Kitabı oku: «Tales of Trail and Town», sayfa 10
But he was not so clear about the young girl. Her tender, appealing voice, although he knew it had been addressed only to a vision, still thrilled his fancy. The pluck that had made her withstand her fear so long—until he had uttered that dreadful word—still excited his admiration. His curiosity to know what mistake he had made—for he knew it must have been some frightful blunder—was all the more keen, as he had no chance to rectify it. What a brute she must have thought him—or DID she really think him a brute even then?—for her look was one more of despair and pity! Yet she would remember him only by that last word, and never know that he had risked insult and ejection from her friends to carry her to her place of safety. He could not bear to go across the seas carrying the pale, unsatisfied face of that gentle girl ever before his eyes! A sense of delicacy—new to Dick, but always the accompaniment of deep feeling—kept him from even hinting his story to his host, though he knew—perhaps BECAUSE he knew—that it would gratify his enmity to the family. A sudden thought struck Dick. He knew her house, and her name. He would write her a note. Somebody would be sure to translate it for her.
He borrowed pen, ink, and paper, and in the clean solitude of his fresh chintz bedroom, indited the following letter:—
DEAR MISS FONTONELLES,—Please excuse me for having skeert you. I hadn’t any call to do it, I never reckoned to do it—it was all jest my derned luck; I only reckoned to tell you I was lost—in them blamed woods—don’t you remember?—“lost”—PERDOO!—and then you up and fainted! I wouldn’t have come into your garden, only, you see, I’d just skeered by accident two of your helps, reg’lar softies, and I wanted to explain. I reckon they allowed I was that man that that picture in the hall was painted after. I reckon they took ME for him—see? But he ain’t MY style, nohow, and I never saw the picture at all until after I’d toted you, when you fainted, up to your house, or I’d have made my kalkilations and acted according. I’d have laid low in the woods, and got away without skeerin’ you. You see what I mean? It was mighty mean of me, I suppose, to have tetched you at all, without saying, “Excuse me, miss,” and toted you out of the garden and up the steps into your own parlor without asking your leave. But the whole thing tumbled so suddent. And it didn’t seem the square thing for me to lite out and leave you lying there on the grass. That’s why! I’m sorry I skeert that old preacher, but he came upon me in the picture hall so suddent, that it was a mighty close call, I tell you, to get off without a shindy. Please forgive me, Miss Fontonelles. When you get this, I shall be going back home to America, but you might write to me at Denver City, saying you’re all right. I liked your style; I liked your grit in standing up to me in the garden until you had your say, when you thought I was the Lord knows what—though I never understood a word you got off—not knowing French. But it’s all the same now. Say! I’ve got your rose!
Yours very respectfully,
RICHARD FOUNTAINS.
Dick folded the epistle and put it in his pocket. He would post it himself on the morning before he left. When he came downstairs he found his indefatigable host awaiting him, with the report of the veterinary blacksmith. There was nothing seriously wrong with the mustang, but it would be unfit to travel for several days. The landlord repeated his former offer. Dick, whose money was pretty well exhausted, was fain to accept, reflecting that SHE had never seen the mustang and would not recognize it. But he drew the line at the sombrero, to which his host had taken a great fancy. He had worn it before HER!
Later in the evening Dick was sitting on the low veranda of the cafe, overlooking the white road. A round white table was beside him, his feet were on the railing, but his eyes were resting beyond on the high, mouldy iron gates of the mysterious park. What he was thinking of did not matter, but he was a little impatient at the sudden appearance of his host—whom he had evaded during the afternoon—at his side. The man’s manner was full of bursting loquacity and mysterious levity.
Truly, it was a good hour when Dick had arrived at Fontonelles,—“just in time.” He could see now what a world of imbeciles was France. What stupid ignorance ruled, what low cunning and low tact could achieve,—in effect, what jugglers and mountebanks, hypocritical priests and licentious and lying noblesse went to make up existing society. Ah, there had been a fine excitement, a regular coup d’theatre at Fontonelles,—the chateau yonder; here at the village, where the news was brought by frightened grooms and silly women! He had been in the thick of it all the afternoon! He had examined it,—interrogated them like a juge d’instruction,—winnowed it, sifted it. And what was it all? An attempt by these wretched priests and noblesse to revive in the nineteenth century—the age of electricity and Pullman cars—a miserable mediaeval legend of an apparition, a miracle! Yes; one is asked to believe that at the chateau yonder was seen last night three times the apparition of Armand de Fontonelles!
