“Here I’m talkin’ to you as if you were one”—Mr. Brice was positive she was going to say “one of the gang,” but she hesitated and concluded, “one of my relations—like cousin Hiram.”

“I wish you would think of me as being as true a friend,” said the young man earnestly.

She did not reply immediately, but seemed to be examining the distance. They were not far from the canyon now, and the river bank. A fringe of buckeyes hid the base of the mountain, which had begun to tower up above them to the invisible stage road overhead. “I am going to be a real guide to you now,” she said suddenly. “When we reach that buckeye corner and are out of sight, we will turn into it instead of going through the canyon. You shall go up the mountain to the stage road, from THIS side.”

“But it is impossible!” he exclaimed, in astonishment. “Your uncle said so.”

“Coming DOWN, but not going up,” she returned, with a laugh. “I found it, and no one knows it but myself.”

He glanced up at the towering cliff; its nearly perpendicular flanks were seamed with fissures, some clefts deeply set with stunted growths of thorn and “scrub,” but still sheer and forbidding, and then glanced back at her incredulously. “I will show you,” she said, answering his look with a smile of triumph. “I haven’t tramped over this whole valley for nothing! But wait until we reach the river bank. They must think that we’ve gone through the canyon.”

“They?

“Yes—any one who is watching us,” said the girl dryly.

A few steps further on brought them to the buckeye thicket, which extended to the river bank and mouth of the canyon. The girl lingered for a moment ostentatiously before it, and then, saying “Come,” suddenly turned at right angles into the thicket. Brice followed, and the next moment they were hidden by its friendly screen from the valley. On the other side rose the mountain wall, leaving a narrow trail before them. It was composed of the rocky debris and fallen trees of the cliff, from which buckeyes and larches were now springing. It was uneven, irregular, and slowly ascending; but the young girl led the way with the free footstep of a mountaineer, and yet a grace that was akin to delicacy. Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl’s fashion, she was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude and rustic surroundings. It was the same slim shoe-print which had guided him that morning. Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing curiously at the cliff side. Brice followed the direction of her eyes. On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly wind was flapping heavily, like a raven’s wing, or as if still saturated with the last night’s rain. “That’s mighty queer!” said Flo, gazing intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which had a vague, weird suggestion. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“It looks like a man’s coat,” remarked Brice uneasily.

“Whew!” said the girl. “Then somebody has come down who won’t go up again! There’s a lot of fresh rocks and brush here, too. What’s that?” She was pointing to a spot some yards before them where there had been a recent precipitation of debris and uprooted shrubs. But mingled with it lay a mass of rags strangely akin to the tattered remnant that flagged from the bush a hundred feet above them. The girl suddenly uttered a sharp feminine cry of mingled horror and disgust,—the first weakness of sex she had shown,—and, recoiling, grasped Brice’s arm. “Don’t go there! Come away!”

But Brice had already seen that which, while it shocked him, was urging him forward with an invincible fascination. Gently releasing himself, and bidding the girl stand back, he moved toward the unsightly heap. Gradually it disclosed a grotesque caricature of a human figure, but so maimed and doubled up that it seemed a stuffed and fallen scarecrow. As is common in men stricken suddenly down by accident in the fullness of life, the clothes asserted themselves before all else with a hideous ludicrousness, obliterating even the majesty of death in their helpless yet ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the wearer, but to have been assumed in ghastly jocularity,—a boot half off the swollen foot, a ripped waistcoat thrown over the shoulder, were like the properties of some low comedian. At first the body appeared to be headless; but as Brice cleared away the debris and lifted it, he saw with horror that the head was twisted under the shoulder, and swung helplessly from the dislocated neck. But that horror gave way to a more intense and thrilling emotion as he saw the face—although strangely free from laceration or disfigurement, and impurpled and distended into the simulation of a self-complacent smile—was a face he recognized! It was the face of the cynical traveler in the coach—the man who he was now satisfied had robbed it.

A strange and selfish resentment took possession of him. Here was the man through whom he had suffered shame and peril, and who even now seemed complacently victorious in death. He examined him closely; his coat and waistcoat had been partly torn away in his fall; his shirt still clung to him, but through its torn front could be seen a heavy treasure belt encircling his waist. Forgetting his disgust, Brice tore away the shirt and unloosed the belt. It was saturated with water like the rest of the clothing, but its pocket seemed heavy and distended. In another instant he had opened it, and discovered the envelope containing the packet of greenbacks, its seal still inviolate and unbroken. It was the stolen treasure!

