In the Carquinez Woods

Bret Harte

In the Carquinez Woods

CHAPTER I

The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods. The few shafts of sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in unfathomable depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on the enormous trunks of the redwoods. For a time the dull red of their vast columns, and the dull red of their cast-off bark which matted the echoless aisles, still seemed to hold a faint glow of the dying day. But even this soon passed. Light and color fled upwards. The dark interlaced treetops, that had all day made an impenetrable shade, broke into fire here and there; their lost spires glittered, faded, and went utterly out. A weird twilight that did not come from the outer world, but seemed born of the wood itself, slowly filled and possessed the aisles. The straight, tall, colossal trunks rose dimly like columns of upward smoke. The few fallen trees stretched their huge length into obscurity, and seemed to lie on shadowy trestles. The strange breath that filled these mysterious vaults had neither coldness nor moisture; a dry, fragrant dust arose from the noiseless foot that trod their bark-strewn floor; the aisles might have been tombs, the fallen trees enormous mummies; the silence the solitude of a forgotten past.

And yet this silence was presently broken by a recurring sound like breathing, interrupted occasionally by inarticulate and stertorous gasps. It was not the quick, panting, listening breath of some stealthy feline or canine animal, but indicated a larger, slower, and more powerful organization, whose progress was less watchful and guarded, or as if a fragment of one of the fallen monsters had become animate. At times this life seemed to take visible form, but as vaguely, as misshapenly, as the phantom of a nightmare. Now it was a square object moving sideways, endways, with neither head nor tail and scarcely visible feet; then an arched bulk rolling against the trunks of the trees and recoiling again, or an upright cylindrical mass, but always oscillating and unsteady, and striking the trees on either hand. The frequent occurrence of the movement suggested the figures of some weird rhythmic dance to music heard by the shape alone. Suddenly it either became motionless or faded away.

There was the frightened neighing of a horse, the sudden jingling of spurs, a shout and outcry, and the swift apparition of three dancing torches in one of the dark aisles; but so intense was the obscurity that they shed no light on surrounding objects, and seemed to advance of their own volition without human guidance, until they disappeared suddenly behind the interposing bulk of one of the largest trees. Beyond its eighty feet of circumference the light could not reach, and the gloom remained inscrutable. But the voices and jingling spurs were heard distinctly.

“Blast the mare! She’s shied off that cursed trail again.”

“Ye ain’t lost it again, hev ye?” growled a second voice.

“That’s jist what I hev. And these blasted pine-knots don’t give light an inch beyond ‘em. D—d if I don’t think they make this cursed hole blacker.”

There was a laugh—a woman’s laugh—hysterical, bitter, sarcastic, exasperating. The second speaker, without heeding it, went on:—

“What in thunder skeert the hosses? Did you see or hear anything?”

“Nothin’. The wood is like a graveyard.”

The woman’s voice again broke into a hoarse, contemptuous laugh. The man resumed angrily:—

“If you know anything, why in h-ll don’t you say so, instead of cackling like a d—d squaw there? P’raps you reckon you ken find the trail too.”

“Take this rope off my wrist,” said the woman’s voice, “untie my hands, let me down, and I’ll find it.” She spoke quickly and with a Spanish accent.

It was the men’s turn to laugh. “And give you a show to snatch that six-shooter and blow a hole through me, as you did to the Sheriff of Calaveras, eh? Not if this court understands itself,” said the first speaker dryly.

“Go to the devil, then,” she said curtly.

“Not before a lady,” responded the other. There was another laugh from the men, the spurs jingled again, the three torches reappeared from behind the tree, and then passed away in the darkness.

For a time silence and immutability possessed the woods; the great trunks loomed upwards, their fallen brothers stretched their slow length into obscurity. The sound of breathing again became audible; the shape reappeared in the aisle, and recommenced its mystic dance. Presently it was lost in the shadow of the largest tree, and to the sound of breathing succeeded a grating and scratching of bark. Suddenly, as if riven by lightning, a flash broke from the center of the tree-trunk, lit up the woods, and a sharp report rang through it. After a pause the jingling of spurs and the dancing of torches were revived from the distance.

“Hallo?”

No answer.

“Who fired that shot?”

But there was no reply. A slight veil of smoke passed away to the right, there was the spice of gunpowder in the air, but nothing more.

The torches came forward again, but this time it could be seen they were held in the hands of two men and a woman. The woman’s hands were tied at the wrist to the horse-hair reins of her mule, while a riata, passed around her waist and under the mule’s girth, was held by one of the men, who were both armed with rifles and revolvers. Their frightened horses curveted, and it was with difficulty they could be made to advance.

