I'll go to her. She's in her room, I suppose," and before they could restrain him, he had thrown off their impeding embraces and darted across the hall.

The two old people stared doubtfully at each other. For even this powerful ally, whose strength, however, they were by no means sure of, might succ.u.mb before the determined Josephine! Prudence demanded a middle course. "Ain't they brother and sister?" said the old man, with an air of virtuous toleration. "Let 'em fight it out."

The young man impatiently entered the room he remembered to have been his sister's. By the light of the moon that streamed upon the window he could see she was not there. He pa.s.sed hurriedly to the door of her bedroom; it was open; the room was empty, the bed unturned. She was not in the house--she had gone to the mill. Ah! What was that they had said?

An infamous thought pa.s.sed through the scoundrel's mind. Then, in what he half believed was an access of virtuous fury, he began by the dim light to rummage in the drawers of the desk for such loose coin or valuables as, in the perfect security of the ranch, were often left unguarded. Suddenly he heard a heavy footstep on the threshold, and turned.

An awful vision--a recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that weird light that he thought he was losing his senses--stood before him.

It moved forwards with staring eyeb.a.l.l.s and white and open lips from which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no living man! With a single desperate, almost superhuman effort Stephen Forsyth bounded aside, leaped from the window, and ran like a madman from the house. Then the apparition trembled, collapsed, and sank in an undistinguishable heap to the ground.

When Josephine Forsyth returned an hour later with her mill foreman, she was startled to find her helpless patient in a fit on the floor of her room. With the a.s.sistance of her now converted and penitent employee, she had the unfortunate man conveyed to his room--but not until she had thoughtfully rearranged the disorder of her desk and closed the open drawers without attracting d.i.c.k Shipley's attention. In the morning, hearing that the patient was still in the semiconscious exhaustion of his late attack, but without seeing him, she sent for Dr. d.u.c.h.esne. The doctor arrived while she was absent at the mill, where, after a careful examination of his patient, he sought her with some little excitement.

"Well?" she said, with eager gravity.

"Well, it looks as if your wish would be gratified. Your friend has had an epileptic fit, but the physical shock has started his mental machinery again. He has recovered his faculties; his memory is returning: he thinks and speaks coherently; he is as sane as you and I."

"And"--said Josephine, questioning the doctor's knitted eyebrows.

"I am not yet sure whether it was the result of some shock he doesn't remember; or an irritation of the brain, which would indicate that the operation had not been successful and that there was still some physical pressure or obstruction there--in which case he would be subject to these attacks all his life."

"Do you think his reason came before the fit or after?" asked the girl, anxiously.

"I couldn't say. Had anything happened?"

"I was away, and found him on the floor on my return," she answered, half uneasily. After a pause she said, "Then he has told you his name and all about himself?"

"Yes, it's nothing at all! He was a stranger just arrived from the States, going to the mines--the old story; had no near relations, of course; wasn't missed or asked after; remembers walking along the ridge and falling over; name, John Baxter, of Maine." He paused, and relaxing into a slight smile, added, "I haven't spoiled your romance, have I?"

"No," she said, with an answering smile. Then as the doctor walked briskly away she slightly knitted her pretty brows, hung her head, patted the ground with her little foot beyond the hem of her gown, and said to herself, "The man was lying to him."

CHAPTER III

On her return to the house, Josephine apparently contented herself with receiving the bulletin of the stranger's condition from the servant, for she did not enter his room. She had obtained no theory of last night's incident from her parents, who, beyond a querulous agitation that was quickened by the news of his return to reason, refrained from even that insidious comment which she half feared would follow. When another day pa.s.sed without her seeing him, she nevertheless was conscious of a little embarra.s.sment when his attendant brought her the request that she would give him a moment's speech in the porch, whither he had been removed.

She found him physically weaker; indeed, so much so that she was fain, even in her embarra.s.sment, to a.s.sist him back to the bench from which he had ceremoniously risen. But she was so struck with the change in his face and manner, a change so virile and masterful, in spite of its gentle sadness of manner, that she recoiled with a slight timidity as if he had been a stranger, although she was also conscious that he seemed to be more at his ease than she was. He began in a low exhausted voice, but before he had finished his first sentence, she felt herself in the presence of a superior.

