’t matter, but anyhow, these cars were always switched onto the sidings by Mr. Truslow’s main elevator D soon as they came in. The wheat was shunted in, and they were pulled out again. Well, I spotted one car and stole a ride on her. Say, look here, that car went right around the city on the Belt, and came back to D again, and the same wheat in her all the time. The grain was reinspected — it was raw, I tell you — and the warehouse receipts made out just as though the stuff had come in from Kansas or Iowa.”

“The same wheat all the time!” interrupted Hornung.

“The same wheat — your wheat, that you sold to Truslow.”

“Great snakes!” ejaculated Hornung’s broker. “Truslow never took it abroad at all.”

“Took it abroad! Say, he’s just been running it around Chicago, like the supers in ‘Shenandoah,’ round an’ round, so you’d think it was a new lot, an’ selling it back to you again.”

“No wonder we couldn’t account for so much wheat.”

“Bought it from us at one-ten, and made us buy it back — our own wheat — at one-fifty.”

Hornung and his broker looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then all at once Hornung struck the arm of his chair with his fist and exploded in a roar of laughter. The broker stared for one bewildered moment, then followed his example.

“Sold! Sold!” shouted Hornung almost gleefully. “Upon my soul it’s as good as a Gilbert and Sullivan show. And we — Oh, Lord! Billy, shake on it, and hats off to my distinguished friend, Truslow. He’ll be President some day. Hey! What? Prosecute him? Not I.”

“He’s done us out of a neat hatful of dollars for all that,” observed the broker, suddenly grave.

“Billy, it’s worth the price.”

“We’ve got to make it up somehow.”

“Well, tell you what. We were going to boost the price to one seventy-five next week, and make that our settlement figure.”

“Can’t do it now. Can’t afford it.”

“No. Here; we’ll let out a big link; we’ll put wheat at two dollars, and let it go at that.”

“Two it is, then,” said the broker.

The street was very dark and absolutely deserted. It was a district on the “South Side,” not far from the Chicago River, given up largely to wholesale stores, and after nightfall was empty of all life. The echoes slept but lightly hereabouts, and the slightest footfall, the faintest noise, woke them upon the instant and sent them clamouring up and down the length of the pavement between the iron shuttered fronts. The only light visible came from the side door of a certain “Vienna” bakery, where at one o’clock in the morning loaves of bread were given away to any who should ask. Every evening about nine o’clock the outcasts began to gather about the side door. The stragglers came in rapidly, and the line — the “bread line,” as it was called — began to form. By midnight it was usually some hundred yards in length, stretching almost the entire length of the block.

Toward ten in the evening, his coat collar turned up against the fine drizzle that pervaded the air, his hands in his pockets, his elbows gripping his sides, Sam Lewiston came up and silently took his place at the end of the line.

Unable to conduct his farm upon a paying basis at the time when Truslow, the “Great Bear,” had sent the price of grain down to sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston had turned over his entire property to his creditors, and, leaving Kansas for good, had abandoned farming, and had left his wife at her sister’s boarding-house in Topeka with the understanding that she was to join him in Chicago so soon as he had found a steady job. Then he had come to Chicago and had turned workman. His brother Joe conducted a small hat factory on Archer Avenue, and for a time he found there a meager employment. But difficulties had occurred, times were bad, the hat factory was involved in debts, the repealing of a certain import duty on manufactured felt overcrowded the home market with cheap Belgian and French products, and in the end his brother had assigned and gone to Milwaukee.

Thrown out of work, Lewiston drifted aimlessly about Chicago, from pillar to post, working a little, earning here a dollar, there a dime, but always sinking, sinking, till at last the ooze of the lowest bottom dragged at his feet and the rush of the great ebb went over him and engulfed him and shut him out from the light, and a park bench became his home and the “bread line” his chief makeshift of subsistence.

He stood now in the enfolding drizzle, sodden, stupefied with fatigue. Before and behind stretched the line. There was no talking. There was no sound. The street was empty. It was so still that the passing of a cable-car in the adjoining thoroughfare grated like prolonged rolling explosions, beginning and ending at immeasurable distances. The drizzle descended incessantly. After a long time midnight struck.

There was something ominous and gravely impressive in this interminable line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely still; a close-packed, silent file, waiting, waiting in the vast deserted night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a movement, there under the night and under the slow-moving mists of rain.

Few in the crowd were professional beggars. Most of them were workmen, long since out of work, forced into idleness by long-continued “hard times,” by ill luck, by sickness. To them the “bread line” was a godsend. At least they could not starve. Between jobs here in the end was something to hold them up — a small platform, as it were, above the sweep of black water, where for a moment they might pause and take breath before the plunge.

The period of waiting on this night of rain seemed endless to those silent, hungry men; but at length there was a stir. The line moved. The side door opened. Ah, at last! They were going to hand out the bread.

But instead of the usual white-aproned under-cook with his crowded hampers there now appeared in the doorway a new man — a young fellow who looked like a bookkeeper’s assistant. He bore in his hand a placard, which he tacked to the outside of the door. Then he disappeared within the bakery, locking the door after him.

A shudder of poignant despair, an unformed, inarticulate sense of calamity, seemed to run from end to end of the line. What had happened? Those in the rear, unable to read the placard, surged forward, a sense of bitter disappointment clutching at their hearts.

The line broke up, disintegrated into a shapeless throng — a throng that crowded forward and collected in front of the shut door whereon the placard was affixed. Lewiston, with the others, pushed forward. On the placard he read these words:

“Owing to the fact that the price of grain has been increased to two dollars a bushel, there will be no distribution of bread from this bakery until further notice.”

Lewiston turned away, dumb, bewildered. Till morning he walked the streets, going on without purpose, without direction. But now at last his luck had turned. Overnight the wheel of his fortunes had creaked and swung upon its axis, and before noon he had found a job in the street-cleaning brigade. In the course of time he rose to be first shift-boss, then deputy inspector, then inspector, promoted to the dignity of driving in a red wagon with rubber tires and drawing a salary instead of mere wages. The wife was sent for and a new start made.

But Lewiston never forgot. Dimly he began to see the significance of things. Caught once in the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible engine, he had seen — none better — its workings. Of all the men who had vainly stood in the “bread line” on that rainy night in early summer, he, perhaps, had been the only one who had struggled up to the surface again. How many others had gone down in the great ebb? Grim question; he dared not think how many.

He had seen the two ends of a great wheat operation — a battle between Bear and Bull. The stories (subsequently published in the city’s press) of Truslow’s countermove in selling Hornung his own wheat, supplied the unseen section. The farmer — he who raised the wheat — was ruined upon one hand; the working-man — he who consumed it — was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world’s food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty “deals,” were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, jovial, contented, enthroned, and unassailable.

On the back porch of the “office,” young Lockwood — his boots, stained with the mud of the mines and with candle-drippings, on the rail — sat smoking his pipe and looking off down the cañon.

It was early in the evening. Lockwood, because he had heard the laughter and horseplay of the men of the night shift as they went down the cañon from the bunk-house to the tunnel-mouth, knew that it was a little after seven. It would not be necessary to go indoors and begin work on the columns of figures of his pay-roll for another hour yet. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled and lighted it — stoppering with his match-box — and shot a wavering blue wreath out over the porch railing. Then he resettled himself in his tilted chair, hooked his thumbs into his belt, and fetched a long breath.

For the last few moments he had been considering, in that comfortable spirit of relaxed attention that comes with the after-dinner tobacco, two subjects: first, the beauty of the evening; second, the temperament, character, and appearance of Felice Zavalla.

As for the evening, there could be no two opinions about that. It was charming. The Hand-over-fist Gravel Mine, though not in the higher Sierras, was sufficiently above the level of the mere foot-hills to be in the sphere of influence of the greater mountains. Also, it was remote, difficult of access. Iowa Hill, the nearest post-office, was a good eight miles distant, by trail, across the Indian River. It was sixteen miles by stage from Iowa Hill to Colfax, on the line of the Overland Railroad, and all of a hundred miles from Colfax to San Francisco.

To Lockwood’s mind this isolation was in itself an attraction. Tucked away in this fold of the Sierras, forgotten, remote, the little community of a hundred souls that comprised the personnel of the Hand-over-fist lived out its life with the completeness of an independent State, having its own government, its own institutions and customs. Besides all this, it had its own dramas as well — little complications that developed with the swiftness of whirlpools, and that trended toward culmination with true Western directness. Lockwood, college-bred — he was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines — found the life interesting.

On this particular evening he sat over his pipe rather longer than usual, seduced by the beauty of the scene and the moment. It was very quiet. The prolonged rumble of the mine’s stamp-mill came to his ears in a ceaseless diapason, but the sound was so much a matter of course that Lockwood no longer heard it. The millions of pines and redwoods that covered the flanks of the mountains were absolutely still. No wind was stirring in their needles. But the chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato, was as incessant as the pounding of the mill. Far-off — thousands of miles, it seemed — an owl was hooting, three velvet-soft notes at exact intervals. A cow in the stable near at hand lay down with a long breath, while from the back veranda of Chino Zavalla’s cabin came the clear voice of Felice singing “The Spanish Cavalier” while she washed the dishes.

The twilight was fading; the glory that had blazed in cloudless vermilion and gold over the divide was dying down like receding music. The mountains were purple-black. From the cañon rose the night mist, pale blue, while above it stood the smoke from the mill, a motionless plume of sable, shot through by the last ruddiness of the afterglow.

The air was full of pleasant odours — the smell of wood fires from the cabins of the married men and from the ovens of the cookhouse, the ammoniacal whiffs from the stables, the smell of ripening apples from “Boston’s” orchard — while over all and through all came the perfume of the witch-hazel and tar-weed from the forests and mountain sides, as pungent as myrrh, as aromatic as aloes.

“And if I should fall,
In vain I would call,”

sang Felice.

Lockwood took his pipe from his teeth and put back his head to listen. Felice had as good a voice as so pretty a young woman should have had. She was twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, and was incontestably the beauty of the camp. She was Mexican-Spanish, tall and very slender, black-haired, as lithe as a cat, with a cat’s green eyes and with all of a cat’s purring, ingratiating insinuation.

Lockwood could not have told exactly just how the first familiarity between him and Felice had arisen. It had grown by almost imperceptible degrees up to a certain point; now it was a chance meeting on the trail between the office and the mill, now a fragment of conversation apropos of a letter to be mailed, now a question as to some regulation of the camp, now a detail of repairs done to the cabin wherein Felice lived. As said above, up to a certain point the process of “getting acquainted” had been gradual, and on Lockwood’s part unconscious; but beyond that point affairs had progressed rapidly.

At first Felice had been, for Lockwood, a pretty woman, neither more nor less; but by degrees she emerged from this vague classification: she became a very pretty woman. Then she became a personality; she occupied a place within the circle which Lockwood called his world, his life. For the past months this place had, perforce, to be enlarged. Lockwood allowed it to expand. To make room for Felice, he thrust aside, or allowed the idea of Felice to thrust aside, other objects which long had sat secure. The invasion of the woman into the sphere of his existence developed at the end into a thing veritably headlong. Deep-seated convictions, old-established beliefs and ideals, even the two landmarks right and wrong, were hustled and shouldered about as the invasion widened and penetrated. This state of affairs was further complicated by the fact that Felice was the wife of Chino Zavalla, shift-boss of No. 4 gang in the new workings.

It was quite possible that, though Lockwood could not have told when and how the acquaintance between him and Felice began and progressed, the young woman herself could. But this is guesswork. Felice being a woman, and part Spanish at that, was vastly more self-conscious, more disingenuous, than the man, the Anglo-Saxon. Also she had that fearlessness that very pretty women have. In her more refined and city-bred sisters this fearlessness would be called poise, or, at the most, “cheek.”

And she was quite capable of making young Lockwood, the superintendent, her employer, and nominally the ruler of her little world, fall in love with her. It is only fair to Felice to say that she would not do this deliberately. She would be more conscious of the business than the man, than Lockwood; but in affairs such as this, involving women like Felice, there is a distinction between deliberately doing a thing and consciously doing it.

Admittedly this is complicated, but it must be understood that Felice herself was complex, and she could no more help attracting men to her than the magnet the steel filings. It made no difference whether the man was the “breed” boy who split logging down by the engine-house or the young superintendent with his college education, his white hands and dominating position; over each and all who came within range of her influence Felice, with her black hair and green eyes, her slim figure and her certain indefinite “cheek” — which must not by any manner of means be considered as “boldness” — cast the weird of her kind.

If one understood her kind, knew how to make allowances, knew just how seriously to take her eyes and her “cheek,” no great harm was done. Otherwise, consequences were very apt to follow.

Hicks was one of those who from the very first had understood. Hicks was the manager of the mine, and Lockwood’s chief — in a word, the boss. He was younger even than Lockwood, a boy virtually, but a wonderful boy — a boy such as only America, western America at that, could produce, masterful, self-controlled, incredibly capable, as taciturn as a sphinx, strong of mind and of muscle, and possessed of a cold gray eye that was as penetrating as chilled steel.

To this person, impersonal as force itself, Felice had once, by some mysterious feminine art, addressed, in all innocence, her little maneuver of fascination. One lift of the steady eyelid, one quiet glint of that terrible cold gray eye, that poniarded her every tissue of complexity, inconsistency, and coquetry, had been enough. Felice had fled the field from this young fellow, so much her junior, and then afterward, in a tremor of discomfiture and distress, had kept her distance.

Hicks understood Felice. Also the great majority of the miners — shift-bosses, chuck-tenders, bed-rock cleaners, and the like — understood. Lockwood did not.

