the cold of foot-hill california in the month of january held the night. the occupants of the surrey were too cramped and stiffened by it, and too uncomfortably enwrapped against it, to speak. silence as complete as that which lay like a spell on the landscape brooded over them. at the last stopping place, chinese gulch, a scattering of houses six miles behind them on the mountain road, they had halted at the main saloon, and whisky and water had been passed to the driver and to the burlier figure on the back seat. the watchers that thronged to the saloon door had eyed the third occupant of the carriage with the intent, sheepish curiosity of the isolated man in presence of the stranger female. afterward, each one was voluble in his impressions of her face, pale in the smoky lamplight, and the hand that slid, small and white, out of its loose glove when the warming glass was offered her.
since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several corners and preserved an unbroken silence. even the driver’s tongue had showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his fares, gradually languished and died.
the surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. the solemn loneliness of the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars, seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing stillness. there was not a sign of human life. the gray patches of fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. the domes of the live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces. steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. over all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions and nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown telegraphy, from illimitable distances.
the larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion.
“hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars.
“fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited the more diminutive bulk.
“get a move on, jake,” to the driver. “this girl’s most famished.”
“hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”
at these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. as they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.
“so that’s rocky bar!” she cried. “have we really got there at last?”
the driver chuckled.
“that’s rocky bar all right. now get your appetite good and ready.”
“no need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. i was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”
“me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “ah, get out! how does it come, governor, that bill cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from new york?”
“she’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “i’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before she was ever thought of.”
a loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached houses of the settlement. shapes appeared at the lighted doorways, and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads was seen in the windows. the entire population of rocky bar spent its evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting and smoking in cheery sociability. but at this hour the great event of rocky bar’s day was over. the eight stages, the passengers of which dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the sierra. that the nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a late arrival in a surrey, driven by jake mcveigh, the proprietor of the san jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational event not often awarded to rocky bar, even in the heyday of summer-time.
the occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed themselves against the windows. they saw that the man who alighted was a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. of the lady, shown but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline and a glint of fair hair were discernible. but, anyway, it was a woman, and of a kind unusual in rocky bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful admiration.
the hotel proprietor, an ancient man with a loosened vest, and trousers tucked into long boots, dispersed them as he ushered the strangers into the office. that they were travelers of distinction was obvious, as much from their own appearance as from the fact that jake mcveigh was driving them himself, in his best surrey and with his finest team. but just how important they were no one guessed till mcveigh followed them in, and into ears stretched for the information dropped the sentence, half-heard, like a stage aside:
“it’s bill cannon and his daughter rose.”
upon the proprietor it had an electric effect. he sped from the room with the alertness of youth, promising “a cold lunch” in a minute. to the others it came as a piece of intelligence that added awe to the lighter emotions of the occasion. by common consent their eyes focused on the great man who stood warming his hands at the stove. even the rare, unusual woman, revealed now as sufficiently pretty to be an object of future dreams, was interesting only to the younger and more impressionable members of the throng. all but these gazed absorbed, unblinking, at bill cannon, the bonanza king.
he was used to it. it had been a part of his life for years. eying his admirers with a genial good humor, he entered into conversation with them, his manner marked by an easy familiarity, which swept away all shades of embarrassment, and drew the men around the stove, eager to respond to his questions as to the condition and prospects of the locality. the talk was becoming general and animated, when the ancient man returned and announced that the “cold lunch” was ready and to please “step after him into the dining-room.”
this gaunt apartment, grimly unadorned and faintly illumined, an occasional lantern backed by a tin reflector projecting a feeble light into its echoing emptiness, was swept of all intruders, and showed a barn-like bareness of wall and loftiness of roof. lines of tables, uncovered between flanking wooden benches, were arranged down its length. across the end of one of these a white cloth was spread and three places set. jake mcveigh, less innocently democratic than the hotel proprietor, was about to withdraw from the society of his distinguished patron and seat himself in seemly loneliness at an adjacent table, when bill cannon’s voice arrested him.
“what are you going off there for, sonny, as if you were a leper? come over here and sit side of us.”
the driver, greatly pleased, not only to enjoy the companionship of the richest man in california but to let the peeping heads in the doorway see him in this moment of proud apotheosis, took the third seat with modest complacence. like most of his kind, the sense of social inferiority was unknown to him. he was simply and naturally himself as he would be anywhere in any company. even the proximity of miss cannon did not abash him, and he dexterously propelled the potatoes into his mouth with his knife and cut fiercely at his meat with a sawing motion, talking the while with all the freedom and more than the pleasure with which he talked to his wife in the kitchen at san jacinto.
