Part 32

“Stop!” she said, with a stamp of her slim foot. “Stay where you are! We must have our talk out HERE. I'm not going to waste words with you in there, before HER.”

Prosper stopped.

“What did you do this for?” she said angrily. “How dared you? How could you? Are you a man, or the fool she takes you for?”

“Wot did I do WOT for?” said Prosper sullenly.

“This! Making my mother pretend you were her son! Bringing her here among these men to live a lie!”

“She was willin',” said Prosper gloomily. “I told her what she had to do, and she seemed to like it.”

“But couldn't you see she was old and weak, and wasn't responsible for her actions? Or were you only thinking of yourself?”

This last taunt stung him. He looked up. He was not facing a helpless, dependent old woman as he had been the day before, but a handsome, clever girl, in every way his superior--and in the right! In his vague sense of honor it seemed more creditable for him to fight it out with HER. He burst out: “I never thought of myself! I never had an old mother; I never knew what it was to want one--but the men did! And as I couldn't get one for them, I got one for myself--to share and share alike--I thought they'd be happier ef there was one in the camp!”

There was the unmistakable accent of truth in his voice. There came a faint twitching of the young girl's lips and the dawning of a smile. But it only acted as a goad to the unfortunate Prosper. “Ye kin laugh, Miss Pottinger, but it's God's truth! But one thing I didn't do. No! When your mother wanted to bring you in here as my sister, I kicked! I did! And you kin thank me, for all your laughin', that you're standing in this camp in your own name--and ain't nothin' but my cousin.”

“I suppose you thought your precious friends didn't want a SISTER too?” said the girl ironically.

“It don't make no matter wot they want now,” he said gloomily. “For,” he added, with sudden desperation, “it's come to an end! Yes! You and your mother will stay here a spell so that the boys don't suspicion nothin' of either of ye. Then I'll give it out that you're takin' your aunt away on a visit. Then I'll make over to her a thousand dollars for all the trouble I've given her, and you'll take her away. I've bin a fool, Miss Pottinger, mebbe I am one now, but what I'm doin' is on the square, and it's got to be done!”

He looked so simple and so good--so like an honest schoolboy confessing a fault and abiding by his punishment, for all his six feet of altitude and silky mustache--that Miss Pottinger lowered her eyes. But she recovered herself and said sharply:--

“It's all very well to talk of her going away! But she WON'T. You have made her like you--yes! like you better than me--than any of us! She says you're the only one who ever treated her like a mother--as a mother should be treated. She says she never knew what peace and comfort were until she came to you. There! Don't stare like that! Don't you understand? Don't you see? Must I tell you again that she is strange--that--that she was ALWAYS queer and strange--and queerer on account of her unfortunate habits--surely you knew THEM, Mr. Riggs! She quarreled with us all. I went to live with my aunt, and she took herself off to San Francisco with a silly claim against my father's shipowners. Heaven only knows how she managed to live there; but she always impressed people with her manners, and some one always helped her! At last I begged my aunt to let me seek her, and I tracked her here. There! If you've confessed everything to me, you have made me confess everything to you, and about my own mother, too! Now, what is to be done?”

“Whatever is agreeable to you is the same to me, Miss Pottinger,” he said formally.

“But you mustn't call me 'Miss Pottinger' so loud. Somebody might hear you,” she returned mischievously.

“All right--'cousin,' then,” he said, with a prodigious blush. “Supposin' we go in.”

In spite of the camp's curiosity, for the next few days they delicately withheld their usual evening visits to Prossy's mother. “They'll be wantin' to talk o' old times, and we don't wanter be too previous,” suggested Wynbrook. But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant. To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt's gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own. In a few days the whole camp was in love with her. Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment--free from any suspicion of coquetry--that there were no heartburnings, and the unlucky man who nourished a fancied slight would have been laughed at by his fellows. She had a town-bred girl's curiosity and interest in camp life, which she declared was like a “perpetual picnic,” and her slim, graceful figure halting beside a ditch where the men were working seemed to them as grateful as the new spring sunshine. The whole camp became tidier; a coat was considered de rigueur at “Prossy's mother” evenings; there was less horseplay in the trails, and less shouting. “It's all very well to talk about 'old mothers,'” said the cynical barkeeper, “but that gal, single handed, has done more in a week to make the camp decent than old Ma'am Riggs has in a month o' Sundays.”

Since Prosper's brief conversation with Miss Pottinger before the house, the question “What is to be done?” had singularly lapsed, nor had it been referred to again by either. The young lady had apparently thrown herself into the diversions of the camp with the thoughtless gayety of a brief holiday maker, and it was not for him to remind her--even had he wished to--that her important question had never been answered. He had enjoyed her happiness with the relief of a secret shared by her. Three weeks had passed; the last of the winter's rains had gone. Spring was stirring in underbrush and wildwood, in the pulse of the waters, in the sap of the great pines, in the uplifting of flowers. Small wonder if Prosper's boyish heart had stirred a little too.

In fact, he had been possessed by another luminous idea--a wild idea that to him seemed almost as absurd as the one which had brought him all this trouble. It had come to him like that one--out of a starlit night--and he had risen one morning with a feverish intent to put it into action! It brought him later to take an unprecedented walk alone with Miss Pottinger, to linger under green leaves in unfrequented woods, and at last seemed about to desert him as he stood in a little hollow with her hand in his--their only listener an inquisitive squirrel. Yet this was all the disappointed animal heard him stammer,--

“So you see, dear, it would THEN be no lie--for--don't you see?--she'd be really MY mother as well as YOURS.”

The marriage of Prosper Riggs and Miss Pottinger was quietly celebrated at Sacramento, but Prossy's “old mother” did not return with the happy pair.

Of Mrs. Pottinger's later career some idea may be gathered from a letter which Prosper received a year after his marriage. “Circumstances,” wrote Mrs. Pottinger, “which had induced me to accept the offer of a widower to take care of his motherless household, have since developed into a more enduring matrimonial position, so that I can always offer my dear Prosper a home with his mother, should he choose to visit this locality, and a second father in Hiram W. Watergates, Esq., her husband.”

THE CONVALESCENCE OF JACK HAMLIN

The habitually quiet, ascetic face of Seth Rivers was somewhat disturbed and his brows were knitted as he climbed the long ascent of Windy Hill to its summit and his own rancho. Perhaps it was the effect of the characteristic wind, which that afternoon seemed to assault him from all points at once and did not cease its battery even at his front door, but hustled him into the passage, blew him into the sitting room, and then celebrated its own exit from the long, rambling house by the banging of doors throughout the halls and the slamming of windows in the remote distance.

Mrs. Rivers looked up from her work at this abrupt onset of her husband, but without changing her own expression of slightly fatigued self-righteousness. Accustomed to these elemental eruptions, she laid her hands from force of habit upon the lifting tablecloth, and then rose submissively to brush together the scattered embers and ashes from the large hearthstone, as she had often done before.

“You're in early, Seth,” she said.

“Yes. I stopped at the Cross Roads Post Office. Lucky I did, or you'd hev had kempany on your hands afore you knowed it--this very night! I found this letter from Dr. Duchesne,” and he produced a letter from his pocket.

Mrs. Rivers looked up with an expression of worldly interest. Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type. The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond Windy Hill.