It may appear difficult of belief that the men, the crude, simple workmen, knew how to take Felice Zavalla, while Lockwood, with all his education and superior intelligence, failed in his estimate of her. The explanation lies no doubt in the fact that in these man-and-woman affairs instinct is a surer guide than education and intelligence, unless, indeed, the intelligence is preternaturally keen. Lockwood’s student life had benumbed the elemental instinct, which in the miners, the “men,” yet remained vigorous and unblunted, and by means of which they assessed Felice and her harmless blandishments at their true worth. For all Lockwood’s culture, his own chuck-tenders, unlettered fellows, cumbersome, slow-witted, “knew women” — at least, women of their own world, like Felice — better than he. On the other hand, his intelligence was no such perfected instrument as Hicks’s, as exact as logarithms, as penetrating as a scalpel, as uncoloured by emotions as a steel trap.

Lockwood’s life had been a narrow one. He had studied too hard at Columbia to see much of the outside world, and he had come straight from his graduation to take his first position. Since then his life had been spent virtually in the wilderness, now in Utah, now in Arizona, now in British Columbia, and now, at last, in Placer County, California. His lot was the common lot of young mining engineers. It might lead one day to great wealth, but meanwhile it was terribly isolated.

Living thus apart from the world, Lockwood very easily allowed his judgment to get, as it were, out of perspective. Class distinctions lost their sharpness, and one woman — as, for instance, Felice — was very like another — as, for instance, the girls his sisters knew “back home” in New York.

As a last result, the passions were strong.

Things were done “for all they were worth” in Placer County, California. When a man worked, he worked hard; when he slept, he slept soundly; when he hated, he hated with primeval intensity; and when he loved he grew reckless.

It was all one that Felice was Chino’s wife. Lockwood swore between his teeth that she should be his wife. He had arrived at this conclusion on the night that he sat on the back porch of his office and watched the moon coming up over the Hog Back. He stood up at length and thrust his pipe into his pocket, and putting an arm across the porch pillar, leaned his forehead against it and looked out far in the purple shadows.

“It’s madness,” he muttered; “yet, I know it — sheer madness; but, by the Lord! I am mad — and I don’t care.”

As time went on the matter became more involved. Hicks was away. Chino Zavalla, stolid, easy-going, came and went about his work on the night shift, always touching his cap to Lockwood when the two crossed each other’s paths, always good-natured, always respectful, seeing nothing but his work.

Every evening, when not otherwise engaged, Lockwood threw a saddle over one of the horses and rode in to Iowa Hill for the mail, returning to the mine between ten and eleven. On one of these occasions, as he drew near to Chino’s cabin, a slim figure came toward him down the road and paused at his horse’s head. Then he was surprised to hear Felice’s voice asking, “‘Ave you a letter for me, then, Meester Lockwude?”

Felice made an excuse of asking thus for her mail each night that Lockwood came from town, and for a month they kept up appearances; but after that they dropped even that pretense, and as often as he met her Lockwood dismounted and walked by her side till the light in the cabin came into view through the chaparral.

At length Lockwood made a mighty effort. He knew how very far he had gone beyond the point where between the two landmarks called right and wrong a line is drawn. He contrived to keep away from Felice. He sent one of the men into town for the mail, and he found reasons to be in the mine itself whole half-days at a time. Whenever a moment’s leisure impended, he took his shotgun and tramped the mine ditch for leagues, looking for quail and gray squirrels. For three weeks he so managed that he never once caught sight of Felice’s black hair and green eyes, never once heard the sound of her singing.

But the madness was upon him none the less, and it rode and roweled him like a hag from dawn to dark and from dark to dawn again, till in his complete loneliness, in the isolation of that simple, primitive life, where no congenial mind relieved the monotony by so much as a word, morbid, hounded, tortured, the man grew desperate — was ready for anything that would solve the situation.

Once every two weeks Lockwood “cleaned up and amalgamated” — that is to say, the mill was stopped and the “ripples” where the gold was caught were scraped clean. Then the ore was sifted out, melted down, and poured into the mould, whence it emerged as the “brick,” a dun-coloured rectangle, rough-edged, immensely heavy, which represented anywhere from two to six thousand dollars. This was sent down by express to the smelting-house.

But it was necessary to take the brick from the mine to the express office at Iowa Hill.

This duty devolved upon Lockwood and Chino Zavalla. Hicks had from the very first ordered that the Spaniard should accompany the superintendent upon this mission. Zavalla was absolutely trustworthy, as honest as the daylight, strong physically, cool-headed, discreet, and — to Hicks’s mind a crowning recommendation — close-mouthed. For about the mine it was never known when the brick went to town or who took it. Hicks had impressed this fact upon Zavalla. He was to tell nobody that he was delegated to this duty. “Not even” — Hicks had leveled a forefinger at Chino, and the cold eyes drove home the injunction as the steam-hammer drives the rivet— “not even your wife.” And Zavalla had promised. He would have trifled with dynamite sooner than with one of Hicks’s orders.

So the fortnightly trips to town in company with Lockwood were explained in various fashions to Felice. She never knew that the mail-bag strapped to her husband’s shoulders on those occasions carried some five thousand dollars’ worth of bullion.

On a certain Friday in early June Lockwood had amalgamated, and the brick, duly stamped, lay in the safe in the office. The following night he and Chino, who was relieved from mine duty on these occasions, were to take it in to Iowa Hill.

Late Saturday afternoon, however, the engineer’s boy brought word to Chino that the superintendent wanted him at once. Chino found Lockwood lying upon the old lounge in the middle room of the office, his foot in bandages.

“Here’s luck, Chino,” he exclaimed, as the Mexican paused on the threshold. “Come in and — shut the door,” he added in a lower voice.

“Dios!” murmured Chino. “An accident?”

“Rather,” growled Lockwood. “That fool boy, Davis’s kid — the car-boy, you know — ran me down in the mine. I yelled at him. Somehow he couldn’t stop. Two wheels went over my foot — and the car loaded, too.”

Chino shuddered politely.

“Now here’s the point,” continued Lockwood. “Um — there’s nobody round outside there? Take a look, Chino, by the window there. All clear, eh? Well, here’s the point. That brick ought to go in to-night just the same, hey?”

“Oh — of a surety, of a surety.” Chino spoke in Spanish.

“Now I don’t want to let any one else take my place — you never can tell — the beggars will talk. Not all like you, Chino.”

“Gracias, sigñor. It is an honour.”

“Do you think you can manage alone? I guess you can, hey? No reason why you couldn’t.”

Chino shut his eyes tight and put up a palm. “Rest assured of that, Sigñor Lockwude. Rest assured of that.”

“Well, get around here about nine.”

“It is understood, sigñor.”

Lockwood, who had a passable knowledge of telegraphy, had wired to the Hill for the doctor. About suppertime one appeared, and Lockwood bore the pain of the setting with such fortitude as he could command. He had his supper served in the office. The doctor shared it with him and kept him company.

During the early hours of the evening Lockwood lay on the sofa trying to forget the pain. There was no easier way of doing this than by thinking of Felice. Inevitably his thoughts reverted to her. Now that he was helpless, he could secure no diversion by plunging into the tunnel, giving up his mind to his work. He could not now take down his gun and tramp the ditch. Now he was supine, and the longing to break through the mesh, wrestle free from the complication, gripped him and racked him with all its old-time force.

Promptly at nine o’clock the faithful Chino presented himself at the office. He had one of the two horses that were used by Lockwood as saddle animals, and as he entered he opened his coat and tapped the hilt of a pistol showing from his trousers pocket, with a wink and a grin. Lockwood took the brick from the safe, strapped it into the mail-bag, and Chino, swinging it across his shoulders, was gone, leaving Lockwood to hop back to the sofa, there to throw himself down and face once more his trouble.

What made it harder for Lockwood just now was that even on that very day, in spite of all precaution, in spite of all good resolutions, he had at last seen Felice. Doubtless the young woman herself had contrived it; but, be that as it may, Lockwood, returning from a tour of inspection along the ditch, came upon her not far from camp, but in a remote corner, and she had of course demanded why he kept away from her. What Lockwood said in response he could not now remember; nor, for that matter, was any part of the conversation very clear to his memory. The reason for this was that, just as he was leaving her, something of more importance than conversation had happened. Felice had looked at him.

And she had so timed her look, had so insinuated it into the little, brief, significant silences between their words, that its meaning had been very clear. Lockwood had left her with his brain dizzy, his teeth set, his feet stumbling and fumbling down the trail, for now he knew that Felice wanted him to know that she regretted the circumstance of her marriage to Chino Zavalla; he knew that she wanted him to know that the situation was as intolerable for her as for him.

All the rest of the day, even at this moment, in fact, this new phase of the affair intruded its pregnant suggestions upon his mind, to the exclusion of everything else. He felt the drift strong around him; he knew that in the end he would resign himself to it. At the same time he sensed the abyss, felt the nearness of some dreadful, nameless cataclysm, a thing of black shadow, bottomless, terrifying.

“Lord!” he murmured, as he drew his hand across his forehead, “Lord! I wonder where this thing is going to fetch up.”

As he spoke, the telegraph key on his desk, near at hand, began all at once to click off his call. Groaning and grumbling, Lockwood heaved himself up, and, with his right leg bent, hobbled from chair-back to chair-back over to the desk. He rested his right knee on his desk chair, reached for his key, opened the circuit, and answered. There was an instant’s pause, then the instrument began to click again. The message was from the express messenger at Iowa Hill.

Word by word Lockwood took it off as follows:

“Reno — Kid — will — attempt — hold-up — of — brick — on — trail-to-night — do — not — send — till — advised — at — this — end.”

Lockwood let go the key and jumped back from the desk, lips compressed, eyes alight, his fists clenched till the knuckles grew white. The whole figure of him stiffened as tense as drawn wire, braced rigid like a finely bred hound “making game.”

Chino was already half an hour gone by the trail, and the Reno Kid was a desperado of the deadliest breed known to the West. How he came to turn up here there was no time to inquire. He was on hand, that was the point; and Reno Kid always “shot to kill.” This would be no mere hold-up; it would be murder.

Just then, as Lockwood snatched open a certain drawer of his desk where he kept his revolver, he heard from down the road, in the direction of Chino’s cabin, Felice’s voice singing:

“To the war I must go,
To fight for my country and you, dear.”

Lockwood stopped short, his arm at full stretch, still gripping tight the revolver that he had half pulled from the drawer — stopped short and listened.

The solution of everything had come.

He saw it in a flash. The knife hung poised over the knot — even at that moment was falling. Nothing was asked of him — nothing but inertia.

For an instant, alone there in that isolated mining-camp, high above the world, lost and forgotten in the gloom of the cañons and redwoods, Lockwood heard the crisis of his life come crashing through the air upon him like the onslaught of a whirlwind. For an instant, and no more, he considered. Then he cried aloud:

“No, no; I can’t, I can’t — not this way!” And with the words he threw the belt of the revolver about his hips and limped and scampered from the room, drawing the buckle close.

How he gained the stable he never knew, nor how he backed the horse from the building, nor how, hopping on one leg, he got the headstall on and drew the cinches tight.

But the wrench of pain in his foot as, swinging up at last, he tried to catch his off stirrup was reality enough to clear any confusion of spirit. Hanging on as best he might with his knees and one foot, Lockwood, threshing the horse’s flanks with the stinging quirt that tapered from the reins of the bridle, shot from the camp in a swirl of clattering hoofs, flying pebbles and blinding clouds of dust.

The night was black dark under the redwoods, so impenetrable that he could not see his horse’s head, and braced even as he was for greater perils it required all his courage to ride top-speed at this vast slab of black that like a wall he seemed to charge head down with every leap of his bronco’s hoofs.

For the first half-hour the trail mounted steadily, then, by the old gravel-pits, it topped the divide and swung down over more open slopes, covered only with chaparral and second growths. Here it was lighter, and Lockwood uttered a fervent “Thank God!” when, a few moments later, the moon shouldered over the mountain crests ahead of him and melted the black shadows to silver-gray. Beyond the gravel-pits the trail turned and followed the flank of the slope, level here for nearly a mile. Lockwood set his teeth against the agony of his foot and gave the bronco the quirt with all his strength.

In another half-hour he had passed Cold Cañon, and twenty minutes after that had begun the descent into Indian River. He forded the river at a gallop, and, with the water dripping from his very hat-brim, drove labouring under the farther slope.

Then he drew rein with a cry of bewilderment and apprehension. The lights of Iowa Hill were not two hundred yards distant. He had covered the whole distance from the mine, and where was Chino?

There was but one answer: back there along the trail somewhere, at some point by which Lockwood had galloped headlong and unheeding, lying up there in the chaparral with Reno’s bullets in his body.

There was no time now to go on to the Hill. Chino, if he was not past help, needed it without an instant’s loss of time. Lockwood spun the horse about. Once more the ford, once more the cañon slopes, once more the sharp turn by Cold Cañon, once more the thick darkness under the redwoods. Steadily he galloped on, searching the roadside.

Then all at once he reined in sharply, bringing the horse to a standstill, one ear turned down the wind. The night’s silence was broken by a multitude of sounds — the laboured breathing of the spent bronco, the saddle creaking as the dripping flanks rose and fell, the touch of wind in the tree-tops and the chorusing of the myriad tree-toads. But through all these, distinct, as precise as a clock-tick, Lockwood had heard, and yet distinguished, the click of a horse’s hoof drawing near, and the horse was at a gallop: Reno at last.

Lockwood drew his pistol. He stood in thick shadow. Only some twenty yards in front of him was there any faintest break in the darkness; but at that point the blurred moonlight made a grayness across the trail, just a tone less deep than the redwoods’ shadows.

With his revolver cocked and trained upon this patch of grayness, Lockwood waited, holding his breath.

The gallop came blundering on, sounding in the night’s silence as loud as the passage of an express train; and the echo of it, flung back from the cañon side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood’s morbid alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, all the hurry of desperation.