Dick started. “Armand de Fontonelles!” He remembered that she had repeated that name.
“Who’s he?” he demanded abruptly.
“The first Comte de Fontonelles! When monsieur knows that the first comte has been dead three hundred years, he will see the imbecility of the affair!”
“Wot did he come back for?” growled Dick.
“Ah! it was a legend. Consider its artfulness! The Comte Armand had been a hard liver, a dissipated scoundrel, a reckless beast, but a mighty hunter of the stag. It was said that on one of these occasions he had been warned by the apparition of St. Hubert; but he had laughed,—for, observe, HE always jeered at the priests too; hence this story!—and had declared that the flaming cross seen between the horns of the sacred stag was only the torch of a poacher, and he would shoot it! Good! the body of the comte, dead, but without a wound, was found in the wood the next day, with his discharged arquebus in his hand. The Archbishop of Rouen refused his body the rites of the Church until a number of masses were said every year and—paid for! One understands! one sees their ‘little game;’ the count now appears,—he is in purgatory! More masses,—more money! There you are. Bah! One understands, too, that the affair takes place, not in a cafe like this,—not in a public place,—but at a chateau of the noblesse, and is seen by—the proprietor checked the characters on his fingers—TWO retainers; one young demoiselle of the noblesse, daughter of the chatelaine herself; and, my faith, it goes without saying, by a fat priest, the Cure! In effect, two interested ones! And the priest,—his lie is magnificent! Superb! For he saw the comte in the picture-gallery,—in effect, stepping into his frame!”
“Oh, come off the roof,” said Dick impatiently; “they must have seen SOMETHING, you know. The young lady wouldn’t lie!”
Monsieur Ribaud leaned over, with a mysterious, cynical smile, and lowering his voice said:—
“You have reason to say so. You have hit it, my friend. There WAS a something! And if we regard the young lady, you shall hear. The story of Mademoiselle de Fontonelles is that she has walked by herself alone in the garden,—you observe, ALONE—in the moonlight, near the edge of the wood. You comprehend? The mother and the Cure are in the house,—for the time effaced! Here at the edge of the wood—though why she continues, a young demoiselle, to the edge of the wood does not make itself clear—she beholds her ancestor, as on a pedestal, young, pale, but very handsome and exalte,—pardon!”
“Nothing,” said Dick hurriedly; “go on!”
“She beseeches him why! He says he is lost! She faints away, on the instant, there—regard me!—ON THE EDGE OF THE WOOD, she says. But her mother and Monsieur le Cure find her pale, agitated, distressed, ON THE SOFA IN THE SALON. One is asked to believe that she is transported through the air—like an angel—by the spirit of Armand de Fontonelles. Incredible!”
“Well, wot do YOU think?” said Dick sharply.
The cafe proprietor looked around him carefully, and then lowered his voice significantly:—
“A lover!”
“A what?” said Dick, with a gasp.
“A lover!” repeated Ribaud. “You comprehend! Mademoiselle has no dot,—the property is nothing,—the brother has everything. A Mademoiselle de Fontonelles cannot marry out of her class, and the noblesse are all poor. Mademoiselle is young,—pretty, they say, of her kind. It is an intolerable life at the old chateau; mademoiselle consoles herself!”
Monsieur Ribaud never knew how near he was to the white road below the railing at that particular moment. Luckily, Dick controlled himself, and wisely, as Monsieur Ribaud’s next sentence showed him.
“A romance,—an innocent, foolish liaison, if you like,—but, all the same, if known of a Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, a compromising, a fatal entanglement. There you are. Look! for this, then, all this story of cock and bulls and spirits! Mademoiselle has been discovered with her lover by some one. This pretty story shall stop their mouths!”
“But wot,” said Dick brusquely, “wot if the girl was really skeert at something she’d seen, and fainted dead away, as she said she did,—and—and”—he hesitated—“some stranger came along and picked her up?”
Monsieur Ribaud looked at him pityingly.
“A Mademoiselle de Fontonelle is picked up by her servants, by her family, but not by the young man in the woods, alone. It is even more compromising!”
“Do you mean to say,” said Dick furiously, “that the ragpickers and sneaks that wade around in the slumgallion of this country would dare to spatter that young gal?”
