Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner

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"You're mistaken about my being modest. Everybody who knows me well says
I'm spoiled."

"Who's spoiled you?"

"Lorry and Aunt Ellen and Fong."

She gave him a quick side glance, met his eyes, and they both laughed, a
light-hearted mingling of treble and bass.

The Italian women breathed deeply on their bench, aware that the
interchanged glances and chimed laughter had advanced the romance on its
happy way.

"Three people can't do any serious spoiling--there should be at least
four. Who's Fong?"

"Our Chinaman; he's been with us for centuries."

"Let me make the fourth. Put me on the list."

"I think you've put yourself there without being invited. Since we sat
down you've done nothing but pay me compliments."

"Never mind that. Here's a sensible suggestion: I'll judge myself if
you're spoiled and if I think you are I won't pay you one more. Isn't
that fair?"

"I think so."

"Very well. Of course I must know you better, have a talk with you before
I can be sure. How can we arrange that? Ah--I have it! Some bright
afternoon like this we might take a walk together."

"Yes, we could do that."

"We might go to the park--it's wonderful there on days like this."

She nodded and said slowly,

"And we could take Lorry."

"To be sure, if she'd care to come."

There was a slight pause and he saw by her profile there was doubt
in her mind.

"I don't know about her caring. Lorry doesn't like walking much."

"Then why ask her to do it?"

She stroked her muff, evidently discomfited.

"Well, you see, it's this way, I don't think Lorry'd like me to go with
you alone."

"But why?" He drew himself up from the bench's back, his tone surprised,
slightly offended. "Surely having invited me to her house, she could
have no objection to my going for a stroll with you?"

"No, no--" Her discomfort was obvious now. "It isn't _you_. It's just
that father was very particular and Lorry always tries to do what he
would have liked."

"My dear young lady, your father's been dead a good many years. Things
have changed since then; the customs of his day are not the customs of
ours. Of course I wouldn't suggest that you go counter to your sister's
wishes, but"--he turned away from her, huffy, head high, a gentleman
flouted in his pride--"it's rather absurd from my point of view. Oh,
well, we'll say no more about it."

Chrystie was distracted. It was not only the humiliation of appearing
out of date and provincial; it was something much worse than that. She
saw Boye Mayer retiring in majestic indignation and not coming back,
leaving her at this first real blossoming of their friendship because
Lorry had ideas that the rest of the world had abandoned with hoop
skirts and chignons.

"Why, why," she stammered, alarm pushing her to the recklessness of the
desperate, "couldn't we go and not tell her? It's--it's--just a prejudice
of Lorry's--no one else feels that way. The Barlow girls, who've been
very strictly brought up, go walking and even go to the theater
with"--she was going to say "their nuggets" and then changed with a gasp
to--"the men their mother asks to her parties."

So Chrystie, guileless and subjugated, assisted in the development of the
Idea. She made an engagement to meet Mr. Mayer four days later in the
Plaza and go with him to see the orchids in the park greenhouse. The Holy
Spirit orchid was in bloom and she had never seen it. A flower with such
a name as the Holy Spirit seemed to Chrystie in some way to shed an
element of propriety if not righteousness over the adventure.

It was when they were sauntering toward the end of the Plaza that a
woman, coming up a side street, saw them. She was about to cross when her
eye, ranging over the green lawns, brought up on them and she stopped,
one foot advanced, its heel knocking softly against the curbstone. As the
two tall figures moved her glance followed them, her head slowly turning.
She watched them cross the intersection of the streets, lights chasing
each other up and down the lady's waving skirt and gilding the web of
golden hair; she watched them pass by a show window, its glassy surface
holding their bright reflections; she watched their farewells at the door
of a large shop which finally absorbed the lady. Then she faced about,
and walked toward the Albion, where a rehearsal was awaiting her.

That afternoon a week had passed since Pancha had seen her lover.

During the first three days of it she experienced a still and perfect
peace. She did not want to see him; she had reached a point of complete
assurance and was glad to wait there, rest in the joy that had come to
her, dwell, awed, on its wonderfulness. In her short periods of leisure
she sat motionless, recalling lovely moments, living them over, sometimes
asking herself why he cared for her, then throwing the question
aside--that he did was all that concerned her now.