Then the hoof-beats rose to a roar, and a shadow just darker than the darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood held covered with his pistol. Instantly he shouted aloud:

“Halt! Throw up your hands!”

His answer was a pistol shot.

He dug his heels to his horse, firing as the animal leaped forward. The horses crashed together, rearing, plunging, and Lockwood, as he felt the body of a man crush by him on the trail, clutched into the clothes of him, and, with the pistol pressed against the very flesh, fired again, crying out as he did so:

“Drop your gun, Reno! I know you. I’ll kill you if you move again!”

And then it was that a wail rose into the night, a wail of agony and mortal apprehension:

“Sigñor Lockwude, Sigñor Lockwude, for the love of God, don’t shoot! ’Tis I — Chino Zavalla.”

An hour later, Felice, roused from her sleep by loud knocking upon her door, threw a blanket about her slim body, serape fashion, and opened the cabin to two gaunt scarecrows, who, the one, half supported by the other, himself far spent and all but swooning, lurched by her across the threshold and brought up wavering and bloody in the midst of the cabin floor.

“Por Dios! Por Dios!” cried Felice. “Ah, love of God! what misfortune has befallen Chino!” Then in English, and with a swift leap of surprise and dismay: “Ah, Meester Lockwude, air you hurt? Eh, tell me-a! Ah, it is too draidful!”

“No, no,” gasped Lockwood, as he dragged Chino’s unconscious body to the bed Felice had just left. “No; I — I’ve shot him. We met — there on the trail.” Then the nerves that had stood strain already surprisingly long snapped and crisped back upon themselves like broken harp-strings.

“I’ve shot him! I’ve shot him!” he cried. “Shot him, do you understand? Killed him, it may be. Get the doctor, quick! He’s at the office. I passed Chino on the trail over to the Hill. He’d hid in the bushes as he heard me coming from behind, then when I came back I took him. Oh, I’ll explain later. Get the doctor, quick.”

Felice threw on such clothes as came to her hand and ran over to the office, returning with the doctor, half dressed and blinking in the lantern-light. He went in to the wounded man at once, and Lockwood, at the end of all strength, dropped into the hammock on the porch, stretching out his leg to ease the anguish of his broken foot. He leaned back and closed his eyes wearily, aware only of a hideous swirl of pain, of intolerable anxiety as to Chino’s wound, and, most of all, of a mere blur of confusion wherein the sights and sounds of the last few hours tore through his brain with the plunge of a wild galloping such as seemed to have been in his ears for years and years.

But as he lay thus he heard a step at his side. Then came the touch of Felice’s long brown hand upon his face. He sat up, opening his eyes.

“You aisk me-a,” she said, “eef I do onderstaind, eh? Yais, I onderstaind. You—” her voice was a whisper— “you shoot Chino, eh? I know. You do those thing’ for me-a. I am note angri, no-a. You ver’ sharp man, eh? All for love oaf Felice, eh? Now we be happi, maybe; now we git married soam day byne-by, eh? Ah, you one brave man, Sigñor Lockwude!”

She would have taken his hand, but Lockwood, the pain all forgot, the confusion all vanishing, was on his feet. It was as though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as malevolence itself.

“What,” shouted Lockwood, “you think — think that I — that I could — oh-h, it’s monstrous — you — —” He could find no words to voice his loathing. Swiftly he turned away from her, the last spark of an evil love dying down forever in his breast.

It was a transformation, a thing as sudden as a miracle, as conclusive as a miracle, and with all a miracle’s sense of uplift and power. In a second of time the scales seemed to fall from the man’s eyes, fetters from his limbs; he saw, and he was free.

At the door Lockwood met the doctor:

“Well?”

“He’s all right; only a superficial wound. He’ll recover. But you — how about you? All right? Well, that is a good hearing. You’ve had a lucky escape, my boy.”

“I have had a lucky escape,” shouted Lockwood. “You don’t know just how lucky it was.”

On a certain morning in the spring of the year, the three men who were known as the Three Black Crows called at the office of “The President of the Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company,” situated in an obscure street near San Francisco’s water-front. They were Strokher, the tall, blond, solemn, silent Englishman; Hardenberg, the American, dry of humour, shrewd, resourceful, who bargained like a Vermonter and sailed a schooner like a Gloucester cod-fisher; and in their company, as ever inseparable from the other two, came the little colonial, nicknamed, for occult reasons, “Ally Bazan,” a small, wiry man, excitable, vociferous, who was without fear, without guile and without money.

When Hardenberg, who was always spokesman for the Three Crows, had sent in their names, they were admitted at once to the inner office of the “President.” The President was an old man, bearded like a prophet, with a watery blue eye and a forehead wrinkled like an orang’s. He spoke to the Three Crows in the manner of one speaking to friends he has not seen in some time.

“Well, Mr. Ryder,” began Hardenberg. “We called around to see if you had anything fer us this morning. I don’t mind telling you that we’re at liberty jus’ now. Anything doing?”

Ryder fingered his beard distressfully. “Very little, Joe; very little.”

“Got any wrecks?”

“Not a wreck.”

Hardenberg turned to a great map that hung on the wall by Ryder’s desk. It was marked in places by red crosses, against which were written certain numbers and letters. Hardenberg put his finger on a small island south of the Marquesas group and demanded: “What might be H. 33, Mr. President?”

“Pearl Island,” answered the President. “Davidson is on that job.”

“Or H. 125?” Hardenberg indicated a point in the Gilbert group.

“Guano deposits. That’s promised.”

“Hallo! You’re up in the Aleutians. I make out. 20 A. — what’s that?”

“Old government telegraph wire — line abandoned — finest drawn-copper wire. I’ve had three boys at that for months.”

“What’s 301? This here, off the Mexican coast?”

The President, unable to remember, turned to his one clerk: “Hyers, what’s 301? Isn’t that Peterson?”

The clerk ran his finger down a column: “No, sir; 301 is the Whisky Ship.”

“Ah! So it is. I remember. You remember, too, Joe. Little schooner, the Tropic Bird — sixty days out from Callao — five hundred cases of whisky aboard — sunk in squall. It was thirty years ago. Think of five hundred cases of thirty-year-old whisky! There’s money in that if I can lay my hands on the schooner. Suppose you try that, you boys — on a twenty per cent. basis. Come now, what do you say?”

“Not for five per cent.,” declared Hardenberg. “How’d we raise her? How’d we know how deep she lies? Not for Joe. What’s the matter with landing arms down here in Central America for Bocas and his gang?”

“I’m out o’ that, Joe. Too much competition.”

“What’s doing here in Tahiti — No. 88? It ain’t lettered.”

Once more the President consulted his books.

“Ah! — 88. Here we are. Cache o’ illicit pearls. I had it looked up. Nothing in it.”

“Say, Cap’n!” — Hardenberg’s eye had traveled to the upper edge of the map— “whatever did you strike up here in Alaska? At Point Barrow, s’elp me Bob! It’s 48 B.”

The President stirred uneasily in his place. “Well, I ain’t quite worked that scheme out, Joe. But I smell the deal. There’s a Russian post along there some’eres. Where they catch sea-otters. And the skins o’ sea-otters are selling this very day for seventy dollars at any port in China.”

“I s’y,” piped up Ally Bazan, “I knows a bit about that gyme. They’s a bally kind o’ Lum-tums among them Chinese as sports those syme skins on their bally clothes — as a mark o’ rank, d’ye see.”

“Have you figured at all on the proposition, Cap’n?” inquired Hardenberg.

“There’s risk in it, Joe; big risk,” declared the President nervously. “But I’d only ask fifteen per cent.”

“You have worked out the scheme, then.”

“Well — ah — y’see, there’s the risk, and — ah—” Suddenly Ryder leaned forward, his watery blue eyes glinting: “Boys, it’s a jewel. It’s just your kind. I’d a-sent for you, to try on this very scheme, if you hadn’t shown up. You kin have the Bertha Millner — I’ve a year’s charter o’ her from Wilbur — and I’ll only ask you fifteen per cent. of the net profits — net, mind you.”

“I ain’t buyin’ no dead horse, Cap’n,” returned Hardenberg, “but I’ll say this: we pay no fifteen per cent.”

“Banks and the Ruggles were daft to try it and give me twenty-five.”

“An’ where would Banks land the scheme? I know him. You put him on that German cipher-code job down Honolulu way, an’ it cost you about a thousand before you could pull out. We’ll give you seven an’ a half.”

“Ten,” declared Ryder, “ten, Joe, at the very least. Why, how much do you suppose just the stores would cost me? And Point Barrow — why, Joe, that’s right up in the Arctic. I got to run the risk o’ you getting the Bertha smashed in the ice.”

“What do we risk?” retorted Hardenberg; and it was the monosyllabic Strokher who gave the answer:

“Chokee, by Jove!”

“Ten is fair. It’s ten or nothing,” answered Hardenberg.

“Gross, then, Joe. Ten on the gross — or I give the job to the Ruggles and Banks.”

“Who’s your bloomin’ agent?” put in Ally Bazan.

“Nickerson. I sent him with Peterson on that Mary Archer wreck scheme. An’ you know what Peterson says of him — didn’t give him no trouble at all. One o’ my best men, boys.”

“There have been,” observed Strokher stolidly, “certain stories told about Nickerson. Not that I wish to seem suspicious, but I put it to you as man to man.”

“Ay,” exclaimed Ally Bazan. “He was fair nutty once, they tell me. Threw some kind o’ bally fit an’ come aout all skew-jee’d in his mind. Forgot his nyme an’ all. I s’y, how abaout him, anyw’y?”

“Boys,” said Ryder, “I’ll tell you. Nickerson — yes, I know the yarns about him. It was this way — y’see, I ain’t keeping anything from you, boys. Two years ago he was a Methody preacher in Santa Clara. Well, he was what they call a revivalist, and he was holding forth one blazin’ hot day out in the sun when all to once he goes down, flat, an’ don’t come round for the better part o’ two days. When he wakes up he’s another person; he’d forgot his name, forgot his job, forgot the whole blamed shooting-match. And he ain’t never remembered them since. The doctors have names for that kind o’ thing. It seems it does happen now and again. Well, he turned to an’ began sailoring first off — soon as the hospitals and medicos were done with him — an’ him not having any friends as you might say, he was let go his own gait. He got to be third mate of some kind o’ dough-dish down Mexico way; and then I got hold o’ him an’ took him into the Comp’ny. He’s been with me ever since. He ain’t got the faintest kind o’ recollection o’ his Methody days, an’ believes he’s always been a sailorman. Well, that’s his business, ain’t it? If he takes my orders an’ walks chalk, what do I care about his Methody game? There, boys, is the origin, history and development of Slick Dick Nickerson. If you take up this sea-otter deal and go to Point Barrow, naturally Nick has got to go as owner’s agent and representative of the Comp’ny. But I couldn’t send a easier fellow to get along with. Honest, now, I couldn’t. Boys, you think over the proposition between now and tomorrow an’ then come around and let me know.”

And the upshot of the whole matter was that one month later the Bertha Millner, with Nickerson, Hardenberg, Strokher and Ally Bazan on board, cleared from San Francisco, bound — the papers were beautifully precise — for Seattle and Tacoma with a cargo of general merchandise.

As a matter of fact, the bulk of her cargo consisted of some odd hundreds of very fine lumps of rock — which as ballast is cheap by the ton — and some odd dozen cases of conspicuously labeled champagne.

The Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company made this champagne out of Rhine wine, effervescent salts, raisins, rock candy and alcohol. It was from the same stock of wine of which Ryder had sold some thousand cases to the Coreans the year before.

“Not that I care a curse,” said Strokher, the Englishman. “But I put it to you squarely that this voyage lacks that certain indescribable charm.”

The Bertha Millner was a fortnight out, and the four adventurers — or, rather, the three adventurers and Nickerson — were lame in every joint, red-eyed from lack of sleep, half-starved, wholly wet and unequivocally disgusted. They had had heavy weather from the day they bade farewell to the whistling buoy off San Francisco Bay until the moment when even patient, docile, taciturn Strokher had at last — in his own fashion — rebelled.

“Ain’t I a dam’ fool? Ain’t I a proper lot? Gard strike me if I don’t chuck fer fair after this. Wot’d I come to sea fer — an’ this ‘ere go is the worst I ever knew — a baoat no bigger’n a bally bath-tub, head seas, livin’ gyles the clock ‘round, wet food, wet clothes, wet bunks. Caold till, by cricky! I’ve lost the feel o’ mee feet. An’ wat for? For the bloomin’ good chanst o’ a slug in mee guts. That’s wat for.” At little intervals the little vociferous colonial, Ally Bazan — he was red-haired and speckled — capered with rage, shaking his fists.

But Hardenberg only shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth. He knew Ally Bazan, and knew that the little fellow would have jeered at the offer of a first-cabin passage back to San Francisco in the swiftest, surest, steadiest passenger steamer that ever wore paint. So he remarked: “I ain’t ever billed this promenade as a Coney Island picnic, I guess.”

Nickerson — Slick Dick, the supercargo — was all that Hardenberg, who captained the schooner, could expect. He never interfered, never questioned; never protested in the name or interests of the Company when Hardenberg “hung on” in the bleak, bitter squalls till the Bertha was rail under and the sails hard as iron.

If it was true that he had once been a Methody revivalist no one, to quote Alia Bazan, “could a’ smelled it off’n him.” He was a black-bearded, scrawling six-footer, with a voice like a steam siren and a fist like a sledge. He carried two revolvers, spoke of the Russians at Point Barrow as the “Boomskys,” and boasted if it came to that he’d engage to account for two of them, would shove their heads into their boot-legs and give them the running scrag, by God so he would!

Slowly, laboriously, beset in blinding fogs, swept with, icy rains, buffeted and mauled and man-handled by the unending assaults of the sea, the Bertha Millner worked her way northward up that iron coast — till suddenly she entered an elysium.

