Mliss

: Selected Stories

CHAPTER I



Just where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside in gentler undulations,

and the rivers grow less rapid and yellow, on the side of a great red

mountain, stands "Smith's Pocket." Seen from the red road at sunset,

in the red light and the red dust, its white houses look like the

outcroppings of quartz on the mountainside. The red stage topped

with red-shirted passengers is lost to view half a dozen imes in the

tortuous descent, turning up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way places, and

vanishing altogether within a hundred yards of the town. It is probably

owing to this sudden twist in the road that the advent of a stranger

at Smith's Pocket is usually attended with a peculiar circumstance.

Dismounting from the vehicle at the stage office, the too-confident

traveler is apt to walk straight out of town under the impression that

it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel

men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers

with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of

"Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just

ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of Smith's Pocket.



An observant traveler might have found some compensation for his

disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge

fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling

more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of

man; while halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and

disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some

forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road,

hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a

clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and

there were the ruins of some cabin with the chimney alone left intact

and the hearthstone open to the skies.



The settlement of Smith's Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a

"pocket" on its site by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars were

taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith. Three thousand dollars were

expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling. And

then Smith's Pocket was found to be only a pocket, and subject like

other pockets to depletion. Although Smith pierced the bowels of the

great red mountain, that five thousand dollars was the first and last

return of his labor. The mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets,

and the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of Smith's fortune.

Then Smith went into quartz-mining; then into quartz-milling; then into

hydraulics and ditching, and then by easy degrees into saloonkeeping.

Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a great deal; then it

was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard, and then people began to

think, as they are apt to, that he had never been anything else. But the

settlement of Smith's Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily

not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected

tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's Pocket became a settlement, with

its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its

two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling street was

overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions,

imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged

Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more

homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the

population to whom the Sabbath, with a change of linen, brought merely

the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment. Then there

was a Methodist Church, and hard by a Monte Bank, and a little beyond,

on the mountainside, a graveyard; and then a little schoolhouse.



"The Master," as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night

in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully

making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the

extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as

"Riches are deceitful," and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity

of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a

gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof during

the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the opening of the

door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look

up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty

and shabbily clad. Still, her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed,

lusterless black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms

and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him. It was

Melissa Smith--Smith's motherless child.



"What can she want here?" thought the master. Everybody knew "Mliss,"

as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.

Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl. Her fierce, ungovernable

disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character, were in their way

as proverbial as the story of her father's weaknesses, and as

philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought

the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She

followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met

her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded on the

mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with

subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms.

Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to Mliss.

The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, "stated" preacher, had placed her in the

hotel as servant, by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced

her to his scholars at Sunday school. But she threw plates occasionally

at the landlord, and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the

guests, and created in the Sabbath school a sensation that was so

inimical to the orthodox dullness and placidity of that institution

that, with a decent regard for the starched frocks and unblemished

morals of the two pink-and-white-faced children of the first families,

the reverend gentleman had her ignominiously expelled. Such were the

antecedents, and such the character of Mliss as she stood before the

master. It was shown in the ragged dress, the unkempt hair, and bleeding

feet, and asked his pity. It flashed from her black, fearless eyes, and

commanded his respect.



"I come here tonight," she said rapidly and boldly, keeping her hard

glance on his, "because I knew you was alone. I wouldn't come here when

them gals was here. I hate 'em and they hates me. That's why. You keep

school, don't you? I want to be teached!"



If to the shabbiness of her apparel and uncomeliness of her tangled hair

and dirty face she had added the humility of tears, the master would

have extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and nothing more. But

with the natural, though illogical, instincts of his species, her

boldness awakened in him something of that respect which all original

natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade. And he gazed at

her the more fixedly as she went on still rapidly, her hand on that door

latch and her eyes on his:



"My name's Mliss--Mliss Smith! You can bet your life on that. My

father's Old Smith--Old Bummer Smith--that's what's the matter with him.

Mliss Smith--and I'm coming to school!"



"Well?" said the master.



Accustomed to be thwarted and opposed, often wantonly and cruelly, for

no other purpose than to excite the violent impulses of her nature, the

master's phlegm evidently took her by surprise. She stopped; she began

to twist a lock of her hair between her fingers; and the rigid line

of upper lip, drawn over the wicked little teeth, relaxed and quivered

slightly. Then her eyes dropped, and something like a blush struggled up

to her cheek and tried to assert itself through the splashes of redder

soil, and the sunburn of years. Suddenly she threw herself forward,

calling on God to strike her dead, and fell quite weak and helpless,

with her face on the master's desk, crying and sobbing as if her heart

would break.



The master lifted her gently and waited for the paroxysm to pass. When,

with face still averted, she was repeating between her sobs the MEA

CULPA of childish penitence--that "she'd be good, she didn't mean to,"

etc., it came to him to ask her why she had left Sabbath school.



Why had she left the Sabbath school?--why? Oh, yes. What did he



(McSnagley) want to tell her she was wicked for? What did he tell her

that God hated her for? If God hated her, what did she want to go to

Sabbath school for? SHE didn't want to be "beholden" to anybody who

hated her.



Had she told McSnagley this?



Yes, she had.



The master laughed. It was a hearty laugh, and echoed so oddly in the

little schoolhouse, and seemed so inconsistent and discordant with the

sighing of the pines without, that he shortly corrected himself with

a sigh. The sigh was quite as sincere in its way, however, and after a

moment of serious silence he asked about her father.



Her father? What father? Whose father? What had he ever done for her?

Why did the girls hate her? Come now! what made the folks say, "Old

Bummer Smith's Mliss!" when she passed? Yes; oh yes. She wished he was

dead--she was dead--everybody was dead; and her sobs broke forth anew.



The master then, leaning over her, told her as well as he could what you

or I might have said after hearing such unnatural theories from childish

lips; only bearing in mind perhaps better than you or I the unnatural

facts of her ragged dress, her bleeding feet, and the omnipresent shadow

of her drunken father. Then, raising her to her feet, he wrapped his

shawl around her, and, bidding her come early in the morning, he walked

with her down the road. There he bade her "good night." The moon shone

brightly on the narrow path before them. He stood and watched the bent

little figure as it staggered down the road, and waited until it had

passed the little graveyard and reached the curve of the hill, where it

turned and stood for a moment, a mere atom of suffering outlined against

the far-off patient stars. Then he went back to his work. But the lines

of the copybook thereafter faded into long parallels of never-ending

road, over which childish figures seemed to pass sobbing and crying into

the night. Then, the little schoolhouse seeming lonelier than before, he

shut the door and went home.



The next morning Mliss came to school. Her face had been washed, and her

coarse black hair bore evidence of recent struggles with the comb,

in which both had evidently suffered. The old defiant look shone

occasionally in her eyes, but her manner was tamer and more subdued.

Then began a series of little trials and self-sacrifices, in which

master and pupil bore an equal part, and which increased the confidence

and sympathy between them. Although obedient under the master's eye,

at times during recess, if thwarted or stung by a fancied slight, Mliss

would rage in ungovernable fury, and many a palpitating young savage,

finding himself matched with his own weapons of torment, would seek

the master with torn jacket and scratched face and complaints of the

dreadful Mliss. There was a serious division among the townspeople on

the subject, some threatening to withdraw their children from such evil

companionship, and others as warmly upholding the course of the master

in his work of reclamation. Meanwhile, with a steady persistence that

seemed quite astonishing to him on looking back afterward, the master

drew Mliss gradually out of the shadow of her past life, as though it

were but her natural progress down the narrow path on which he had

set her feet the moonlit night of their first meeting. Remembering the

experience of the evangelical McSnagley, he carefully avoided that Rock

of Ages on which that unskillful pilot had shipwrecked her young faith.

But if, in the course of her reading, she chanced to stumble upon those

few words which have lifted such as she above the level of the older,

the wiser, and the more prudent--if she learned something of a faith

that is symbolized by suffering, and the old light softened in her eyes,

it did not take the shape of a lesson. A few of the plainer people had

made up a little sum by which the ragged Mliss was enabled to assume

the garments of respect and civilization; and often a rough shake of

the hand, and words of homely commendation from a red-shirted and burly

figure, sent a glow to the cheek of the young master, and set him to

thinking if it was altogether deserved.



Three months had passed from the time of their first meeting, and the

master was sitting late one evening over the moral and sententious

copies, when there came a tap at the door and again Mliss stood before

him. She was neatly clad and clean-faced, and there was nothing perhaps

but the long black hair and bright black eyes to remind him of his

former apparition. "Are you busy?" she asked. "Can you come with

me?"--and on his signifying his readiness, in her old willful way she

said, "Come, then, quick!"



They passed out of the door together and into the dark road. As they

entered the town the master asked her whither she was going. She

replied, "To see my father."



It was the first time he had heard her call him by that filial title, or

indeed anything more than "Old Smith" or the "Old Man." It was the first

time in three months that she had spoken of him at all, and the master

knew she had kept resolutely aloof from him since her great change.

Satisfied from her manner that it was fruitless to question her purpose,

he passively followed. In out-of-the-way places, low groggeries,

restaurants, and saloons; in gambling hells and dance houses, the

master, preceded by Mliss, came and went. In the reeking smoke and

blasphemous outcries of low dens, the child, holding the master's hand,

stood and anxiously gazed, seemingly unconscious of all in the one

absorbing nature of her pursuit. Some of the revelers, recognizing

Mliss, called to the child to sing and dance for them, and would have

forced liquor upon her but for the interference of the master. Others,

recognizing him mutely, made way for them to pass. So an hour slipped

by. Then the child whispered in his ear that there was a cabin on the

other side of the creek crossed by the long flume, where she thought he

still might be. Thither they crossed--a toilsome half-hour's walk--but

in vain. They were returning by the ditch at the abutment of the flume,

gazing at the lights of the town on the opposite bank, when, suddenly,

sharply, a quick report rang out on the clear night air. The echoes

caught it, and carried it round and round Red Mountain, and set the

dogs to barking all along the streams. Lights seemed to dance and move

quickly on the outskirts of the town for a few moments, the stream

rippled quite audibly beside them, a few stones loosened themselves from

the hillside and splashed into the stream, a heavy wind seemed to surge

the branches of the funereal pines, and then the silence seemed to fall

thicker, heavier, and deadlier. The master turned toward Mliss with an

unconscious gesture of protection, but the child had gone. Oppressed by

a strange fear, he ran quickly down the trail to the river's bed, and,

jumping from boulder to boulder, reached the base of Red Mountain and

the outskirts of the village. Midway of the crossing he looked up and

held his breath in awe. For high above him on the narrow flume he saw

the fluttering little figure of his late companion crossing swiftly in

the darkness.



He climbed the bank, and, guided by a few lights moving about a central

point on the mountain, soon found himself breathless among a crowd of

awe-stricken and sorrowful men. Out from among them the child appeared,

and, taking the master's hand, led him silently before what seemed a

ragged hole in the mountain. Her face was quite white, but her excited

manner gone, and her look that of one to whom some long-expected

event had at last happened--an expression that to the master in his

bewilderment seemed almost like relief. The walls of the cavern were

partly propped by decaying timbers. The child pointed to what appeared

to be some ragged, castoff clothes left in the hole by the late

occupant. The master approached nearer with his flaming dip, and bent

over them. It was Smith, already cold, with a pistol in his hand and a

bullet in his heart, lying beside his empty pocket.





CHAPTER II





The opinion which McSnagley expressed in reference to a "change of

heart" supposed to be experienced by Mliss was more forcibly described

in the gulches and tunnels. It was thought there that Mliss had

"struck a good lead." So when there was a new grave added to the

little enclosure, and at the expense of the master a little board

and inscription put above it, the RED MOUNTAIN BANNER came out quite

handsomely, and did the fair thing to the memory of one of "our oldest

Pioneers," alluding gracefully to that "bane of noble intellects," and

otherwise genteelly shelving our dear brother with the past. "He leaves

an only child to mourn his loss," says the BANNER, "who is now an

exemplary scholar, thanks to the efforts of the Rev. Mr. McSnagley." The

Rev. McSnagley, in fact, made a strong point of Mliss's conversion,

and, indirectly attributing to the unfortunate child the suicide of

her father, made affecting allusions in Sunday school to the beneficial

effects of the "silent tomb," and in this cheerful contemplation

drove most of the children into speechless horror, and caused the

pink-and-white scions of the first families to howl dismally and refuse

to be comforted.



The long dry summer came. As each fierce day burned itself out in little

whiffs of pearl-gray smoke on the mountain summits, and the upspringing

breeze scattered its red embers over the landscape, the green wave which

in early spring upheaved above Smith's grave grew sere and dry and

hard. In those days the master, strolling in the little churchyard of

a Sabbath afternoon, was sometimes surprised to find a few wild flowers

plucked from the damp pine forests scattered there, and oftener rude

wreaths hung upon the little pine cross. Most of these wreaths were

formed of a sweet-scented grass, which the children loved to keep in

their desks, intertwined with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringa,

and the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the

dark-blue cowl of the monkshood, or deadly aconite. There was something

in the odd association of this noxious plant with these memorials which

occasioned a painful sensation to the master deeper than his esthetic

sense. One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded ridge he came

upon Mliss in the heart of the forest, perched upon a prostrate pine on

a fantastic throne formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless branches,

her lap full of grasses and pine burrs, and crooning to herself one of

the Negro melodies of her younger life. Recognizing him at a distance,

she made room for him on her elevated throne, and with a grave

assumption of hospitality and patronage that would have been ridiculous

had it not been so terribly earnest, she fed him with pine nuts and crab

apples. The master took that opportunity to point out to her the noxious

and deadly qualities of the monkshood, whose dark blossoms he saw in her

lap, and extorted from her a promise not to meddle with it as long

as she remained his pupil. This done--as the master had tested her

integrity before--he rested satisfied, and the strange feeling which had

overcome him on seeing them died away.



Of the homes that were offered Mliss when her conversion became known,

the master preferred that of Mrs. Morpher, a womanly and kindhearted

specimen of Southwestern efflorescence, known in her maidenhood as the

"Per-rairie Rose." Being one of those who contend resolutely against

their own natures, Mrs. Morpher, by a long series of self-sacrifices and

struggles, had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition to

principles of "order," which she considered, in common with Mr. Pope,

as "Heaven's first law." But she could not entirely govern the orbits

of her satellites, however regular her own movements, and even her own

"Jeemes" sometimes collided with her. Again her old nature asserted

itself in her children. Lycurgus dipped into the cupboard "between

meals," and Aristides came home from school without shoes, leaving those

important articles on the threshold, for the delight of a barefooted

walk down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were "keerless" of their

clothes. So with but one exception, however much the "Prairie Rose"

might have trimmed and pruned and trained her own matured luxuriance,

the little shoots came up defiantly wild and straggling. That

one exception was Clytemnestra Morpher, aged fifteen. She was the

realization of her mother's immaculate conception--neat, orderly, and

dull.



It was an amiable weakness of Mrs. Morpher to imagine that "Clytie" was

a consolation and model for Mliss. Following this fallacy, Mrs. Morpher

threw Clytie at the head of Mliss when she was "bad," and set her up

before the child for adoration in her penitential moments. It was not,

therefore, surprising to the master to hear that Clytie was coming to

school, obviously as a favor to the master and as an example for Mliss

and others. For "Clytie" was quite a young lady. Inheriting her mother's

physical peculiarities, and in obedience to the climatic laws of the Red

Mountain region, she was an early bloomer. The youth of Smith's Pocket,

to whom this kind of flower was rare, sighed for her in April and

languished in May. Enamored swains haunted the schoolhouse at the hour

of dismissal. A few were jealous of the master.



Perhaps it was this latter circumstance that opened the master's eyes

to another. He could not help noticing that Clytie was romantic; that

in school she required a great deal of attention; that her pens were

uniformly bad and wanted fixing; that she usually accompanied the

request with a certain expectation in her eye that was somewhat

disproportionate to the quality of service she verbally required; that

she sometimes allowed the curves of a round, plump white arm to rest on

his when he was writing her copies; that she always blushed and flung

back her blond curls when she did so. I don't remember whether I have

stated that the master was a young man--it's of little consequence,

however; he had been severely educated in the school in which Clytie

was taking her first lesson, and, on the whole, withstood the flexible

curves and factitious glance like the fine young Spartan that he

was. Perhaps an insufficient quality of food may have tended to this

asceticism. He generally avoided Clytie; but one evening, when she

returned to the schoolhouse after something she had forgotten, and

did not find it until the master walked home with her, I hear that he

endeavored to make himself particularly agreeable--partly from the

fact, I imagine, that his conduct was adding gall and bitterness to the

already overcharged hearts of Clytemnestra's admirers.



The morning after this affecting episode Mliss did not come to school.

Noon came, but not Mliss. Questioning Clytie on the subject, it appeared

that they had left the school together, but the willful Mliss had taken

another road. The afternoon brought her not. In the evening he called on

Mrs. Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed. Mr. Morpher had

spent all day in search of her, without discovering a trace that might

lead to her discovery. Aristides was summoned as a probable accomplice,

but that equitable infant succeeded in impressing the household with his

innocence. Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that the child

would yet be found drowned in a ditch, or, what was almost as terrible,

muddied and soiled beyond the redemption of soap and water. Sick at

heart, the master returned to the schoolhouse. As he lit his lamp and

seated himself at his desk, he found a note lying before him addressed

to himself, in Mliss's handwriting. It seemed to be written on a

leaf torn from some old memorandum book, and, to prevent sacrilegious

trifling, had been sealed with six broken wafers. Opening it almost

tenderly, the master read as follows:





RESPECTED SIR--When you read this, I am run away. Never to come back.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my

Amerika's Pride [a highly colored lithograph from a tobacco-box] to

Sally Flanders. But don't you give anything to Clytie Morpher. Don't

you dare to. Do you know what my opinion is of her, it is this, she is

perfekly disgustin. That is all and no more at present from



Yours respectfully,



MELISSA SMITH.





The master sat pondering on this strange epistle till the moon lifted

its bright face above the distant hills, and illuminated the trail that

led to the schoolhouse, beaten quite hard with the coming and going

of little feet. Then, more satisfied in mind, he tore the missive into

fragments and scattered them along the road.



At sunrise the next morning he was picking his way through the palmlike

fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hare from its

form, and awakening a querulous protest from a few dissipated crows, who

had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge

where he had once found Mliss. There he found the prostrate pine and

tasseled branches, but the throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what

might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling

limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch and sheltered

itself in some friendly foliage. The master, reaching the old seat,

found the nest still warm; looking up in the intertwining branches, he

met the black eyes of the errant Mliss. They gazed at each other without

speaking. She was first to break the silence.



"What do you want?" she asked curtly.



The master had decided on a course of action. "I want some crab apples,"

he said humbly.



"Sha'n't have 'em! go away. Why don't you get 'em of Clytemnerestera?"

(It seemed to be a relief to Mliss to express her contempt in additional

syllables to that classical young woman's already long-drawn title.) "O

you wicked thing!"



"I am hungry, Lissy. I have eaten nothing since dinner yesterday. I am

famished!" and the young man in a state of remarkable exhaustion leaned

against the tree.



Melissa's heart was touched. In the bitter days of her gypsy life

she had known the sensation he so artfully simulated. Overcome by his

heartbroken tone, but not entirely divested of suspicion, she said:



"Dig under the tree near the roots, and you'll find lots; but mind you

don't tell," for Mliss had HER hoards as well as the rats and squirrels.



But the master, of course, was unable to find them; the effects of

hunger probably blinding his senses. Mliss grew uneasy. At length she

peered at him through the leaves in an elfish way, and questioned:



"If I come down and give you some, you'll promise you won't touch me?"



The master promised.



"Hope you'll die if you do!"



The master accepted instant dissolution as a forfeit. Mliss slid down

the tree. For a few moments nothing transpired but the munching of the

pine nuts. "Do you feel better?" she asked, with some solicitude. The

master confessed to a recuperated feeling, and then, gravely thanking

her, proceeded to retrace his steps. As he expected, he had not gone far

before she called him. He turned. She was standing there quite white,

with tears in her widely opened orbs. The master felt that the right

moment had come. Going up to her, he took both her hands, and looking

in her tearful eyes, said, gravely, "Lissy, do you remember the first

evening you came to see me?"



Lissy remembered.



"You asked me if you might come to school, for you wanted to learn

something and be better, and I said--"



"Come," responded the child, promptly.



"What would YOU say if the master now came to you and said that he was

lonely without his little scholar, and that he wanted her to come and

teach him to be better?"



The child hung her head for a few moments in silence. The master waited

patiently. Tempted by the quiet, a hare ran close to the couple, and

raising her bright eyes and velvet forepaws, sat and gazed at them.

A squirrel ran halfway down the furrowed bark of the fallen tree, and

there stopped.



"We are waiting, Lissy," said the master, in a whisper, and the child

smiled. Stirred by a passing breeze, the treetops rocked, and a long

pencil of light stole through their interlaced boughs full on the

doubting face and irresolute little figure. Suddenly she took the

master's hand in her quick way. What she said was scarcely audible, but

the master, putting the black hair back from her forehead, kissed her;

and so, hand in hand, they passed out of the damp aisles and forest

odors into the open sunlit road.





CHAPTER III





Somewhat less spiteful in her intercourse with other scholars, Mliss

still retained an offensive attitude in regard to Clytemnestra. Perhaps

the jealous element was not entirely lulled in her passionate little

breast. Perhaps it was only that the round curves and plump outline

offered more extended pinching surface. But while such ebullitions

were under the master's control, her enmity occasionally took a new and

irrepressible form.