On the fourth day her serenity was disturbed very slightly, but she could
not banish a faint, intruding surprise that she had not heard from him.
She tried to smother it by a return to her old interests, but her work
had lost its power to engross and she went through it mechanically
without enthusiasm. By the fifth her mental state had changed. She would
not admit that she was uneasy, but in spite of her efforts a queer,
upsetting restlessness invaded her. Everything was all right, she knew
it, but she seemed to be dodging a shadow that fell thinly across the
brightness. That evening she played badly, missed a cue and had no snap.
She realized it, saw it in the faces of her fellows, and knew she must do
better or there would be complaints.

On the way home she argued it out with herself. She was thinking too much
of Mayer--worrying about nothing--and it was interfering with her work.
She oughtn't to be such a fool, but her place at the Albion was
important, and a word from him--a line or a phone message--would tone her
up, and she would go on even better than before. At an "all night" drug
store she bought a box of pink notepaper and a sachet, and before she
went to bed put the scented envelope in the box and covered them both
with a sofa pillow to draw out the perfume.

In the morning, after sniffing delicately at the paper, which exhaled a
powerful smell of musk, she sat at her table and wrote him a letter. She
made several drafts before she attained the tone, jocose and tender, that
would save her pride and draw from him the line that was to dissipate her
foolish fancies.

"DEAREST BOYE:

"No one has knocked at my door for nearly six days now. Not even sent me
a telephone message. But I'm not complaining as maybe the caller may have
a lot of things to keep him busy. But I would like a word just so I won't
forget you. I don't want to do that but you know these stage dames do
have sort of tricky memories. So it might be a good idea to give mine a
jolt. A post card will do it and a letter do it better, and I guess
yourself would do it best of all.

"Thine,

"PANCHITA."

The next morning his answer came and she forgot that she ever had been
uneasy. The world shone, the air was as intoxicating as wine, the sun a
benediction. She kissed the letter and pinned it in her blouse, where it
lay against her heart, from which it had lifted all care. The second
floor of the Vallejo rang to her singing, warbling runs and high, crystal
notes, gushes of melody, and tones clear as a bird's held exultingly.
People passing stopped to listen, looking up at the open windows. And yet
it was far from a love letter:

"DEAR PANCHA:

"What a brute I must seem. I've been out of town, that's all. I have to
go every now and then--business I'm meditating in the interior. I forgot
to tell you about it, but it will take up a good deal of my time from now
on. I won't be able to see you as often as I'd like, but as soon as I
have a spare moment there'll be a knock at your door, or someone waiting
in the alley to the stage entrance. Until then _au revoir, _or in your
own beautiful language, _hasta manana,_

"B."

If she had seen Mayer and the blonde lady before the receipt of this
missive her alarms would have increased. But the letter with one violent
push had sent her to the top of the golden moment again. She was poised
there firmly; it would take more than the sight of Mayer in casual confab
with a woman to dislodge her. He knew many people, went to many places;
she was proud of his social progress. So undisturbed was she that as she
walked to the theatre she smiled to herself, a sly, soft smile. How
surprised the lady would be if she knew that the shabby girl unnoticed on
the curb was Boye Mayer's choice--the Rosamund of his bower, the inmate
of his secret garden.

CHAPTER XVIII

OUTLAWED

The night and the chaparral had made Garland's escape possible. In those
first moments, breaking through the thicket with the shots and shouts of
his pursuers at his back, his mind had held nothing but a frantic fear. A
thing of gaping mouth and strained eyes, he had groped and rushed, torn
between branches, splashed through streams, a menaced animal possessed by
an animal's instinct for flight.

Then a bullet, tearing the leaves above his head, had pulled his
scattered faculties together. He dropped and lay, crawled forward in a
moist darkness, rose and made a slantwise dart across the hill's face,
crouching as a bullet struck into a nearby trunk. Pausing to listen, he
could hear the voices of his pursuers flung back and forth, sound against
sound, broken, clamorous, the baying of the pack. Against the ground,
trickle of water and stir of leaves soft around him, he lay for a second,
the breaths coming in rending gasps from his lungs.