Overnight she seemed to have run into it: it was a world of green, wooded islands, of smooth channels, of warm and steady winds, of cloudless skies. Coming on deck upon the morning of the Bertha’s first day in this new region, Ally Bazan gazed open-mouthed. Then: “I s’y!” he yelled. “Hey! By crickey! Look!” He slapped his thighs. “S’trewth! This is ‘eavenly.”

Strokher was smoking his pipe on the hatch combings. “Rather,” he observed. “An’ I put it to you — we’ve deserved it.”

In the main, however, the northward flitting was uneventful. Every fifth day Nickerson got drunk — on the Company’s Corean champagne. Now that the weather had sweetened, the Three Black Crows had less to do in the way of handling and nursing the schooner. Their plans when the “Boomskys” should be reached were rehearsed over and over again. Then came spells of card and checker playing, story-telling, or hours of silent inertia when, man fashion, they brooded over pipes in a patch of sun, somnolent, the mind empty of all thought.

But at length the air took on a keener tang; there was a bite to the breeze, the sun lost his savour and the light of him lengthened till Hardenberg could read off logarithms at ten in the evening. Great-coats and sweaters were had from the chests, and it was no man’s work to reef when the wind came down from out the north.

Each day now the schooner was drawing nearer the Arctic Circle. At length snow fell, and two days later they saw their first iceberg.

Hardenberg worked out their position on the chart and bore to the eastward till he made out the Alaskan coast — a smudge on the horizon. For another week he kept this in sight, the schooner dodging the bergs that by now drove by in squadrons, and even bumping and butling through drift and slush ice.

Seals were plentiful, and Hardenberg and Strokher promptly revived the quarrel of their respective nations. Once even they slew a mammoth bull walrus — astray from some northern herd — and played poker for the tusks. Then suddenly they pulled themselves sharply together, and, as it were, stood “attention.”

For more than a week the schooner, following the trend of the far-distant coast, had headed eastward, and now at length, looming out of the snow and out of the mist, a somber bulwark, black, vast, ominous, rose the scarps and crags of that which they came so far to see — Point Barrow.

Hardenberg rounded the point, ran in under the lee of the land and brought out the chart which Ryder had given him. Then he shortened sail and moved west again till Barrow was “hull down” behind him. To the north was the Arctic, treacherous, nursing hurricanes, ice-sheathed; but close aboard, not a quarter of a mile off his counter, stretched a gray and gloomy land, barren, bleak as a dead planet, inhospitable as the moon.

For three days they crawled along the edge keeping their glasses trained upon every bay, every inlet. Then at length, early one morning, Ally Bazan, who had been posted at the bows, came scrambling aft to Hardenberg at the wheel. He was gasping for breath in his excitement.

“Hi! There we are,” he shouted. “O Lord! Oh, I s’y! Now we’re in fer it. That’s them! That’s them! By the great jumpin’ jimminy Christmas, that’s them fer fair! Strike me blind for a bleedin’ gutter-cat if it eyent. O Lord! S’y, I gotta to get drunk. S’y, what-all’s the first jump in the bally game now?”

“Well, the first thing, little man,” observed Hardenberg, “is for your mother’s son to hang the monkey onto the safety-valve. Keep y’r steam and watch y’r uncle.”

“Scrag the Boomskys,” said Slick Dick encouragingly.

Strokher pulled the left end of his viking mustache with the fingers of his right hand.

“We must now talk,” he said.

A last conference was held in the cabin, and the various parts of the comedy rehearsed. Also the three looked to their revolvers.

“Not that I expect a rupture of diplomatic relations,” commented Strokher; “but if there’s any shooting done, as between man and man, I choose to do it.”

“All understood, then?” asked Hardenberg, looking from face to face. “There won’t be no chance to ask questions once we set foot ashore.”

The others nodded.

It was not difficult to get in with the seven Russian sea-otter fishermen at the post. Certain of them spoke a macerated English, and through these Hardenberg, Ally Bazan and Nickerson — Strokher remained on board to look after the schooner — told to the “Boomskys” a lamentable tale of the reported wreck of a vessel, described by Hardenberg, with laborious precision, as a steam whaler from San Francisco — the Tiber by name, bark-rigged, seven hundred tons burden, Captain Henry Ward Beecher, mate Mr. James Boss Tweed. They, the visitors, were the officers of the relief-ship on the lookout for castaways and survivors.

But in the course of these preliminaries it became necessary to restrain Nickerson — not yet wholly recovered from a recent incursion into the store of Corean champagne. It presented itself to his consideration as facetious to indulge (when speaking to the Russians) in strange and elaborate distortions of speech.

“And she sunk-avitch in a hundred fathom o’ water-owski.”

“ — All on board-erewski.”

“ — hell of dam’ bad storm-onavna.”

And he persisted in the idiocy till Hardenberg found an excuse for taking him aside and cursing him into a realization of his position.

In the end — inevitably — the schooner’s company were invited to dine at the post.

It was a strange affair — a strange scene. The coast, flat, gray, dreary beyond all power of expression, lonesome as the interstellar space, and quite as cold, and in all that limitless vastness of the World’s Edge, two specks — the hut, its three windows streaming with light, and the tiny schooner rocking in the offing. Over all flared the pallid incandescence of the auroras.

The Company drank steadily, and Strokher, listening from the schooner’s quarterdeck, heard the shouting and the songs faintly above the wash and lapping under the counter. Two hours had passed since the moment he guessed that the feast had been laid. A third went by. He grew uneasy. There was no cessation of the noise of carousing. He even fancied he heard pistol shots. Then after a long time the noise by degrees wore down; a long silence followed. The hut seemed deserted; nothing stirred; another hour went by.

Then at length Strokher saw a figure emerge from the door of the hut and come down to the shore. It was Hardenberg. Strokher saw him wave his arm slowly, now to the left, now to the right, and he took down the wig-wag as follows: “Stand — in — closer — we — have — the — skins.”

During the course of the next few days Strokher heard the different versions of the affair in the hut over and over again till he knew its smallest details. He learned how the “Boomskys” fell upon Ryder’s champagne like wolves upon a wounded buck, how they drank it from “enameled-ware” coffee-cups, from tin dippers, from the bottles themselves; how at last they even dispensed with the tedium of removing the corks and knocked off the heads against the table-ledge and drank from the splintered bottoms; how they quarreled over the lees and dregs, how ever and always fresh supplies were forthcoming, and how at last Hardenberg, Ally Bazan and Slick Dick stood up from the table in the midst of the seven inert bodies; how they ransacked the place for the priceless furs; how they failed to locate them; how the conviction grew that this was the wrong place after all, and how at length Hardenberg discovered the trap-door that admitted to the cellar, where in the dim light of the uplifted lanterns they saw, corded in tiny bales and packages, the costliest furs known to commerce.

Ally Bazan had sobbed in his excitement over that vision and did not regain the power of articulate speech till the “loot” was safely stowed in the ‘tween-decks and Hardenberg had given order to come about.

“Now,” he had observed dryly, “now, lads, it’s Hongkong — or bust.”

The tackle had fouled aloft and the jib hung slatting over the sprit like a collapsed balloon.

“Cast off up there, Nick!” called Hardenberg from the wheel.

Nickerson swung himself into the rigging, crying out in a mincing voice as, holding to a rope’s end, he swung around to face the receding hut: “By-bye-skevitch. We’ve had such a charming evening. Do hope-sky we’ll be able to come again-off.” And as he spoke the lurch of the Bertha twitched his grip from the rope. He fell some thirty feet to the deck, and his head carromed against an iron cleat with a resounding crack.

“Here’s luck,” observed Hardenberg, twelve hours later, when Slick Dick, sitting on the edge of his bunk, looked stolidly and with fishy eyes from face to face. “We wa’n’t quite short-handed enough, it seems.”

“Dotty for fair. Dotty for fair,” exclaimed Ally Bazan; “clean off ‘is nut. I s’y, Dick-ol’-chap, wyke-up, naow. Buck up. Buck up. ‘Ave a drink.”

But Nickerson could only nod his head and murmur: “A few more — consequently — and a good light — —” Then his voice died down to unintelligible murmurs.

“We’ll have to call at Juneau,” decided Hardenberg two days later. “I don’t figure on navigating this ‘ere bath-tub to no Hongkong whatsoever, with three hands. We gotta pick up a couple o’ A.B.’s in Juneau, if so be we can.”

“How about the loot?” objected Strokher. “If one of those hands gets between decks he might smell — a sea-otter, now. I put it to you he might.”

“My son,” said Hardenberg, “I’ve handled A.B.’s before;” and that settled the question.

During the first part of the run down, Nickerson gloomed silently over the schooner, looking curiously about him, now at his comrades’ faces, now at the tumbling gray-green seas, now — and this by the hour — at his own hands. He seemed perplexed, dazed, trying very hard to get his bearings. But by and by he appeared, little by little, to come to himself. One day he pointed to the rigging with an unsteady forefinger, then, laying the same finger doubtfully upon his lips, said to Strokher: “A ship?”

“Quite so, quite so, me boy.”

“Yes,” muttered Nickerson absently, “a ship — of course.”

Hardenberg expected to make Juneau on a Thursday. Wednesday afternoon Slick Dick came to him. He seemed never more master of himself. “How did I come aboard?” he asked.

Hardenberg explained.

“What have we been doing?”

“Why, don’t you remember?” continued Hardenberg. He outlined the voyage in detail. “Then you remember,” he went on, “we got up there to Point Barrow and found where the Russian fellows had their post, where they caught sea-otters, and we went ashore and got ’em all full and lifted all the skins they had — —”

“‘Lifted’? You mean stole them.”

“Come here,” said the other. Encouraged by Nickerson’s apparent convalescence, Hardenberg decided that the concrete evidence of things done would prove effective. He led him down into the ‘tween-decks. “See now,” he said. “See this packing-case” — he pried up a board— “see these ‘ere skins. Take one in y’r hand. Remember how we found ’em all in the cellar and hyked ’em out while the beggars slept?”

“Stole them? You say we got — that is you did — got somebody intoxicated and stole their property, and now you are on your way to dispose of it.”

“Oh, well, if you want to put it thataway. Sure we did.”

“I understand —— Well —— Let’s go back on deck. I want to think this out.”

The Bertha Millner crept into the harbour of Juneau in a fog, with ships’ bells tolling on every side, let go her anchor at last in desperation and lay up to wait for the lifting. When this came the Three Crows looked at one another wide-eyed. They made out the drenched town and the dripping hills behind it. The quays, the custom house, the one hotel, and the few ships in the harbour. There were a couple of whalers from ‘Frisco, a white, showily painted passenger boat from the same port, a Norwegian bark, and a freighter from Seattle grimy with coal-dust. These, however, the Bertha’s company ignored. Another boat claimed all their attention. In the fog they had let go not a pistol-shot from her anchorage. She lay practically beside them. She was the United States revenue cutter Bear.

“But so long as they can’t smell sea-otter skin,” remarked Hardenberg, “I don’t know that we’re any the worse.”

“All the syme,” observed Ally Bazan, “I don’t want to lose no bloomin’ tyme a-pecking up aour bloomin’ A.B.’s.”

“I’ll stay aboard and tend the baby,” said Hardenberg with a wink. “You two move along ashore and get what you can — Scoovies for choice. Take Slick Dick with you. I reckon a change o’ air might buck him up.”

When the three had gone, Hardenberg, after writing up the painfully doctored log, set to work to finish a task on which the adventurers had been engaged in their leisure moments since leaving Point Barrow. This was the counting and sorting of the skins. The packing-case had been broken open, and the scanty but precious contents littered an improvised table in the hold. Pen in hand, Hardenberg counted and ciphered and counted again. He could not forbear a chuckle when the net result was reached. The lot of the skins — the pelt of the sea-otter is ridiculously small in proportion to its value — was no heavy load for the average man. But Hardenberg knew that once the “loot” was safely landed at the Hongkong pierhead the Three Crows would share between them close upon ten thousand dollars. Even — if they had luck, and could dispose of the skins singly or in small lots — that figure might be doubled.

“And I call it a neat turn,” observed Hardenberg. He was aroused by the noise of hurried feet upon the deck, and there was that in their sound that brought him upright in a second, hand on hip. Then, after a second, he jumped out on deck to meet Ally Bazan and Strokher, who had just scrambled over the rail.

“Bust. B-u-s-t!” remarked the Englishman.

“‘Ere’s ‘ell to pay,” cried Ally Bazan in a hoarse whisper, glancing over at the revenue cutter.

“Where’s Nickerson?” demanded Hardenberg.

“That’s it,” answered the colonial. “That’s where it’s ‘ell. Listen naow. He goes ashore along o’ us, quiet and peaceable like, never battin’ a eye, we givin’ him a bit o’ jolly, y’ know, to keep him chirked up as ye might s’y. But so soon as ever he sets foot on shore, abaout faice he gaoes, plumb into the Custom’s orfice. I s’ys, ‘Wot all naow, messmite? Come along aout o’ that.’ But he turns on me like a bloomin’ babby an s’ys he: ‘Hands orf, wretch!’ Ay, them’s just his words. Just like that, ‘Hands orf, wretch!’ And then he nips into the orfice an’ marches fair up to the desk an’ sy’s like this — we heerd him, havin’ followed on to the door — he s’ys, just like this:

“‘Orfficer, I am a min’ster o’ the gospel, o’ the Methodis’ denomineye-tion, an’ I’m deteyined agin my will along o’ a pirate ship which has robbed certain parties o’ val-able goods. Which syme I’m pre-pared to attest afore a no’try publick, an’ lodge informeye-tion o’ crime. An’,’ s’ys he, ‘I demand the protection o’ the authorities an’ arsk to be directed to the American consul.’

