Rich men's children

The cold of foot-hill California in the month of January held the night. The occupants of the surrey were too cramped and stiffened by it, and too uncomfortably enwrapped against it, to speak. Silence as complete as that which lay like a spell on the landscape brooded over them. At the last stopping place, Chinese Gulch, a scattering of houses six miles behind them on the mountain road, they had halted at the main saloon, and whisky and water had been passed to the driver and to the burlier figure on the back seat. The watchers that thronged to the saloon door had eyed the third occupant of the carriage with the intent, sheepish curiosity of the isolated man in presence of the stranger female. Afterward, each one was voluble in his impressions of her face, pale in the smoky lamplight, and the hand that slid, small and white, out of its loose glove when the warming glass was offered her.

Since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several corners and preserved an unbroken silence. Even the driver’s tongue had showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his fares, gradually languished and died.

The surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. The solemn loneliness of the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars, seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing stillness. There was not a sign of human life. The gray patches of fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. The domes of the live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces. Steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. Over all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions and Nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown telegraphy, from illimitable distances.

The larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion.

“Hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars.

“Fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited the more diminutive bulk.

“Get a move on, Jake,” to the driver. “This girl’s most famished.”

“Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”

At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.

“So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?”

The driver chuckled.

“That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.”

“No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”

“Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from New York?”

“She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before she was ever thought of.”

A loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached houses of the settlement. Shapes appeared at the lighted doorways, and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads was seen in the windows. The entire population of Rocky Bar spent its evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting and smoking in cheery sociability. But at this hour the great event of Rocky Bar’s day was over. The eight stages, the passengers of which dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the Sierra. That the nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a late arrival in a surrey, driven by Jake McVeigh, the proprietor of the San Jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational event not often awarded to Rocky Bar, even in the heyday of summer-time.

The occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed themselves against the windows. They saw that the man who alighted was a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. Of the lady, shown but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline and a glint of fair hair were discernible. But, anyway, it was a woman, and of a kind unusual in Rocky Bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful admiration.

The hotel proprietor, an ancient man with a loosened vest, and trousers tucked into long boots, dispersed them as he ushered the strangers into the office. That they were travelers of distinction was obvious, as much from their own appearance as from the fact that Jake McVeigh was driving them himself, in his best surrey and with his finest team. But just how important they were no one guessed till McVeigh followed them in, and into ears stretched for the information dropped the sentence, half-heard, like a stage aside:

“It’s Bill Cannon and his daughter Rose.”

Upon the proprietor it had an electric effect. He sped from the room with the alertness of youth, promising “a cold lunch” in a minute. To the others it came as a piece of intelligence that added awe to the lighter emotions of the occasion. By common consent their eyes focused on the great man who stood warming his hands at the stove. Even the rare, unusual woman, revealed now as sufficiently pretty to be an object of future dreams, was interesting only to the younger and more impressionable members of the throng. All but these gazed absorbed, unblinking, at Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King.

He was used to it. It had been a part of his life for years. Eying his admirers with a genial good humor, he entered into conversation with them, his manner marked by an easy familiarity, which swept away all shades of embarrassment, and drew the men around the stove, eager to respond to his questions as to the condition and prospects of the locality. The talk was becoming general and animated, when the ancient man returned and announced that the “cold lunch” was ready and to please “step after him into the dining-room.”

This gaunt apartment, grimly unadorned and faintly illumined, an occasional lantern backed by a tin reflector projecting a feeble light into its echoing emptiness, was swept of all intruders, and showed a barn-like bareness of wall and loftiness of roof. Lines of tables, uncovered between flanking wooden benches, were arranged down its length. Across the end of one of these a white cloth was spread and three places set. Jake McVeigh, less innocently democratic than the hotel proprietor, was about to withdraw from the society of his distinguished patron and seat himself in seemly loneliness at an adjacent table, when Bill Cannon’s voice arrested him.

“What are you going off there for, sonny, as if you were a leper? Come over here and sit side of us.”

The driver, greatly pleased, not only to enjoy the companionship of the richest man in California but to let the peeping heads in the doorway see him in this moment of proud apotheosis, took the third seat with modest complacence. Like most of his kind, the sense of social inferiority was unknown to him. He was simply and naturally himself as he would be anywhere in any company. Even the proximity of Miss Cannon did not abash him, and he dexterously propelled the potatoes into his mouth with his knife and cut fiercely at his meat with a sawing motion, talking the while with all the freedom and more than the pleasure with which he talked to his wife in the kitchen at San Jacinto.

Cannon, his overcoat removed, was seen to be a powerful, thick-set man, with a bulkiness that was more a matter of broad build and muscular development than fat. His coat set ill upon him and strained at the buttons. It had the effect of having worked up toward the shoulders, noticeable in the clothes of men who are deep-chested and sit bunchily. He had a short neck which he accommodated with a turn-down collar, a gray beard, clipped close to his cheeks and square on the chin, and gray hair, worn rather long and combed sleekly and without parting back from his forehead. In age he was close to seventy, but the alertness and intelligence of a conquering energy and vitality were in his glance, and showed in his movements, deliberate, but sure and full of precision. He spoke little as he ate his dinner, leaning over his plate and responding to the remarks of his daughter with an occasional monosyllable that might have sounded curt, had it not been accompanied with a lazy cast of his eye upon her that was as full of affection as a caress.

The young lady, who had also put off her outer wraps, still wore her hat, which was wide-brimmed and cast a shadow over the upper part of her face. Below it her hair showed a fine, bright blonde, giving forth silky gleams in the lamplight. To the peeping heads in the doorway she seemed a creature instinct with romantic charm, which was expressed in such delicacies of appearance as a pearl-white throat, a rounded chin, and lips that smiled readily. These graces, eagerly deciphered through dimness and distance, had the attraction of the semi-seen, and imagination, thus given an encouraging fillip, invested Bill Cannon’s girl with a haunting beauty. It was remarked that she bore no resemblance to her father in coloring, features, or build. In talking it over later, Rocky Bar decided that she must favor her mother, who, as all California knew, had been a waitress in the Yuba Hotel at Marysville, when Bill Cannon, then a miner in the Freeze-Out, had wooed and won her.

The conversation between the diners was desultory. They were beyond doubt hungry. Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semicircle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught McVeigh’s, and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.

It was toward the end of the meal, that, looking at the opposite wall, her glance was caught by a large clock to which she drew her father’s attention: