The Bell-Ringer of Angel''s, and Other Stories

  CHAPTER IV.

  Howbeit the sun shone cheerfully over the Bar the next morning and thenext; the breath of life and activity was in the air; the settlementnever had been more prosperous, and the yield from the opened placerson the drained river-bed that week was enormous. The Brothers Waynewere said to be "rolling in gold." It was thought to be consistent withMadison Wayne's nature that there was no trace of good fortune in hisface or manner--rather that he had become more nervous, restless, andgloomy. This was attributed to the joylessness of avarice as contrastedwith the spendthrift gayety of the more liberal Arthur, and he wasfeared and RESPECTED as a miser. His long, solitary walks around thepromontory, his incessant watchfulness, his reticence when questioned,were all recognized as the indications of a man whose soul was absorbedin money-getting. The reverence they failed to yield to his religiousisolation they were willing to freely accord to his financialabstraction. But Mr. McGee was not so deceived. Overtaking him oneday under the fringe of willows, he characteristically chided himwith absenting himself from Mrs. McGee and her house since their lastinterview.

  "I reckon you did not harbor malice in your Christianity," he said;"but it looks mighty like ez if ye was throwing off on Safie and me onaccount of what I said."

  In vain Madison gloomily and almost sternly protested.

  McGee looked him all over with his clear measuring eye, and for someminutes was singularly silent. At last he said slowly: "I've beenthinkin' suthin' o' goin' down to 'Frisco, and I'd be a heap easier inmy mind ef you'd promise to look arter Safie now and then."

  "You surely are not going to leave her here ALONE?" said Wayne roughly.

  "Why not?"

  For an instant Wayne hesitated. Then he burst out. "For a hundredreasons! If she ever wanted your protection, before, she surely doesnow. Do you suppose the Bar is any less heathen or more regenerated thanit was when you thought it necessary to guard her with your revolver?Man! It is a hundred times worse than then! The new claims havefilled it with spying adventurers--with wolves like Hamlin and hisfriends--idolaters who would set up Baal and Ashteroth here--and fillyour tents with the curses of Sodom!"

  Perhaps it was owing to the Scriptural phrasing, perhaps it was fromsome unusual authority of the man's manner, but a look of approvingrelief and admiration came into McGee's clear eyes.

  "And YOU'RE just the man to tackle 'em," he said, clapping his hand onWayne's shoulder. "That's your gait--keep it up! But," he added, ina lower voice, "me and my revolver are played out." There was astrangeness in the tone that arrested Wayne's attention. "Yes,"continued McGee, stroking his beard slowly, "men like me has their day,and revolvers has theirs; the world turns round and the Bar fills up,and this yer river changes its course--and it's all in the day's work.You understand what I mean--you follow me? And if anything should happento me--not that it's like to; but it's in the way o' men--I want youto look arter Safie. It ain't every woman ez has two men, ez like andunlike, to guard her. You follow me--you understand what I mean, don'tyou?" With these words he parted somewhat abruptly from Wayne, turninginto the steep path to the promontory crest and leaving his companionlost in gloomy abstraction. The next day Alexander McGee had departed ona business trip to San Francisco.

  In his present frame of mind, with his new responsibility and thecarrying out of a plan which he had vaguely conceived might remove theterrible idea that had taken possession of him, Madison Wayne was evenrelieved when his brother also announced his intention of going toAngel's for a few days.

  For since his memorable interview with McGee he had been convinced thatSafie had been clandestinely visited by some one. Whether it was thethoughtless and momentary indiscretion of a willful woman, or the sequelto some deliberately planned intrigue, did not concern him so much asthe falsity of his own position, and the conniving lie by which he hadsaved her and her lover. That at this crucial moment he had failed to"testify" to guilt and wickedness; that he firmly believed--such is theinordinate vanity of the religious zealot--that he had denied Him in hiseffort to shield HER; and that he had broken faith with the husband whohad entrusted to him the custody of his wife's honor, seemed to him moreterrible than her faithlessness. In his first horror he had dreadedto see her, lest her very confession--he knew her reckless franknesstowards himself--should reveal to him the extent of his complicity. Butsince then, and during her husband's absence, he had convinced himselfthat it was his duty to wrestle and strive with her weak spirit, toimplore her to reveal her new intrigue to her husband, and then he wouldhelp her to sue for his forgiveness. It was a part of the inconsistencyof his religious convictions; in his human passion he was perfectlyunselfish, and had already forgiven her the offense against himself. Hewould see her at once!

