In the Carquinez Woods

When he returned that afternoon he was startled to find the cabin empty. But instead of bearing any appearance of disturbance or hurried flight, the rude interior seemed to have magically assumed a decorous order and cleanliness unknown before. Fresh bark hid the inequalities of the floor. The skins and blankets were folded in the corners, the rude shelves were carefully arranged, even a few tall ferns and bright but quickly fading flowers were disposed around the blackened chimney. She had evidently availed herself of the change of clothing he had brought her, for her late garments were hanging from the hastily-devised wooden pegs driven in the wall. The young man gazed around him with mixed feelings of gratification and uneasiness. His presence had been dispossessed in a single hour; his ten years of lonely habitation had left no trace that this woman had not effaced with a deft move of her hand. More than that, it looked as if she had always occupied it; and it was with a singular conviction that even when she should occupy it no longer it would only revert to him as her dwelling that he dropped the bark shutters athwart the opening, and left it to follow her.

To his quick ear, fine eye, and abnormal senses, this was easy enough. She had gone in the direction of this morning’s camp. Once or twice he paused with a half-gesture of recognition and a characteristic “Good!” at the place where she had stopped, but was surprised to find that her main course had been as direct as his own. Deviating from this direct line with Indian precaution, he first made a circuit of the camp, and approached the shattered trunk from the opposite direction. He consequently came upon Teresa unawares. But the momentary astonishment and embarrassment were his alone.

He scarcely recognized her. She was wearing the garments he had brought her the day before—a certain discarded gown of Miss Nellie Wynn, which he had hurriedly begged from her under the pretext of clothing the wife of a distressed overland emigrant then on the way to the mines. Although he had satisfied his conscience with the intention of confessing the pious fraud to her when Teresa was gone and safe from pursuit, it was not without a sense of remorse that he witnessed the sacrilegious transformation. The two women were nearly the same height and size; and although Teresa’s maturer figure accented the outlines more strongly, it was still becoming enough to increase his irritation.

Of this becomingness she was doubtless unaware at the moment that he surprised her. She was conscious of having “a change,” and this had emboldened her to “do her hair” and otherwise compose herself. After their greeting she was the first to allude to the dress, regretting that it was not more of a rough disguise, and that, as she must now discard the national habit of wearing her shawl “manta” fashion over her head, she wanted a hat. “But you must not,” she said, “borrow any more dresses for me from your young woman. Buy them for me at some shop. They left me enough money for that.” Low gently put aside the few pieces of gold she had drawn from her pocket, and briefly reminded her of the suspicion such a purchase by him would produce. “That’s so,” she said, with a laugh. “Caramba! what a mule I’m becoming! Ah! wait a moment. I have it! Buy me a common felt hat—a man’s hat—as if for yourself, as a change to that animal,” pointing to the fox-tailed cap he wore summer and winter, “and I’ll show you a trick. I haven’t run a theatrical wardrobe for nothing.” Nor had she, for the hat thus procured, a few days later, became, by the aid of a silk handkerchief and a bluejay’s feather, a fascinating “pork pie.”

Whatever cause of annoyance to Low still lingered in Teresa’s dress, it was soon forgotten in a palpable evidence of Teresa’s value as a botanical assistant. It appeared that during the afternoon she had not only duplicated his specimens, but had discoverd one or two rare plants as yet unclassified in the flora of the Carquinez Woods. He was delighted, and in turn, over the campfire, yielded up some details of his present life and some of his earlier recollections.

“You don’t remember anything of your father?” she asked. “Did he ever try to seek you out?”

“No! Why should he?” replied the imperturbable Low; “he was not a Cherokee.”

“No, he was a beast,” responded Teresa promptly. “And your mother—do you remember her?”

“No, I think she died.”

“You THINK she died? Don’t you know?”

“No!”

“Then you’re another!” said Teresa. Notwithstanding this frankness, they shook hands for the night: Teresa nestling like a rabbit in a hollow by the side of the campfire; Low with his feet towards it, Indian-wise, and his head and shoulders pillowed on his haversack, only half distinguishable in the darkness beyond.

With such trivial details three uneventful days slipped by. Their retreat was undisturbed, nor could Low detect, by the least evidence to his acute perceptive faculties, that any intruding feet had since crossed the belt of shade. The echoes of passing events at Indian Spring had recorded the escape of Teresa as occurring at a remote and purely imaginative distance, and her probable direction the county of Yolo.

“Can you remember,” he one day asked her, “what time it was when you cut the riata and got away?”

Teresa pressed her hands upon her eyes and temples.

“About three, I reckon.”

“And you were here at seven; you could have covered some ground in four hours?”

“Perhaps—I don’t know,” she said, her voice taking up its old quality again. “Don’t ask me—I ran all the way.”

Her face was quite pale as she removed her hands from her eyes, and her breath came as quickly as if she had just finished that race for life.

“Then you think I am safe here?” she added, after a pause.

“Perfectly—until they find you are NOT in Yolo. Then they’ll look here. And THAT’S the time for you to go THERE.” Teresa smiled timidly.

“It will take them some time to search Yolo—unless,” she added, “you’re tired of me here.” The charming non sequitur did not, however, seem to strike the young man. “I’ve got time yet to find a few more plants for you,” she suggested.

“Oh, certainly!”

“And give you a few more lessons in cooking.”

“Perhaps.”

The conscientious and literal Low was beginning to doubt if she were really practical. How otherwise could she trifle with such a situation?