A faint sigh recalled him to himself. The girl was standing a few feet from him, regarding him curiously.

“It’s the thief himself!” he said, in a breathless explanation. “In trying to escape he must have fallen from the road above. But here are the greenbacks safe! We must go back to your uncle at once,” he said excitedly. “Come!”

“Are you mad?” she cried, in astonishment.

“No,” returned Brice, in equal astonishment, “but you know I agreed with him that we should work together to recover the money, and I must show him our good luck.”

“He told you that if you met the thief and could get the money from him, you were welcome to it,” said the girl gravely, “and you HAVE got it.”

“But not in the way he meant,” returned Brice hurriedly. “This man’s death is the result of his attempting to escape from your uncle’s guards along the road; the merit of it belongs to them and your uncle. It would be cowardly and mean of me to take advantage of it.”

The girl looked at him with an expression of mingled admiration and pity. “But the guards were placed there before he ever saw you,” said she impatiently. “And whatever uncle Harry may want to do, he must do what the gang says. And with the money once in their possession, or even in yours, if they knew it, I wouldn’t give much for its chances—or YOURS either—for gettin’ out o’ this hollow again.”

“But if THEY are treacherous, that is no reason why I should be so,” protested Brice stoutly.

“You’ve no right to say they were treacherous when they knew nothing of your plans,” said the girl sharply. “Your company would have more call to say YOU were treacherous to it for making a plan without consultin’ them.” Brice winced, for he had never thought of that before. “You can offer that reward AFTER you get away from here with the greenbacks. But,” she added proudly, with a toss of her head, “go back if you want to! Tell him all! Tell him where you found it—tell him I did not take you through the canyon, but was showin’ you a new trail I had never shown to THEM! Tell him that I am a traitor, for I have given them and him away to you, a stranger, and that you consider yourself the only straight and honest one about here!”

Brice flushed with shame. “Forgive me,” he said hurriedly; “you are right and I am wrong again. I will do just what you say. I will first place these greenbacks in a secure place—and then”—

“Get away first—that’s your only holt,” she interrupted him quickly, her eyes still flashing through indignant tears. “Come quick, for I must put you on the trail before they miss me.”

She darted forward; he followed, but she kept the lead, as much, he fancied, to evade his observation as to expedite his going. Presently they stopped before the sloping trunk of a huge pine that had long since fallen from the height above, but, although splintered where it had broken ground, had preserved some fifty feet of its straight trunk erect and leaning like a ladder against the mountain wall. “There,” she said, hurriedly pointing to its decaying but still projecting lateral branches, “you climb it—I have. At the top you’ll find it’s stuck in a cleft among the brush. There’s a little hollow and an old waterway from a spring above which makes a trail through the brush. It’s as good as the trail you took from the stage road this mornin’, but it’s not as safe comin’ down. Keep along it to the spring, and it will land ye jest the other side of uncle Hiram’s cabin. Go quick! I’ll wait here until ye’ve reached the cleft.”

“But you,” he said, turning toward her, “how can I ever thank you?”

As if anticipating a leave-taking, the girl had already withdrawn herself a few yards away, and simply made an upward gesture with her hand. “Quick! Up with you! Every minute now is a risk to me.”

Thus appealed to, Brice could only comply. Perhaps he was a little hurt at the girl’s evident desire to avoid a gentler parting. Securing his prized envelope within his breast, he began to ascend the tree. Its inclination, and the aid offered by the broken stumps of branches, made this comparatively easy, and in a few moments he reached its top, and stood upon a little ledge in the wall. A swift glance around him revealed the whole waterway or fissure slanting upward along the mountain face. Then he turned quickly to look down the dizzy height. At first he could distinguish nothing but the top of the buckeyes and their white clustering blossoms. Then something fluttered,—the torn white handkerchief of his that she had kept. And then he caught a single glimpse of the flower-plumed hat receding rapidly among the trees, and Flora Dimwood was gone.

III

In twenty-four hours Edward Brice was in San Francisco. But although successful and the bearer of the treasure, it is doubtful if he approached this end of his journey with the temerity he had shown on entering the robbers’ valley. A consciousness that the methods he had employed might excite the ridicule, if not the censure, of his principals, or that he might have compromised them in his meeting with Snapshot Harry, considerably modified his youthful exultation. It is possible that Flora’s reproach, which still rankled in his mind, may have quickened his sensitiveness on that point. However, he had resolved to tell the whole truth, except his episode with Flora, and to place the conduct of Snapshot Harry and the Tarboxes in as favorable a light as possible. But first he had recourse to the manager, a man of shrewd worldly experience, who had recommended him to his place. When he had finished and handed him the treasured envelope, the man looked at him with a critical and yet not unkindly expression. “Perhaps it’s just as well, Brice, that you did come to me at first, and did not make your report to the president and directors.”