cannon, his overcoat removed, was seen to be a powerful, thick-set man, with a bulkiness that was more a matter of broad build and muscular development than fat. his coat set ill upon him and strained at the buttons. it had the effect of having worked up toward the shoulders, noticeable in the clothes of men who are deep-chested and sit bunchily. he had a short neck which he accommodated with a turn-down collar, a gray beard, clipped close to his cheeks and square on the chin, and gray hair, worn rather long and combed sleekly and without parting back from his forehead. in age he was close to seventy, but the alertness and intelligence of a conquering energy and vitality were in his glance, and showed in his movements, deliberate, but sure and full of precision. he spoke little as he ate his dinner, leaning over his plate and responding to the remarks of his daughter with an occasional monosyllable that might have sounded curt, had it not been accompanied with a lazy cast of his eye upon her that was as full of affection as a caress.
the young lady, who had also put off her outer wraps, still wore her hat, which was wide-brimmed and cast a shadow over the upper part of her face. below it her hair showed a fine, bright blonde, giving forth silky gleams in the lamplight. to the peeping heads in the doorway she seemed a creature instinct with romantic charm, which was expressed in such delicacies of appearance as a pearl-white throat, a rounded chin, and lips that smiled readily. these graces, eagerly deciphered through dimness and distance, had the attraction of the semi-seen, and imagination, thus given an encouraging fillip, invested bill cannon’s girl with a haunting beauty. it was remarked that she bore no resemblance to her father in coloring, features, or build. in talking it over later, rocky bar decided that she must favor her mother, who, as all california knew, had been a waitress in the yuba hotel at marysville, when bill cannon, then a miner in the freeze-out, had wooed and won her.
the conversation between the diners was desultory. they were beyond doubt hungry. even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. once or twice, as she bit a semicircle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught mcveigh’s, and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.
it was toward the end of the meal, that, looking at the opposite wall, her glance was caught by a large clock to which she drew her father’s attention:
“half-past nine! how fashionable we are! and when are you going to get us up to antelope, mr. mcveigh?”
mcveigh studied the clock ponderingly as he felt in his breast pocket for his toothpick.
“well,” he said, “if we leave here at ten and make good time the hull way—it’s up hill pretty much without a break—i’ll get you there about midnight.”
she made a little grimace.
“and it will be much colder, won’t it?”
“colder ’n’ colder. you’ll be goin’ higher with every step. antelope’s on the slope of the sierra, and you can’t expect to be warm up there in the end of january.”
“if you hadn’t wanted to come,” said her father, “you’d have been just about getting ready for mrs. ryan’s ball. isn’t this about the magic hour when you begin to lay on the first layer of war-paint?”
the girl looked at the clock, nodding with a faint, reminiscent smile.
“just about,” she said. “i’d have been probably looking at my dress laid out on the bed and saying to myself, ‘now i wonder if it’s worth while getting into that thing and having all the bother of going to this ball.’ on the evenings when i go out, there’s always a stage when that happens.”
mcveigh, with his toothpick in full operation, looked at her, admiring and half comprehending, for the first time feeling himself an outsider. she caught his eye, read its meaning, and with the quick tact of a delicate nature, said:
“it’s mrs. cornelius ryan in san francisco. she has a ball to-night and i was going, but i came up here with papa instead. i don’t care for balls.”
“sort of late to be primping up for a ball,” said mcveigh, restoring the toothpick to his pocket and pushing back his chair. “i’ll go and have a look at the horses. and, governor, if you’ll be ready in fifteen minutes i’ll be round at the porch waiting.”
cannon nodded, and, as the driver clumped off over the board floor, said to his daughter,
“i wonder if dominick ryan’ll be there—at the ball, i mean. his mother’s made up her mind not to recognize the woman he’s married, and to freeze her out, but i wonder if she’ll have the nerve not to ask her to-night.”
“i don’t see how she could do that,” said the girl. “this is one of the largest balls ever given in san francisco. she can’t leave her son out, and she couldn’t ask him without his wife.”
“couldn’t she?” said the old man, with a narrowing of his eyes and a knowing wag of his head. “you don’t know delia ryan. i do. i’ve known her forty years, ever since she was first married and did washing on the back porch of her shanty in virginia city. she was a good deal of a woman then, a strong, brainy woman, and she’s the same to-day, but hard as nails. i’ll bet a hat she hasn’t asked dominick’s wife to that ball.”
“what do you suppose he’ll do?” asked the daughter, somewhat aghast at this glimpse of the ryan family skeleton.
“don’t ask me such conundrums. i’m glad i’m not in it, that’s all i know. when two women lock horns i’m ready to step quietly down and out. i never to my knowledge saw dominick’s wife, but i’ve heard about her, and take it she’s a pretty hard kind of a proposition. they say she married the boy for money and position, and hasn’t got either. delia, who has the money, hasn’t given them a cent since the marriage; made up her mind, people say, to force mrs. dominick out. she doesn’t seem to have done it, and i guess it’s been sort of aggravating to her. just the same i’d like to know if she’s had the nerve not to send the woman an invitation to the ball. that would be pretty tough.”