“Ho! stranger, what are you shooting at?”

The woman laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Look yonder at the roots of the tree. You’re a d—d smart man for a sheriff, ain’t you?”

The man uttered an exclamation and spurred his horse forward, but the animal reared in terror. He then sprang to the ground and approached the tree. The shape lay there, a scarcely distinguishable bulk.

“A grizzly, by the living Jingo! Shot through the heart.”

It was true. The strange shape lit up by the flaring torches seemed more vague, unearthly, and awkward in its dying throes, yet the small shut eyes, the feeble nose, the ponderous shoulders, and half-human foot armed with powerful claws were unmistakable. The men turned by a common impulse and peered into the remote recesses of the wood again.

“Hi, Mister! come and pick up your game. Hallo there!”

The challenge fell unheeded on the empty woods.

“And yet,” said he whom the woman had called the sheriff, “he can’t be far off. It was a close shot, and the bear hez dropped in his tracks. Why, wot’s this sticking in his claws?”

The two men bent over the animal. “Why, it’s sugar, brown sugar—look!” There was no mistake. The huge beast’s fore paws and muzzle were streaked with the unromantic household provision, and heightened the absurd contrast of its incongruous members. The woman, apparently indifferent, had taken that opportunity to partly free one of her wrists.

“If we hadn’t been cavorting round this yer spot for the last half hour, I’d swear there was a shanty not a hundred yards away,” said the sheriff.

The other man, without replying, remounted his horse instantly.

“If there is, and it’s inhabited by a gentleman that kin make centre shots like that in the dark, and don’t care to explain how, I reckon I won’t disturb him.”

The sheriff was apparently of the same opinion, for he followed his companion’s example, and once more led the way. The spurs tinkled, the torches danced, and the cavalcade slowly reentered the gloom. In another moment it had disappeared.

The wood sank again into repose, this time disturbed by neither shape nor sound. What lower forms of life might have crept close to its roots were hidden in the ferns, or passed with deadened tread over the bark-strewn floor. Towards morning a coolness like dew fell from above, with here and there a dropping twig or nut, or the crepitant awakening and stretching-out of cramped and weary branches. Later a dull, lurid dawn, not unlike the last evening’s sunset, filled the aisles. This faded again, and a clear gray light, in which every object stood out in sharp distinctness, took its place. Morning was waiting outside in all its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured and sobered day.

Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the dead bear lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk, and showed in its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the ground, partly hidden by hanging strips of bark which had fallen across it. Suddenly one of these strips was pushed aside, and a young man leaped lightly down.

But for the rifle he carried and some modern peculiarities of dress, he was of a grace so unusual and unconventional that he might have passed for a faun who was quitting his ancestral home. He stepped to the side of the bear with a light elastic movement that was as unlike customary progression as his face and figure were unlike the ordinary types of humanity. Even as he leaned upon his rifle, looking down at the prostrate animal, he unconsciously fell into an attitude that in any other mortal would have been a pose, but with him was the picturesque and unstudied relaxation of perfect symmetry.

“Hallo, Mister!”

He raised his head so carelessly and listlessly that he did not otherwise change his attitude. Stepping from behind the tree, the woman of the preceding night stood before him. Her hands were free except for a thong of the riata, which was still knotted around one wrist, the end of the thong having been torn or burnt away. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair hung over her shoulders in one long black braid.

“I reckoned all along it was YOU who shot the bear,” she said; “at least some one hiding yer,” and she indicated the hollow tree with her hand. “It wasn’t no chance shot.” Observing that the young man, either from misconception or indifference, did not seem to comprehend her, she added, “We came by here, last night, a minute after you fired.”

“Oh, that was YOU kicked up such a row, was it?” said the young man, with a shade of interest.

“I reckon,” said the woman, nodding her head, “and them that was with me.”

“And who are they?”

“Sheriff Dunn, of Yolo, and his deputy.”

“And where are they now?”

“The deputy—in h-ll, I reckon; I don’t know about the sheriff.”

“I see,” said the young man quietly; “and you?”

“I—got away,” she said savagely. But she was taken with a sudden nervous shiver, which she at once repressed by tightly dragging her shawl over her shoulders and elbows, and folding her arms defiantly.

“And you’re going?”

“To follow the deputy, may be,” she said gloomily. “But come, I say, ain’t you going to treat? It’s cursed cold here.”