“I suppose,” said Brice diffidently, “that they wouldn’t have liked my communicating with the highwayman without their knowledge?”

“More than that—they wouldn’t have believed your story.”

“Not believe it?” cried Brice, flushing quickly. “Do you think”—

The manager checked him with a laugh. “Hold on! I believe every word of it, and why? Because you’ve added nothing to it to make yourself the regular hero. Why, with your opportunity, and no one able to contradict you, you might have told me you had a hand-to-hand fight with the thief, and had to kill him to recover the money, and even brought your handkerchief and hat back with the bullet holes to prove it.” Brice winked as he thought of the fair possessor of those articles. “But as a story for general circulation, it won’t do. Have you told it to any one else? Does any one know what happened but yourself?”

Brice thought of Flora, but he had resolved not to compromise her, and he had a consciousness that she would be equally loyal to him. “No one,” he answered boldly.

“Very good. And I suppose you wouldn’t mind if it were kept out of the newspapers? You’re not hankering after a reputation as a hero?”

“Certainly not,” said Brice indignantly.

“Well, then, we’ll keep it where it is. You will say nothing. I will hand over the greenbacks to the company, but only as much of your story as I think they’ll stand. You’re all right as it is. Yuba Bill has already set you up in his report to the company, and the recovery of this money will put you higher! Only, the PUBLIC need know nothing about it.”

“But,” asked Brice amazedly, “how can it be prevented? The shippers who lost the money will have to know that it has been recovered.”

“Why should they? The company will assume the risk, and repay them just the same. It’s a great deal better to have the reputation for accepting the responsibility than for the shippers to think that they only get their money through the accident of its recovery.”

Brice gasped at this large business truth. Besides, it occurred to him that it kept the secret, and Flora’s participation in it, from Snapshot Harry and the gang. He had not thought of that before.

“Come,” continued the manager, with official curtness. “What do you say? Are you willing to leave it to me?”

Brice hesitated a moment. It was not what his impulsive truthful nature had suggested. It was not what his youthful fancy had imagined. He had not worked upon the sympathies of the company on behalf of Snapshot Harry as he believed he would do. He had not even impressed the manager. His story, far from exciting a chivalrous sentiment, had been pronounced improbable. Yet he reflected he had so far protected HER, and he consented with a sigh.

Nevertheless, the result ought to have satisfied him. A dazzling check, inclosed in a letter of thanks from the company the next day, and his promotion from “the road” to the San Francisco office, would have been quite enough for any one but Edward Brice. Yet he was grateful, albeit a little frightened and remorseful over his luck. He could not help thinking of the kindly tolerance of the highwayman, the miserable death of the actual thief, which had proved his own salvation, and above all the generous, high-spirited girl who had aided his escape. While on his way to San Francisco, and yet in the first glow of his success, he had written her a few lines from Marysville, inclosed in a letter to Mr. Tarbox. He had received no reply.

Then a week passed. He wrote again, and still no reply. Then a vague feeling of jealousy took possession of him as he remembered her warning hint of the attentions to which she was subjected, and he became singularly appreciative of Snapshot Harry’s proficiency as a marksman. Then, cruelest of all, for your impassioned lover is no lover at all if not cruel in his imaginings, he remembered how she had evaded her uncle’s espionage with HIM; could she not equally with ANOTHER? Perhaps that was why she had hurried him away,—why she had prevented his returning to her uncle. Following this came another week of disappointment and equally miserable cynical philosophy, in which he persuaded himself he was perfectly satisfied with his material advancement, that it was the only outcome of his adventure to be recognized; and he was more miserable than ever.

A month had passed, when one morning he received a small package by post. The address was in a handwriting unknown to him, but opening the parcel he was surprised to find only a handkerchief neatly folded. Examining it closely, he found it was his own,—the one he had given her, the rent made by her uncle’s bullet so ingeniously and delicately mended as to almost simulate embroidery. The joy that suddenly filled him at this proof of her remembrance showed him too plainly how hollow had been his cynicism and how lasting his hope! Turning over the wrapper eagerly, he discovered what he had at first thought was some business card. It was, indeed, printed and not engraved, in some common newspaper type, and bore the address, “Hiram Tarbox, Land and Timber Agent, 1101 California Street.” He again examined the parcel; there was nothing else,—not a line from HER! But it was a clue at last, and she had not forgotten him! He seized his hat, and ten minutes later was breasting the steep sand hill into which California Street in those days plunged, and again emerged at its crest, with a few struggling houses.