"My thanks come very late, Miss Forsyth," he said, with a faint smile, "but no one knows better than yourself the reason why, or can better understand that they mean that the burden you have so generously taken on yourself is about to be lifted. I know all, Miss Forsyth. Since yesterday I have learned how much I owe you, even my life I believe, though I am afraid I must tell you in the same breath that THAT is of little worth to any one. You have kindly helped and interested yourself in a poor stranger who turns out to be a n.o.body, without friends, without romance, and without even mystery. You found me lying in the road down yonder, after a stupid accident that might have happened to any other careless tramp, and which scarcely gave me a claim to a bed in the county hospital, much less under this kindly roof. It was not my fault, as you know, that all this did not come out sooner; but while it doesn't lessen your generosity, it doesn't lessen my debt, and although I cannot hope to ever repay you, I can at least keep the score from running on. Pardon my speaking so bluntly, but my excuse for speaking at all was to say 'Good-by' and 'G.o.d bless you.' Dr. d.u.c.h.esne has promised to give me a lift on my way in his buggy when he goes."

There was a slight touch of consciousness in his voice in spite of its sadness, which struck the young girl as a weak and even ungentlemanly note in his otherwise self-abnegating and undemonstrative att.i.tude. If he was a common tramp, he wouldn't talk in that way, and if he wasn't, why did he lie? Her practical good sense here a.s.serted itself.

"But you are far from strong yet; in fact, the doctor says you might have a relapse at any moment, and you have--that is, you SEEM to have no money," she said gravely.

"That's true," he said, quickly. "I remember I was quite played out when I entered the settlement, and I think I had parted from even some little trifles I carried with me. I am afraid I was a poor find to those who picked me up, and you ought to have taken warning. But the doctor has offered to lend me enough to take me to San Francisco, if only to give a fair trial to the machine he has set once more a-going."

"Then you have friends in San Francisco?" said the young girl quickly.

"Those who know you? Why not write to them first, and tell them you are here?"

"I don't think your postmaster here would be preoccupied with letters for John Baxter, if I did," he said, quietly. "But here is the doctor waiting. Good-by."

He stood looking at her in a peculiar, yet half-resigned way, and held out his hand. For a moment she hesitated. Had he been less independent and strong, she would have refused to let him go--have offered him some slight employment at the ranch; for oddly enough, in spite of the suspicion that he was concealing something, she felt that she would have trusted him, and he would have been a help to her. But he was not only determined, but SHE was all the time conscious that he was a totally different man from the one she had taken care of, and merely ordinary prudence demanded that she should know something more of him first. She gave him her hand constrainedly; he pressed it warmly.

Dr. d.u.c.h.esne drove up, helped him into the buggy, smiled a good-natured but half-perfunctory a.s.surance that he would look after "her patient,"

and drove away.

The whole thing was over, but so unexpectedly, so suddenly, so unromantically, so unsatisfactorily, that, although her common sense told her that it was perfectly natural, proper, business-like, and reasonable, and, above all, final and complete, she did not know whether to laugh or be angry. Yet this was her parting from the man who had but a few days ago moved her to tears with a single hopeless gesture.

Well, this would teach her what to expect. Well, what had she expected?

Nothing!

Yet for the rest of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she rated that trusted retainer with such pitiless equity and unfeminine logic that his hot Latin blood chilled in his veins, and he stood livid on the road. Then, informing d.i.c.k Shipley with equally relentless calm that she might feel it necessary to change ALL her foremen unless they could agree in harmony, she sought the dignified seclusion of her castle. But her respected parents, whose triumphant relief at the stranger's departure had emboldened them to await her return in their porch with bended bows of invective and lifted javelins of aggression, recoiled before the resistless helm of this cold-browed Minerva, who galloped contemptuously past them.

Nevertheless, she sat late that night at her desk. The cold moon looked down upon her window, and lit up the empty porch where her silent guest had mutely watched her. For a moment she regretted that he had recovered his reason, excusing herself on the practical ground that he would never have known his dependence, and he would have been better cared for by her. She felt restless and uneasy. This slight divergence from the practical groove in which her life had been set had disturbed her in many other things, and given her the first views of the narrowness of it.