The master in his first estimate of the child's character could not

conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many

other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a

priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll, but then it was emphatically Mliss's

doll--a smaller copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had been a

secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher. It had been the old-time

companion of Mliss's wanderings, and bore evident marks of suffering.

Its original complexion was long since washed away by the weather and

anointed by the slime of ditches. It looked very much as Mliss had in

days past. Its one gown of faded stuff was dirty and ragged, as hers

had been. Mliss had never been known to apply to it any childish term of

endearment. She never exhibited it in the presence of other children. It

was put severely to bed in a hollow tree near the schoolhouse, and only

allowed exercise during Mliss's rambles. Fulfilling a stern duty to her

doll, as she would to herself, it knew no luxuries.



Now Mrs. Morpher, obeying a commendable impulse, bought another doll

and gave it to Mliss. The child received it gravely and curiously. The

master on looking at it one day fancied he saw a slight resemblance

in its round red cheeks and mild blue eyes to Clytemnestra. It became

evident before long that Mliss had also noticed the same resemblance.

Accordingly she hammered its waxen head on the rocks when she was

alone, and sometimes dragged it with a string round its neck to and from

school. At other times, setting it up on her desk, she made a pincushion

of its patient and inoffensive body. Whether this was done in revenge

of what she considered a second figurative obtrusion of Clytie's

excellences upon her, or whether she had an intuitive appreciation of

the rites of certain other heathens, and, indulging in that "fetish"

ceremony, imagined that the original of her wax model would pine away

and finally die, is a metaphysical question I shall not now consider.



In spite of these moral vagaries, the master could not help noticing

in her different tasks the working of a quick, restless, and vigorous

perception. She knew neither the hesitancy nor the doubts of childhood.

Her answers in class were always slightly dashed with audacity. Of

course she was not infallible. But her courage and daring in passing

beyond her own depth and that of the floundering little swimmers around

her, in their minds outweighed all errors of judgment. Children are

not better than grown people in this respect, I fancy; and whenever the

little red hand flashed above her desk, there was a wondering silence,

and even the master was sometimes oppressed with a doubt of his own

experience and judgment.



Nevertheless, certain attributes which at first amused and entertained

his fancy began to afflict him with grave doubts. He could not but see

that Mliss was revengeful, irreverent, and willful. That there was but

one better quality which pertained to her semisavage disposition--the

faculty of physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another, though

not always an attribute of the noble savage--Truth. Mliss was both

fearless and sincere; perhaps in such a character the adjectives were

synonymous.



The master had been doing some hard thinking on this subject, and had

arrived at that conclusion quite common to all who think sincerely, that

he was generally the slave of his own prejudices, when he determined

to call on the Rev. McSnagley for advice. This decision was somewhat

humiliating to his pride, as he and McSnagley were not friends. But he

thought of Mliss, and the evening of their first meeting; and perhaps

with a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that

had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with a

complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked

back his dislike and went to McSnagley.



The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed

that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he had got over the

"neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had been troubled with a dumb

"ager" since last conference. But he had learned to "rastle and pray."



Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain method

of curing the dumb "ager" upon the book and volume of his brain,

Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. "She is an

adornment to ChrisTEWanity, and has a likely growin' young family,"

added Mr. McSnagley; "and there's that mannerly young gal--so well

behaved--Miss Clytie." In fact, Clytie's perfections seemed to affect

him to such an extent that he dwelt for several minutes upon them. The

master was doubly embarrassed. In the first place, there was an enforced

contrast with poor Mliss in all this praise of Clytie. Secondly, there

was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Mrs.

Morpher's earliest born. So that the master, after a few futile

efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another

engagement, and left without asking the information required, but in his

after reflections somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley the

full benefit of having refused it.



Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil once more in the close

communion of old. The child seemed to notice the change in the master's

manner, which had of late been constrained, and in one of their long

postprandial walks she stopped suddenly, and mounting a stump, looked

full in his face with big, searching eyes. "You ain't mad?" said she,

with an interrogative shake of the black braids. "No." "Nor bothered?"

"No." "Nor hungry?" (Hunger was to Mliss a sickness that might attack

a person at any moment.) "No." "Nor thinking of her?" "Of whom, Lissy?"

"That white girl." (This was the latest epithet invented by Mliss, who

was a very dark brunette, to express Clytemnestra.) "No." "Upon your

word?" (A substitute for "Hope you'll die!" proposed by the master.)

"Yes." "And sacred honor?" "Yes." Then Mliss gave him a fierce little

kiss, and, hopping down, fluttered off. For two or three days after

that she condescended to appear more like other children, and be, as she

expressed it, "good."



Two years had passed since the master's advent at Smith's Pocket, and as

his salary was not large, and the prospects of Smith's Pocket eventually

becoming the capital of the State not entirely definite, he contemplated

a change. He had informed the school trustees privately of his

intentions, but educated young men of unblemished moral character being

scarce at that time, he consented to continue his school term through

the winter to early spring. None else knew of his intention except his

one friend, a Dr. Duchesne, a young Creole physician known to the people

of Wingdam as "Duchesny." He never mentioned it to Mrs. Morpher,

Clytie, or any of his scholars. His reticence was partly the result of

a constitutional indisposition to fuss, partly a desire to be spared

the questions and surmises of vulgar curiosity, and partly that he never

really believed he was going to do anything before it was done.