But when he reached the summit he could see that the outline of the street was still plainly marked along the distance by cottages and new suburban villa-like blocks of houses. No. 1101 was in one of these blocks, a small tenement enough, but a palace compared to Mr. Tarbox’s Sierran cabin. He impetuously rang the bell, and without waiting to be announced dashed into the little drawing-room and Mr. Tarbox’s presence. That had changed too; Mr. Tarbox was arrayed in a suit of clothes as new, as cheaply decorative, as fresh and, apparently, as damp as his own drawing room.

“Did you get my letter? Did you give her the one I inclosed? Why didn’t you answer?” burst out Brice, after his first breathless greeting.

Mr. Tarbox’s face here changed so suddenly into his old dejected doggedness that Brice could have imagined himself back in the Sierran cabin. The man straightened and bowed himself at Brice’s questions, and then replied with bold, deliberate emphasis:

“Yes, I DID get your letter. I DIDN’T give no letter o’ yours to her. And I didn’t answer your letter BEFORE, for I didn’t propose to answer it AT ALL.”

“Why?” demanded Brice indignantly.

“I didn’t give her your letter because I didn’t kalkilate to be any go-between ‘twixt you and Snapshot Harry’s niece. Look yar, Mr. Brice. Sense I read that ‘ar paragraph in that paper you gave me, I allowed to myself that it wasn’t the square thing for me to have any more doin’s with him, and I quit it. I jest chucked your letter in the fire. I didn’t answer you because I reckoned I’d no call to correspond with ye, and when I showed ye that trail over to Harry’s camp, it was ended. I’ve got a house and business to look arter, and it don’t jibe with keepin’ company with ‘road agents.’ That’s what I got outer that paper you gave me, Mr. Brice.”

Rage and disgust filled Brice at the man’s utter selfishness and shameless desertion of his kindred, none the less powerfully that he remembered the part he himself had played in concocting the paragraph. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded passionately, “that for the sake of that foolish paragraph you gave up your own kindred? That you truckled to the mean prejudices of your neighbors and kept that poor, defenseless girl from the only honest roof she could find refuge under? That you dared to destroy my letter to her, and made her believe I was as selfish and ungrateful as yourself?”

“Young feller,” said Mr. Tarbox still more deliberately, yet with a certain dignity that Brice had never noticed before, “what’s between you and Flo, and what rights she has fer thinkin’ ye ‘ez selfish’ and ‘ez ongrateful’ ez me—ef she does, I dunno!—but when ye talk o’ me givin’ up my kindred, and sling such hogwash ez ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ round this yer sittin’-room, mebbe it mout occur to ye that Harry Dimwood might hev HIS opinion o’ what was ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ ef I’d played in between his niece and a young man o’ the express company, his nat’ral enemy. It’s one thing to hev helped ye to see her in her uncle’s own camp, but another to help ye by makin’ a clandecent post-offis o’ my cabin. Ef, instead o’ writin’, you’d hev posted yourself by comin’ to me, you mout hev found out that when I broke with Harry I offered to take Flo with me for good and all—ef he’d keep away from us. And that’s the kind o’ ‘honest roof’ that that thar ‘poor defenseless girl’ got under when her crippled mother died three weeks ago, and left Harry free. It was by ‘trucklin’’ to them ‘mean prejudices,’ and readin’ that thar ‘foolish paragraph,’ that I settled this thing then and thar!”

Brice’s revulsion of sentiment was so complete, and the gratitude that beamed in his eyes was so sincere, that Mr. Tarbox hardly needed the profuse apologies which broke from him. “Forgive me!” he continued to stammer, “I have wronged you, wronged HER—everybody. But as you know, Mr. Tarbox, how I have felt over this, how deeply—how passionately”—

“It DOES make a man loony sometimes,” said Mr. Tarbox, relaxing into demure dryness again, “so I reckon you DID! Mebbe she reckoned so, too, for she asked me to give you the handkercher I sent ye. It looked as if she’d bin doin’ some fancy work on it.”

Brice glanced quickly at Mr. Tarbox’s face. It was stolid and imperturbable. She had evidently kept the secret of what passed in the hollow to herself. For the first time he looked around the room curiously. “I didn’t know you were a land agent before,” he said.