“I mean to say, yes,—assuredly, positively yes!” said Ribaud, rubbing his hands with a certain satisfaction at Dick’s fury. “For you comprehend not the position of la jeune fille in all France! Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen her—pretty, charming, fascinating—alone with the young man. But here, no, never! Regard me, my friend. The French mother, she say to her daughter’s fiance, ‘Look! there is my daughter. She has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,—not even with you. Take her for your wife!’ It is monstrous! it is impossible! it is so!”
There was a silence of a few minutes, and Dick looked blankly at the iron gates of the park of Fontonelles. Then he said: “Give me a cigar.”
Monsieur Ribaud instantly produced his cigar case. Dick took a cigar, but waved aside the proffered match, and entering the cafe, took from his pocket the letter to Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, twisted it in a spiral, lighted it at a candle, lit his cigar with it, and returning to the veranda held it in his hand until the last ashes dropped on the floor. Then he said, gravely, to Ribaud:—
“You’ve treated me like a white man, Frenchy, and I ain’t goin’ back on yer—though your ways ain’t my ways—nohow; but I reckon in this yer matter at the shotto you’re a little too previous! For though I don’t as a gin’ral thing take stock in ghosts, I BELIEVE EVERY WORD THAT THEM FOLK SAID UP THAR. And,” he added, leaning his hand somewhat heavily on Ribaud’s shoulder, “if you’re the man I take you for, you’ll believe it too! And if that chap, Armand de Fontonelles, hadn’t hev picked up that gal at that moment, he would hev deserved to roast in hell another three hundred years! That’s why I believe her story. So you’ll let these yer Fontonelles keep their ghosts for all they’re worth; and when you next feel inclined to talk about that girl’s LOVER, you’ll think of me, and shut your head! You hear me, Frenchy, I’m shoutin’! And don’t you forget it!”
Nevertheless, early the next morning, Monsieur Ribaud accompanied his guest to the railway station, and parted from him with great effusion. On his way back an old-fashioned carriage with a postilion passed him. At a sign from its occupant, the postilion pulled up, and Monsieur Ribaud, bowing to the dust, approached the window, and the pale, stern face of a dignified, white-haired woman of sixty that looked from it.
“Has he gone?” said the lady.
“Assuredly, madame; I was with him at the station.”
“And you think no one saw him?”
“No one, madame, but myself.”
“And—what kind of a man was he?”
Monsieur Ribaud lifted his shoulders, threw out his hands despairingly, yet with a world of significance, and said:—
“An American.”
“Ah!”
The carriage drove on and entered the gates of the chateau. And Monsieur Ribaud, cafe proprietor and Social Democrat, straightened himself in the dust and shook his fist after it.
A NIGHT ON THE DIVIDE
With the lulling of the wind towards evening it came on to snow—heavily, in straight, quickly succeeding flakes, dropping like white lances from the sky. This was followed by the usual Sierran phenomenon. The deep gorge, which, as the sun went down, had lapsed into darkness, presently began to reappear; at first the vanished trail came back as a vividly whitening streak before them; then the larches and pines that ascended from it like buttresses against the hillsides glimmered in ghostly distinctness, until at last the two slopes curved out of the darkness as if hewn in marble. For the sudden storm, which extended scarcely two miles, had left no trace upon the steep granite face of the high cliffs above; the snow, slipping silently from them, left them still hidden in the obscurity of night. In the vanished landscape the gorge alone stood out, set in a chaos of cloud and storm through which the moonbeams struggled ineffectually.
It was this unexpected sight which burst upon the occupants of a large covered “station wagon” who had chanced upon the lower end of the gorge. Coming from a still lower altitude, they had known nothing of the storm, which had momentarily ceased, but had left a record of its intensity in nearly two feet of snow. For some moments the horses floundered and struggled on, in what the travelers believed to be some old forgotten drift or avalanche, until the extent and freshness of the fall became apparent. To add to their difficulties, the storm recommenced, and not comprehending its real character and limit, they did not dare to attempt to return the way they came. To go on, however, was impossible. In this quandary they looked about them in vain for some other exit from the gorge. The sides of that gigantic white furrow terminated in darkness. Hemmed in from the world in all directions, it might have been their tomb.
