The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other Stories

She stopped breathless; she stopped with the corner of her apron against her tearful hazel eyes; she stopped with—what was more remarkable than all—Rand’s arm actually around her waist, and his astonished, alarmed face within a few inches of her own.

“Why, Miss Euphemia, Phemie, my dear girl! I never meant anything like THAT,” said Rand earnestly. “I really didn’t now! Come now!”

“You never once spoke to me when I sat down,” said Miss Euphemia, feebly endeavoring to withdraw from Rand’s grasp.

“I really didn’t! Oh, come now, look here! I didn’t! Don’t! There’s a dear—THERE!”

This last conclusive exposition was a kiss. Miss Euphemia was not quick enough to release herself from his arms. He anticipated that act a full half-second, and had dropped his own, pale and breathless.

The girl recovered herself first. “There, I declare, I’m forgetting Mrs. Sol’s coffee!” she exclaimed hastily, and, snatching up the coffee-pot, disappeared. When she returned, Rand was gone. Miss Euphemia busied herself demurely in clearing up the dishes, with the tail of her eye sweeping the horizon of the summit level around her. But no Rand appeared. Presently she began to laugh quietly to herself. This occurred several times during her occupation, which was somewhat prolonged. The result of this meditative hilarity was summed up in a somewhat grave and thoughtful deduction as she walked slowly back to the cabin: “I do believe I’m the first woman that that boy ever kissed.”

Miss Euphemia staid that day and the next, and Rand forgot his embarrassment. By what means I know not, Miss Euphemia managed to restore Rand’s confidence in himself and in her, and in a little ramble on the mountain-side got him to relate, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the particulars of his rescue of Mornie from her dangerous position on the broken trail.

“And, if you hadn’t got there as soon as you did, she’d have fallen?” asked the “Pet.”

“I reckon,” returned Rand gloomily: “she was sorter dazed and crazed like.”

“And you saved her life?”

“I suppose so, if you put it that way,” said Rand sulkily.

“But how did you get her up the mountain again?”

“Oh! I got her up,” returned Rand moodily.

“But how? Really, Mr. Rand, you don’t know how interesting this is. It’s as good as a play,” said the “Pet,” with a little excited laugh.

“Oh, I carried her up!”

“In your arms?”

“Y-e-e-s.”

Miss Euphemia paused, and bit off the stalk of a flower, made a wry face, and threw it away from her in disgust.

Then she dug a few tiny holes in the earth with her parasol, and buried bits of the flower-stalk in them, as if they had been tender memories. “I suppose you knew Mornie very well?” she asked.

“I used to run across her in the woods,” responded Rand shortly, “a year ago. I didn’t know her so well then as—” He stopped.

“As what? As NOW?” asked the “Pet” abruptly. Rand, who was coloring over his narrow escape from a topic which a delicate kindness of Sol had excluded from their intercourse on the mountain, stammered, “as YOU do, I meant.”

The “Pet” tossed her head a little. “Oh! I don’t know her at all—except through Sol.”

Rand stared hard at this. The “Pet,” who was looking at him intently, said, “Show me the place where you saw Mornie clinging that night.”

“It’s dangerous,” suggested Rand.

“You mean I’d be afraid! Try me! I don’t believe she was SO dreadfully frightened!”

“Why?” asked Rand, in astonishment.

“Oh—because—”

Rand sat down in vague wonderment.

“Show it to me,” continued the “Pet,” “or—I’ll find it ALONE!”

Thus challenged, he rose, and, after a few moments’ climbing, stood with her upon the trail. “You see that thorn-bush where the rock has fallen away. It was just there. It is not safe to go farther. No, really! Miss Euphemia! Please don’t! It’s almost certain death!”

But the giddy girl had darted past him, and, face to the wall of the cliff, was creeping along the dangerous path. Rand followed mechanically. Once or twice the trail crumbled beneath her feet; but she clung to a projecting root of chaparral, and laughed. She had almost reached her elected goal, when, slipping, the treacherous chaparral she clung to yielded in her grasp, and Rand, with a cry, sprung forward.

But the next instant she quickly transferred her hold to a cleft in the cliff, and was safe. Not so her companion. The soil beneath him, loosened by the impulse of his spring, slipped away: he was falling with it, when she caught him sharply with her disengaged hand, and together they scrambled to a more secure footing.

“I could have reached it alone,” said the “Pet,” “if you’d left me alone.”

“Thank Heaven, we’re saved!” said Rand gravely.

“AND WITHOUT A ROPE,” said Miss Euphemia significantly.