He did not like to think of Mliss. It was a selfish instinct, perhaps,

which made him try to fancy his feeling for the child was foolish,

romantic, and unpractical. He even tried to imagine that she would do

better under the control of an older and sterner teacher. Then she was

nearly eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red Mountain, would

be a woman. He had done his duty. After Smith's death he addressed

letters to Smith's relatives, and received one answer from a sister

of Melissa's mother. Thanking the master, she stated her intention of

leaving the Atlantic States for California with her husband in a few

months. This was a slight superstructure for the airy castle which the

master pictured for Mliss's home, but it was easy to fancy that some

loving, sympathetic woman, with the claims of kindred, might better

guide her wayward nature. Yet, when the master had read the letter,

Mliss listened to it carelessly, received it submissively, and

afterward cut figures out of it with her scissors, supposed to represent

Clytemnestra, labeled "the white girl," to prevent mistakes, and impaled

them upon the outer walls of the schoolhouse.



When the summer was about spent, and the last harvest had been gathered

in the valleys, the master bethought him of gathering in a few

ripened shoots of the young idea, and of having his Harvest Home, or

Examination. So the savants and professionals of Smith's Pocket were

gathered to witness that time-honored custom of placing timid children

in a constrained positions and bullying them as in a witness box. As

usual in such cases, the most audacious and self-possessed were the

lucky recipients of the honors. The reader will imagine that in the

present instance Mliss and Clytie were preeminent, and divided

public attention; Mliss with her clearness of material perception

and self-reliance, Clytie with her placid self-esteem and saintlike

correctness of deportment. The other little ones were timid and

blundering. Mliss's readiness and brilliancy, of course, captivated the

greatest number and provoked the greatest applause. Mliss's antecedents

had unconsciously awakened the strongest sympathies of a class whose

athletic forms were ranged against the walls, or whose handsome bearded

faces looked in at the windows. But Mliss's popularity was overthrown by

an unexpected circumstance.



McSnagley had invited himself, and had been going through the pleasing

entertainment of frightening the more timid pupils by the vaguest and

most ambiguous questions delivered in an impressive funereal tone; and

Mliss had soared into astronomy, and was tracking the course of our

spotted ball through space, and keeping time with the music of the

spheres, and defining the tethered orbits of the planets, when McSnagley

impressively arose. "Meelissy! ye were speaking of the revolutions of

this yere yearth and the move-MENTS of the sun, and I think ye said it

had been a doing of it since the creashun, eh?" Mliss nodded a scornful

affirmative. "Well, war that the truth?" said McSnagley, folding his

arms. "Yes," said Mliss, shutting up her little red lips tightly. The

handsome outlines at the windows peered further in the schoolroom, and a

saintly Raphael face, with blond beard and soft blue eyes, belonging

to the biggest scamp in the diggings, turned toward the child and

whispered, "Stick to it, Mliss!" The reverend gentleman heaved a

deep sigh, and cast a compassionate glance at the master, then at the

children, and then rested his look on Clytie. That young woman softly

elevated her round, white arm. Its seductive curves were enhanced by a

gorgeous and massive specimen bracelet, the gift of one of her humblest

worshipers, worn in honor of the occasion. There was a momentary

silence. Clytie's round cheeks were very pink and soft. Clytie's big

eyes were very bright and blue. Clytie's low-necked white book muslin

rested softly on Clytie's white, plump shoulders. Clytie looked at the

master, and the master nodded. Then Clytie spoke softly:



"Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and it obeyed him!" There

was a low hum of applause in the schoolroom, a triumphant expression on

McSnagley's face, a grave shadow on the master's, and a comical look of

disappointment reflected from the windows. Mliss skimmed rapidly over

her astronomy, and then shut the book with a loud snap. A groan burst

from McSnagley, an expression of astonishment from the schoolroom, a

yell from the windows, as Mliss brought her red fist down on the desk,

with the emphatic declaration:



"It's a damn lie. I don't believe it!"





CHAPTER IV





The long wet season had drawn near its close. Signs of spring were

visible in the swelling buds and rushing torrents. The pine forests

exhaled the fresher spicery. The azaleas were already budding, the

ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland

which climbed Red Mountain at its southern aspect the long spike of the

monkshood shot up from its broad-leaved stool, and once more shook

its dark-blue bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was soft and

green, its crest just tossed with the foam of daisies and buttercups.

The little graveyard had gathered a few new dwellers in the past year,

and the mounds were placed two by two by the little paling until they

reached Smith's grave, and there there was but one. General superstition

had shunned it, and the plot beside Smith was vacant.



There had been several placards posted about the town, intimating that,

at a certain period, a celebrated dramatic company would perform, for

a few days, a series of "side-splitting" and "screaming farces"; that,

alternating pleasantly with this, there would be some melodrama and a

grand divertisement which would include singing, dancing, etc. These

announcements occasioned a great fluttering among the little folk,

and were the theme of much excitement and great speculation among the

master's scholars. The master had promised Mliss, to whom this sort of

thing was sacred and rare, that she should go, and on that momentous

evening the master and Mliss "assisted."



The performance was the prevalent style of heavy mediocrity; the

melodrama was not bad enough to laugh at nor good enough to excite.

But the master, turning wearily to the child, was astonished and felt

something like self-accusation in noticing the peculiar effect upon her

excitable nature. The red blood flushed in her cheeks at each stroke of

her panting little heart. Her small passionate lips were slightly parted

to give vent to her hurried breath. Her widely opened lids threw up and

arched her black eyebrows. She did not laugh at the dismal comicalities

of the funny man, for Mliss seldom laughed. Nor was she discreetly

affected to the delicate extremes of the corner of a white handkerchief,

as was the tender-hearted "Clytie," who was talking with her "feller"

and ogling the master at the same moment. But when the performance was

over, and the green curtain fell on the little stage, Mliss drew a

long deep breath, and turned to the master's grave face with a

half-apologetic smile and wearied gesture. Then she said, "Now take me

home!" and dropped the lids of her black eyes, as if to dwell once more

in fancy on the mimic stage.