But although THEY could see nothing beyond their prison walls, they themselves were perfectly visible from the heights above them. And Jack Tenbrook, quartz miner, who was sinking a tunnel in the rocky ledge of shelf above the gorge, stepping out from his cabin at ten o’clock to take a look at the weather before turning in, could observe quite distinctly the outline of the black wagon, the floundering horses, and the crouching figures by their side, scarcely larger than pygmies on the white surface of the snow, six hundred feet below him. Jack had courage and strength, and the good humor that accompanies them, but he contented himself for a few moments with lazily observing the travelers’ discomfiture. He had taken in the situation with a glance; he would have helped a brother miner or mountaineer, although he knew that it could only have been drink or bravado that brought HIM into the gorge in a snowstorm, but it was very evident that these were “greenhorns,” or eastern tourists, and it served their stupidity and arrogance right! He remembered also how he, having once helped an Eastern visitor catch the mustang that had “bucked” him, had been called “my man,” and presented with five dollars; he recalled how he had once spread the humble resources of his cabin before some straying members of the San Francisco party who were “opening” the new railroad, and heard the audible wonder of a lady that a civilized being could live so “coarsely”? With these recollections in his mind, he managed to survey the distant struggling horses with a fine sense of humor, not unmixed with self-righteousness. There was no real danger in the situation; it meant at the worst a delay and a camping in the snow till morning, when he would go down to their assistance. They had a spacious traveling equipage, and were, no doubt, well supplied with furs, robes, and provisions for a several hours’ journey; his own pork barrel was quite empty, and his blankets worn. He half smiled, extended his long arms in a decided yawn, and turned back into his cabin to go to bed. Then he cast a final glance around the interior. Everything was all right; his loaded rifle stood against the wall; he had just raked ashes over the embers of his fire to keep it intact till morning. Only one thing slightly troubled him; a grizzly bear, two-thirds grown, but only half tamed, which had been given to him by a young lady named “Miggles,” when that charming and historic girl had decided to accompany her paralytic lover to the San Francisco hospital, was missing that evening. It had been its regular habit to come to the door every night for some sweet biscuit or sugar before going to its lair in the underbrush behind the cabin. Everybody knew it along the length and breadth of Hemlock Ridge, as well as the fact of its being a legacy from the fair exile. No rifle had ever yet been raised against its lazy bulk or the stupid, small-eyed head and ruff of circling hairs made more erect by its well-worn leather collar. Consoling himself with the thought that the storm had probably delayed its return, Jack took off his coat and threw it on his bunk. But from thinking of the storm his thoughts naturally returned again to the impeded travelers below him, and he half mechanically stepped out in his shirt-sleeves for a final look at them.
But here something occurred that changed his resolution entirely. He had previously noticed only the three foreshortened, crawling figures around the now stationary wagon bulk. They were now apparently making arrangements to camp for the night. But another figure had been added to the group, and as it stood perched upon a wagon seat laid on the snow Jack could see that its outline was not bifurcated like the others. But even that general suggestion was not needed! the little head, the symmetrical curves visible even at that distance, were quite enough to indicate that it was a woman! The easy smile faded from Jack’s face, and was succeeded by a look of concern and then of resignation. He had no choice now; he MUST go! There was a woman there, and that settled it. Yet he had arrived at this conclusion from no sense of gallantry, nor, indeed, of chivalrous transport, but as a matter of simple duty to the sex. He was giving up his sleep, was going down six hundred feet of steep trail to offer his services during the rest of the night as much as a matter of course as an Eastern man would have offered his seat in an omnibus to a woman, and with as little expectation of return for his courtesy.
Having resumed his coat, with a bottle of whiskey thrust into its pocket, he put on a pair of india-rubber boots reaching to his thighs, and, catching the blanket from his bunk, started with an axe and shovel on his shoulder on his downward journey. When the distance was half completed he shouted to the travelers below; the cry was joyously answered by the three men; he saw the fourth figure, now unmistakably that of a slender youthful woman, in a cloak, helped back into the wagon, as if deliverance was now sure and immediate. But Jack on arriving speedily dissipated that illusive hope; they could only get through the gorge by taking off the wheels of the wagon, placing the axle on rude sledge-runners of split saplings, which, with their assistance, he would fashion in a couple of hours at his cabin and bring down to the gorge. The only other alternative would be for them to come to his cabin and remain there while he went for assistance to the nearest station, but that would take several hours and necessitate a double journey for the sledge if he was lucky enough to find one. The party quickly acquiesced in Jack’s first suggestion.