By a series of doublings and loops, he gained the summit and here rose
and looked down. The voices were fainter, the trampling among the
branches was drifting toward the right. The lights of the town showed a
central cluster with a scattering of bright, disconnected particles as if
a fiery thing had fallen and burst, sending sparks in every direction.
Some of them moved, a train of dancing dots, lanterns carried on the
run--the town was roused for the man hunt.

He went on, down from the crest and then up; the voices died and he was
alone in the vast, enmuffling dark.

For the time safe, he allowed himself a rest, flat on his back under a
pine, breathing through open mouth. It was then that he was aware of a
wet warmth on his neck, and feeling of it with clumsy fingers remembered
the shot that had followed the breaking of the door. One inch to the left
and he would have been a dead man. As it was, it was only a surface tear
through the flesh and he sopped at it with his bandanna, muttering and
wiping his fingers on the moss.

Presently he moved on again, one with the woodland creatures in their
night prowls. He could hear them, cracklings of twigs under their furtive
feet, scurrying retreats before his heavier human tread. Once he stopped
at a cry, a shriek tearing open the silence as the lightning tears the
cope of the sky. He knew it well, had heard it often by his camp fire in
his old prospecting days--the yell of a California lion in the mountains
beyond. The night was drawing toward its last deep hours when he came to
a straight uprearing of rock, a ledge, broken and heaved upward in some
ancient earth-throe. He felt along its face, glazed by water films,
close-curtained by shrubs and ferns, found an opening and crawled in.

There he stayed for a week; saw the sun rise over the sea of pines, wheel
across the sky, drop behind the rock whence its last glow painted every
tree top with a golden varnish. Then came evening, long and still, a
great rush of color to the west, birds winging their way homeward,
shadows slanting blue over the slopes, brimming purple in the hollows.
Then night with its majestic silence and its large, serene stars. He lay
in the cave mouth looking at them, his thoughts ranging far. Sometimes
they went back to the past and he remembered the deep blue nights in
Arizona, the white glare of the days. He could see the walls of his ranch
house, with the peppers in red bunches, Juana in her calico wrapper and
Pancha playing in the shade. He rose, cursing, sopped his bandanna in the
water trickling from the rock and put it on his wound. It hurt and made
him feverish, a prey to such harassing memories.

With a piece of cord he found in his pocket he made a trap--a noose
suspended from a bent sapling--and caught a rabbit. This kept him in food
for two days, then setting it again he broke the cord, and driven by
hunger went forth, revolver in hand. He saw fresh deer tracks, and was
lucky enough to find his quarry, steal close and shoot it. His hunger
made him reckless and he lit a fire, roasting the meat on planted sticks.
But the birds came and wheeled about overhead and the specks of moving
birds in the sky can be seen from afar.

His forces restored by nourishment he grew restless. The loneliness of
the place oppressed him and he wanted to hear of Knapp. Knapp had been
caught and Knapp would talk and he burned to know what Knapp would say of
him. He was sure the man knew little; he had foreseen such a catastrophe
and been as secret as the grave, but Knapp might have picked up
something. Anyway he wanted to know just how he stood. Food, his greatest
need, supplied, his next was news, someone to tell him, or a newspaper.

The people who stood in with him were scattered far. Up beyond Angels the
Garcias were his friends, and over to the left, on the bend of the river
near Pine Flat, Old Man Haley, reputed cracked and a survivor of the
great days of the lode, had been his confederate from the start. But
Haley's shack was too near Pine Flat, and now with a reward probably
offered, he feared the Garcias--greasers, father and son, not to be
trusted. The wisest course was to lie low and keep to himself, anyway
till he knew more.

So he tracked across the country from landmark to landmark, a cave, an
abandoned tunnel, the shell of a ruined cabin. He left the foothills and
went back toward the mountain spurs where ridge rises beyond ridge, and
at the bottom of ravines rivers lie like yellow threads. Nature held him
aloof, an atom leaving no mark upon it, an intruder on its musing
self-engrossment. He moved, secure and solitary, seeing no living thing
but the game he shot and the hawk hanging poised in the blue. Sometimes
he sat for hours watching its winged shadow float over the tree tops.