On their way to Mrs. Morpher's the master thought proper to ridicule

the whole performance. Now he shouldn't wonder if Mliss thought that the

young lady who acted so beautifully was really in earnest, and in love

with the gentleman who wore such fine clothes. Well, if she were in love

with him it was a very unfortunate thing! "Why?" said Mliss, with an

upward sweep of the drooping lid. "Oh! well, he couldn't support his

wife at his present salary, and pay so much a week for his fine clothes,

and then they wouldn't receive as much wages if they were married as if

they were merely lovers--that is," added the master, "if they are not

already married to somebody else; but I think the husband of the pretty

young countess takes the tickets at the door, or pulls up the curtain,

or snuffs the candles, or does something equally refined and elegant. As

to the young man with nice clothes, which are really nice now, and must

cost at least two and a half or three dollars, not to speak of that

mantle of red drugget which I happen to know the price of, for I bought

some of it for my room once--as to this young man, Lissy, he is a pretty

good fellow, and if he does drink occasionally, I don't think people

ought to take advantage of it and give him black eyes and throw him in

the mud. Do you? I am sure he might owe me two dollars and a half a

long time, before I would throw it up in his face, as the fellow did the

other night at Wingdam."



Mliss had taken his hand in both of hers and was trying to look in his

eyes, which the young man kept as resolutely averted. Mliss had a faint

idea of irony, indulging herself sometimes in a species of sardonic

humor, which was equally visible in her actions and her speech. But

the young man continued in this strain until they had reached Mrs.

Morpher's, and he had deposited Mliss in her maternal charge. Waiving

the invitation of Mrs. Morpher to refreshment and rest, and shading

his eyes with his hand to keep out the blue-eyed Clytemnestra's siren

glances, he excused himself, and went home.



For two or three days after the advent of the dramatic company, Mliss

was late at school, and the master's usual Friday afternoon ramble was

for once omitted, owing to the absence of his trustworthy guide. As he

was putting away his books and preparing to leave the schoolhouse, a

small voice piped at his side, "Please, sir?" The master turned and

there stood Aristides Morpher.



"Well, my little man," said the master, impatiently, "what is it?

quick!"



"Please, sir, me and 'Kerg' thinks that Mliss is going to run away

agin."



"What's that, sir?" said the master, with that unjust testiness with

which we always receive disagreeable news.



"Why, sir, she don't stay home any more, and 'Kerg' and me see her

talking with one of those actor fellers, and she's with him now; and

please, sir, yesterday she told 'Kerg' and me she could make a speech

as well as Miss Cellerstina Montmoressy, and she spouted right off by

heart," and the little fellow paused in a collapsed condition.



"What actor?" asked the master.



"Him as wears the shiny hat. And hair. And gold pin. And gold chain,"

said the just Aristides, putting periods for commas to eke out his

breath.



The master put on his gloves and hat, feeling an unpleasant tightness

in his chest and thorax, and walked out in the road. Aristides trotted

along by his side, endeavoring to keep pace with his short legs to the

master's strides, when the master stopped suddenly, and Aristides bumped

up against him. "Where were they talking?" asked the master, as if

continuing the conversation.



"At the Arcade," said Aristides.



When they reached the main street the master paused. "Run down home,"

said he to the boy. "If Mliss is there, come to the Arcade and tell me.

If she isn't there, stay home; run!" And off trotted the short-legged

Aristides.



The Arcade was just across the way--a long, rambling building containing

a barroom, billiard room, and restaurant. As the young man crossed the

plaza he noticed that two or three of the passers-by turned and looked

after him. He looked at his clothes, took out his handkerchief, and

wiped his face before he entered the barroom. It contained the usual

number of loungers, who stared at him as he entered. One of them looked

at him so fixedly and with such a strange expression that the master

stopped and looked again, and then saw it was only his own reflection in

a large mirror. This made the master think that perhaps he was a little

excited, and so he took up a copy of the RED MOUNTAIN BANNER from one of

the tables, and tried to recover his composure by reading the column of

advertisements.



He then walked through the barroom, through the restaurant, and into the

billiard room. The child was not there. In the latter apartment a person

was standing by one of the tables with a broad-brimmed glazed hat on his

head. The master recognized him as the agent of the dramatic company;

he had taken a dislike to him at their first meeting, from the peculiar

fashion of wearing his beard and hair. Satisfied that the object of his

search was not there, he turned to the man with a glazed hat. He had

noticed the master, but tried that common trick of unconsciousness in

which vulgar natures always fail. Balancing a billiard cue in his hand,

he pretended to play with a ball in the center of the table. The master

stood opposite to him until he raised his eyes; when their glances met,

the master walked up to him.



He had intended to avoid a scene or quarrel, but when he began to speak,

something kept rising in his throat and retarded his utterance, and his

own voice frightened him, it sounded so distant, low, and resonant. "I

understand," he began, "that Melissa Smith, an orphan, and one of my

scholars, has talked with you about adopting your profession. Is that

so?"



The man with the glazed hat leaned over the table and made an imaginary

shot that sent the ball spinning round the cushions. Then, walking round

the table, he recovered the ball and placed it upon the spot. This duty

discharged, getting ready for another shot, he said:



"S'pose she has?"