“Very well,” said Jack, “then there’s no time to be lost; unhitch your horses and we’ll dig a hole in that bank for them to stand in out of the snow.” This was speedily done. “Now,” continued Jack, “you’ll just follow me up to my cabin; it’s a pretty tough climb, but I’ll want your help to bring down the runners.”
Here the man who seemed to be the head of the party—of middle age and a superior, professional type—for the first time hesitated. “I forgot to say that there is a lady with us,—my daughter,” he began, glancing towards the wagon.
“I reckoned as much,” interrupted Jack simply, “and I allowed to carry her up myself the roughest part of the way. She kin make herself warm and comf’ble in the cabin until we’ve got the runners ready.”
“You hear what our friend says, Amy?” suggested the gentleman, appealingly, to the closed leather curtains of the wagon.
There was a pause. The curtain was suddenly drawn aside, and a charming little head and shoulders, furred to the throat and topped with a bewitching velvet cap, were thrust out. In the obscurity little could be seen of the girl’s features, but there was a certain willfulness and impatience in her attitude. Being in the shadow, she had the advantage of the others, particularly of Jack, as his figure was fully revealed in the moonlight against the snowbank. Her eyes rested for a moment on his high boots, his heavy mustache, so long as to mingle with the unkempt locks which fell over his broad shoulders, on his huge red hands streaked with black grease from the wagon wheels, and some blood, stanched with snow, drawn from bruises in cutting out brambles in the brush; on—more awful than all—a monstrous, shiny “specimen” gold ring encircling one of his fingers,—on the whiskey bottle that shamelessly bulged from his side pocket, and then—slowly dropped her dissatisfied eyelids.
“Why can’t I stay HERE?” she said languidly. “It’s quite nice and comfortable.”
“Because we can’t leave you alone, and we must go with this gentleman to help him.”
Miss Amy let the tail of her eye again creep shudderingly over this impossible Jack. “I thought the—the gentleman was going to help US,” she said dryly.
“Nonsense, Amy, you don’t understand,” said her father impatiently. “This gentleman is kind enough to offer to make some sledge-runners for us at his cabin, and we must help him.”
“But I can stay here while you go. I’m not afraid.”
“Yes, but you’re ALONE here, and something might happen.”
“Nothing could happen,” interrupted Jack, quickly and cheerfully. He had flushed at first, but he was now considering that the carrying of a lady as expensively attired and apparently as delicate and particular as this one might be somewhat difficult. “There’s nothin’ that would hurt ye here,” he continued, addressing the velvet cap and furred throat in the darkness, “and if there was it couldn’t get at ye, bein’, so to speak, in the same sort o’ fix as you. So you’re all right,” he added positively.
Inconsistently enough, the young lady did not accept this as gratefully as might have been imagined, but Jack did not see the slight flash of her eye as, ignoring him, she replied markedly to her father, “I’d much rather stop here, papa.”
“And,” continued Jack, turning also to her father, “you can keep the wagon and the whole gorge in sight from the trail all the way up. So you can see that everything’s all right. Why, I saw YOU from the first.” He stopped awkwardly, and added, “Come along; the sooner we’re off the quicker the job’s over.”
“Pray don’t delay the gentleman and—the job,” said Miss Amy sweetly.
Reassured by Jack’s last suggestion, her father followed him with the driver and the second man of the party, a youngish and somewhat undistinctive individual, but to whose gallant anxieties Miss Amy responded effusively. Nevertheless, the young lady had especially noted Jack’s confession that he had seen them when they first entered the gorge. “And I suppose,” she added to herself mentally, “that he sat there with his boozing companions, laughing and jeering at our struggles.”
But when the sound of her companions’ voices died away, and their figures were swallowed up in the darkness behind the snow, she forgot all this, and much else that was mundane and frivolous, in the impressive and majestic solitude which seemed to descend upon her from the obscurity above.