Rand did not understand her. But, as they slowly returned to the summit, he stammered out the always difficult thanks of a man who has been physically helped by one of the weaker sex. Miss Euphemia was quick to see her error.

“I might have made you lose your footing by catching at you,” she said meekly. “But I was so frightened for you, and could not help it.”

The superior animal, thoroughly bamboozled, thereupon complimented her on her dexterity.

“Oh, that’s nothing!” she said, with a sigh. “I used to do the flying-trapeze business with papa when I was a child, and I’ve not forgotten it.” With this and other confidences of her early life, in which Rand betrayed considerable interest, they beguiled the tedious ascent. “I ought to have made you carry me up,” said the lady, with a little laugh, when they reached the summit; “but you haven’t known me as long as you have Mornie, have you?” With this mysterious speech she bade Rand “good-night,” and hurried off to the cabin.

And so a week passed by,—the week so dreaded by Rand, yet passed so pleasantly, that at times it seemed as if that dread were only a trick of his fancy, or as if the circumstances that surrounded him were different from what he believed them to be. On the seventh day the doctor had staid longer than usual; and Rand, who had been sitting with Euphemia on the ledge by the shaft, watching the sunset, had barely time to withdraw his hand from hers, as Mrs. Sol, a trifle pale and wearied-looking, approached him.

“I don’t like to trouble you,” she said,—indeed, they had seldom troubled him with the details of Mornie’s convalescence, or even her needs and requirements,—“but the doctor is alarmed about Mornie, and she has asked to see you. I think you’d better go in and speak to her. You know,” continued Mrs. Sol delicately, “you haven’t been in there since the night she was taken sick, and maybe a new face might do her good.”

The guilty blood flew to Rand’s face as he stammered, “I thought I’d be in the way. I didn’t believe she cared much to see me. Is she worse?”

“The doctor is looking very anxious,” said Mrs. Sol simply.

The blood returned from Rand’s face, and settled around his heart. He turned very pale. He had consoled himself always for his complicity in Ruth’s absence, that he was taking good care of Mornie, or—what is considered by most selfish natures an equivalent—permitting or encouraging some one else to “take good care of her;” but here was a contingency utterly unforeseen. It did not occur to him that this “taking good care” of her could result in anything but a perfect solution of her troubles, or that there could be any future to her condition but one of recovery. But what if she should die? A sudden and helpless sense of his responsibility to Ruth, to HER, brought him trembling to his feet.

He hurried to the cabin, where Mrs. Sol left him with a word of caution: “You’ll find her changed and quiet,—very quiet. If I was you, I wouldn’t say anything to bring back her old self.”

The change which Rand saw was so great, the face that was turned to him so quiet, that, with a new fear upon him, he would have preferred the savage eyes and reckless mien of the old Mornie whom he hated. With his habitual impulsiveness he tried to say something that should express that fact not unkindly, but faltered, and awkwardly sank into the chair by her bedside.

“I don’t wonder you stare at me now,” she said in a far-off voice. “It seems to you strange to see me lying here so quiet. You are thinking how wild I was when I came here that night. I must have been crazy, I think. I dreamed that I said dreadful things to you; but you must forgive me, and not mind it. I was crazy then.” She stopped, and folded the blanket between her thin fingers. “I didn’t ask you to come here to tell you that, or to remind you of it; but—but when I was crazy, I said so many worse, dreadful things of HIM; and you—YOU will be left behind to tell him of it.”

Rand was vaguely murmuring something to the effect that “he knew she didn’t mean anything,” that “she musn’t think of it again,” that “he’d forgotten all about it,” when she stopped him with a tired gesture.

“Perhaps I was wrong to think, that, after I am gone, you would care to tell him anything. Perhaps I’m wrong to think of it at all, or to care what he will think of me, except for the sake of the child—his child, Rand—that I must leave behind me. He will know that IT never abused him. No, God bless its sweet heart! IT never was wild and wicked and hateful, like its cruel, crazy mother. And he will love it; and you, perhaps, will love it too—just a little, Rand! Look at it!” She tried to raise the helpless bundle beside her in her arms, but failed. “You must lean over,” she said faintly to Rand. “It looks like him, doesn’t it?”

Rand, with wondering, embarrassed eyes, tried to see some resemblance, in the little blue-red oval, to the sad, wistful face of his brother, which even then was haunting him from some mysterious distance. He kissed the child’s forehead, but even then so vaguely and perfunctorily, that the mother sighed, and drew it closer to her breast.