The master choked up again, but, squeezing the cushion of the table in

his gloved hand, he went on:



"If you are a gentleman, I have only to tell you that I am her guardian,

and responsible for her career. You know as well as I do the kind of

life you offer her. As you may learn of anyone here, I have already

brought her out of an existence worse than death--out of the streets and

the contamination of vice. I am trying to do so again. Let us talk like

men. She has neither father, mother, sister, or brother. Are you seeking

to give her an equivalent for these?"



The man with the glazed hat examined the point of his cue, and then

looked around for somebody to enjoy the joke with him.



"I know that she is a strange, willful girl," continued the master, "but

she is better than she was. I believe that I have some influence over

her still. I beg and hope, therefore, that you will take no further

steps in this matter, but as a man, as a gentleman, leave her to me. I

am willing--" But here something rose again in the master's throat, and

the sentence remained unfinished.



The man with the glazed hat, mistaking the master's silence, raised his

head with a coarse, brutal laugh, and said in a loud voice:



"Want her yourself, do you? That cock won't fight here, young man!"



The insult was more in the tone than in the words, more in the glance

than tone, and more in the man's instinctive nature than all these. The

best appreciable rhetoric to this kind of animal is a blow. The master

felt this, and, with his pent-up, nervous energy finding expression in

the one act, he struck the brute full in his grinning face. The blow

sent the glazed hat one way and the cue another, and tore the glove

and skin from the master's hand from knuckle to joint. It opened up

the corners of the fellow's mouth, and spoilt the peculiar shape of his

beard for some time to come.



There was a shout, an imprecation, a scuffle, and the trampling of many

feet. Then the crowd parted right and left, and two sharp quick reports

followed each other in rapid succession. Then they closed again about

his opponent, and the master was standing alone. He remembered picking

bits of burning wadding from his coat sleeve with his left hand. Someone

was holding his other hand. Looking at it, he saw it was still bleeding

from the blow, but his fingers were clenched around the handle of a

glittering knife. He could not remember when or how he got it.



The man who was holding his hand was Mr. Morpher. He hurried the master

to the door, but the master held back, and tried to tell him as well

as he could with his parched throat about "Mliss." "It's all right,

my boy," said Mr. Morpher. "She's home!" And they passed out into the

street together. As they walked along Mr. Morpher said that Mliss had

come running into the house a few moments before, and had dragged him

out, saying that somebody was trying to kill the master at the Arcade.

Wishing to be alone, the master promised Mr. Morpher that he would not

seek the agent again that night, and parted from him, taking the road

toward the schoolhouse. He was surprised in nearing it to find the door

open--still more surprised to find Mliss sitting there.



The master's nature, as I have hinted before, had, like most sensitive

organizations, a selfish basis. The brutal taunt thrown out by his late

adversary still rankled in his heart. It was possible, he thought, that

such a construction might be put upon his affection for the child,

which at best was foolish and Quixotic. Besides, had she not voluntarily

abnegated his authority and affection? And what had everybody else said

about her? Why should he alone combat the opinion of all, and be at last

obliged tacitly to confess the truth of all they predicted? And he had

been a participant in a low barroom fight with a common boor, and risked

his life, to prove what? What had he proved? Nothing? What would the

people say? What would his friends say? What would McSnagley say?



In his self-accusation the last person he should have wished to meet was

Mliss. He entered the door, and going up to his desk, told the child, in

a few cold words, that he was busy, and wished to be alone. As she

rose he took her vacant seat, and, sitting down, buried his head in his

hands. When he looked up again she was still standing there. She was

looking at his face with an anxious expression.



"Did you kill him?" she asked.



"No!" said the master.



"That's what I gave you the knife for!" said the child, quickly.



"Gave me the knife?" repeated the master, in bewilderment.



"Yes, gave you the knife. I was there under the bar. Saw you hit him.

Saw you both fall. He dropped his old knife. I gave it to you. Why

didn't you stick him?" said Mliss rapidly, with an expressive twinkle of

the black eyes and a gesture of the little red hand.



The master could only look his astonishment.



"Yes," said Mliss. "If you'd asked me, I'd told you I was off with the

play-actors. Why was I off with the play-actors? Because you wouldn't

tell me you was going away. I knew it. I heard you tell the Doctor so.

I wasn't a goin' to stay here alone with those Morphers. I'd rather die

first."



With a dramatic gesture which was perfectly consistent with her

character, she drew from her bosom a few limp green leaves, and, holding

them out at arm's length, said in her quick vivid way, and in the queer

pronunciation of her old life, which she fell into when unduly excited:



"That's the poison plant you said would kill me. I'll go with the

play-actors, or I'll eat this and die here. I don't care which. I won't

stay here, where they hate and despise me! Neither would you let me, if

you didn't hate and despise me too!"



The passionate little breast heaved, and two big tears peeped over the

edge of Mliss's eyelids, but she whisked them away with the corner of

her apron as if they had been wasps.



"If you lock me up in jail," said Mliss, fiercely, "to keep me from the

play-actors, I'll poison myself. Father killed himself--why shouldn't

I? You said a mouthful of that root would kill me, and I always carry it

here," and she struck her breast with her clenched fist.



The master thought of the vacant plot beside Smith's grave, and of

the passionate little figure before him. Seizing her hands in his and

looking full into her truthful eyes, he said:



"Lissy, will you go with ME?"



The child put her arms around his neck, and said joyfully, "Yes."



"But now--tonight?"



"Tonight."



And, hand in hand, they passed into the road--the narrow road that had

once brought her weary feet to the master's door, and which it seemed

she should not tread again alone. The stars glittered brightly above

them. For good or ill the lesson had been learned, and behind them the

school of Red Mountain closed upon them forever.