Part 35

Suddenly the laughter ceased and Liberty Jones's voice arose, shrill but masterful: “Thar, that'll do! Quit now! You jest get back to your scrubbin'--d'ye hear? I'm boss o' this shanty, you bet!”

The doctor turned with a grim smile to his companion. “That's the only thing that bothered me, and I've been waiting for. She's settled it. She'll do. Come.”

They turned away briskly through the wood. At the end of half an hour's walk they found the team that had brought them there in waiting, and drove towards San Jose. It was nearly ten miles before they passed another habitation or trace of clearing. And by this time night had fallen upon the cabin they had left, and upon the newly made orphan and her Indian companion, alone and contented in that trackless solitude.

*****

Liberty Jones had been a year at the cabin. In that time she had learned that her employer's name was Doctor Ruysdael, that he had a lucrative practice in San Jose, but had also “taken up” a league or two of wild forest land in the Santa Cruz range, which he preserved and held after a fashion of his own, which gave him the reputation of being a “crank” among the very few neighbors his vast possessions permitted, and the equally few friends his singular tastes allowed him. It was believed that a man owning such an enormous quantity of timber land, who should refuse to set up a sawmill and absolutely forbid the felling of trees; who should decline to connect it with the highway to Santa Cruz, and close it against improvement and speculation, had given sufficient evidence of his insanity; but when to this was added the rumor that he himself was not only devoid of the human instinct of hunting the wild animals with which his domain abounded, but that he held it so sacred to their use as to forbid the firing of a gun within his limits, and that these restrictions were further preserved and “policed” by the scattered remnants of a band of aborigines,--known as “digger Injins,”--it was seriously hinted that his eccentricity had acquired a political and moral significance, and demanded legislative interference. But the doctor was a rich man, a necessity to his patients, a good marksman, and, it was rumored, did not include his fellow men among the animals he had a distaste for killing.

Of all this, however, Liberty knew little and cared less. The solitude appealed to her sense of freedom; she did not “hanker” after a society she had never known. At the end of the first week, when the doctor communicated to her briefly, by letter, the convincing proofs of the death of her father and his entombment beneath the sunken cliff, she accepted the fact without comment or apparent emotion. Two months later, when her only surviving relative, “Aunt Marty,” of Missouri, acknowledged the news--communicated by Doctor Ruysdael--with Scriptural quotations and the cheerful hope that it “would be a lesson to her” and she would “profit in her new place,” she left her aunt's letter unanswered.

She looked after the cows and calves with an interest that was almost possessory, patronized and played with the squaw,--yet made her feel her inferiority,--and moved among the peaceful aborigines with the domination of a white woman and a superior. She tolerated the half-monthly visits of “Jim Hoskins,” the young companion of the doctor, who she learned was the doctor's factor and overseer of the property, who lived seven miles away on an agricultural clearing, and whose control of her actions was evidently limited by the doctor,--for the doctor's sake alone. Nor was Mr. Hoskins inclined to exceed those limits. He looked upon her as something abnormal,--a “crank” as remarkable in her way as her patron was in his, neuter of sex and vague of race, and he simply restricted his supervision to the bringing and taking of messages. She remained sole queen of the domain. A rare straggler from the main road, penetrating this seclusion, might have scarcely distinguished her from Waya, in her coarse cotton gown and slouched hat, except for the free stride which contrasted with her companion's waddle. Once, in following an estrayed calf, she had crossed the highway and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger dialect; yet the mistake left no sting in her memory. And, like the digger, she shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard taskmaster.

The sole touch of human interest she had in her surroundings was in the rare visits of the doctor and his brief but sincere commendation of her rude and rustic work. It is possible that the strange, middle-aged, gray-haired, intellectual man, whose very language was at times mysterious and unintelligible to her, and whose suggestion of power awed her, might have touched some untried filial chord in her being. Although she felt that, save for absolute freedom, she was little more to him than she had been to her father, yet he had never told her she had “no sense,” that she was “a hindrance,” and he had even praised her performance of her duties. Eagerly as she looked for his coming, in his actual presence she felt a singular uneasiness of which she was not entirely ashamed, and if she was relieved at his departure, it none the less left her to a delightful memory of him, a warm sense of his approval, and a fierce ambition to be worthy of it, for which she would have sacrificed herself or the other miserable retainers about her, as a matter of course. She had driven Waya and the other squaws far along the sparse tableland pasture in search of missing stock; she herself had lain out all night on the rocks beside an ailing heifer. Yet, while satisfied to earn his praise for the performance of her duty, for some feminine reason she thought more frequently of a casual remark he had made on his last visit: “You are stronger and more healthy in this air,” he had said, looking critically into her face. “We have got that abominable alkali out of your system, and wholesome food will do the rest.” She was not sure she had quite understood him, but she remembered that she had felt her face grow hot when he spoke,--perhaps because she had not understood him.