“Wait a moment.” The young man was looking at her, with his arched brows slightly knit and a half smile of curiosity. “Ain’t you Teresa?”

She was prepared for the question, but evidently was not certain whether she would reply defiantly or confidently. After an exhaustive scrutiny of his face she chose the latter, and said, “You can bet your life on it, Johnny.”

“I don’t bet, and my name isn’t Johnny. Then you’re the woman who stabbed Dick Curson over at Lagrange’s?”

She became defiant again.

“That’s me, all the time. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. And you used to dance at the Alhambra?” She whisked the shawl from her shoulders, held it up like a scarf, and made one or two steps of the sembicuacua. There was not the least gayety, recklessness, or spontaneity in the action; it was simply mechanical bravado. It was so ineffective, even upon her own feelings, that her arms presently dropped to her side, and she coughed embarrassedly. “Where’s that whiskey, pardner?” she asked.

The young man turned toward the tree he had just quitted, and without further words assisted her to mount to the cavity. It was an irregular-shaped vaulted chamber, pierced fifty feet above by a shaft or cylindrical opening in the decayed trunk, which was blackened by smoke, as if it had served the purpose of a chimney. In one corner lay a bearskin and blanket; at the side were two alcoves or indentations, one of which was evidently used as a table, and the other as a cupboard. In another hollow, near the entrance, lay a few small sacks of flour, coffee, and sugar, the sticky contents of the latter still strewing the floor. From this storehouse the young man drew a wicker flask of whiskey, and handed it, with a tin cup of water, to the woman. She waved the cup aside, placed the flask to her lips, and drank the undiluted spirit. Yet even this was evidently bravado, for the water started to her eyes, and she could not restrain the paroxysm of coughing that followed.

“I reckon that’s the kind that kills at forty rods,” she said, with a hysterical laugh. “But I say, pardner, you look as if you were fixed here to stay,” and she stared ostentatiously around the chamber. But she had already taken in its minutest details, even to observing that the hanging strips of bark could be disposed so as to completely hide the entrance.

“Well, yes,” he replied; “it wouldn’t be very easy to pull up the stakes and move the shanty further on.”

Seeing that either from indifference or caution he had not accepted her meaning, she looked at him fixedly, and said,—

“What is your little game?”

“Eh?”

“What are you hiding for—here, in this tree?”

“But I’m not hiding.”

“Then why didn’t you come out when they hailed you last night?”

“Because I didn’t care to.”

Teresa whistled incredulously. “All right—then if you’re not hiding, I’m going to.” As he did not reply, she went on: “If I can keep out of sight for a couple of weeks, this thing will blow over here, and I can get across into Yolo. I could get a fair show there, where the boys know me. Just now the trails are all watched, but no one would think of lookin’ here.”

“Then how did you come to think of it?” he asked carelessly.

“Because I knew that bear hadn’t gone far for that sugar; because I know he hadn’t stole it from a cache—it was too fresh, and we’d have seen the torn-up earth; because we had passed no camp; and because I knew there was no shanty here. And, besides,” she added in a low voice, “maybe I was huntin’ a hole myself to die in—and spotted it by instinct.”

There was something in this suggestion of a hunted animal that, unlike anything she had previously said or suggested, was not exaggerated, and caused the young man to look at her again. She was standing under the chimney-like opening, and the light from above illuminated her head and shoulders. The pupils of her eyes had lost their feverish prominence, and were slightly suffused and softened as she gazed abstractedly before her. The only vestige of her previous excitement was in her left-hand fingers, which were incessantly twisting and turning a diamond ring upon her right hand, but without imparting the least animation to her rigid attitude. Suddenly, as if conscious of his scrutiny, she stepped aside out of the revealing light and by a swift feminine instinct raised her hand to her head as if to adjust her straggling hair. It was only for a moment, however, for, as if aware of the weakness, she struggled to resume her aggressive pose.

“Well,” she said. “Speak up. Am I goin’ to stop here, or have I got to get up and get?”

“You can stay,” said the young man quietly; “but as I’ve got my provisions and ammunition here, and haven’t any other place to go to just now, I suppose we’ll have to share it together.”

She glanced at him under her eyelids, and a half-bitter, half-contemptuous smile passed across her face. “All right, old man,” she said, holding out her hand, “it’s a go. We’ll start in housekeeping at once, if you like.”

“I’ll have to come here once or twice a day,” he said, quite composedly, “to look after my things, and get something to eat; but I’ll be away most of the time, and what with camping out under the trees every night I reckon my share won’t incommode you.”