“S’y, we never wyted to hear no more, but hyked awye hot foot. S’y, wot all now. Oh, mee Gord! eyen’t it a rum gao for fair? S’y, let’s get aout o’ here, Hardy, dear.”

“Look there,” said Hardenberg, jerking his head toward the cutter, “how far’d we get before the customs would ‘a’ passed the tip to her and she’d started to overhaul us? That’s what they feed her for — to round up the likes o’ us.”

“We got to do something rather soon,” put in Strokher. “Here comes the custom house dinghy now.”

As a matter of fact, a boat was putting off from the dock. At her stern fluttered the custom house flag.

“Bitched — bitched for fair!” cried Ally Bazan.

[Illustration: “‘ERE’S ‘ELL TO PAY!”

From a drawing by Lucius Hitchcock Courtesy of Collier’s Weekly.]

“Quick, now!” exclaimed Hardenberg. “On the jump! Overboard with that loot! — or no. Steady! That won’t do. There’s that dam’ cutter. They’d see it go. Here! — into the galley. There’s a fire in the stove. Get a move on!”

“Wot!” wailed Ally Bazan. “Burn the little joker. Gord, I can’t, Hardy, I can’t. It’s agin human nature.”

“You can do time in San Quentin, then, for felony,” retorted Strokher as he and Hardenberg dashed by him, their arms full of the skins. “You can do time in San Quentin else. Make your choice. I put it to you as between man and man.”

With set teeth, and ever and again glancing over the rail at the oncoming boat, the two fed their fortune to the fire. The pelts, partially cured and still fatty, blazed like crude oil, the hair crisping, the hides melting into rivulets of grease. For a minute the schooner reeked of the smell and a stifling smoke poured from the galley stack. Then the embers of the fire guttered and a long whiff of sea wind blew away the reek. A single skin, fallen in the scramble, still remained on the floor of the galley. Hardenberg snatched it up, tossed it into the flames and clapped the door to. “Now, let him squeal,” he declared. “You fellows, when that boat gets here, let me talk; keep your mouths shut or, by God, we’ll all wear stripes.”

The Three Crows watched the boat’s approach in a silence broken only once by a long whimper from Ally Bazan. “An’ it was a-workin’ out as lovely as Billy-oh,” he said, “till that syme underbred costermonger’s swipe remembered he was Methody — an’ him who, only a few d’ys back, went raound s’yin’ ‘scrag the “Boomskys”!’ A couple o’ thousand pounds gone as quick as look at it. Oh, I eyn’t never goin’ to git over this.”

The boat came up and the Three Crows were puzzled to note that no brass-buttoned personage sat in the stern-sheets, no harbour police glowered at them from the bow, no officer of the law fixed them with the eye of suspicion. The boat was manned only by a couple of freight-handlers in woolen Jerseys, upon the breasts of which were affixed the two letters “C.H.”

“Say,” called one of the freight-handlers, “is this the Bertha Millner?”

“Yes,” answered Hardenberg, his voice at a growl. “An’ what might you want with her, my friend?”

“Well, look here,” said the other, “one of your hands came ashore mad as a coot and broke into the house of the American Consul, and resisted arrest and raised hell generally. The inspector says you got to send a provost guard or something ashore to take him off. There’s been several mix-ups among ships’ crews lately and the town — —”

The tide drifted the boat out of hearing, and Hardenberg sat down on the capstan head, turning his back to his comrades. There was a long silence. Then he said:

“Boys, let’s go home. I — I want to have a talk with President Ryder.”

Cyrus Ryder, the President of the South Pacific Exploitation Company, had at last got hold of a “proposition” — all Ryder’s schemes were, in his vernacular, “propositions” — that was not only profitable beyond precedent or belief, but that also was, wonderful to say, more or less legitimate. He had got an “island.” He had not discovered it. Ryder had not felt a deck under his shoes for twenty years other than the promenade deck of the ferry-boat San Rafael, that takes him home to Berkeley every evening after “business hours.” He had not discovered it, but “Old Rosemary,” captain of the barkentine Scottish Chief, of Blyth, had done that very thing, and, dying before he was able to perfect the title, had made over his interest in it to his best friend and old comrade, Cyrus Ryder.

“Old Rosemary,” I am told, first landed on the island — it is called Paa — in the later ‘60’s.

He established its location and took its latitude and longitude, but as minutes and degrees mean nothing to the lay reader, let it be said that the Island of Paa lies just below the equator, some 200 miles west of the Gilberts and 1,600 miles due east from Brisbane, in Australia. It is six miles long, three wide, and because of the prevailing winds and precipitous character of the coast can only be approached from the west during December and January.

“Old Rosemary” landed on the island, raised the American flag, had the crew witness the document by virtue of which he made himself the possessor, and then, returning to San Francisco, forwarded to the Secretary of State, at Washington, application for title. This was withheld till it could be shown that no other nation had a prior claim. While “Old Rosemary” was working out the proof, he died, and the whole matter was left in abeyance till Cyrus Ryder took it up. By then there was a new Secretary in Washington and times were changed, so that the Government of Ryder’s native land was not so averse toward acquiring Eastern possessions. The Secretary of State wrote to Ryder to say that the application would be granted upon furnishing a bond for $50,000; and you may believe that the bond was forthcoming.

For in the first report upon Paa, “Old Rosemary” had used the magic word “guano.”

He averred, and his crew attested over their sworn statements, that Paa was covered to an average depth of six feet with the stuff, so that this last and biggest of “Cy” Ryder’s propositions was a vast slab of an extremely marketable product six feet thick, three miles wide and six miles long.

But no sooner had the title been granted when there came a dislocation in the proceedings that until then had been going forward so smoothly. Ryder called the Three Black Crows to him at this juncture, one certain afternoon in the month of April. They were his best agents. The plums that the “Company” had at its disposal generally went to the trio, and if any man could “put through” a dangerous and desperate piece of work, Strokher, Hardenberg and Ally Bazan were those men.

Of late they had been unlucky, and the affair of the contraband arms, which had ended in failure of cataclysmic proportions, yet rankled in Ryder’s memory, but he had no one else to whom he could intrust the present proposition and he still believed Hardenberg to be the best boss on his list.

If Paa was to be fought for, Hardenberg, backed by Strokher and Ally Bazan, was the man of all men for the job, for it looked as though Ryder would not get the Island of Paa without a fight after all, and nitrate beds were worth fighting for.

“You see, boys, it’s this way,” Ryder explained to the three as they sat around the spavined table in the grimy back room of Ryder’s “office.” “It’s this way. There’s a scoovy after Paa, I’m told; he says he was there before ‘Rosemary,’ which is a lie, and that his Gov’ment has given him title. He’s got a kind of dough-dish up Portland way and starts for Paa as soon as ever he kin fit out. He’s got no title, in course, but if he gits there afore we do and takes possession it’ll take fifty years o’ lawing an’ injunctioning to git him off. So hustle is the word for you from the word ‘go.’ We got a good start o’ the scoovy. He can’t put to sea within a week, while over yonder in Oakland Basin there’s the Idaho Lass, as good a schooner, boys, as ever wore paint, all ready but to fit her new sails on her. Ye kin do it in less than no time. The stores will be goin’ into her while ye’re workin’, and within the week I expect to see the Idaho Lass showing her heels to the Presidio. You see the point now, boys. If ye beat the scoovy — his name is Petersen, and his boat is called the Elftruda — we’re to the wind’ard of a pretty pot o’ money. If he gets away before you do — well, there’s no telling; we prob’ly lose the island.”

About ten days before the morning set for their departure I went over to the Oakland Basin to see how the Three Black Crows were getting on.

Hardenberg welcomed me as my boat bumped alongside, and extending a great tarry paw, hauled me over the rail. The schooner was a wilderness of confusion, with the sails covering, apparently, nine-tenths of the decks, the remaining tenth encumbered by spars, cordage, tangled rigging, chains, cables and the like, all helter-skeltered together in such a haze of entanglements that my heart misgave me as I looked on it. Surely order would not issue from this chaos in four days’ time with only three men to speed the work.

But Hardenberg was reassuring, and little Ally Bazan, the colonial, told me they would “snatch her shipshape in the shorter end o’ two days, if so be they must.”

I stayed with the Three Crows all that day and shared their dinner with them on the quarterdeck when, wearied to death with the strain of wrestling with the slatting canvas and ponderous boom, they at last threw themselves upon the hamper of “cold snack” I had brought off with me and pledged the success of the venture in tin dippers full of Pilsener.

“And I’m thinking,” said Ally Bazan, “as ‘ow ye might as well turn in along o’ us on board ‘ere, instead o’ hykin’ back to town to-night. There’s a fairish set o’ currents up and daown ‘ere about this time o’ dye, and ye’d find it a stiff bit o’ rowing.”

“We’ll sling a hammick for you on the quarterdeck, m’son,” urged Hardenberg.

And so it happened that I passed my first night aboard the Idaho Lass.

We turned in early. The Three Crows were very tired, and only Ally Bazan and I were left awake at the time when we saw the 8:30 ferryboat negotiating for her slip on the Oakland side. Then we also went to bed.

And now it becomes necessary, for a better understanding of what is to follow, to mention with some degree of particularization the places and manners in which my three friends elected to take their sleep, as well as the condition and berth of the schooner Idaho Lass.

Hardenberg slept upon the quarterdeck, rolled up in an army blanket and a tarpaulin. Strokher turned in below in the cabin upon the fixed lounge by the dining-table, while Ally Bazan stretched himself in one of the bunks in the fo’c’s’le.

As for the location of the schooner, she lay out in the stream, some three or four cables’ length off the yards and docks of a ship-building concern. No other ship or boat of any description was anchored nearer than at least 300 yards. She was a fine, roomy vessel, three-masted, about 150 feet in length overall. She lay head up stream, and from where I lay by Hardenberg on the quarterdeck I could see her tops sharply outlined against the sky above the Golden Gate before I went to sleep.

I suppose it was very early in the morning — nearer two than three — when I awoke. Some movement on the part of Hardenberg — as I afterward found out — had aroused me. But I lay inert for a long minute trying to find out why I was not in my own bed, in my own home, and to account for the rushing, rippling sound of the tide eddies sucking and chuckling around the Lass’s rudder-post.

Then I became aware that Hardenberg was awake. I lay in my hammock, facing the stern of the schooner, and as Hardenberg had made up his bed between me and the wheel he was directly in my line of vision when I opened my eyes, and I could see him without any other movement than that of raising the eyelids. Just now, as I drifted more and more into wakefulness, I grew proportionately puzzled and perplexed to account for a singularly strange demeanour and conduct on the part of my friend.

He was sitting up in his place, his knees drawn up under the blanket, one arm thrown around both, the hand of the other arm resting on the neck and supporting the weight of his body. He was broad awake. I could see the green shine of our riding lantern in his wide-open eyes, and from time to time I could hear him muttering to himself, “What is it? What is it? What the devil is it, anyhow?” But it was not his attitude, nor the fact of his being so broad awake at the unseasonable hour, nor yet his unaccountable words, that puzzled me the most. It was the man’s eyes and the direction in which they looked that startled me.

His gaze was directed not upon anything on the deck of the boat, nor upon the surface of the water near it, but upon something behind me and at a great height in the air. I was not long in getting myself broad awake.

I rolled out on the deck and crossed over to where Hardenberg sat huddled in his blankets.

“What the devil—” I began.

He jumped suddenly at the sound of my voice, then raised an arm and pointed toward the top of the foremast.

“D’ye see it?” he muttered. “Say, huh? D’ye see it? I thought I saw it last night, but I wasn’t sure. But there’s no mistake now. D’ye see it, Mr. Dixon?”

I looked where he pointed. The schooner was riding easily to anchor, the surface of the bay was calm, but overhead the high white sea-fog was rolling in. Against it the foremast stood out like the hand of an illuminated town clock, and not a detail of its rigging that was not as distinct as if etched against the sky.

And yet I saw nothing.

“Where?” I demanded, and again and again “where?”

“In the crosstrees,” whispered Hardenberg. “Ah, look there.”

He was right. Something was stirring there, something that I had mistaken for the furled tops’l. At first it was but a formless bundle, but as Hardenberg spoke it stretched itself, it grew upright, it assumed an erect attitude, it took the outlines of a human being. From head to heel a casing housed it in, a casing that might have been anything at that hour of the night and in that strange place — a shroud, if you like, a winding-sheet — anything; and it is without shame that I confess to a creep of the most disagreeable sensation I have ever known as I stood at Hardenberg’s side on that still, foggy night and watched the stirring of that nameless, formless shape standing gaunt and tall and grisly and wrapped in its winding-sheet upon the crosstrees of the foremast of the Idaho Lass.

We watched and waited breathless for an instant. Then the creature on the foremast laid a hand upon the lashings of the tops’l and undid them. Then it turned, slid to the deck by I know not what strange process, and, still hooded, still shrouded, still lapped about by its mummy-wrappings, seized a rope’s end. In an instant the jib was set and stood on hard and billowing against the night wind. The tops’l followed. Then the figure moved forward and passed behind the companionway of the fo’c’s’le.

We looked for it to appear upon the other side, but looked in vain. We saw it no more that night.

What Hardenberg and I told each other between the time of the disappearing and the hour of breakfast I am now ashamed to recall. But at last we agreed to say nothing to the others — for the time being. Just after breakfast, however, we two had a few words by the wheel on the quarterdeck. Ally Bazan and Strokher were forward.

“The proper thing to do,” said I — it was a glorious, exhilarating morning, and the sunlight was flooding every angle and corner of the schooner— “the proper thing to do is to sleep on deck by the foremast to-night with our pistols handy and interview the — party if it walks again.”

