Bushy

“He is a mean man and I won’t ever like him any”——

“Sh! Don’t say anything you will be sorry for, Bushy,” said her father, as he looked down upon his little daughter, who stood grabbing at her short hair with both brown hands. Bushy had lost her temper and was racing about the tent in a passion, stamping her feet and digging her heels into the soft dirt floor.

“But Tom teases me awfully, and just now he said I looked like a boy, rode like a boy, talked like a boy, and whistled like a boy. That wasn’t all, either; he said I didn’t love you, that I was just pretending, and, oh, I could”—Words were not strong enough, so she took up a hammer and gave vent to her feelings by breaking into a fine powder some specimens that the miners had brought in for her father to look at.

Mr. Sukolt stooped down and took both her hands in his. “Was Tom in earnest, do you think?”

“Maybe he was only teasing, but it makes me so mad,” replied Bushy, and her eyes filled with angry tears.

“Little girl, if you were in danger and I was not here, whom would you run to first for protection?”

Bushy’s face flushed, but she unhesitatingly answered: “Why, Tom, of course! He has helped me out lots of times.”

“Then there is a lesson for you to learn on gratitude. It begins”——

“Oh, Padre, don’t say any more. What a naughty girl I have been to get so mad at Tom for nothing! Dear old Tom! Why, Padre, I love him ’most as much as I do you. I’ll go find him and make it all up.”

She hurried away singing at the top of her voice as she disappeared behind the tent.

They had arrived at Gold Dust Hill, half way home. Bushy had not made the acquaintance of half the miners at the stopping-place, but a great amount of attention had been paid her already. The men told her to call on them early in the morning before they started to work, and each would show her over his particular cabin. She found Tom feeding the horses, and they started to make the promised morning calls.

“You are the first little girl I have seen since I left mine in the States,” said a miner with a cross face and very heavy black eyebrows. His kind, gentle voice would have been a surprise to anybody but Bushy. Everybody was kind to her, and if there was the least bit of tenderness left in a miner’s heart, it always expressed itself in some way when Bushy came around.

“Let me see what I can find for you,” he said, taking her by the hand and going into the log cabin where he kept the wooden box containing all his treasures. “Ah! this will do. It will make up into a bright dress for you.” He took from the box a roll of red flannel and put it into Bushy’s arms. “That we have kept to have handy if any of us had the fever, but it had better be used, I think, to keep the only little girl in camp from getting sick.”

Every miner looked about him for something to give Bushy. It seemed to be the only way he could show how glad he was to see a little child once more. “Can you read?” asked one old shaggy-bearded man who looked, Bushy thought, like a grizzly bear. “I will give you this if you can read,” and he brought carefully to view one-half of a weekly story paper. It had part of a continued story in it. “You can imagine how it ends,” said the miner. “It is ’most all there.”

The story did not interest Bushy half so much as the picture. It was of a woman, who seemed to her to be shaking hands with a man. There was poetry called “Oh, take my love!” under the picture, and it provoked her very much that the lines said not a word about the good-by appropriate to such a farewell scene. “I could write better than that,” she said to herself. Bushy knew nothing about love-making.

By the time Bushy had made the rounds of the cabins her arms were loaded down with treasures that for years had been carefully guarded by the men. One who was particularly pleased that Bushy could read, gave her a part of a slate to write her lessons on. “Be very careful,” he said, “and break off just as little as possible when you want to write, because every time you take off the splinters to write with, the slate grows smaller, and some day you will have nothing but a splinter left.”

They had no slate pencils, and the only way to write on the slate was to break a little piece off the edge.

Bushy returned to her father’s tent and spent the rest of the morning examining her rich store of presents. The flannel was bright red, and oh, so soft and fine! “I will wind it all about me and wear it so,” she said. “I will never let Tom cut it.” She took one end and pinned it to her blouse, then began to wind and wind and wind until when she came to the other end it had gone two or three times about her neck, and arms, and legs, and waist, making her look like a clown dressed for the circus. She put on her hat, and, with the paper spread out on her lap, took up her slate and began to write a piece of poetry, trying to put more sense into it than there was in the lines under that strange picture.

“Hallo! What in the world is this?” called Mr. Sukolt, as he came in from his visit to the mine.

“Ha! ha! you don’t know me, perhaps,” replied the queer red object in the tent door. Bushy stood up and bowed low before him. Bushy was not a pretty little girl—just a common, every-day little girl that all the miners loved better than they did even the gold-dust that they dug so hard for. Tom got a glimpse of her and called to some miners near, and Shanks, always up to a jolly time, threw down his load of tools, and, picking up the banjo, called out: “Attention, gentlemen! We will now present to you Mlle. Bushy Sukolt, famous not so much for her beauty as for being the only child in camp.” Bushy made a little mouth at him, and the miners seeing there was a treat in store, threw themselves comfortably on the ground and looked on with smiling faces.

“Mlle. Bushy will now give you the Great Pine Mine jig, in which performance she is the star of the world.”

“Bravo!” cried the rough miners, who clapped their hard hands until the birds stopped singing to wonder over the noise.

Bushy threw kisses to the right and left from the tips of her sunburnt fingers; then as the banjo struck up her favorite tune, “The Irish Washerwoman,” she suddenly made a leap into the middle of the tent, and, oh, such dancing! She went so fast and turned so quick she looked like a great red ball whirling in the air. There were the single shuffle, the double shuffle, then a whirl that carried her into the French style, and from that she suddenly whisked off into the English style of jigging, and just as the miners thought she must be ready to drop with fatigue, she stepped off into the Spanish dance, with its free and swaying motions, so restful after the energetic negro steps that she invariably used for the liveliest strains of music. Her hair seemed to stand on end and dance in the breeze that her rapid movements created. The red flannel began to unwind, and the ends floated out in great flaming streamers, making the dance a veritable serpentine one of modern days. Shanks’s fingers fairly flew over the banjo. Faster and faster went Bushy’s feet, keeping time not only to the banjo, but to the clapping of hands and boot-tapping, for the miners could no more keep still than the child herself. Some whistled the tune, others hummed it in loud bass voices. One old fellow got so enthusiastic that his “Hi! hi! yep!” every now and then lent vim to the whole performance. Finally, when it seemed that every head, hand, and foot could not go faster without dropping off, Bushy made a sudden bound out of the tent into the very arms of Tom, who, with a profound bow, pronounced the entertainment at an end.

“It’s not stretchin’ a p’int to say that the gal is amazing bright,” said a toothless old man who wanted to say something complimentary of Bushy to Mr. Sukolt. “It’s worth while bein’ a family man,” said another, “if you kin own a peach blossom like that.” “She is a diamond in the rough, old fellow,” spoke up another, as he patted Bushy on the head and gazed admiringly into her flushed hot face. “Better take care of her.” “She is a fairy in disguise, and some morning you will wake up and find her gone back to fairyland,” remarked the superintendent of the mines. “No wonder the boys have given her all their treasures.” He pointed to the slate, the paper, the yards of red flannel, certain nuggets of ore, ball and bat, and a bow and arrow.

“Well, Padre,” said she, after the men had disappeared over the hill and the two were alone again in the tent, “this is the loveliest place we ever camped in. The men are awful nice, and I love every one of them. They said I was a pretty girl and a nice girl and a jolly girl—they never said a word about my being like a boy.” She wound the flannel about her again, and with the paper in one hand and the slate in the other began a hornpipe, “just to calm me down a little,” she said.