It must be confessed that that day and the next she did trifle with it. She gave herself up to a grave and delicious languor that seemed to flow from shadow and silence and permeate her entire being. She passed hours in a thoughtful repose of mind and spirit that seemed to fall like balm from those steadfast guardians, and distill their gentle ether in her soul; or breathed into her listening ear immunity from the forgotten past, and security for the present. If there was no dream of the future in this calm, even recurrence of placid existence, so much the better. The simple details of each succeeding day, the quaint housekeeping, the brief companionship and coming and going of her young host—himself at best a crystallized personification of the sedate and hospitable woods—satisfied her feeble cravings. She no longer regretted the inferior position that her fears had obliged her to take the first night she came; she began to look up to this young man—so much younger than herself—without knowing what it meant; it was not until she found that this attitude did not detract from his picturesqueness that she discovered herself seeking for reasons to degrade him from this seductive eminence.

A week had elapsed with little change. On two days he had been absent all day, returning only in time to sup in the hollow tree, which, thanks to the final removal of the dead bear from its vicinity, was now considered a safer retreat than the exposed camp-fire. On the first of these occasions she received him with some preoccupation, paying but little heed to the scant gossip he brought from Indian Spring, and retiring early under the plea of fatigue, that he might seek his own distant camp-fire, which, thanks to her stronger nerves and regained courage, she no longer required so near. On the second occasion, he found her writing a letter more or less blotted with her tears. When it was finished, she begged him to post it at Indian Spring, where in two days an answer would be returned, under cover, to him.

“I hope you will be satisfied then,” she added.

“Satisfied with what?” queried the young man.

“You’ll see,” she replied, giving him her cold hand. “Good-night.”

“But can’t you tell me now?” he remonstrated, retaining her hand.

“Wait two days longer—it isn’t much,” was all she vouchsafed to answer.

The two days passed. Their former confidence and good fellowship were fully restored when the morning came on which he was to bring the answer from the post-office at Indian Spring. He had talked again of his future, and had recorded his ambition to procure the appointment of naturalist to a Government Surveying Expedition. She had even jocularly proposed to dress herself in man’s attire and “enlist” as his assistant.

“But you will be safe with your friends, I hope, by that time,” responded Low.

“Safe with my friends,” she repeated in a lower voice. “Safe with my friends—yes!” An awkward silence followed; Teresa broke it gayly: “But your girl, your sweetheart, my benefactor—will SHE let you go?”

“I haven’t told her yet,” said Low, gravely, “but I don’t see why she should object.”

“Object, indeed!” interrupted Teresa in a high voice and a sudden and utterly gratuitous indignation; “how should she? I’d like to see her do it!”

She accompanied him some distance to the intersection of the trail, where they parted in good spirits. On the dusty plain without a gale was blowing that rocked the high tree-tops above her, but, tempered and subdued, entered the low aisles with a fluttering breath of morning and a sound like the cooing of doves. Never had the wood before shown so sweet a sense of security from the turmoil and tempest of the world beyond; never before had an intrusion from the outer life—even in the shape of a letter—seemed so wicked a desecration. Tempted by the solicitation of air and shade, she lingered, with Low’s herbarium slung on her shoulder.

A strange sensation, like a shiver, suddenly passed across her nerves, and left them in a state of rigid tension. With every sense morbidly acute, with every faculty strained to its utmost, the subtle instincts of Low’s woodcraft transformed and possessed her. She knew it now! A new element was in the wood—a strange being—another life—another man approaching! She did not even raise her head to look about her, but darted with the precision and fleetness of an arrow in the direction of her tree. But her feet were arrested, her limbs paralzyed, her very existence suspended, by the sound of a voice:—

“Teresa!”

It was a voice that had rung in her ears for the last two years in all phases of intensity, passion, tenderness, and anger; a voice upon whose modulations, rude and unmusical though they were, her heart and soul had hung in transport or anguish. But it was a chime that had rung its last peal to her senses as she entered the Carquinez Woods, and for the last week had been as dead to her as a voice from the grave. It was the voice of her lover—Dick Curson!

CHAPTER V

The wind was blowing towards the stranger, so that he was nearly upon her when Teresa first took the alarm. He was a man over six feet in height, strongly built, with a slight tendency to a roundness of bulk which suggested reserved rather than impeded energy. His thick beard and mustache were closely cropped around a small and handsome mouth that lisped except when he was excited, but always kept fellowship with his blue eyes in a perpetual smile of half-cynical good-humor. His dress was superior to that of the locality; his general expression that of a man of the world, albeit a world of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Murderer’s Bar. He advanced towards her with a laugh and an outstretched hand.

“YOU here!” she gasped, drawing back.

Apparently neither surprised nor mortified at this reception, he answered frankly, “Yeth. You didn’t expect me, I know. But Doloreth showed me the letter you wrote her, and—well—here I am, ready to help you, with two men and a thpare horthe waiting outside the woodth on the blind trail.”

“You—YOU—here?” she only repeated.

Curson shrugged his shoulders. “Yeth. Of courth you never expected to thee me again, and leatht of all HERE. I’ll admit that; I’ll thay I wouldn’t if I’d been in your plathe. I’ll go further, and thay you didn’t want to thee me again—anywhere. But it all cometh to the thame thing; here I am. I read the letter you wrote Doloreth. I read how you were hiding here, under Dunn’th very nothe, with his whole pothe out, cavorting round and barkin’ up the wrong tree. I made up my mind to come down here with a few nathty friends of mine and cut you out under Dunn’th nothe, and run you over into Yuba—that’th all.”

“How dared she show you my letter—YOU of all men? How dared she ask YOUR help?” continued Teresa, fiercely.

“But she didn’t athk my help,” he responded coolly. “D—d if I don’t think she jutht calculated I’d be glad to know you were being hunted down and thtarving, that I might put Dunn on your track.”