“Oh, yes,” cried Hardenberg heartily. “Oh, yes; that’s the proper thing. Of course it is. No manner o’ doubt about that, Mr. Dixon. Watch for the party — yes, with pistols. Of course it’s the proper thing. But I know one man that ain’t going to do no such thing.”

“Well,” I remember to have said reflectively, “well — I guess I know another.”

But for all our resolutions to say nothing to the others about the night’s occurrences, we forgot that the tops’l and jib were both set and both drawing.

“An’ w’at might be the bloomin’ notion o’ setting the bloomin’ kite and jib?” demanded Ally Bazan not half an hour after breakfast. Shamelessly Hardenberg, at a loss for an answer, feigned an interest in the grummets of the life-boat cover and left me to lie as best I might.

But it is not easy to explain why one should raise the sails of an anchored ship during the night, and Ally Bazan grew very suspicious. Strokher, too, had something to say, and in the end the whole matter came out.

Trust a sailor to give full value to anything savouring of the supernatural. Strokher promptly voted the ship a “queer old hooker anyhow, and about as seaworthy as a hen-coop.” He held forth at great length upon the subject.

“You mark my words, now,” he said. “There’s been some fishy doin’s in this ‘ere vessel, and it’s like somebody done to death crool hard, an’ ‘e wants to git away from the smell o’ land, just like them as is killed on blue water. That’s w’y ‘e takes an’ sets the sails between dark an’ dawn.”

But Ally Bazan was thoroughly and wholly upset, so much so that at first he could not speak. He went pale and paler while we stood talking it over, and crossed himself — he was a Catholic — furtively behind the water-butt.

“I ain’t never ‘a’ been keen on ha’nts anyhow, Mr. Dixon,” he told me aggrievedly at dinner that evening. “I got no use for ‘em. I ain’t never known any good to come o’ anything with a ha’nt tagged to it, an’ we’re makin’ a ill beginnin’ o’ this island business, Mr. Dixon — a blyme ill beginnin’. I mean to stye awyke to-night.”

But if he was awake the little colonial was keeping close to his bunk at the time when Strokher and Hardenberg woke me at about three in the morning.

I rolled out and joined them on the quarterdeck and stood beside them watching. The same figure again towered, as before, gray and ominous in the crosstrees. As before, it set the tops’l; as before, it came down to the deck and raised the jib; as before, it passed out of sight amid the confusion of the forward deck.

But this time we all ran toward where we last had seen it, stumbling over the encumbered decks, jostling and tripping, but keeping wonderfully close together. It was not twenty seconds from the time the creature had disappeared before we stood panting upon the exact spot we had last seen it. We searched every corner of the forward deck in vain. We looked over the side. The moon was up. This night there was no fog. We could see for miles each side of us, but never a trace of a boat was visible, and it was impossible that any swimmer could have escaped the merciless scrutiny to which we subjected the waters of the bay in every direction.

Hardenberg and I dived down into the fo’c’s’le. Ally Bazan was sound asleep in his bunk and woke stammering, blinking and bewildered by the lantern we carried.

“I sye,” he cried, all at once scrambling up and clawing at our arms, “D’d the bally ha’nt show up agyne?” And as we nodded he went on more aggrievedly than ever— “Oh, I sye, y’ know, I daon’t like this. I eyen’t shipping in no bloomin’ ‘ooker wot carries a ha’nt for supercargo. They waon’t no good come o’ this cruise — no, they waon’t. It’s a sign, that’s wot it is. I eyen’t goin’ to buck again no signs — it eyen’t human nature, no it eyen’t. You mark my words, ‘Bud’ Hardenberg, we clear this port with a ship wot has a ha’nt an’ we waon’t never come back agyne, my hearty.”

That night he berthed aft with us on the quarterdeck, but though we stood watch and watch till well into the dawn, nothing stirred about the foremast. So it was the next night, and so the night after that. When three successive days had passed without any manifestation the keen edge of the business became a little blunted and we declared that an end had been made.

Ally Bazan returned to his bunk in the fo’c’s’le on the fourth night, and the rest of us slept the hours through unconcernedly.

But in the morning there were the jib and tops’l set and drawing as before.

After this we began experimenting — on Ally Bazan. We bunked him forward and we bunked him aft, for some one had pointed out that the “ha’nt” walked only at the times when the colonial slept in the fo’c’s’le. We found this to be true. Let the little fellow watch on the quarterdeck with us and the night passed without disturbance. As soon as he took up his quarters forward the haunting recommenced. Furthermore, it began to appear that the “ha’nt” carefully refrained from appearing to him. He of us all had never seen the thing. He of us all was spared the chills and the harrowings that laid hold upon the rest of us during these still gray hours after midnight when we huddled on the deck of the Idaho Lass and watched the sheeted apparition in the rigging; for by now there was no more charging forward in attempts to run the ghost down. We had passed that stage long since.

But so far from rejoicing in this immunity or drawing courage therefrom, Ally Bazan filled the air with his fears and expostulations. Just the fact that he was in some way differentiated from the others — that he was singled out, if only for exemption — worked upon him. And that he was unable to scale his terrors by actual sight of their object excited them all the more.

And there issued from this a curious consequence. He, the very one who had never seen the haunting, was also the very one to unsettle what little common sense yet remained to Hardenberg and Strokher. He never allowed the subject to be ignored — never lost an opportunity of referring to the doom that o’erhung the vessel. By the hour he poured into the ears of his friends lugubrious tales of ships, warned as this one was, that had cleared from port, never to be seen again. He recalled to their minds parallel incidents that they themselves had heard; he foretold the fate of the Idaho Lass when the land should lie behind and she should be alone in midocean with this horrid supercargo that took liberties with the rigging, and at last one particular morning, two days before that which was to witness the schooner’s departure, he came out flatfooted to the effect that “Gaw-blyme him, he couldn’t stand the gaff no longer, no he couldn’t, so help him, that if the owners were wishful for to put to sea” (doomed to some unnamable destruction) “he for one wa’n’t fit to die, an’ was going to quit that blessed day.” For the sake of appearances, Hardenberg and Strokher blustered and fumed, but I could hear the crack in Strokher’s voice as plain as in a broken ship’s bell. I was not surprised at what happened later in the day, when he told the others that he was a very sick man. A congenital stomach trouble, it seemed — or was it liver complaint — had found him out again. He had contracted it when a lad at Trincomalee, diving for pearls; it was acutely painful, it appeared. Why, gentlemen, even at that very moment, as he stood there talking — Hi, yi! O Lord ! — talking, it was a-griping of him something uncommon, so it was. And no, it was no manner of use for him to think of going on this voyage; sorry he was, too, for he’d made up his mind, so he had, to find out just what was wrong with the foremast, etc.

And thereupon Hardenberg swore a great oath and threw down the capstan bar he held in his hand.

“Well, then,” he cried wrathfully, “we might as well chuck up the whole business. No use going to sea with a sick man and a scared man.”

“An’ there’s the first word o’ sense,” cried Ally Bazan, “I’ve heard this long day. ‘Scared,’ he says; aye, right ye are, me bully.”

“It’s Cy Rider’s fault,” the three declared after a two-hours’ talk. “No business giving us a schooner with a ghost aboard. Scoovy or no scoovy, island or no island, guano or no guano, we don’t go to sea in the haunted hooker called the Idaho Lass.”

No more they did. On board the schooner they had faced the supernatural with some kind of courage born of the occasion. Once on shore, and no money could hire, no power force them to go aboard a second time.

The affair ended in a grand wrangle in Cy Rider’s back office, and just twenty-four hours later the bark Elftruda, Captain Jens Petersen, cleared from Portland, bound for “a cruise to South Pacific ports — in ballast.”

Two years after this I took Ally Bazan with me on a duck-shooting excursion in the “Toolies” back of Sacramento, for he is a handy man about a camp and can row a boat as softly as a drifting cloud.

We went about in a cabin cat of some thirty feet over all, the rowboat towing astern. Sometimes we did not go ashore to camp, but slept aboard. On the second night of this expedient I woke in my blankets on the floor of the cabin to see the square of gray light that stood for the cabin door darkened by — it gave me the same old start — a sheeted figure. It was going up the two steps to the deck. Beyond question it had been in the cabin. I started up and followed it. I was too frightened not to — if you can see what I mean. By the time I had got the blankets off and had thrust my head above the level of the cabin hatch the figure was already in the bows, and, as a matter of course, hoisting the jib.

I thought of calling Ally Bazan, who slept by me on the cabin floor, but it seemed to me at the time that if I did not keep that figure in sight it would elude me again, and, besides, if I went back in the cabin I was afraid that I would bolt the door and remain under the bedclothes till morning. I was afraid to go on with the adventure, but I was much more afraid to go back.

So I crept forward over the deck of the sloop. The “ha’nt” had its back toward me, fumbling with the ends of the jib halyards. I could hear the creak of new ropes as it undid the knot, and the sound was certainly substantial and commonplace. I was so close by now that I could see every outline of the shape. It was precisely as it had appeared on the crosstrees of the Idaho, only, seen without perspective, and brought down to the level of the eye, it lost its exaggerated height.

It had been kneeling upon the deck. Now, at last, it rose and turned about, the end of the halyards in its hand. The light of the earliest dawn fell squarely on the face and form, and I saw, if you please, Ally Bazan himself. His eyes were half shut, and through his open lips came the sound of his deep and regular breathing.

At breakfast the next morning I asked, “Ally Bazan, did you ever walk in your sleep.”

“Aye,” he answered, “years ago, when I was by wye o’ being a lad, I used allus to wrap the bloomin’ sheets around me. An’ crysy things I’d do the times. But the ‘abit left me when I grew old enough to tyke me whisky strite and have hair on me fyce.”

I did not “explain away” the ghost in the crosstrees either to Ally Bazan or to the other two Black Crows. Furthermore, I do not now refer to the Island of Paa in the hearing of the trio. The claims and title of Norway to the island have long since been made good and conceded — even by the State Department at Washington — and I understand that Captain Petersen has made a very pretty fortune out of the affair.

As young Felipe Arillaga guided his pony out of the last intricacies of Pacheco Pass, he was thinking of Rubia Ytuerate and of the scene he had had with her a few days before. He reconstructed it now very vividly. Rubia had been royally angry, and as she had stood before him, her arms folded and her teeth set, he was forced to admit that she was as handsome a woman as could be found through all California.

There had been a time, three months past, when Felipe found no compulsion in the admission, for though betrothed to Buelna Martiarena he had abruptly conceived a violent infatuation for Rubia, and had remained a guest upon her rancho many weeks longer than he had intended.

For three months he had forgotten Buelna entirely. At the end of that time he had remembered her — had awakened to the fact that his infatuation for Rubia was infatuation, and had resolved to end the affair and go back to Buelna as soon as it was possible.

But Rubia was quick to notice the cooling of his passion. First she fixed him with oblique suspicion from under her long lashes, then avoided him, then kept him at her side for days together. Then at last — his defection unmistakable — turned on him with furious demands for the truth.

Felipe had snatched occasion with one hand and courage with the other.

“Well,” he had said, “well, it is not my fault. Yes, it is the truth. It is played out.”

He had not thought it necessary to speak of Buelna; but Rubia divined the other woman.

“So you think you are to throw me aside like that. Ah, it is played out, is it, Felipe Arillaga? You listen to me. Do not fancy for one moment you are going back to an old love, or on to a new one. You listen to me,” she had cried, her fist over her head. “I do not know who she is, but my curse is on her, Felipe Arillaga. My curse is on her who next kisses you. May that kiss be a blight to her. From that moment may evil cling to her, bad luck follow her; may she love and not be loved; may friends desert her, enemies beset her, her sisters shame her, her brothers disown her, and those whom she has loved abandon her. May her body waste as your love for me has wasted; may her heart be broken as your promises to me have been broken; may her joy be as fleeting as your vows, and her beauty grow as dim as your memory of me. I have said it.”

Illustration: “‘My Curse Is On Her Who Next Kisses You’”

“So be it!” Felipe had retorted with vast nonchalance, and had flung out from her presence to saddle his pony and start back to Buelna.

But Felipe was superstitious. He half believed in curses, had seen two-headed calves born because of them, and sheep stampeded over cliffs for no other reason.

Now, as he drew out of Pacheco Pass and came down into the valley the idea of Rubia and her curse troubled him. At first, when yet three days’ journey from Buelna, it had been easy to resolve to brave it out. But now he was already on the Rancho Martiarena (had been traveling over it for the last ten hours, in fact), and in a short time would be at the hacienda of Martiarena, uncle and guardian of Buelna. He would see Buelna, and she, believing always in his fidelity, would expect to kiss him.

“Well, this is to be thought about,” murmured Felipe uneasily. He touched up the pony with one of his enormous spurs.

“Now I know what I will do,” he thought. “I will go to San Juan Bautista and confess and be absolved, and will buy candles. Then afterward will go to Buelna.”

He found the road that led to the Mission and turned into it, pushing forward at a canter. Then suddenly at a sharp turning reined up just in time to avoid colliding with a little cavalcade.

He uttered an exclamation under his breath.

At the head of the cavalcade rode old Martiarena himself, and behind him came a peon or two, then Manuela, the aged housekeeper and — after a fashion — duenna. Then at her side, on a saddle of red leather with silver bosses, which was cinched about the body of a very small white burro, Buelna herself.

She was just turned sixteen, and being of the best blood of the mother kingdom (the strain dating back to the Ostrogothic invasion), was fair. Her hair was blond, her eyes blue-gray, her eyebrows and lashes dark brown, and as he caught sight of her Felipe wondered how he ever could have believed the swarthy Rubia beautiful.

There was a jubilant meeting. Old Martiarena kissed both his cheeks, patting him on the back.

“Oh, ho!” he cried. “Once more back. We have just returned from the feast of the Santa Cruz at the Mission, and Buelna prayed for your safe return. Go to her, boy. She has waited long for this hour.”