  But it happened to be a quiet, intense night, with the tremulousopulence of a full moon that threw quivering shafts of light like summerlightning over the blue river, and laid a wonderful carpet of intricatelace along the path that wound through the willows to the crest. Therewas the dry, stimulating dust and spice of heated pines from below; thelanguorous odors of syringa; the faint, feminine smell of southernwood,and the infinite mystery of silence. This silence was at times softlybroken with the tender inarticulate whisper of falling leaves, brokensighs from the tree-tops, and the languid stretching of wakened andunclasping boughs. Madison Wayne had not, alas! taken into account thissubtle conspiracy of Night and Nature, and as he climbed higher, hissteps began to falter with new and strange sensations. The rigidityof purpose which had guided the hard religious convictions that alwayssustained him, began to relax. A tender sympathy stole over him; aloving mercy to himself as well as others stole into his heart. Hethought of HER as she had nestled at his side, hand in hand, upon themoonlit veranda of her father's house, before his hard convictions hadchilled and affrighted her. He thought of her fresh simplicity, and whathad seemed to him her wonderful girlish beauty, and lo! in a quick turnof the path he stood breathless and tremulous before the house. Themoonbeams lay tenderly upon the peaceful eaves; the long blossoms of theMadeira vine seemed sleeping also. The pink flush of the Cherokee rosein the unreal light had become chastely white.

  But he was evidently too late for an interview. The windows were blankin the white light; only one--her bedroom--showed a light behind thelowered muslin blind. Her draped shadow once or twice passed across it.He was turning away with soft steps and even bated breath when suddenlyhe stopped. The exaggerated but unmistakable shadow of a man stoodbeside her on the blind.

  With a fierce leap as of a maniac, he was at the door, pounding,rattling, and uttering hoarse and furious outcries. Even through hisfury he heard quickened footsteps--her light, reckless, half-hystericallaugh--a bound upon the staircase--the hurried unbolting and opening ofdistant doors, as the lighter one with which he was struggling at lastyielded to his blind rage, and threw him crashing into the sitting-room.The back door was wide open. He could hear the rustling and crackling oftwigs and branches in different directions down the hillside, where thefugitives had separated as they escaped. And yet he stood there for aninstant, dazed and wondering, "What next?"

  His eyes fell upon McGee's rifle standing upright in the corner. It wasa clean, beautiful, precise weapon, even to the unprofessional eye,its long, laminated hexagonal barrel taking a tenderer blue in themoonlight. He snatched it up. It was capped and loaded. Without a pausehe dashed down the hill.

  Only one thought was in his mind now--the crudest, simplest duty. Hewas there in McGee's place; he should do what McGee would do. God hadabandoned him, but McGee's rifle remained.

  In a few minutes' downward plunging he had reached the river bank. Thetranquil silver surface quivered and glittered before him. He saw whathe knew he would see, the black target of a man's head above it, makingfor the Bar. He took deliberate aim and fired. There was no echo to thatsharp detonation; a distant dog barked, there was a slight whisperin the trees beside him, that was all! But the head of the man was nolonger visible, and the liquid silver filmed over again, wit
hout a speckor stain.

  He shouldered the rifle, and with the automatic action of men in greatcrises returned slowly and deliberately to the house and carefullyreplaced the rifle in its old position. He had no concern for themiserable woman who had fled; had she appeared before him at the moment,he would not have noticed her. Yet a strange instinct--it seemed to himthe vaguest curiosity--made him ascend the stairs and enter herchamber. The candle was still burning on the table with that awfulunconsciousness and simplicity of detail which makes the scene of realtragedy so terrible. Beside it lay a belt and leather pouch. MadisonWayne suddenly dashed forward and seized it, with a wild, inarticulatecry; staggered, fell over the chair, rose to his feet, blindly gropedhis way down the staircase, burst into the road, and, hugging the pouchto his bosom, fled like a madman down the hill.

  *****

  The body of Arthur Wayne was picked up two days later a dozen miles downthe river. Nothing could be more evident and prosaic than the mannerin which he had met his fate. His body was only partly clothed, andthe money pouch and belt, which had been securely locked next his skin,after the fashion of all miners, was gone. He was known to have left theBar with a considerable sum of money; he was undoubtedly dogged, robbed,and murdered during his journey on the river bank by the desperadoes whowere beginning to infest the vicinity. The grief and agony of his onlybrother, sole survivor of that fraternal and religious partnership sowell known to the camp, although shown only by a grim and speechlessmelancholy,--broken by unintelligible outbursts of religiousraving,--was so real, that it affected even the callous camp. Butscarcely had it regained its feverish distraction, before it wasthrilled by another sensation. Alexander McGee had fallen from the deckof a Sacramento steamboat in the Straits of Carquinez, and his body hadbeen swept out to sea. The news had apparently been first to reach theears of his devoted wife, for when the camp--at this lapse of the oldprohibition--climbed to her bower with their rude consolations, thehouse was found locked and deserted. The fateful influence of thepromontory had again prevailed, the grim record of its seclusion wasonce more unbroken.