Finally he knew he would have to return to the settlements, for his store
of cartridges was almost exhausted. He tried to hoard them, eking out his
deer meat with roots and berries till body and nerve began to weaken.
That decided him and he started back, eating only just enough to give him
strength to get there. He was nearly spent when he found himself once
more among the chaparral's low growth, looking down on the brown and
green fields.

There was a ranch below him whose acres stretched like a patterned cloth
along the hill's slant. The house, white-painted, stood in the midst of
cultivated land which he would have to cross to reach it. But driven by
hunger he stole down, his way marked by a swaying in the close-packed
foliage. He could see the smoke rising in a blue skein from its chimney
and at night its windows break out in bright squares. He drew close
enough to watch the men go off to their work and the women move,
sunbonneted, about the yard.

The second day, faint and desperate, he ventured; it was midmorning, the
men away in the fields till noon. There was not a sound when he reached
the house, skirted the rear, and walked round to the side where a balcony
ran the length of the building. Chairs stood here and evidences of
sewing, work baskets, spools and scissors, and a tumbled heap of
material. On the step lay a newspaper and he was stretching his hand for
it when he heard the voices of women.

Through an open door he saw them--two--standing in front of a mirror, one
with her back toward him, in a blouse of pink that she was pulling into a
waistband. The other watched her, pins in her mouth, a tape measure over
her arm. Both were absorbed, the one in her reflection in the glass, the
other in the pink blouse. He trod on the step with a heavy foot and
muttered a gruff "Say, lady."

The women flashed round and he saw them to be middle-aged and young--a
mother and daughter evidently. The elder with a quick, defensive movement
walked to the doorway and stood there, blocking it. He heard the younger
exclaim, "A tramp!" and then she came forward, squeezing in beside her
mother. Hostility and apprehension were on both their faces.

"What do you want here?" said the elder sharply.

"Somethin' to eat," he answered, trying to make his hoarse tones mild; "I
bin on the tramp for days."

"No, no, go off," she cried, waving him away.

"I'm starved," he pleaded. "Any bones or scraps'll do me."

They eyed him, still apprehensive, but evidently impressed by his
appearance.

"Honest to God it's true," he said, snatching at his advantage. "Can't
you see it by the looks of me?"

The girl, thrusting her hand through her mother's arm and drawing her
back, answered,

"All right. Go round to the kitchen."

With the words she banged the door and he heard the click of the lock,
then their scurrying steps, bangs of other doors and their receding
voices. In a twinkling he grabbed the paper, thrust it into his coat
pocket, and slouched round to the kitchen door.

"Stay out there," called the mother from within. "I'll give you food, but
I don't want no tramp tracking up my kitchen."

He could see them cutting bread and chunks of meat, flurried and he knew
frightened. Leaning against a chair was a rifle, placed where he could
see it. He could have smiled at it had he not been so bound and cramped
with fear. As they cut they interchanged low-toned remarks, and once the
elder looked at him frowningly over her shoulder.

"Why ain't you workin'? A big, husky man like you?" she asked.

"I'm calcalatin' to find work at Sonora, but I have to have the strength
to git there. I've had a bad spell of ague."

The girl raised her eyes to him and compassion softened them. As she went
back to her bread-cutting he heard her murmur,

"I guess that's straight. He sure has an awful peaked look."

It was she who gave him the food, rolled in a piece of newspaper.
Standing in the doorway, she held it out to him and said, smiling,

"There, it's a good lunch. I hope it'll brace you up so you can get
to Sonora all right. I believe you're tellin' the truth and I wish
you luck."

He grunted his thanks and made off, shambling across the yard and out
into the sun-flooded fields. He had to cross them to get out of range
behind a hill spur before he turned into the woods. As he walked, feeling
their eyes boring into his back, conscious of himself as hugely
conspicuous in the untenanted landscape, he opened the paper and ate
ravenously, tearing at the bread and meat.