Felipe, his eyes upon those of his betrothed, advanced. She was looking at him and smiling. As he saw the unmistakable light in her blue eyes, the light he knew she had kept burning for him alone, Felipe could have abased himself to the very hoofs of her burro. Could it be possible he had ever forgotten her for such a one as Rubia — have been unfaithful to this dear girl for so much as the smallest fraction of a minute?

“You are welcome, Felipe,” she said. “Oh, very, very welcome.” She gave him her hand and turned her face to his. But it was her hand and not her face the young man kissed. Old Martiarena, who looked on, shook with laughter.

“Hoh! a timid lover this,” he called. “We managed different when I was a lad. Her lips, Felipe. Must an old man teach a youngster gallantry?”

Buelna blushed and laughed, but yet did not withdraw her hand nor turn her face away.

There was a delicate expectancy in her manner that she nevertheless contrived to make compatible with her native modesty. Felipe had been her acknowledged lover ever since the two were children.

“Well?” cried Martiarena as Felipe hesitated.

Even then, if Felipe could have collected his wits, he might have saved the situation for himself. But no time had been allowed him to think. Confusion seized upon him. All that was clear in his mind were the last words of Rubia. It seemed to him that between his lips he carried a poison deadly to Buelna above all others. Stupidly, brutally he precipitated the catastrophe.

“No,” he exclaimed seriously, abruptly drawing his hand from Buelna’s, “no. It may not be. I cannot.”

Martiarena stared. Then:

“Is this a jest, señor?” he demanded. “An ill-timed one, then.”

“No,” answered Felipe, “it is not a jest.”

“But, Felipe,” murmured Buelna. “But — why — I do not understand.”

“I think I begin to,” cried Martiarena. “Señor, you do not,” protested Felipe. “It is not to be explained. I know what you believe. On my honour, I love Buelna.”

“Your actions give you the lie, then, young man. Bah! Nonsense. What fool’s play is all this? Kiss him, Buelna, and have done with it.”

Felipe gnawed his nails.

“Believe me, oh, believe me, Señor Martiarena, it must not be.”

“Then an explanation.”

For a moment Felipe hesitated. But how could he tell them the truth — the truth that involved Rubia and his disloyalty, temporary though that was. They could neither understand nor forgive. Here, indeed, was an impasse. One thing only was to be said, and he said it. “I can give you no explanation,” he murmured.

But Buelna suddenly interposed.

“Oh, please,” she said, pushing by Felipe, “uncle, we have talked too long. Please let us go. There is only one explanation. Is it not enough already?”

“By God, it is not!” vociferated the old man, turning upon Felipe. “Tell me what it means. Tell me what this means.”

“I cannot.”

“Then I will tell you!” shouted the old fellow in Felipe’s face. “It means that you are a liar and a rascal. That you have played with Buelna, and that you have deceived me, who have trusted you as a father would have trusted a son. I forbid you to answer me. For the sake of what you were I spare you now. But this I will do. Off of my rancho!” he cried. “Off my rancho, and in the future pray your God, or the devil, to whom you are sold, to keep you far from me.”

“You do not understand, you do not understand,” pleaded Felipe, the tears starting to his eyes. “Oh, believe me, I speak the truth. I love your niece. I love Buelna. Oh, never so truly, never so devoutly as now. Let me speak to her; she will believe me.”

But Buelna, weeping, had ridden on.

A fortnight passed. Soon a month had gone by. Felipe gloomed about his rancho, solitary, taciturn, siding the sheep-walks and cattle-ranges for days and nights together, refusing all intercourse with his friends. It seemed as if he had lost Buelna for good and all. At times, as the certainty of this defined itself more clearly, Felipe would fling his hat upon the ground, beat his breast, and then, prone upon his face, his head buried in his folded arms, would lie for hours motionless, while his pony nibbled the sparse alfalfa, and the jack-rabbits limping from the sage peered at him, their noses wrinkling.

But about a month after the meeting and parting with Buelna, word went through all the ranches that a hide-roger had cast anchor in Monterey Bay. At once an abrupt access of activity seized upon the rancheros. Rodeos were held, sheep slaughtered, and the great tallow-pits began to fill up.

Felipe was not behind his neighbours, and, his tallow once in hand, sent it down to Monterey, and himself rode down to see about disposing of it.

On his return he stopped at the wine shop of one Lopez Catala, on the road between Monterey and his rancho.

It was late afternoon when he reached it, and the wine shop was deserted. Outside, the California August lay withering and suffocating over all the land. The far hills were burnt to dry, hay-like grass and brittle clods. The eucalyptus trees in front of the wine shop (the first trees Felipe had seen all that day) were coated with dust. The plains of sagebrush and the alkali flats shimmered and exhaled pallid mirages, glistening like inland seas. Over all blew the trade-wind; prolonged, insistent, harassing, swooping up the red dust of the road and the white powder of the alkali beds, and flinging it — white-and-red banners in a sky of burnt-out blue — here and there about the landscape.

The wine shop, which was also an inn, was isolated, lonely, but it was comfortable, and Felipe decided to lay over there that night, then in the morning reach his rancho by an easy stage.

He had his supper — an omelet, cheese, tortillas, and a glass of wine — and afterward sat outside on a bench smoking innumerable cigarettes and watching the sun set.

While he sat so a young man of about his own age rode up from the eastward with a great flourish, and giving over his horse to the muchacho, entered the wine shop and ordered dinner and a room for the night. Afterward he came out and stood in front of the inn and watched the muchacho cleaning his horse.

Felipe, looking at him, saw that he was of his own age and about his own build — that is to say, twenty-eight or thirty, and tall and lean. But in other respects the difference was great. The stranger was flamboyantly dressed: skin-tight pantaloons, fastened all up and down the leg with round silver buttons; yellow boots with heels high as a girl’s, set off with silver spurs; a very short coat faced with galloons of gold, and a very broad-brimmed and very high-crowned sombrero, on which the silver braid alone was worth the price of a good horse. Even for a Spanish Mexican his face was dark. Swart it was, the cheeks hollow; a tiny, tight mustache with ends truculently pointed and erect helped out the belligerency of the tight-shut lips. The eyes were black as bitumen, and flashed continually under heavy brows.

“Perhaps,” thought Felipe, “he is a toreador from Mexico.”

The stranger followed his horse to the barn, but, returning in a few moments, stood before Felipe and said:

“Señor, I have taken the liberty to put my horse in the stall occupied by yours. Your beast the muchacho turned into the corrale. Mine is an animal of spirit, and in a corrale would fight with the other horses. I rely upon the señor’s indulgence.”

At ordinary times he would not have relied in vain. But Felipe’s nerves were in a jangle these days, and his temper, since Buelna’s dismissal of him, was bitter. His perception of offense was keen. He rose, his eyes upon the stranger’s eyes.

“My horse is mine,” he observed. “Only my friends permit themselves liberties with what is mine.”

The other smiled scornfully and drew from his belt a little pouch of gold dust.

“What I take I pay for,” he remarked, and, still smiling, tendered Felipe a few grains of the gold.

Felipe struck the outstretched palm.

“Am I a peon?” he vociferated.

“Probably,” retorted the other.

“I will take pay for that word,” cried Felipe, his face blazing, “but not in your money, señor.”

“In that case I may give you more than you ask.”

“No, by God, for I shall take all you have.”

But the other checked his retort. A sudden change came over him.

“I ask the señor’s pardon,” he said, with grave earnestness, “for provoking him. You may not fight with me nor I with you. I speak the truth. I have made oath not to fight till I have killed one whom now I seek.”

“Very well; I, too, spoke without reflection. You seek an enemy, then, señor?”

“My sister’s, who is therefore mine. An enemy truly. Listen, you shall judge. I am absent from my home a year, and when I return what do I find? My sister betrayed, deceived, flouted by a fellow, a nobody, whom she received a guest in her house, a fit return for kindness, for hospitality! Well, he answers to me for the dishonour.”

“Wait. Stop!” interposed Felipe. “Your name, señor.”

“Unzar Ytuerate, and my enemy is called Arillaga. Him I seek and — —”

“Then you shall seek no farther!” shouted Felipe. “It is to Rubia Ytuerate, your sister, whom I owe all my unhappiness, all my suffering. She has hurt not me only, but one — but —— Mother of God, we waste words!” he cried. “Knife to knife, Unzar Ytuerate. I am Felipe Arillaga, and may God be thanked for the chance that brings this quarrel to my hand.”

“You! You!” gasped Unzar. Fury choked him; his hands clutched and unclutched — now fists, now claws. His teeth grated sharply while a quivering sensation as of a chill crisped his flesh. “Then the sooner the better,” he muttered between his set teeth, and the knives flashed in the hands of the two men so suddenly that the gleam of one seemed only the reflection of the other.

Unzar held out his left wrist.

“Are you willing?” he demanded, with a significant glance.

“And ready,” returned the other, baring his forearm.

Catala, keeper of the inn, was called.

“Love of the Virgin, not here, señors. My house — the alcalde—”

“You have a strap there.” Unzar pointed to a bridle hanging from a peg by the doorway. “No words; quick; do as you are told.”

The two men held out their left arms till wrist touched wrist, and Catala, trembling and protesting, lashed them together with a strap.

“Tighter,” commanded Felipe; “put all your strength to it.”

The strap was drawn up to another hole.

“Now, Catala, stand back,” commanded Unzar, “and count three slowly. At the word ‘three,’ Señor Arillaga, we begin. You understand.”

“I understand.”

“Ready…. Count.”

“One.”

Felipe and Unzar each put his right hand grasping the knife behind his back as etiquette demanded.

“Two.”

They strained back from each other, the full length of their left arms, till the nails grew bloodless.

“Three!” called Lopez Catala in a shaking voice.

When Felipe regained consciousness he found that he lay in an upper chamber of Catala’s inn upon a bed. His shoulder, the right one, was bandaged, and so was his head. He felt no pain, only a little weak, but there was a comfortable sense of brandy at his lips, an arm supported his head, and the voice of Rubia Ytuerate spoke his name. He sat up on a sudden.

“Rubia, you!” he cried. “What is it? What happened? Oh, I remember, Unzar — we fought. Oh, my God, how we fought! But you —— What brought you here?”

“Thank Heaven,” she murmured, “you are better. You are not so badly wounded. As he fell he must have dragged you with him, and your head struck the threshold of the doorway.”

“Is he badly hurt? Will he recover?”

“I hope so. But you are safe.”

“But what brought you here?”

“Love,” she cried; “my love for you. What I suffered after you had gone! Felipe, I have fought, too. Pride was strong at first, and it was pride that made me send Unzar after you. I told him what had happened. I hounded him to hunt you down. Then when he had gone my battle began. Ah, dearest, dearest, it all came back, our days together, the life we led, knowing no other word but love, thinking no thoughts that were not of each other. And love conquered. Unzar was not a week gone before I followed him — to call him back, to shield you, to save you from his fury. I came all but too late, and found you both half dead. My brother and my lover, your body across his, your blood mingling with his own. But not too late to love you back to life again. Your life is mine now, Felipe. I love you, I love you.” She clasped her hands together and pressed them to her cheek. “Ah, if you knew,” she cried; “if you could only look into my heart. Pride is nothing; good name is nothing; friends are nothing. Oh, it is a glory to give them all for love, to give up everything; to surrender, to submit, to cry to one’s heart: ‘Take me; I am as wax. Take me; conquer me; lead me wherever you will. All is well lost so only that love remains.’ And I have heard all that has happened — this other one, the Señorita Buelna, how that she for bade you her lands. Let her go; she is not worthy of your love, cold, selfish — —”

“Stop!” cried Felipe, “you shall say no more evil of her. It is enough.”

“Felipe, you love her yet?”

“And always, always will.”

“She who has cast you off; she who disdains you, who will not suffer you on her lands? And have you come to be so low, so base and mean as that?”

“I have sunk no lower than a woman who could follow after a lover who had grown manifestly cold.”

“Ah,” she answered sadly, “if I could so forget my pride as to follow you, do not think your reproaches can touch me now.” Then suddenly she sank at the bedside and clasped his hand in both of hers. Her beautiful hair, unbound, tumbled about her shoulders; her eyes, swimming with tears, were turned up to his; her lips trembled with the intensity of her passion. In a voice low, husky, sweet as a dove’s, she addressed him. “Oh, dearest, come back to me; come back to me. Let me love you again. Don’t you see my heart is breaking? There is only you in all the world for me. I was a proud woman once. See now what I have brought myself to. Don’t let it all be in vain. If you fail me now, think how it will be for me afterward — to know that I — I, Rubia Ytuerate, have begged the love of a man and begged in vain. Do you think I could live knowing that?” Abruptly she lost control of herself. She caught him about the neck with both her arms. Almost incoherently her words rushed from her tight-shut teeth.

“Ah, I can make you love me. I can make you love me,” she cried. “You shall come back to me. You are mine, and you cannot help but come back.”

“Por Dios, Rubia,” he ejaculated, “remember yourself. You are out of your head.”

“Come back to me; love me.”

“No, no.”

“Come back to me.”

“No.”

“You cannot push me from you,” she cried, for, one hand upon her shoulder, he had sought to disengage himself. “No, I shall not let you go. You shall not push me from you! Thrust me off and I will embrace you all the closer. Yes, strike me if you will, and I will kiss you.”

And with the words she suddenly pressed her lips to his.

Abruptly Felipe freed himself. A new thought suddenly leaped to his brain.

“Let your own curse return upon you,” he cried. “You yourself have freed me; you yourself have broken the barrier you raised between me and my betrothed. You cursed her whose lips should next touch mine, and you are poisoned with your own venom.”

He sprang from off the bed, and catching up his serape, flung it about his shoulders.

