In the Carquinez Woods

“He supposes so! Have you no convictions—no profession?”

“But, Nellie, I never thought that you—”

“Never thought that I—what? Do you think that I could ever be anything to a man who did not believe in justification by faith, or in the covenant of church fellowship? Do you think father would let me?”

In his eagerness to defend himself he stepped to her side. But seeing her little feet shining through the dark water, like outcroppings of delicately veined quartz, he stopped embarrassed. Miss Nellie, however, leaped to one foot, and, shaking the other over the pool, put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. “You haven’t got a towel—or,” she said dubiously, looking at her small handkerchief, “anything to dry them on?”

But Low did not, as she perhaps expected, offer his own handkerchief.

“If you take a bath after our fashion,” he said gravely, “you must learn to dry yourself after our fashion.”

Lifting her again lightly in his arms, he carried her a few steps to the sunny opening, and bade her bury her feet in the dried mosses and baked withered grasses that were bleaching in a hollow. The young girl uttered a cry of childish delight, as the soft ciliated fibres touched her sensitive skin.

“It is healing, too,” continued Low; “a moccasin filled with it after a day on the trail makes you all right again.”

But Miss Nellie seemed to be thinking of something else.

“Is that the way the squaws bathe and dry themselves?”

“I don’t know; you forget I was a boy when I left them.”

“And you’re sure you never knew any?”

“None.”

The young girl seemed to derive some satisfaction in moving her feet up and down for several minutes among the grasses in the hollow; then, after a pause, said, “You are quite certain I am the first woman that ever touched this spring?”

“Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except myself.”

“How nice!”

They had taken each other’s hands; seated side by side, they leaned against a curving elastic root that half supported, half encompassed, them. The girl’s capricious, fitful manner succumbed as before to the near contact of her companion. Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a sweet, selfish lover’s monologue, descriptive of his past and present feelings towards her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a slight exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity. The sun had painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting tree-trunk, and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the water mingling with their whispers came as one sound to the listening ear; even their eloquent silences were as deep, and, I wot, perhaps as dangerous, as the darkened pool that filled so noiselessly a dozen yards away. So quiet were they that the tremor of invading wings once or twice shook the silence, or the quick scamper of frightened feet rustled the dead grass. But in the midst of a prolonged stillness the young man sprang up so suddenly that Nellie was still half clinging to his neck as he stood erect. “Hush!” he whispered; “some one is near!”

He disengaged her anxious hands gently, leaped upon the slanting tree-trunk, and running half-way up its incline with the agility of a squirrel, stretched himself at full length upon it and listened.

To the impatient, inexplicably startled girl, it seemed an age before he rejoined her.

“You are safe,” he said; “he is going by the western trail towards Indian Spring.”

“Who is HE?” she asked, biting her lips with a poorly restrained gesture of mortification and disappointment.

“Some stranger,” replied Low.

“As long as he wasn’t coming here, why did you give me such a fright?” she said pettishly. “Are you nervous because a single wayfarer happens to stray here?”

“It was no wayfarer, for he tried to keep near the trail,” said Low. “He was a stranger to the wood, for he lost his way every now and then. He was seeking or expecting some one, for he stopped frequently and waited or listened. He had not walked far, for he wore spurs that tinkled and caught in the brush; and yet he had not ridden here, for no horse’s hoofs passed the road since we have been here. He must have come from Indian Spring.”

“And you heard all that when you listened just now?” asked Nellie, half disdainfully.

Impervious to her incredulity Low turned his calm eyes on her face. “Certainly, I’ll bet my life on what I say. Tell me: do you know anybody in Indian Spring who would likely spy upon you?”

The young girl was conscious of a certain ill-defined uneasiness, but answered, “No.”

“Then it was not YOU he was seeking,” said Low thoughtfully. Miss Nellie had not time to notice the emphasis, for he added, “You must go at once, and lest you have been followed I will show you another way back to Indian Spring. It is longer, and you must hasten. Take your shoes and stockings with you until we are out of the bush.”

He raised her again in his arms and strode once more out through the covert into the dim aisles of the wood. They spoke but little; she could not help feeling that some other discordant element, affecting him more strongly than it did her, had come between them, and was half perplexed and half frightened. At the end of ten minutes he seated her upon a fallen branch, and telling her he would return by the time she had resumed her shoes and stockings glided from her like a shadow. She would have uttered an indignant protest at being left alone, but he was gone ere she could detain him. For a moment she thought she hated him. But when she had mechanically shod herself once more, not without nervous shivers at every falling needle, he was at her side.