“i’ve never seen either dominick or his wife,” said the girl. “it seems odd when i know mrs. ryan and cornelia so well. but he married the year i came back from europe, and he’s never been anywhere since. i don’t believe he ever goes to his mother’s. there’s mr. mcveigh in the doorway; we’d better be going.”
once again in the carriage they were soon clear of the last straggling shanty, and speeding along the pale, ascending road. the silence that held the trio before their arrival at rocky bar again fell on them. wrapped in overcoats and rugs, bill cannon appeared to slumber, every now and then—as the wheels jolted over a piece of rough road-bed—shaken into growling wakefulness. mcveigh also rolled sleepily in his seat, occasionally leaning sidewise to spit over the wheel. only the girl seemed alert and wide-awake, her face craning out from the shadowed back seat, her eyes strained to pierce the obscurity and see for the first time the landscape of foot-hill california, of which her father had so often told her.
now it was all a dark, formless background of broken blacknesses, where the light, open spaces of fields alternated with blotches of woods and trees. at intervals they passed a lone cabin, solitary in its pale clearing, the red eye of a stove sending a gleam through an uncurtained pane. once they woke the echoes in the single street of a tiny town, sleeping behind its shuttered windows. dogs barked, the shout of a belated reveler rose from a congeries of gaudily-bright doorways, and over all, imposing its mighty voice on the silence, came the roar of the stamp-mill on the hill above. it rose into the night like a fortress, a black mass looming from the slant of vast dumps, lines of lit windows puncturing its sides. the thunder of its stamps was loud on the night, fierce and insistent, like the roar of a monster round whose feet the little town cowered.
mcveigh looked back over his shoulder, saw the bright eyes under the hat-brim, and said softly,
“the silver crescent stamp-mill. the last big mine we’ll see.”
it was the last town they passed; even the groups of buildings that marked embryo mines grew rare. the dimly-seen country became wilder, seemed to shake off the signs of man’s encroachment and to be sweeping up into mountain majesty. the ascending road crept along the edges of ravines whence the sound of running water came in a clear clinking, dived down into black caverns of trees unlighted by the feeblest ray of star-shine, and then climbed in slow, laborious loops the bare bulwarks of the mountain. had the girl been able to see plainly she would have noticed the change in the foliage, the disappearance of the smaller shrubs and delicate interlacement of naked boughs, and the mightier growth of the pines, soaring shafts devoid of branches to a great height. boulders appeared among their roots, straight falls of rock edged the road like the walls of a fort.
mcveigh turned again, and again caught the bright eye.
“seems like your paw must think a lot of what he’s heard about the new strike at greenhide to come all this way,” he whispered.
“i guess he does,” came the response in the same key.
“it sort of stumps me to know why you came along with him,” he continued, his eyes on the horses, but leaning back to catch her answer.
“mightn’t i just want to see the country?”
“well, mebbe you might, but it don’t seem to me that you’re seein’ much of it to-night.”
he heard her smothered laugh, shot his glance back to see her face, and laughed himself, turning to his horses, and then turning back to her.
“you’re a lively girl, ain’t you?” he said.
“i don’t feel very lively just at this minute. i’m a cold girl, the coldest in california, i think.”
that made him laugh, too, but he turned back to his horses, saying with quick consideration:
“i guess you are. come boys,” to the horses, “we’ve got to get a move on. we can’t let this young lady catch cold.”
the horses quickened their pace and there was no more talk. an hour later the first broken lights of antelope sparkled along the road. the old mining camp, in a hollow between two buttresses of the sierra, lay shuttered and dreaming under the starlight. a lamp-lit window, here and there, showed the course of its straggling main street, and where the hotel stood, welcoming rays winked between the boughs of leafless trees.
as the thud of the approaching hoof-beats woke the echoes a sudden violent barking of dogs broke out. antelope was evidently not as sound asleep as it looked. at the hotel, especially, there was life and movement. the bar disgorged a throng of men, and perley, the proprietor, had to push his way through them to welcome his midnight guests. antelope, though remote, was in telegraphic communication with the world, and the operator at rocky bar had wired perley to be ready for the distinguished arrivals,—news that in a half-hour was known throughout the town and had brought most of the unattached male population into the hotel.
jake mcveigh was pulling the luggage from under the seats and cannon was interchanging the first greetings with his landlord, when the girl, who had gone to the balcony railing and was looking out into the darkness, cried:
“why, papa, snow!”
the information seemed to startle every one. the men crowded from the doorway and balcony into the street. mcveigh set down the bags, and, turning his weather-beaten face to the sky, uttered a smothered ejaculation of a profane character. cannon came forward to where his daughter stood and looked into the blackness beyond. the girl had drawn off her glove and held her bare hand out, then stepping back to the light of the window, she showed it to her father. the white skin was sprinkled with snow crystals.
“sure enough,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “well, it won’t be the first time i’ve been snowed up at antelope.”