She opened her black eyes upon him, at this original proposition. Then she looked down at her torn dress. “I suppose this style of thing ain’t very fancy, is it?” she said, with a forced laugh.

“I think I know where to beg or borrow a change for you, if you can’t get any,” he replied simply.

She stared at him again. “Are you a family man?”

“No.”

She was silent for a moment. “Well,” she said, “you can tell your girl I’m not particular about its being in the latest fashion.”

There was a slight flush on his forehead as he turned toward the little cupboard, but no tremor in his voice as he went on: “You’ll find tea and coffee here, and, if you’re bored, there’s a book or two. You read, don’t you—I mean English?”

She nodded, but cast a look of undisguised contempt upon the two worn, coverless novels he held out to her. “You haven’t got last week’s ‘Sacramento Union,’ have you? I hear they have my case all in; only them lying reporters made it out against me all the time.”

“I don’t see the papers,” he replied curtly.

“They say there’s a picture of me in the ‘Police Gazette,’ taken in the act,” and she laughed.

He looked a little abstracted, and turned as if to go. “I think you’ll do well to rest a while just now, and keep as close hid as possible until afternoon. The trail is a mile away at the nearest point, but some one might miss it and stray over here. You’re quite safe if you’re careful, and stand by the tree. You can build a fire here,” he stepped under the chimney-like opening, “without its being noticed. Even the smoke is lost and cannot be seen so high.”

The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it had on hers. She looked at him intently.

“You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don’t you?” she said, with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality; “but I don’t see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods. So you’re going, are you? You might be more sociable. Good-by.”

“Good-by!” He leaped from the opening.

“I say pardner!”

He turned a little impatiently. She had knelt down at the entrance, so as to be nearer his level, and was holding out her hand. But he did not notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.

“If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?”

He smiled. “Don’t wait to hear.”

“But suppose I wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?”

He hesitated. “Call me—Lo.”

“Lo, the poor Indian?” 1

“Exactly.”

It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young man’s height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular gravity of demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion. He did not look like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as a youthful chief might have looked. There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin shirt and moccasins; but before she could utter the half-sarcastic comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as an Indian might have done.

She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity, dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance. Yet this did not darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous light through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof than that which came from the dim woodland aisles below. Nevertheless, she shivered, and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth. When she had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern, and became motionless.

What did she see through that shadow?

Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that would not have happened but for another thing—the thing before which everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she had cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse, jilted. And then the moment of delirium, when the light danced; the one wild act that lifted her, the despised one, above them all—made her the supreme figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by half-startled, half-admiring men! “Yes,” she laughed; but struck by the sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern nervously, and then dropped again into her old position.

As they carried him away he had laughed at her—like a hound that he was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her revenge against others; he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted; and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown. She was what he, what other men, had made her. And what was she now? What had she been once?

She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might have been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her precocious little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either; and then left her with a circus troupe, where she first tasted the power of her courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those flashes of triumph that left a fever in her veins—a fever that when it failed must be stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything that would keep her name a wonder in men’s mouths, an envious fear to women. She recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap pleasures, and cheaper rivalries and hatred—but always Teresa! the daring Teresa! the reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman, invincible as a boy; dancing, flirting, fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting Teresa! “Oh, yes; she had been loved, perhaps—who knows?—but always feared. Why should she change now? Ha, he should see.”

She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with gestures, ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate apostrophes, but with this strange and unexpected result. Heretofore she had always been sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality, if only perhaps a humble companion; there had always been some one she could fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had been something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic solitude; she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening, dashed the hanging bark aside, and leaped to the ground.

She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.

“Hallo!” she cried. “Look, ‘tis I, Teresa!”

The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared austerities of the vaults around her.

“Come and take me if you dare!”

The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more breathless than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that encompassed her. The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her rage of the previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility. Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she trembled and turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed to her less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous witnesses of her weakness. Like a wounded quail with lowered crest and trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding place.

Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her. She picked up the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside, only to let it fall again in utter weariness. For a moment her feminine curiosity was excited by the discovery of an old book, in whose blank leaves were pressed a variety of flowers and woodland grasses. As she could not conceive that these had been kept for any but a sentimental purpose, she was disappointed to find that underneath each was a sentence in an unknown tongue, that even to her untutored eye did not appear to be the language of passion. Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and blankets, and, imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely different character, lay down to pursue her reveries. But nature asserted herself, and ere she knew it she was asleep.