The pioneer

Since his connection with the Graceys Jerry had been buying stock in the numerous undeveloped and unpaying mines which had cropped up like mushrooms round the edges of the town. In the end of July a new strike in the two-thousand-foot level of the Cresta Plata sent the stock of the mines in the vicinity suddenly up. As the vein was opened it developed into a discovery of great importance. The shares Jerry held doubled in value and continued to advance. August was not half over when he realized that, on paper at least, he was again a rich man.

The realization brought with it a pulsing sense of exhilaration. It meant not only the joys of independent wealth, which were to him among the dearest on earth, but the liberty to do with his life what he pleased. It was not only freedom from the Graceys, with whom his work had become a detested servitude, but an escape from the bonds his marriage had cast round him. Escape from it all—the scorn of his employers, the drudgery of his position, the meaningless tie that held him to an unloved wife and denied him the woman he craved.

The fever of the time and his own mounting fortunes was in his blood. Actions that under normal conditions would have seemed to him base he now contemplated with a sense of headstrong defiance. He was on fire with the lust of money and the desire of woman. The two passions carried him off his feet, swept away his judgment and reason. But the instinctive deceptiveness of the lover of intrigue did not desert him. While he was inwardly contemplating desperate steps, on the surface he appeared to be merely full of boyish animation and high spirits.

To June alone he was different, a man of almost terrifying moods, before whom at one moment she shrank and the next melted. He had brushed aside her request not to see her, as he would later on brush aside all her requests, her reticences and modesties, and be the master of a broken and abject slave.

Despite his desire to be with her he saw her seldom. The mining town offered few opportunities for meetings, which, however innocent they might be, were more agreeable if they took place in the seclusion of parks and quiet byways than on the crowded sidewalks of the populous streets. There were no wooded lanes for man and maid to loiter in, no plazas with benches in sheltered corners. In its hand-to-hand fight against elemental forces the town had no time to make concessions to the delicately debatable diversions of social life. It only recognized a love that was honestly licit or frankly illicit.

A few hurried visits at the Murchison mansion in the late afternoon when the Colonel was known to be busy at the office and Allen was still down town, were the only times that Jerry had been able to have speech with her. These interviews had at first been presided over by an outward seeming of that coolly polite friendship of which Jerry liked to talk. The conversation avoided all questions of sentiment as the man and woman seemed to avoid the proximity one of the other, sitting drawn apart with averted eyes, talking of impersonal matters.

But as his holdings advanced in value, as he saw himself day by day loosening the bonds that bound him to his employers, his wife, a society of which he was weary, his restraint was relaxed. His words grew less fluent, his pose of friend changed to that of the man on whose conversation moments of silence fall while he looks with ardent eyes on a down-drooped face. June made a last desperate stand, tried with despairing struggles to draw back from the fate closing around her. Even now she did not realize how close she was to the edge of the precipice. But Jerry did. He knew they were standing on its brink.

One evening, early in September, June and the Colonel were sitting together at dinner in the dining-room of the Murchison mansion. Allen had gone to San Francisco for a week, and the Colonel was to dine with June every evening till his return. He spent as much of his time as possible with the young girl in these lonely days. Even Mitty Sullivan and the baby were away, having gone to Lake Tahoe for two months. Thus the one house to which June could constantly go and be cheered by the society of a woman friend was closed to her.

Since Rosamund’s wedding the Colonel had seen a distinct change in his darling. He set it down to grief at her sister’s departure. She was pale and listless. The joy of youth had gone completely from her. Of late he had noticed that she was often absent-minded, not answering him if he spoke to her. He worried over her with a man’s helplessness in situations of complicated feminine tribulation. Allen, drunk half of the time, absent the other half, was no guardian for her. Yet the Colonel could not take her away from him. He was her father. Sometimes when he let himself build air castles over his after-dinner cigar, he thought that perhaps Allen might die or marry again and then June would come to him and be his daughter. He would watch over her and lap her round with love and tenderness, and far off, in a rosy future, he would see her giving her hand to Rion, the man, he told himself, that Providence had made for her.

Her appearance to-night shocked him. She was pallid, the delicate blue blur of veins showing on her temples, her eyes heavy and darkly shadowed. He noticed that she ate little, crumbling her bread with a nervous hand, and only touching her lips to the rim of the wine glass. She was unusually distraught, often not answering the remarks he made to her, but sitting with her lids down, her eyes on her restlessly moving fingers.