“Felipe,” she cried, “Felipe, where are you going?”

“Back to Buelna,” he shouted, and with the words rushed from the room. Her strength seemed suddenly to leave her. She sank lower to the floor, burying her face deep upon the pillows that yet retained the impress of him she loved so deeply, so recklessly.

Footsteps in the passage and a knocking at the door aroused her. A woman, one of the escort who had accompanied her, entered hurriedly.

“Señorita,” cried this one, “your brother, the Señor Unzar, he is dying.”

Rubia hurried to an adjoining room, where upon a mattress on the floor lay her brother.

“Put that woman out,” he gasped as his glance met hers. “I never sent for her,” he went on. “You are no longer sister of mine. It was you who drove me to this quarrel, and when I have vindicated you what do you do? Your brother you leave to be tended by hirelings, while all your thought and care are lavished on your paramour. Go back to him. I know how to die alone, but as you go remember that in dying I hated and disowned you.”

He fell back upon the pillows, livid, dead.

Rubia started forward with a cry.

“It is you who have killed him,” cried the woman who had summoned her. The rest of Rubia’s escort, vaqueros, peons, and the old alcalde of her native village, stood about with bared heads.

“That is true. That is true,” they murmured. The old alcalde stepped forward.

“Who dishonours my friend dishonours me,” he said. “From this day, Señorita Ytuerate, you and I are strangers.” He went out, and one by one, with sullen looks and hostile demeanour, Rubia’s escort followed. Their manner was unmistakable; they were deserting her.

Rubia clasped her hands over her eyes.

“Madre de Dios, Madre de Dios,” she moaned over and over again. Then in a low voice she repeated her own words: “May it be a blight to her. From that moment may evil cling to her, bad luck follow her; may she love and not be loved; may friends desert her, her sisters shame her, her brothers disown her — —”

There was a clatter of horse’s hoofs in the courtyard.

“It is your lover,” said her woman coldly from the doorway. “He is riding away from you.”

“ —— and those,” added Rubia, “whom she has loved abandon her.”

Meanwhile Felipe, hatless, bloody, was galloping through the night, his pony’s head turned toward the hacienda of Martiarena. The Rancho Martiarena lay between his own rancho and the inn where he had met Rubia, so that this distance was not great. He reached it in about an hour of vigorous spurring.

The place was dark though it was as yet early in the night, and an ominous gloom seemed to hang about the house. Felipe, his heart sinking, pounded at the door, and at last aroused the aged superintendent, who was also a sort of major-domo in the household, and who in Felipe’s boyhood had often ridden him on his knee.

“Ah, it is you, Arillaga,” he said very sadly, as the moonlight struck across Felipe’s face. “I had hoped never to see you again.”

“Buelna,” demanded Felipe. “I have something to say to her, and to the padron.”

“Too late, señor.”

“My God, dead?”

“As good as dead.”

“Rafael, tell me all. I have come to set everything straight again. On my honour, I have been misjudged. Is Buelna well?”

“Listen. You know your own heart best, señor. When you left her our little lady was as one half dead; her heart died within her. Ah, she loved you, Arillaga, far more than you deserved. She drooped swiftly, and one night all but passed away. Then it was that she made a vow that if God spared her life she would become the bride of the church — would forever renounce the world. Well, she recovered, became almost well again, but not the same as before. She never will be that. So soon as she was able to obtain Martiarena’s consent she made all the preparations — signed away all her lands and possessions, and spent the days and nights in prayer and purifications. The Mother Superior of the Convent of Santa Teresa has been a guest at the hacienda this fortnight past. Only to-day the party — that is to say, Martiarena, the Mother Superior and Buelna — left for Santa Teresa, and at midnight of this very night Buelna takes the veil. You know your own heart, Señor Felipe. Go your way.”

“But not till midnight!” cried Felipe.

“What? I do not understand.”

“She will not take the veil till midnight.”

“No, not till then.”

“Rafael,” cried Felipe, “ask me no questions now. Only believe me. I always have and always will love Buelna. I swear it. I can stop this yet; only once let me reach her in time. Trust me. Ah, for this once trust me, you who have known me since I was a lad.”

He held out his hand. The other for a moment hesitated, then impulsively clasped it in his own.

“Bueno, I trust you then. Yet I warn you not to fool me twice.”

“Good,” returned Felipe. “And now adios. Unless I bring her back with me you’ll never see me again.”

“But, Felipe, lad, where away now?”

“To Santa Teresa.”

“You are mad. Do you fancy you can reach it before midnight?” insisted the major-domo.

“I will, Rafael; I will.”

“Then Heaven be with you.”

But the old fellow’s words were lost in a wild clatter of hoofs, as Felipe swung his pony around and drove home the spurs. Through the night came back a cry already faint:

“Adios, adios.”

“Adios, Felipe,” murmured the old man as he stood bewildered in the doorway, “and your good angel speed you now.”

When Felipe began his ride it was already a little after nine. Could he reach Santa Teresa before midnight? The question loomed grim before him, but he answered only with the spur. Pépe was hardy, and, as Felipe well knew, of indomitable pluck. But what a task now lay before the little animal. He might do it, but oh! it was a chance!

In a quarter of a mile Pépe had settled to his stride, the dogged, even gallop that Felipe knew so well, and at half-past ten swung through the main street of Piedras Blancas — silent, somnolent, dark.

“Steady, little Pépe,” said Felipe; “steady, little one. Soh, soh. There.”

The little horse flung back an ear, and Felipe could feel along the lines how he felt for the bit, trying to get a grip of it to ease the strain on his mouth.

The De Profundis bell was sounding from the church tower as Felipe galloped through San Anselmo, the next village, but by the time he raised the lights of Arcata it was black night in very earnest. He set his teeth. Terra Bella lay eight miles farther ahead, and here from the town-hall clock that looked down upon the plaza he would be able to know the time.

“Hoopa, Pépe; pronto!” he shouted.

The pony responded gallantly. His head was low; his ears in constant movement, twitched restlessly back and forth, now laid flat on his neck, now cocked to catch the rustle of the wind in the chaparral, the scurrying of a rabbit or ground-owl through the sage.

It grew darker, colder, the trade-wind lapsed away. Low in the sky upon the right a pale, dim belt foretold the rising of the moon. The incessant galloping of the pony was the only sound.

The convent toward which he rode was just outside the few scattered huts in the valley of the Rio Esparto that by charity had been invested with the name of Caliente. From Piedras Blancas to Caliente between twilight and midnight! What a riding! Could he do it? Would Pépe last under him?

“Steady, little one. Steady, Pépe.”

Thus he spoke again and again, measuring the miles in his mind, husbanding the little fellow’s strength.

Lights! Cart lanterns? No, Terra Bella. A great dog charged out at him from a dobe, filling the night with outcry; a hayrick loomed by like a ship careening through fog; there was a smell of chickens and farmyards. Then a paved street, an open square, a solitary pedestrian dodging just in time from under Pépe’s hoofs. All flashed by. The open country again, unbroken darkness again, and solitude of the fields again. Terra Bella past.

But through the confusion Felipe retained one picture, that of the moon-faced clock with hands marking the hour of ten. On again with Pépe leaping from the touch of the spur. On again up the long, shallow slope that rose for miles to form the divide that overlooked the valley of the Esparto.

“Hold, there! Madman to ride thus. Mad or drunk. Only desperadoes gallop at night. Halt and speak!”

The pony had swerved barely in time, and behind him the Monterey stage lay all but ditched on the roadside, the driver fulminating oaths. But Felipe gave him but an instant’s thought. Dobe huts once more abruptly ranged up on either side the roadway, staggering and dim under the night. Then a wine shop noisy with carousing peons darted by. Pavements again. A shop-front or two. A pig snoring in the gutter, a dog howling in a yard, a cat lamenting on a rooftop. Then the smell of fields again. Then darkness again. Then the solitude of the open country. Cadenassa past.

But now the country changed. The slope grew steeper; it was the last lift of land to the divide. The road was sown with stones and scored with ruts. Pépe began to blow; once he groaned. Perforce his speed diminished. The villages were no longer so thickly spread now. The crest of the divide was wild, desolate, forsaken. Felipe again and again searched the darkness for lights, but the night was black.

Then abruptly the moon rose. By that Felipe could guess the time. His heart sank. He halted, recinched the saddle, washed the pony’s mouth with brandy from his flask, then mounted and spurred on.

Another half-hour went by. He could see that Pépe was in distress; his speed was by degrees slacking. Would he last! Would he last? Would the minutes that raced at his side win in that hard race?

Houses again. Plastered fronts. All dark and gray. No soul stirring. Sightless windows stared out upon emptiness. The plaza bared its desolation to the pitiless moonlight. Only from an unseen window a guitar hummed and tinkled. All vanished. Open country again. The solitude of the fields again; the moonlight sleeping on the vast sweep of the ranchos. Calpella past.

Felipe rose in his stirrups with a great shout.

At Calpella he knew he had crossed the divide. The valley lay beneath him, and the moon was turning to silver the winding courses of the Rio Esparto, now in plain sight.

It was between Calpella and Proberta that Pépe stumbled first. Felipe pulled him up and ceased to urge him to his topmost speed. But five hundred yards farther he stumbled again. The spume-flakes he tossed from the bit were bloody. His breath came in labouring gasps.

But by now Felipe could feel the rising valley-mists; he could hear the piping of the frogs in the marshes. The ground for miles had sloped downward. He was not far from the river, not far from Caliente, not far from the Convent of Santa Teresa and Buelna.

But the way to Caliente was roundabout, distant. If he should follow the road thither he would lose a long half-hour. By going directly across the country from where he now was, avoiding Proberta, he could save much distance and precious time. But in this case Pépe, exhausted, stumbling, weak, would have to swim the river. If he failed to do this Felipe would probably drown. If he succeeded, Caliente and the convent would be close at hand.

For a moment Felipe hesitated, then suddenly made up his mind. He wheeled Pépe from the road, and calling upon his last remaining strength, struck off across the country.

The sound of the river at last came to his ears.

“Now, then, Pépe,” he cried.

For the last time the little horse leaped to the sound of his voice. Still at a gallop, Felipe cut the cinches of the heavy saddle, shook his feet clear of the stirrups, and let it fall to the ground; his coat, belt and boots followed. Bareback, with but the headstall and bridle left upon the pony, he rode at the river.

Before he was ready for it Pépe’s hoofs splashed on the banks. Then the water swirled about his fetlocks; then it wet Felipe’s bare ankles. In another moment Felipe could tell by the pony’s motion that his feet had left the ground and that he was swimming in the middle of the current.

He was carried down the stream more than one hundred yards. Once Pépe’s leg became entangled in a sunken root. Freed from that, his hoofs caught in grasses and thick weeds. Felipe’s knee was cut against a rock; but at length the pony touched ground. He rose out of the river trembling, gasping and dripping. Felipe put him at the steep bank. He took it bravely, scrambled his way — almost on his knees — to the top, then stumbled badly and fell prone upon the ground. Felipe twisted from under him as he fell and regained his feet unhurt. He ran to the brave little fellow’s head.

“Up, up, my Pépe. Soh, soh.”

Suddenly he paused, listening. Across the level fields there came to his ears the sound of the bell of the convent of Santa Teresa tolling for midnight.

Upon the first stroke of midnight the procession of nuns entered the nave of the church. There were some thirty in the procession. The first ranks swung censers; those in the rear carried lighted candles. The Mother Superior and Buelna, the latter wearing a white veil, walked together. The youngest nun followed these two, carrying upon her outspread palms the black veil.

Arrived before the altar the procession divided into halves, fifteen upon the east side of the chancel, fifteen upon the west. The organ began to drone and murmur, the censers swung and smoked, the candle-flames flared and attracted the bats that lived among the rafters overhead. Buelna knelt before the Mother Superior. She was pale and a little thin from fasting and the seclusion of the cells. But, try as she would, she could not keep her thoughts upon the solemn office in which she was so important a figure. Other days came back to her. A little girl gay and free once more, she romped through the hallways and kitchen of the old hacienda Martiarena with her playmate, the young Felipe; a young schoolgirl, she rode with him to the Mission to the instruction of the padre; a young woman, she danced with him at the fête of All Saints at Monterey. Why had it not been possible that her romance should run its appointed course to a happy end? That last time she had seen him how strangely he had deported himself. Untrue to her! Felipe! Her Felipe; her more than brother! How vividly she recalled the day. They were returning from the Mission, where she had prayed for his safe and speedy return. Long before she had seen him she heard the gallop of a horse’s hoofs around the turn of the road. Yes, she remembered that — the gallop of a horse. Ah! how he rode — how vivid it was in her fancy. Almost she heard the rhythmic beat of the hoofs. They came nearer, nearer. Fast, furiously fast hoof-beats. How swift he rode. Gallop, gallop — nearer, on they came. They were close by. They swept swiftly nearer, nearer. What — what was this? No fancy. Nearer, nearer. No fancy this. Nearer, nearer. These — ah, Mother of God — are real hoof-beats. They are coming; they are at hand; they are at the door of the church; they are here!

She sprang up, facing around. The ceremony was interrupted. The frightened nuns were gathering about the Mother Superior. The organ ceased, and in the stillness that followed all could hear that furious gallop. On it came, up the hill, into the courtyard. Then a shout, hurried footsteps, the door swung in, and Felipe Arillaga, ragged, dripping, half fainting, hatless and stained with mud, sprang toward Buelna. Forgetting all else, she ran to meet him, and, clasped in each other’s arms, they kissed one another upon the lips again and again.

The bells of Santa Teresa that Felipe had heard that night on the blanks of the Esparto rang for a wedding the next day.

Two days after they tolled as passing bells. A beautiful woman had been found drowned in a river not far from the house of Lopez Catala, on the high road to Monterey.