Frontier Stories | Page 2

of dust
and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps
exaggerated in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a
drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud
of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten
garments clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened
and upheld by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he
kept on his course.
Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once, when he stopped and
leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the

distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more
musical interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot
trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the
interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed
with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and
trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed
and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the luxurious retreat of many
a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott. Without a
moment's hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped
cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop. His head
disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.
Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,--his revolver
and tobacco pouch.
A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue-jay alighted on the bank and
made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave
way to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between
the pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous
fascination. Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of
animated nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above
the bank. It was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this
wholesale process, washed himself and his light "drill" garments
entirely clean, but that he had, apparently by the same operation,
morally cleansed himself, and left every stain and ugly blot of his late
misdeeds and reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here and
there, was rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good-humor and
youthful levity. His large blue eyes were infantine in their innocent
surprise and thoughtlessness. Dripping yet with water, and panting, he
rested his elbows lazily on the bank, and became instantly absorbed
with a boy's delight in the movements of the gopher, who, after the first
alarm, returned cautiously to abduct the tobacco pouch. If any familiar
had failed to detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust
and grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have
recognized in this blonde faun the possible outcast and murderer. And

when with a swirl of his spattering sleeve he drove back the gopher in a
shower of spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted his
felonious hiding-place as a mere picnicking bower.
A slight breeze was unmistakably permeating the wood from the west.
Looking in that direction, Lance imagined that the shadow was less
dark, and although the undergrowth was denser, he struck off carelessly
toward it. As he went on, the wood became lighter and lighter;
branches, and presently leaves, were painted against the vivid blue of
the sky. He knew he must be near the summit, stopped, felt for his
revolver, and then lightly put the few remaining branches aside.
The full glare of the noonday sun at first blinded him. When he could
see more clearly, he found himself on the open western slope of the
mountain, which in the Coast Range was seldom wooded. The spiced
thicket stretched between him and the summit, and again between him
and the stage road that plunges from the terrace, like forked lightning
into the valley below. He could command all the approaches without
being seen. Not that this seemed to occupy his thoughts or cause him
any anxiety. His first act was to disencumber himself of his tattered
coat; he then filled and lighted his pipe, and stretched himself
full-length on the open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun. While
smoking he carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which had
enveloped his tobacco, and being struck with some amusing paragraph,
read it half aloud again to some imaginary auditor, emphasizing its
humor with an