Suddenly she heard a step in the porch. The lateness of the hour, perhaps some other reason, seemed to startle her, and she half rose.

The next moment the figure of Miguel appeared at the doorway, and with a quick, hurried look around him, and at the open window, he approached her. He was evidently under great excitement, his hollow shaven cheek looked like a waxen effigy in the mission church; his yellow, tobacco-stained eye glittered like phosph.o.r.escent amber, his lank gray hair was damp and perspiring; but more striking than this was the evident restraint he had put upon himself, pressing his broad-brimmed sombrero with both of his trembling yellow hands against his breast. The young girl cast a hurried glance at the open window and at the gun which stood in the corner, and then confronted him with clear and steady eyes, but a paler cheek.

Ah, he began in Spanish, which he himself had taught her as a child, it was a strange thing, his coming there to-night; but, then, mother of G.o.d! it was a strange, a terrible thing that she had done to him--old Miguel, her uncle's servant: he that had known her as a muchacha; he that had lived all his life at the ranch--ay, and whose fathers before him had lived there all THEIR lives and driven the cattle over the very spot where she now stood, before the thieving Americans came here! But he would be calm; yes, the senora should find him calm, even as she was when she told him to go. He would not speak. No, he--Miguel--would contain himself; yes, he HAD mastered himself, but could he restrain others? Ah, yes, OTHERS--that was it. Could he keep Manuel and Pepe and Dominguez from talking to the milkman--that leaking sieve, that gabbling brute of a Shipley, for whose sake she had cast off her old servant that very day?

She looked at him with cold astonishment, but without fear. Was he drunk with aguardiente, or had his jealousy turned his brain? He continued gasping, but still pressing his hat against his breast.

Ah, he saw it all! Yes, it was to-day, the day he left. Yes, she had thought it safe to cast Miguel off now--now that HE was gone!

Without in the least understanding him, the color had leaped to her cheek, and the consciousness of it made her furious.

"How dare you?" she said, pa.s.sionately. "What has that stranger to do with my affairs or your insolence?"

He stopped and gazed at her with a certain admiring loyalty. "Ah! so,"

he said, with a deep breath, "the senora is the niece of her uncle. She does well not to fear HIM--a dog,"--with a slight shrug,--"who is more than repaid by the senora's condescension. HE dare not speak!"

"Who dare not speak? Are you mad?" She stopped with a sudden terrible instinct of apprehension. "Miguel," she said in her deepest voice, "answer me, I command you! Do you know anything of this man?"

It was Miguel's turn to recoil from his mistress. "Ah, my G.o.d! is it possible the senora has not suspect?"

"Suspect!" said Josephine, haughtily, albeit her proud heart was beating quickly. "I SUSPECT nothing. I command you to tell me what you KNOW."

Miguel turned with a rapid gesture and closed the door. Then, drawing her away from the window, he said in a hurried whisper,--

"I know that that man has not the name of Baxter! I know that he has the name of Randolph, a young gambler, who have won a large sum at Sacramento, and, fearing to be robbed by those he won of, have walk to himself through the road in disguise of a miner. I know that your brother Esteban have decoyed him here, and have fallen on him."

"Stop!" said the young girl, her eyes, which had been fixed with the agony of conviction, suddenly flashing with the energy of despair. "And you call yourself the servant of my uncle, and dare say this of his nephew?"

"Yes, senora," broke out the old man, pa.s.sionately. "It is because I am the servant of your uncle that I, and I ALONE, dare say it to you! It is because I perjured my soul, and have perjured my soul to deny it elsewhere, that I now dare to say it! It is because I, your servant, knew it from one of my countrymen, who was of the gang,--because I, Miguel, knew that your brother was not far away that night, and because I, whom you would dismiss, have picked up this pocket-book of Randolph's and your brother's ring which he have dropped, and I have found beneath the body of the man you sent me to fetch."

He drew a packet from his bosom, and tossed it on the desk before her.

"And why have you not told me this before?" said Josephine, pa.s.sionately.

Miguel shrugged his shoulders.