  For with it, too, drooped and faded the fortunes of the Bar. MadisonWayne sold out his claim, endowed the church at the Cross Roads with theproceeds, and the pulpit with his grim, hopeless, denunciatory presence.The first rains brought a freshet to the Bar. The river leaped thelight barriers that had taken the place of Wayne's peaceful engines,and regained the old channel. The curse that the Rev. Madison Wayne hadlaunched on this riverside Sodom seemed to have been fulfilled. But eventhis brought no satisfaction to the gloomy prophet, for it was presentlyknown that he had abandoned his terror-stricken flock to take thecircuit as revivalist preacher and camp-meeting exhorter, in the rudestand most lawless of gatherings. Desperate ruffians writhed at his feetin impotent terror or more impotent rage; murderers and thieves listenedto him with blanched faces and set teeth, restrained only by a moreawful fear. Over and over again he took his life with his Bible into hisown hands when he rose above the excited multitude; he was shot at, hewas rail-ridden, he was deported, but never silenced. And so, sweepingover the country, carrying fear and frenzy with him, scouting life andmercy, and crushing alike the guilty and innocent, he came one Sabbathto a rocky crest of the Sierras--the last tattered and frayed and soiledfringe of civilization on the opened tract of a great highway. And herehe was to "testify," as was his wont.

  But not as he expected. For as he stood up on a boulder above the thirtyor forty men sitting or lying upon other rocks and boulders around him,on the craggy mountain shelf where they had gathered, a man also rose,elbowed past them, and with a hurried impulse tried to descendthe declivity. But a cry was suddenly heard from others, quick andclamoring, which called the whole assembly to its feet, and it was seenthat the fugitive had in some blundering way fallen from the precipice.

  He was brought up cruelly maimed and mangled, his ribs crushed, and onelung perforated, but still breathing and conscious. He had asked to seethe preacher. Death impending, and even then struggling with his breath,made this request imperative. Madison Wayne stopped the service, andstalked grimly and inflexibly to where the dying man lay. But there hestarted.

  "McGee!" he said breathlessly.

  "Send these men away," said McGee faintly. "I've got suthin' to tellyou."

  The men drew back without a word. "You thought I was dead," said McGee,with eyes still undimmed and marvelously clear. "I orter bin, but itdon't need no doctor to say it ain't far off now. I left the Bar to getkilled; I tried to in a row, but the fellows were skeert to close withme, thinkin' I'd shoot. My reputation was agin me, there! You follow me?You understand what I mean?"

  Kneeling beside him now and grasping both his hands, the changed andhorror-stricken Wayne gasped, "But"--

  "Hold on! I jumped off the Sacramento boat--I was goin' down the thirdtime--they thought on the boat I was gone--they think so now! But apassin' fisherman dived for me. I grappled him--he was clear grit andwould have gone down with me, but I couldn't let him die too--havin' soto speak no cause. You follow me--you understand me? I let him save me.But it was all the same, for when I got to 'Frisco I read as how I wasdrowned. And then I reckoned it was all right, and I wandered HERE,where I wasn't known--until I saw you."

  "But why should you want to die?" said Wayne, almost fiercely. "Whatright have you to die while others--double-dyed and blood-stained, arecondemned to live, 'testify,' and suffer?"

  The dying man feebly waved a deprecation with his maimed hand, and evensmiled faintly. "I knew you'd say that. I knew what you'd think aboutit, but it's all the same now. I did it for you and Safie! I knew I wasin the way; I knew you was the man she orter had; I knew you was the manwho had dragged her outer the mire and clay where I was leavin' her, asyou did when she fell in the water. I knew that every day I lived I wasmakin' YOU suffer and breakin' HER heart--for all she tried to be gentleand gay."

  "Great God in heaven! Will you stop!" said Wayne, springing to his feetin agony. A frightened look--the first that any one had ever seen inthe clear eyes of the Bell-ringer of Angel's--passed over them, and hemurmured tremulously: "All right--I'm stoppin'!"

  So, too, was his heart, for the wonderful eyes were now slowly glazing.Yet he rallied once more--coming up again the third time as it seemedto Wayne--and his lips moved slowly. The preacher threw himselfdespairingly on the ground beside him.

  "Speak, brother! For God's sake, speak!"

  It was his last whisper--so faint it might have been the first of hisfreed soul. But he only said:--

  "You're--followin'--me? You--understand--what--I--mean?"