His next visit was a day or two delayed, and in her anxiety she had ventured as far as the highway to earnestly watch for his coming. From her hiding-place in the underwood she could see the team and Jim Hoskins already waiting for him. Presently she saw him drive up to the trail in a carryall with a party of ladies and gentlemen. He alighted, bade “Good-by” to the party, and the team turned to retrace its course. But in that single moment she had been struck and bewildered by what seemed to her the dazzlingly beautiful apparel of the women, and their prettiness. She felt a sudden consciousness of her own coarse, shapeless calico gown, her straggling hair, and her felt hat, and a revulsion of feeling seized her. She crept like a wounded animal out of the underwood, and then ran swiftly and almost fiercely back towards the cabin. She ran so fast that for a time she almost kept pace with the doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail. Then she dived into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the cabin,--footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement that had driven her back. Here she thought she heard voices--his voice among the rest--calling her, but the same singular revulsion of feeling hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced a foolish savage delight in not answering the summons. In this erratic wandering she came upon the spring she had found on her first entrance in the forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a second time at its trickling source. She could see that since her first visit it had worn a great hollow below the tree roots and now formed a shining, placid pool. As she stooped to look at it, she suddenly observed that it reflected her whole figure as in a cruel mirror,--her slouched hat and loosened hair, her coarse and shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow skin,--in all their hopeless, uncompromising details. She uttered a quick, angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly. But she had not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious faces of the doctor and Hoskins. She stopped, trembling and irresolute.

“Ah,” said the doctor, in a tone of frank relief. “Here you are! I was getting worried about you. Waya said you had been gone since morning!” He stopped and looked at her attentively. “Is anything the matter?”

His evident concern sent a warm glow over her chilly frame, and yet the strange sensation remained. “No--no!” she stammered.

Doctor Ruysdael turned to Hoskins. “Go back and tell Waya I've found her.”

Libby felt that the doctor only wanted to get rid of his companion, and became awed again.

“Has anybody been bothering you?”

“No.”

“Have the diggers frightened you?”

“No”--with a gesture of contempt.

“Have you and Waya quarreled?”

“Nary”--with a faint, tremulous smile.

He still stared at her, and then dropped his blue eyes musingly. “Are you lonely here? Would you rather go to San Jose?”

Like a flash the figures of the two smartly dressed women started up before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome finery as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness in the mirror of the spring. “No! NO!” she broke out vehemently and passionately. “Never!”

He smiled gently. “Look here! I'll send you up some books. You read--don't you?” She nodded quickly. “Some magazines and papers. Odd I never thought of it before,” he added half musingly. “Come along to the cabin. And,” he stopped again and said decisively, “the next time you want anything, don't wait for me to come, but write.”

A few days after he left she received a package of books,--an odd collection of novels, magazines, and illustrated journals of the period. She received them eagerly as an evidence of his concern for her, but it is to be feared that her youthful nature found little satisfaction in the gratification of fancy. Many of the people she read of were strange to her; many of the incidents related seemed to her mere lies; some tales which treated of people in her own sphere she found profoundly uninteresting. In one of the cheaper magazines she chanced upon a fashion plate; she glanced eagerly through all the others for a like revelation until she got a dozen together, when she promptly relegated the remaining literature to a corner and oblivion. The text accompanying the plates was in a jargon not always clear, but her instinct supplied the rest. She dispatched by Hoskins a note to Doctor Ruysdael: “Please send me some brite kalikers and things for sewing. You told me to ask.” A few days later brought the response in a good-sized parcel.

Yet this did not keep her from her care of the stock nor her rambles in the forest; she was quick to utilize her rediscovery of the spring for watering the cattle; it was not so far afield as the half-dried creek in the canyon, and was a quiet sylvan spot. She ate her frugal midday meal there and drank of its waters, and, secure in her seclusion, bathed there and made her rude toilet when the cows were driven home. But she did not again look into its mirrored surface when it was tranquil!

And so a month passed. But when Doctor Ruysdael was again due at the cabin, a letter was brought by Hoskins, with the news that he was called away on professional business down the coast, and could not come until two weeks later. In the disappointment that overcame her, she did not at first notice that Hoskins was gazing at her with a singular expression, which was really one of undisguised admiration. Never having seen this before in the eyes of any man who looked at her, she referred it to some vague “larking” or jocularity, for which she was in no mood.

“Say, Libby! you're gettin' to be a right smart-lookin' gal. Seems to agree with ye up here,” said Hoskins with an awkward laugh. “Darned ef ye ain't lookin' awful purty!”

“G'long!” said Liberty Jones, more than ever convinced of his badinage.

“Fact,” said Hoskins energetically. “Why, Doc would tell ye so, too. See ef he don't!”