He was far afield before he dared to rest and look at the paper. It was
part of the Sunday edition of the _Stockton Expositor_, and in it he read
of the approaching trial of Knapp. Both Danny Leonard and Jim Bailey had
identified him by his hands and his size as the man who had wounded the
messenger, and Knapp had admitted it. The paper predicted a life sentence
for him. Then it went on to Garland, who was still at large. Various
people were sure they had seen him. A saloon keeper on the outskirts of
Placerville was ready to swear that a mounted man, who had stopped at his
place one night for a drink, was the fugitive outlaw. If this evidence
was reliable Garland was moving toward his old stamping ground, the camps
along the Feather, where it was said he had friends.

His relief was intense, for it was evident Knapp had had little to say of
him, and his hunters were on the wrong trail. Food cravings appeased, his
anxieties temporarily at rest, he was easier than he had been since the
night at Sheeps Bar. Curled under a thicket of madrone he slept like a
log and woke in the morning, his energies primed, his brain alert,
thinking of Pancha.

There were two things that had to be done--get a letter to her and
replenish his store of cartridges. If too long a time passed without news
of him, she would grow anxious, might talk, might betray suspicious facts
or draw inferences herself. A word from him, dispatched from a camp along
the lode, would quiet her. So he must gird his loins for the perilous
venture of a break into the open under the eyes of men.

Up beyond Angels, slumbering amid its rotting placers and abandoned
ditches, lies the old camp of Farleys. In times past it was a stop on the
way to the Calaveras Big Trees, but after the railroad diverted the
traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil
way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant,
self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along
which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without
exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a
letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting
notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy and a good
way from anywhere. Warnings sent from there would not be acted upon too
quickly. A man could catch the eye of Farleys, wake its suspicions and
get away while it was talking things over and starting the machinery for
his arrest.

This was the place he decided on and forthwith moved toward. He had four
cartridges and if game was plentiful and his aim good he might make
Farleys and still have one or maybe two left.

But it took longer than he calculated, swollen rivers blocking his path,
luck going against him. Three of his cartridges were expended on a deer
before he brought it down and the rains came back, blinding and
torrential. Forced to make detours because of the unfordable streams he
lost his way and spent precious hours groping about in pine forests, dark
as twilight, their boughs bent to the onslaught of the storm. Crossing a
watercourse he fell and his matches were soaked, and that night, crouched
against a tree trunk, a creature less protected than the beasts who had
their shelters, he sucked the raw meat.

The next day his misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last
bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the
darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less
as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was.
But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to
sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with
the first light, staggering a little, squinting down the columned aisles
for open ground whence he could look out and get his bearings.

It was late in the afternoon, dusk at hand, when he saw the light of a
clearing. He hastened, staring ahead, stood for a stunned second, then
leaped behind a tree, muscles tight, the dull confusion of his brain
gone. Looming high through the gray of the twilight, balconied,
many-windowed, was a large white building. Outhouses sprawled at one
side, a weed-grown drive curved to its front steps, down the slant of its
roof the rain ran, spouting from broken gutters and lashing the shutters
that blinded its tiers of windows.

The first shock over, he stole cat-soft from trunk to trunk, studying it.
There were no lights, no smoke from the chimneys, no sign of habitation.
A loosened shutter on the ground floor banged furiously, calling out
echoes from the solitude. He circled the back of it, round by the
outbuildings, a lot of them, one like a stable--all silent. Then made his
way to the side with its deep, first-floor veranda and was creeping
toward the front when he ran into something--a circular construction
covered with a rough bark and topped by a balustrade.

One look at it and he gave a smothered exclamation and ran back among
the trees. The light was almost gone, but there was enough to show a
line of enormous shafts towering into a remote blackness. Like reddish
monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about
their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the
encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by
some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to
touch the low sky. He knew where he was now--the Calaveras Big Trees.
The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since
fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few
travelers found their way there, but at this season the spot was in as
complete a solitude as it had been when the first gringoes came and
stood in silent awe.

He broke his way in by the window with the loosened shutter and passed
through the dimness of long rooms, bare and chilly, his steps loud on the
uncarpeted floors. The place was damp and had the musty smell of a house
long unaired and unoccupied. The double doors into the dining room were
jammed and he had to wrench them open; in the pantry a windowpane was
broken and the rain had seeped in. Here, on a three-legged table, he
found a calendar and remembered hearing that the hotel had been opened
during the previous summer, but that, business being bad, the proprietor
had closed it after a few weeks.

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