Jeff Briggs's Love Story

There was no reply.

“Driver,” said Mr. Mayfield, slightly weakening under Bill’s eye, “I shall want you no longer. I have”—

“Is he speaking to me?” said Bill audibly to Jeff, “‘cause they call me ‘Yuba Bill’ yer abouts.”

“He is,” said Jeff hastily.

“Mebbee he’s drunk,” said Bill audibly; “a drop or two afore breakfast sometimes upsets his kind.”

“I was saying, Bill,” said Mr. Mayfield, becoming utterly limp and weak again under Bill’s cold gray eyes, “that I’ve changed my mind, and shall stop here awhile. My daughter seems already benefited by the change. You can take my traps from the boot and leave them here.”

Bill laid down his lines resignedly, coolly surveyed Mr. Mayfield, the house, and the half-pleased, half-frightened Jeff, and then proceeded to remove the luggage from the boot, all the while whistling loud and offensive incredulity. Then he climbed back to his box. Mr. Mayfield, completely demoralized under this treatment, as a last resort essayed patronage.

“You can say to the Sacramento agents, Bill, that I am entirely satisfied, and”—

“Ye needn’t fear but I’ll give ye a good character,” interrupted Bill coolly, gathering up his lines. The whip snapped, the six horses dashed forward as one, the coach plunged down the road and was gone.

With its disappearance, Mr. Mayfield stiffened slightly again. “I have just told your aunt, Mr. Briggs,” he said, turning upon Jeff, “that my daughter has expressed a desire to remain here a few days; she has slept well, seems to be invigorated by the air, and although we expected to go on to the ‘Summit,’ Mrs. Mayfield and myself are willing to accede to her wishes. Your house seems to be new and clean. Your table—judging from the breakfast this morning—is quite satisfactory.”

Jeff, in the first flush of delight at this news, forgot what that breakfast had cost him—forgot all his morning’s experience, and, I fear, when he did remember it, was too full of a vague, hopeful courage to appreciate it. Conscious of showing too much pleasure, he affected the necessity of an immediate interview with his aunt, in the kitchen. But his short cut round the house was arrested by a voice and figure. It was Miss Mayfield, wrapped in a shawl and seated in a chair, basking in the sunlight at one of the bleakest and barest angles of the house. Jeff stopped in a delicious tremor.

As we are dealing with facts, however, it would be well to look at the cause of this tremor with our own eyes and not Jeff’s. To be plain, my dear madam, as she basked in that remorseless, matter-of-fact California sunshine, she looked her full age-twenty-five, if a day! There were wrinkles in the corners of her dark eyes, contracted and frowning in that strong, merciless light; there was a nervous pallor in her complexion; but being one of those “fast colored” brunettes, whose dyes are a part of their temperament, no sickness nor wear could bleach it out. The red of her small mouth was darker than yours, I wot, and there were certain faint lines from the corners of her delicate nostrils indicating alternate repression and excitement under certain experiences, which are not found in the classic ideals. Now Jeff knew nothing of the classic ideal—did not know that a thousand years ago certain sensual idiots had, with brush and chisel, inflicted upon the world the personification of the strongest and most delicate, most controlling and most subtle passion that humanity is capable of, in the likeness of a thick-waisted, idealess, expressionless, perfectly contented female animal; and that thousands of idiots had since then insisted upon perpetuating this model for the benefit of a world that had gone on sighing for, pining for, fighting for, and occasionally blowing its brains out over types far removed from that idiotic standard.

Consequently Jeff saw only a face full of possibilities and probabilities, framed in a small delicate oval, saw a slight woman’s form—more than usually small—and heard a low voice, to him full of gentle pride, passion, pathos, and human weakness, and was helpless.

“I only said ‘Good-morning,’” said Miss Mayfield, with that slight, arch satisfaction in the observation of masculine bashfulness, which the best of her sex cannot forego.

“Thank you, miss; good-morning. I’ve been wanting to say to you that I hope you wasn’t mad, you know,” stammered Jeff, desperately intent upon getting off his apology.

“It is so lovely this morning—such a change!” continued Miss Mayfield.

“Yes, miss! You know I reckoned—at least what your father said, made me kalkilate that you”—

Miss Mayfield, still smiling, knitted her brows and went on: “I slept so well last night,” she said gratefully, “and feel so much better this morning, that I ventured out. I seem to be drinking in health in this clear sunlight.”

“Certainly miss. As I was sayin’, your father says his daughter is in the coach; and Bill says, says he to me, ‘I’ll pack—I’ll carry the old—I’ll bring up Mrs. Mayfield, if you’ll bring up the daughter;’ and when we come to the coach I saw you asleep—like in the corner, and bein’ small, why miss, you know how nat’ral it is, I”—

“Oh, Mr. Jeff! Mr. Briggs!” said Miss Mayfield plaintively, “don’t, please—don’t spoil the best compliment I’ve had in many a year. You thought I was a child, I know, and—well, you find,” she said audaciously, suddenly bringing her black eyes to bear on him like a rifle, “you find—well?”

What Jeff thought was inaudible but not invisible. Miss Mayfield saw enough of it in his eye to protest with a faint color in her cheek. Thus does Nature betray itself to Nature the world over.

The color faded. “It’s a dreadful thing to be so weak and helpless, and to put everybody to such trouble, isn’t it, Mr. Jeff? I beg your pardon—your aunt calls you Jeff.”

“Please call me Jeff,” said Jeff, to his own surprise rapidly gaining courage. “Everybody calls me that.”

Miss Mayfield smiled. “I suppose I must do what everybody does. So it seems that we are to give you the trouble of keeping us here until I get better or worse?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Therefore I won’t detain you now. I only wanted to thank you for your gentleness last night, and to assure you that the bear-skin did not give me my death.”