Toward the end of dinner a sense of apprehension began to pervade him. If she continued to droop this way she might contract some ailment and die. Her mother had died of consumption and consumption often descended from parent to child. He knew now that her likeness to Alice went deeper than mere outward form into the secret springs of thought and action. It was one of those careful and perfect reproductions of type to which Nature is now and then subject. June was her mother in looks, in character, in temperament. It was so singularly close a resemblance that it seemed but natural to dread for her the disease that had killed the elder woman.

“You feel perfectly well, Junie?” he inquired, trying to speak easily but with anxious eyes on her.

“Well?” she repeated. “Oh, quite well! I’ve never been better. What makes you ask?”

“I thought you looked pale, paler than usual, and seemed out of spirits. Are you out of spirits, dearie?”

“I’ve not been very cheerful since—since—Rosamund left.”

She concluded the sentence with an effort. The half-truth stuck in her throat. She had been in a state of confused misery for days, but the pain of her deception pierced through it.

“I hate to leave you looking like this,” he continued. “I’m sure you’re not well.”

“Leave me!” she exclaimed with a startled emphasis. “You’re not going to leave me?”

Her face, full of alarmed protest, astonished him.

“Of course I’m not going to leave you. I’m going down to San Francisco on Monday for two weeks, that’s all. Business of Black Dan’s.”

She sat upright, bracing her hands against the edge of the table and said, almost with violence:

“Don’t go. I don’t want you to go. You mustn’t go.”

“But, my dear little girl, it’s only for two weeks, perhaps less. I expect to be back Friday evening. I know it’s lonely for you, but you know we have to put up with a good deal on our way through this world. You’ve found that out, honey. We’ve got to have our philosophy pretty handy sometimes.”

“Oh, philosophy! I haven’t got any. I only seem to have feelings.”

She rose from her chair, the Colonel watching her with anxiously knit brows. Her distress at the thought of his leaving her filled him with uneasy surprise. It seemed so disproportioned to the cause. She passed round the table and came to a halt beside him.

“Can’t you put it off?” she said, trying to speak in her old coaxing way. “Put it off till I go to England to visit Rosamund.”

“Oh, June!” he exclaimed, hardly able to forbear laughing. “What a thing for a girl who’s lived among mining men almost all her life to suggest! You won’t go for over two months yet, and this is important. It’s about the new pumps for the two-thousand-foot level. I leave on Monday.”

“Monday!” she repeated with the same air of startled alarm. “Next Monday?”

“Yes. If all goes well I won’t be gone two weeks. I’ll be back Friday night. I’ll bring you up some new books, and anything else you can think of. You know this is business, and there’s no fooling with Black Dan. If you were sick in bed it would be a different matter. But as it is I must go.”

Without more words she turned away and went slowly back to her seat. The Colonel, worried and baffled, watched her apprehensively. He thought to prick her pride into life and said rallyingly:

“I’m beginning to think you’re just a little bit spoiled. The old man’s making a baby of you. You’re just as much of a child as ever.”

He looked at her with a twinkling eye, hoping to see her laugh. But she was grave, leaning languidly against the back of the chair.

“I’m not as much of a child as you think,” was her answer.

On the following Monday, en route to the depot, the Colonel paused on the outskirts of the crowd round the stock bulletins pasted up in a broker’s window. He did not see that Jerry was on the other side of the crowd. But Jerry saw him, and through the openings between the swaying heads, eyed him warily.

As the elder man turned away in the direction of the depot, Jerry backed from the edges of the crowd to watch the retreating figure. His handsome face only showed a still curiosity, but there was malevolence in his eyes. He had quietly hated the Colonel since the night of the Davenport ball and awaited his opportunity to return that blow.

“Old blackguard!” he thought to himself, “I’ll be even with you soon, now!”

The month of September advanced with early darkening evenings and the clear sharpening of outlines which marks the first breath of autumn. It was easier for Jerry now to see June. In the late afternoons the twilight came quickly and he could mount the long stairs to the Murchison mansion without fear of detection. The Colonel was away. Allen had returned but was much out, and when at home was closeted in a small room of his own that he called his office. The way was clear for Jerry, but he still advanced with slow and cautious steps.