“The doctor says,” she continued in a calmer voice, “that I’m not doing as well as I ought to. I don’t think,” she faltered, with something of her old bitter laugh, “that I’m ever doing as well as I ought to, and perhaps it’s not strange now that I don’t. And he says that, in case anything happens to me, I ought to look ahead. I have looked ahead. It’s a dark look ahead, Rand—a horror of blackness, without kind faces, without the baby, without—without HIM!”

She turned her face away, and laid it on the bundle by her side. It was so quiet in the cabin, that, through the open door beyond, the faint, rhythmical moan of the pines below was distinctly heard.

“I know it’s foolish; but that is what ‘looking ahead’ always meant to me,” she said, with a sigh. “But, since the doctor has been gone, I’ve talked to Mrs. Sol, and find it’s for the best. And I look ahead, and see more clearly. I look ahead, and see my disgrace removed far away from HIM and you. I look ahead, and see you and HE living together happily, as you did before I came between you. I look ahead, and see my past life forgotten, my faults forgiven; and I think I see you both loving my baby, and perhaps loving me a little for its sake. Thank you, Rand, thank you!”

For Rand’s hand had caught hers beside the pillow, and he was standing over her, whiter than she. Something in the pressure of his hand emboldened her to go on, and even lent a certain strength to her voice.

“When it comes to THAT, Rand, you’ll not let these people take the baby away. You’ll keep it HERE with you until HE comes. And something tells me that he will come when I am gone. You’ll keep it here in the pure air and sunlight of the mountain, and out of those wicked depths below; and when I am gone, and they are gone, and only you and Ruth and baby are here, maybe you’ll think that it came to you in a cloud on the mountain,—a cloud that lingered only long enough to drop its burden, and faded, leaving the sunlight and dew behind. What is it, Rand? What are you looking at?”

“I was thinking,” said Rand in a strange altered voice, “that I must trouble you to let me take down those duds and furbelows that hang on the wall, so that I can get at some traps of mine behind them.” He took some articles from the wall, replaced the dresses of Mrs. Sol, and answered Mornie’s look of inquiry.

“I was only getting at my purse and my revolver,” he said, showing them. “I’ve got to get some stores at the Ferry by daylight.”

Mornie sighed. “I’m giving you great trouble, Rand, I know; but it won’t be for long.”

He muttered something, took her hand again, and bade her “good-night.” When he reached the door, he looked back. The light was shining full upon her face as she lay there, with her babe on her breast, bravely “looking ahead.”

IV. THE CLOUDS PASS.

It was early morning at the Ferry. The “up coach” had passed, with lights unextinguished, and the “outsides” still asleep. The ferryman had gone up to the Ferry Mansion House, swinging his lantern, and had found the sleepy-looking “all night” bar-keeper on the point of withdrawing for the day on a mattress under the bar. An Indian half-breed, porter of the Mansion House, was washing out the stains of recent nocturnal dissipation from the bar-room and veranda; a few birds were twittering on the cotton-woods beside the river; a bolder few had alighted upon the veranda, and were trying to reconcile the existence of so much lemon-peel and cigar-stumps with their ideas of a beneficent Creator. A faint earthly freshness and perfume rose along the river banks. Deep shadow still lay upon the opposite shore; but in the distance, four miles away, Morning along the level crest of Table Mountain walked with rosy tread.

The sleepy bar-keeper was that morning doomed to disappointment; for scarcely had the coach passed, when steps were heard upon the veranda, and a weary, dusty traveller threw his blanket and knapsack to the porter, and then dropped into a vacant arm-chair, with his eyes fixed on the distant crest of Table Mountain. He remained motionless for some time, until the bar-keeper, who had already concocted the conventional welcome of the Mansion House, appeared with it in a glass, put it upon the table, glanced at the stranger, and then, thoroughly awake, cried out,—

“Ruth Pinkney—or I’m a Chinaman!”

The stranger lifted his eyes wearily. Hollow circles were around their orbits; haggard lines were in his checks. But it was Ruth.

He took the glass, and drained it at a single draught. “Yes,” he said absently, “Ruth Pinkney,” and fixed his eyes again on the distant rosy crest.

“On your way up home?” suggested the bar-keeper, following the direction of Ruth’s eyes.

“Perhaps.”

“Been upon a pasear, hain’t yer? Been havin’ a little tear round Sacramento,—seein’ the sights?”

Ruth smiled bitterly. “Yes.”