“No more I was! All that kem out o’ that paragraph, Mr. Brice. That man Heckshill, who was so mighty perlite that night, wrote to me afterwards that he didn’t know my name till he’d seed that paragraph, and he wanted to know ef, ez a ‘well-known citizen,’ I could recommend him some timber lands. I recommended him half o’ my own quarter section, and he took it. He’s puttin’ up a mill thar, and that’s another reason why we want peace and quietness up thar. I’m tryin’ (betwixt and between us, Mr. Brice) to get Harry to cl’ar out and sell his rights in the valley and the water power on the Fork to Heckshill and me. I’m opening a business here.”

“Then you’ve left Mrs. Tarbox with Miss Flora in your cabin while you attend to business here,” said Brice tentatively.

“Not exactly, Mr. Brice. The old woman thought it a good chance to come to ‘Frisco and put Flo in one o’ them Catholic convent schools—that asks no questions whar the raw logs come from, and turns ‘em out first-class plank all round. You foller me, Mr. Brice? But Mrs. Tarbox is jest in the next room, and would admire to tell ye all this—and I’ll go in and send her to you.” And with a patronizing wave of the hand, Mr. Tarbox complacently disappeared in the hall.

Mr. Brice was not sorry to be left to himself in his utter bewilderment! Flo, separated from her detrimental uncle, and placed in a convent school! Tarbox, the obscure pioneer, a shrewd speculator emerging into success, and taking the uncle’s place! And all this within that month which he had wasted with absurd repinings. How feeble seemed his own adventure and advancement; how even ludicrous his pretensions to any patronage and superiority. How this common backwoodsman had set him in his place as easily as SHE had evaded the advances of the journalist and Heckshill! They had taught him a lesson; perhaps even the sending back of his handkerchief was part of it! His heart grew heavy; he walked to the window and gazed out with a long sigh.

A light laugh, that might have been an echo of the one which had attracted him that night in Tarbox’s cabin, fell upon his ear. He turned quickly to meet Flora Dimwood’s laughing eyes shining upon him as she stood in the doorway.

Many a time during that month he had thought of this meeting—had imagined what it would be like—what would be his manner towards her—what would be her greeting, and what they would say. He would be cold, gentle, formal, gallant, gay, sad, trustful, reproachful, even as the moods in which he thought of her came to his foolish brain. He would always begin with respectful seriousness, or a frankness equal to her own, but never, never again would he offend as he had offended under the buckeyes! And now, with her pretty face shining upon him, all his plans, his speeches, his preparations vanished, and left him dumb. Yet he moved towards her with a brief articulate something on his lips,—something between a laugh and a sigh,—but that really was a kiss, and—in point of fact—promptly folded her in his arms.

Yet it was certainly direct, and perhaps the best that could be done, for the young lady did not emerge from it as coolly, as unemotionally, nor possibly as quickly as she had under the shade of the buckeyes. But she persuaded him—by still holding his hand—to sit beside her on the chilly, highly varnished “green rep” sofa, albeit to him it was a bank in a bower of enchantment. Then she said, with adorable reproachfulness, “You don’t ask what I did with the body.”

Mr. Edward Brice started. He was young, and unfamiliar with the evasive expansiveness of the female mind at such supreme moments.

“The body—oh, yes—certainly.”

“I buried it myself—it was suthin too awful!—and the gang would have been sure to have found it, and the empty belt. I burned THAT. So that nobody knows nothin’.”

It was not a time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am afraid that the girl’s characteristically familiar speech, even when pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent, endeared her the more to him. And when she said, “And now, Mr. Edward Brice, sit over at that end of the sofy and let’s talk,” they talked. They talked for an hour, more or less continuously, until they were surprised by a discreet cough and the entrance of Mrs. Tarbox. Then there was more talk, and the discovery that Mr. Brice was long due at the office.

“Ye might drop in, now and then, whenever ye feel like it, and Flo is at home,” suggested Mrs. Tarbox at parting.

Mr. Brice DID drop in frequently during the next month. On one of these occasions Mr. Tarbox accompanied him to the door. “And now—ez everything is settled and in order, Mr. Brice, and ef you should be wantin’ to say anything about it to your bosses at the office, ye may mention MY name ez Flo Dimwood’s second cousin, and say I’m a depositor in their bank. And,” with greater deliberation, “ef anything at any time should be thrown up at ye for marryin’ a niece o’ Snapshot Harry’s, ye might mention, keerless like, that Snapshot Harry, under the name o’ Henry J. Dimwood, has held shares in their old bank for years!”