She smiled and nodded her small head, and wrapped her shawl again closely around her shoulders, and turned her eyes upon the mountains, gestures which the now quick-minded Jeff interpreted as a gentle dismissal, and flew to seek his aunt.

Here he grew practical. Ready money was needed; for the “Half-way House” was such a public monument of ill-luck, that Jeff had no credit. He must keep up the table to the level of that fortunate breakfast—to do which he had $1.50 in the till, left by Bill, and $2.50 produced by his Aunt Sally from her work-basket.

“Why not ask Mr. Mayfield to advance ye suthin?” said Aunt Sally.

The blood flew to Jeff’s face. “Never! Don’t say that again, aunty.”

The tone and manner were so unlike Jeff that the old lady sat down half frightened, and taking the corners of her apron in her hands began to whimper.

“Thar now, aunty! I didn’t mean nothin’,—only if you care to have me about the place any longer, and I reckon it’s little good I am any way,” he added, with a new-found bitterness in his tone, “ye’ll not ask me to do that.”

“What’s gone o’ ye, Jeff?” said his aunt lugubriously; “ye ain’t nat’ral like.”

Jeff laughed. “See here, aunty; I’m goin’ to take your advice. You know Rabbit?”

“The mare?”

“Yes; I’m going to sell her. The blacksmith offered me a hundred dollars for her last week.”

“Ef ye’d done that a month ago, Jeff, ez I wanted ye to, instead o’ keeping the brute to eat ye out o’ house and home, ye’d be better off.” Aunt Sally never let slip an opportunity to “improve the occasion,” but preferred to exhort over the prostrate body of the “improved.” “Well, I hope he mayn’t change his mind.”

Jeff smiled at such suggestion regarding the best horse within fifty miles of the “Half-way House.” Nevertheless he went briskly to the stable, led out and saddled a handsome grey mare, petting her the while, and keeping up a running commentary of caressing epithets to which Rabbit responded with a whinny and playful reaches after Jeff’s red flannel sleeve. Whereat Jeff, having loved the horse until it was displaced by another mistress, grew grave and suddenly threw his arms around Rabbit’s neck, and then taking Rabbit’s nose, thrust it in the bosom of his shirt and held it there silently for a moment. Rabbit becoming uneasy, Jeff’s mood changed too, and having caparisoned himself and charger in true vaquero style, not without a little Mexican dandyism as to the set of his doeskin trousers, and the tie of his red sash, put a sombrero rakishly on his curls and leaped into the saddle.

Jeff was a fair rider in a country where riding was understood as a natural instinct, and not as a purely artificial habit of horse and rider, consequently he was not perched up, jockey fashion, with a knee-grip for his body, and a rein-rest for his arms on the beast’s mouth, but rode with long, loose stirrups, his legs clasping the barrel of his horse, his single rein lying loose upon her neck, leaving her head free as the wind. After this fashion he had often emerged from a cloud of dust on the red mountain road, striking admiration into the hearts of the wayfarers and coach-passengers, and leaving a trail of pleasant incense in the dust behind him. It was therefore with considerable confidence in himself, and a little human vanity, that he dashed round the house, and threw his mare skilfully on her haunches exactly a foot before Miss Mayfield—himself a resplendent vision of flying riata, crimson scarf, fawn-colored trousers, and jingling silver spurs.

“Kin I do anythin’ for ye, miss, at the Forks?”

Miss Mayfield looked up quietly. “I think not,” she said indifferently, as if the flaming-Jeff was a very common occurrence.

Jeff here permitted the mare to bolt fifty yards, caught her up sharply, swung her round on her off hind heel, permitted her to paw the air once or twice with her white-stockinged fore-feet, and then, with another dash forward, pulled her up again just before she apparently took Miss Mayfield and her chair in a running leap.

“Are you sure, miss?” asked Jeff, with a flushed face and a rather lugubrious voice.

“Quite so, thank you,” she said coldly, looking past this centaur to the wooded mountain beyond.

Jeff, thoroughly crushed, was pacing meekly away when a childlike voice stopped him.

“If you are going near a carpenter’s shop you might get a new shutter for my window; it blew away last night.”

“It did, miss?”

“Yes,” said the shrill voice of Aunt Sally, from the doorway, “in course it did! Ye must be crazy, Jeff, for thar it stands in No. 8, whar ye must have put it after ye picked it up outside.”

Jeff, conscious that Miss Mayfield’s eyes were on his suffused face, stammered “that he would attend to it,” and put spurs to the mare, eager only to escape.

It was not his only discomfiture; for the blacksmith, seeing Jeff’s nervousness and anxiety, was suspicious of something wrong, as the world is apt to be, and appeased his conscience after the worldly fashion, by driving a hard bargain with the doubtful brother in affliction—the morality of a horse trade residing always with the seller. Whereby Master Jeff received only eighty dollars for horse and outfit—worth at least two hundred—and was also mulcted of forty dollars, principal and interest for past service of the blacksmith. Jeff walked home with forty dollars in his pocket—capital to prosecute his honest calling of innkeeper; the blacksmith retired to an adjoining tavern to discuss Jeff’s affairs, and further reduce his credit. Yet I doubt which was the happier—the blacksmith estimating his possible gains, and doubtful of some uncertain sequence in his luck, or Jeff, temporarily relieved, boundlessly hopeful, and filled with the vague delights of a first passion. The only discontented brute in the whole transaction was poor Rabbit, who, missing certain attentions, became indignant, after the manner of her sex, bit a piece out of her crib, kicked a hole in her box, and receiving a bad character from the blacksmith, gave a worse one to her late master.