At first it was accompanied with a slight thrill of vague fear, but this passed presently into that profound peace which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed children. It seemed to her that Nature was never the same, on the great plains where men and cities always loomed into such ridiculous proportions, as when the Great Mother raised herself to comfort them with smiling hillsides, or encompassed them and drew them closer in the loving arms of her mountains. The long white canada stretched before her in a purity that did not seem of the earth; the vague bulk of the mountains rose on either side of her in a mystery that was not of this life. Yet it was not oppressive; neither was its restfulness and quiet suggestive of obliviousness and slumber; on the contrary, the highly rarefied air seemed to give additional keenness to her senses; her hearing had become singularly acute; her eyesight pierced the uttermost extremity of the gorge, lit by the full moon that occasionally shone through slowly drifting clouds. Her nerves thrilled with a delicious sense of freedom and a strange desire to run or climb. It seemed to her, in her exalted fancy, that these solitudes should be peopled only by a kingly race, and not by such gross and material churls as this mountaineer who helped them. And, I grieve to say,—writing of an idealist that WAS, and a heroine that IS to be,—she was getting outrageously hungry.
There were a few biscuits in her traveling-bag, and she remembered that she had been presented with a small jar of California honey at San Jose. This she took out and opened on the seat before her, and spreading the honey on the biscuits, ate them with a keen schoolgirl relish and a pleasant suggestion of a sylvan picnic in spite of the cold. It was all very strange; quite an experience for her to speak of afterwards. People would hardly believe that she had spent an hour or two, all alone, in a deserted wagon in a mountain snow pass. It was an adventure such as one reads of in the magazines. Only something was lacking which the magazines always supplied,—something heroic, something done by somebody. If that awful-looking mountaineer—that man with the long hair and mustache, and that horrible gold ring,—why such a ring?—was only different! But he was probably gorging beefsteak or venison with her father and Mr. Waterhouse,—men were always such selfish creatures!—and had quite forgotten all about her. It would have been only decent for them to have brought her down something hot; biscuits and honey were certainly cloying, and somehow didn’t agree with the temperature. She was really half starved! And much they cared! It would just serve them right if something DID happen to her,—or SEEM to happen to her,—if only to frighten them. And the pretty face that was turned up in the moonlight wore a charming but decided pout.
Good gracious, what was that? The horses were either struggling or fighting in their snow shelters. Then one with a frightened neigh broke from its halter and dashed into the road, only to be plunged snorting and helpless into the drifts. Then the other followed. How silly! Something had frightened them. Perhaps only a rabbit or a mole; horses were such absurdly nervous creatures! However, it is just as well; somebody would see them or hear them,—that neigh was quite human and awful,—and they would hurry down to see what was the matter. SHE couldn’t be expected to get out and look after the horses in the snow. Anyhow, she WOULDN’T! She was a good deal safer where she was; it might have been rats or mice about that frightened them! Goodness!
She was still watching with curious wonder the continued fright of the animals, when suddenly she felt the wagon half bumped, half lifted from behind. It was such a lazy, deliberate movement that for a moment she thought it came from the party, who had returned noiselessly with the runners. She scrambled over to the back seat, unbuttoned the leather curtain, lifted it, but nothing was to be seen. Consequently, with feminine quickness, she said, “I see you perfectly, Mr. Waterhouse—don’t be silly!” But at this moment there was another shock to the wagon, and from beneath it arose what at first seemed to her to be an uplifting of the drift itself, but, as the snow was shaken away from its heavy bulk, proved to be the enormous head and shoulders of a bear!
Yet even then she was not WHOLLY frightened, for the snout that confronted her had a feeble inoffensiveness; the small eyes were bright with an eager, almost childish curiosity rather than a savage ardor, and the whole attitude of the creature lifted upon its hind legs was circus-like and ludicrous rather than aggressive. She was enabled to say with some dignity, “Go away! Shoo!” and to wave her luncheon basket at it with exemplary firmness. But here the creature laid one paw on the back seat as if to steady itself, with the singular effect of collapsing the whole side of the wagon, and then opened its mouth as if in some sort of inarticulate reply. But the revelation of its red tongue, its glistening teeth, and, above all, the hot, suggestive fume of its breath, brought the first scream from the lips of Miss Amy. It was real and convincing; the horses joined in it; the three screamed together! The bear hesitated for an instant, then, catching sight of the honey-pot on the front seat, which the shrinking-back of the young girl had disclosed, he slowly reached forward his other paw and attempted to grasp it. This exceedingly simple movement, however, at once doubled up the front seat, sent the honey-pot a dozen feet into the air, and dropped Miss Amy upon her knees in the bed of the wagon. The combined mental and physical shock was too much for her; she instantly and sincerely fainted; the last thing in her ears amidst this wreck of matter being the “wheep” of a bullet and the sharp crack of a rifle.