“Do you know anyone who wears a frieze coat like that?” he asked, handing her a few torn shreds of wool affixed to a splinter of bark.

Miss Nellie instantly recognized the material of a certain sporting coat worn by Mr. Jack Brace on festive occasions, but a strange yet infallible instinct that was part of her nature made her instantly disclaim all knowledge of it.

“No,” she said.

“Not anyone who scents himself with some doctor’s stuff like cologne?” continued Low, with the disgust of keen olfactory sensibilities.

Again Miss Nellie recognized the perfume with which the gallant expressman was wont to make redolent her little parlor, but again she avowed no knowledge of its possessor. “Well,” returned Low with some disappointment, “such a man has been here. Be on your guard. Let us go at once.”

She required no urging to hasten her steps, but hurried breathlessly at his side. He had taken a new trail by which they left the wood at right angles with the highway, two miles away. Following an almost effaced mule track along a slight depression of the plain, deep enough, however, to hide them from view, he accompanied her, until, rising to the level again, she saw they were beginning to approach the highway and the distant roofs of Indian Spring. “Nobody meeting you now,” he whispered, “would suspect where you had been. Good night! until next week—remember.”

They pressed each other’s hands, and standing on the slight ridge outlined against the paling sky, in full view of the highway, parting carelessly, as if they had been chance met travelers. But Nellie could not restrain a parting backward glance as she left the ridge. Low had descended to the deserted trail, and was running swiftly in the direction of the Carquinez Woods.

CHAPTER IV

Teresa awoke with a start. It was day already, but how far advanced the even, unchanging, soft twilight of the woods gave no indication. Her companion had vanished, and to her bewildered senses so had the camp-fire, even to its embers and ashes. Was she awake, or had she wandered away unconsciously in the night? One glance at the tree above her dissipated the fancy. There was the opening of her quaint retreat and the hanging strips of bark, and at the foot of the opposite tree lay the carcass of the bear. It had been skinned, and, as Teresa thought with an inward shiver, already looked half its former size.

Not yet accustomed to the fact that a few steps in either direction around the circumference of those great trunks produced the sudden appearance or disappearance of any figure, Teresa uttered a slight scream as her young companion unexpectedly stepped to her side. “You see a change here,” he said; “the stamped-out ashes of the camp-fire lie under the brush,” and he pointed to some cleverly scattered boughs and strips of bark which completely effaced the traces of last night’s bivouac. “We can’t afford to call the attention of any packer or hunter who might straggle this way to this particular spot and this particular tree; the more naturally,” he added, “as they always prefer to camp over an old fire.” Accepting this explanation meekly, as partly a reproach for her caprice of the previous night, Teresa hung her head.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, “but wouldn’t that,” pointing to the carcass of the bear, “have made them curious?”

But Low’s logic was relentless.

“By this time there would have been little left to excite curiosity, if you had been willing to leave those beasts to their work.”

“I’m very sorry,” repeated the woman, her lips quivering.

“They are the scavengers of the wood,” he continued in a lighter tone; “if you stay here you must try to use them to keep your house clean.”

Teresa smiled nervously.

“I mean that they shall finish their work to-night,” he added, “and I shall build another camp-fire for us a mile from here until they do.”

But Teresa caught his sleeve.

“No,” she said hurriedly, “don’t, please, for me. You must not take the trouble, nor the risk. Hear me; do, please. I can bear it, I WILL bear it—to-night. I would have borne it last night, but it was so strange—and”—she passed her hands over her forehead—“I think I must have been half mad. But I am not so foolish now.”

She seemed so broken and despondent that he replied reassuringly: “Perhaps it would be better that I should find another hiding-place for you, until I can dispose of that carcass so that it will not draw dogs after the wolves, and men after THEM. Besides, your friend the sheriff will probably remember the bear when he remembers anything, and try to get on its track again.”

“He’s a conceited fool,” broke in Teresa in a high voice, with a slight return of her old fury, “or he’d have guessed where that shot came from; and,” she added in a lower tone, looking down at her limp and nerveless fingers, “he wouldn’t have let a poor, weak, nervous wretch like me get away.”