The bar-keeper lingered, ostentatiously wiping a glass. But Ruth again became abstracted in the mountain, and the barkeeper turned away.

How pure and clear that summit looked to him! how restful and steadfast with serenity and calm! how unlike his own feverish, dusty, travel-worn self! A week had elapsed since he had last looked upon it,—a week of disappointment, of anxious fears, of doubts, of wild imaginings, of utter helplessness. In his hopeless quest of the missing Mornie, he had, in fancy, seen this serene eminence haunting his remorseful, passion-stricken soul. And now, without a clew to guide him to her unknown hiding-place, he was back again, to face the brother whom he had deceived, with only the confession of his own weakness. Hard as it was to lose forever the fierce, reproachful glances of the woman he loved, it was still harder, to a man of Ruth’s temperament, to look again upon the face of the brother he feared. A hand laid upon his shoulder startled him. It was the bar-keeper.

“If it’s a fair question, Ruth Pinkney, I’d like to ask ye how long ye kalkilate to hang around the Ferry to-day.”

“Why?” demanded Ruth haughtily.

“Because, whatever you’ve been and done, I want ye to have a square show. Ole Nixon has been cavoortin’ round yer the last two days, swearin’ to kill you on sight for runnin’ off with his darter. Sabe? Now, let me ax ye two questions. FIRST, Are you heeled?”

Ruth responded to this dialectical inquiry affirmatively by putting his hand on his revolver.

“Good! Now, SECOND, Have you got the gal along here with you?”

“No,” responded Ruth in a hollow voice.

“That’s better yet,” said the man, without heeding the tone of the reply. “A woman—and especially THE woman in a row of this kind—handicaps a man awful.” He paused, and took up the empty glass. “Look yer, Ruth Pinkney, I’m a square man, and I’ll be square with you. So I’ll just tell you you’ve got the demdest odds agin’ ye. Pr’aps ye know it, and don’t keer. Well, the boys around yer are all sidin’ with the old man Nixon. It’s the first time the old rip ever had a hand in his favor: so the boys will see fair play for Nixon, and agin’ YOU. But I reckon you don’t mind him!”

“So little, I shall never pull trigger on him,” said Ruth gravely.

The bar-keeper stared, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, thar’s that Kanaka Joe, who used to be sorter sweet on Mornie,—he’s an ugly devil,—he’s helpin’ the old man.”

The sad look faded from Ruth’s eyes suddenly. A certain wild Berserker rage—a taint of the blood, inherited from heaven knows what Old-World ancestry, which had made the twin-brothers’ Southwestern eccentricities respected in the settlement—glowed in its place. The barkeeper noted it, and augured a lively future for the day’s festivities. But it faded again; and Ruth, as he rose, turned hesitatingly towards him.

“Have you seen my brother Rand lately?”

“Nary.”

“He hasn’t been here, or about the Ferry?”

“Nary time.”

“You haven’t heard,” said Ruth, with a faint attempt at a smile, “if he’s been around here asking after me,—sorter looking me up, you know?”

“Not much,” returned the bar-keeper deliberately. “Ez far ez I know Rand,—that ar brother o’ yours,—he’s one of yer high-toned chaps ez doesn’t drink, thinks bar-rooms is pizen, and ain’t the sort to come round yer, and sling yarns with me.”

Ruth rose; but the hand that he placed upon the table, albeit a powerful one, trembled so that it was with difficulty he resumed his knapsack. When he did so, his bent figure, stooping shoulders, and haggard face, made him appear another man from the one who had sat down. There was a slight touch of apologetic deference and humility in his manner as he paid his reckoning, and slowly and hesitatingly began to descend the steps.

The bar-keeper looked after him thoughtfully. “Well, dog my skin!” he ejaculated to himself, “ef I hadn’t seen that man—that same Ruth Pinkney—straddle a friend’s body in this yer very room, and dare a whole crowd to come on, I’d swar that he hadn’t any grit in him. Thar’s something up!”

But here Ruth reached the last step, and turned again.

“If you see old man Nixon, say I’m in town; if you see that – –” (I regret to say that I cannot repeat his exact, and brief characterization of the present condition and natal antecedents of Kanaka Joe), “say I’m looking out for him,” and was gone.