The Colonel had been gone over a week when one evening June entered the office to consult with her father about an unpaid household bill for which a tradesman had been dunning her. The shortness of money from which Allen had been suffering since Rosamund’s marriage, was beginning to react upon June. Several times of late the holders of accounts against her father had paid personal visits to the Murchison mansion. She had not yet grasped the hopeless nature of their situation. Even in the town Allen’s insolvency was not known. It was simply rumored that he was “hard-up.”

As she opened the door in answer to his “Come in” she smelt the sharp odor of burning paper, and saw that the grate was full of charred fragments. Portions of a man’s wardrobe were scattered about on the various pieces of furniture, and on a sofa against the wall two half-packed valises stood open. Allen sat at his desk, amid a litter of papers, some of which he had been tearing up, others burning. As his eye fell on his daughter he laid his hand over an open letter before him.

She came in, holding the bill out toward him, and timidly explaining her entrance and its cause, for of late he had been fiercely irascible. To-night, however, he greeted her with unusual gentleness, and taking the paper from her hand looked at it and laid it aside.

“Thompson,” he said; “tell him his account will be settled in a few days. And any of the others that send in bills like this, tell them the same thing.”

“Are you going again?” she asked, looking at the valises.

“Yes, to-morrow. You can just casually let these fellows know that I’ve gone down to San Francisco to sell some stock, and everything will be satisfactorily settled up when I get back.”

“When will you get back?” she asked, not from desire for his presence, but to know what to say to the uneasy tradesmen.

“You tell them next week,” he said, “that’ll quiet them. But I may be longer. It may be two or even three weeks. I’ve lots of things to arrange, so don’t you worry if I don’t show up next week or even later.”

He tore the letter he had been covering with his hand into small pieces and, rising, threw them into the grate on the smoldering remnants of the others.

“Uncle Jim’s down below now,” she said, “you’ll probably see him.”

“But he’ll be back in a few days, won’t he?” he queried, looking at her with sudden, sharp inquiry. “If—if—I should be delayed, as I told you I might be, he’ll be here and he’ll look after you. You see more of him now than you do of me. He seems to be more your father than I.”

“He’s here oftener,” she said apologetically, “you’re away so much.”

“Maybe that’s it. I’m not kicking about it. He’s the Graceys’ right hand man now. He’s on top of the heap. He’ll always look out for you, and he’ll be able to do it.”

He turned to throw some more papers on the burning pile, missing her look of surprise.

“Always look out for me!” she repeated. “There’s no need for him to do that. You’ll be back soon.”

“You needn’t take me so literally. But you ought to know by this time that the future’s a pretty uncertain thing. If anything should happen to me, it’s just as I say, he’d be here on the spot ready and willing to take care of you. You can’t look for much from me. If I died to-morrow I wouldn’t leave you a cent. The Barranca’s petered.”

“But the stocks you’re going to San Francisco to sell? They must be worth a good deal. Everybody’s stocks seem to be worth something now. Mitty Sullivan’s cook says she’s thirty thousand ahead.”

“Oh, yes, they’ll bring something.” He spoke absently, took up Thompson’s bill and thrust it on a spike with others of its kind. “There they are, all the tradesmen. Don’t let them bother you. You’d better run along now and let me finish up.”

“Can I help you pack?” she suggested with timid politeness.

He shook his head, his eye traveling down a new letter he had picked up from the desk.

“Good night,” she said, moving toward the door.

He dropped the letter and, following her, put his arm around her and kissed her. It was an unexpected caress. He and his daughter had grown very far apart in this last year.

“Good-by,” he said gently, and turning from her went back to his papers.

“Run along,” he said without looking up. “I’ll be busy here for some hours yet.”

When she came down to breakfast the next morning he had already gone. The Chinaman told her he had left early, driving into Reno by private conveyance in order to catch the first morning train to the coast.

That evening Jerry beat out the last spark of her resistance. He held her close in his arms, his cheek against hers, and revealed to her his plan of elopement. Trembling and sobbing she clung to him, under his kisses the words of denial dying on her lips. He paid no heed to her feeble pleadings, hushing her protests with caresses, whispering of their happiness, murmuring the lovers’ sentences that, since Eve, have been the undoing of impassioned women.

When he stole down the steps in the darkness of the early night, triumph was in his heart. She was his when he chose to take her, her will as water, her resistance only words. A new world of love, liberty and riches lay before him. The bleak town and its bitter memories would soon be far behind, and June and he in a strange country and a new life would begin their dream of love.