He wandered down the road, towards the one long, straggling street of the settlement. The few people who met him at that early hour greeted him with a kind of constrained civility; certain cautious souls hurried by without seeing him; all turned and looked after him; and a few followed him at a respectful distance. A somewhat notorious practical joker and recognized wag at the Ferry apparently awaited his coming with something of invitation and expectation, but, catching sight of Ruth’s haggard face and blazing eyes, became instantly practical, and by no means jocular in his greeting. At the top of the hill, Ruth turned to look once more upon the distant mountain, now again a mere cloud-line on the horizon. In the firm belief that he would never again see the sun rise upon it, he turned aside into a hazel-thicket, and, tearing out a few leaves from his pocket-book, wrote two letters,—one to Rand, and one to Mornie, but which, as they were never delivered, shall not burden this brief chronicle of that eventful day. For, while transcribing them, he was startled by the sounds of a dozen pistol-shots in the direction of the hotel he had recently quitted. Something in the mere sound provoked the old hereditary fighting instinct, and sent him to his feet with a bound, and a slight distension of the nostrils, and sniffing of the air, not unknown to certain men who become half intoxicated by the smell of powder. He quickly folded his letters, and addressed them carefully, and, taking off his knapsack and blanket, methodically arranged them under a tree, with the letters on top. Then he examined the lock of his revolver, and then, with the step of a man ten years younger, leaped into the road. He had scarcely done so when he was seized, and by sheer force dragged into a blacksmith’s shop at the roadside. He turned his savage face and drawn weapon upon his assailant, but was surprised to meet the anxious eyes of the bar-keeper of the Mansion House.

“Don’t be a d–d fool,” said the man quickly. “Thar’s fifty agin’ you down thar. But why in h-ll didn’t you wipe out old Nixon when you had such a good chance?”

“Wipe out old Nixon?” repeated Ruth.

“Yes; just now, when you had him covered.”

“What!”

The bar-keeper turned quickly upon Ruth, stared at him, and then suddenly burst into a fit of laughter. “Well, I’ve knowed you two were twins, but damn me if I ever thought I’d be sold like this!” And he again burst into a roar of laughter.

“What do you mean?” demanded Ruth savagely.

“What do I mean?” returned the barkeeper. “Why, I mean this. I mean that your brother Rand, as you call him, he’z bin—for a young feller, and a pious feller—doin’ about the tallest kind o’ fightin’ to-day that’s been done at the Ferry. He laid out that ar Kanaka Joe and two of his chums. He was pitched into on your quarrel, and he took it up for you like a little man. I managed to drag him off, up yer in the hazel-bush for safety, and out you pops, and I thought you was him. He can’t be far away. Halloo! There they’re comin’; and thar’s the doctor, trying to keep them back!”

A crowd of angry, excited faces, filled the road suddenly; but before them Dr. Duchesne, mounted, and with a pistol in his hand, opposed their further progress.

“Back in the bush!” whispered the barkeeper. “Now’s your time!”

But Ruth stirred not. “Go you back,” he said in a low voice, “find Rand, and take him away. I will fill his place here.” He drew his revolver, and stepped into the road.

A shout, a report, and the spatter of red dust from a bullet near his feet, told him he was recognized. He stirred not; but another shout, and a cry, “There they are—BOTH of ‘em!” made him turn.

His brother Rand, with a smile on his lip and fire in his eye, stood by his side. Neither spoke. Then Rand, quietly, as of old, slipped his hand into his brother’s strong palm. Two or three bullets sang by them; a splinter flew from the blacksmith’s shed: but the brothers, hard gripping each other’s hands, and looking into each other’s faces with a quiet joy, stood there calm and imperturbable.

There was a momentary pause. The voice of Dr. Duchesne rose above the crowd.

“Keep back, I say! keep back! Or hear me!—for five years I’ve worked among you, and mended and patched the holes you’ve drilled through each other’s carcasses—Keep back, I say!—or the next man that pulls trigger, or steps forward, will get a hole from me that no surgeon can stop. I’m sick of your bungling ball practice! Keep back!—or, by the living Jingo, I’ll show you where a man’s vitals are!”

There was a burst of laughter from the crowd, and for a moment the twins were forgotten in this audacious speech and coolly impertinent presence.

“That’s right! Now let that infernal old hypocritical drunkard, Mat Nixon, step to the front.”

The crowd parted right and left, and half pushed, half dragged Nixon before him.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor, “this is the man who has just shot at Rand Pinkney for hiding his daughter. Now, I tell you, gentlemen, and I tell him, that for the last week his daughter, Mornie Nixon, has been under my care as a patient, and my protection as a friend. If there’s anybody to be shot, the job must begin with me!”

There was another laugh, and a cry of “Bully for old Sawbones!” Ruth started convulsively, and Rand answered his look with a confirming pressure of his hand.