From Sand Hill to Pine

Bret Harte

From Sand Hill to Pine

A NIECE OF SNAPSHOT HARRY’S

I

There was a slight jarring though the whole frame of the coach, a grinding and hissing from the brakes, and then a sudden jolt as the vehicle ran upon and recoiled from the taut pole-straps of the now arrested horses. The murmur of a voice in the road was heard, followed by the impatient accents of Yuba Bill, the driver.

“Wha-a-t? Speak up, can’t ye?”

Here the voice uttered something in a louder key, but equally unintelligible to the now interested and fully awakened passengers.

One of them dropped the window nearest him and looked out. He could see the faint glistening of a rain-washed lantern near the wheelers’ heads, mingling with the stronger coach lights, and the glow of a distant open cabin door through the leaves and branches of the roadside. The sound of falling rain on the roof, a soft swaying of wind-tossed trees, and an impatient movement on the box-seat were all they heard. Then Yuba Bill’s voice rose again, apparently in answer to the other.

“Why, that’s half a mile away!”

“Yes, but ye might have dropped onto it in the dark, and it’s all on the down grade,” responded the strange voice more audibly.

The passengers were now thoroughly aroused.

“What’s up, Ned?” asked the one at the window of the nearest of two figures that had descended from the box.

“Tree fallen across the road,” said Ned, the expressman, briefly.

“I don’t see no tree,” responded the passenger, leaning out of the window towards the obscurity ahead.

“Now, that’s onfortnit!” said Yuba Bill grimly; “but ef any gentleman will only lend him an opery glass, mebbe he can see round the curve and over the other side o’ the hill where it is. Now, then,” addressing the stranger with the lantern, “bring along your axes, can’t ye?”

“Here’s one, Bill,” said an officious outside passenger, producing the instrument he had taken from its strap in the boot. It was the “regulation” axe, beautifully shaped, highly polished, and utterly ineffective, as Bill well knew.

“We ain’t cuttin’ no kindlin’s,” he said scornfully; then he added brusquely to the stranger: “Fetch out your biggest wood axe—you’ve got one, ye know—and look sharp.”

“I don’t think Bill need be so d–d rough with the stranger, considering he’s saved the coach a very bad smash,” suggested a reflective young journalist in the next seat. “He talks as if the man was responsible.”

“He ain’t quite sure if that isn’t the fact,” said the express messenger, in a lowered voice.

“Why? What do you mean?” clamored the others excitedly.

“Well—THIS is about the spot where the up coach was robbed six months ago,” returned the messenger.

“Dear me!” said the lady in the back seat, rising with a half hysterical laugh, “hadn’t we better get out before they come?”

“There is not the slightest danger, madam,” said a quiet, observant man, who had scarcely spoken before, “or the expressman would not have told us; nor would he, I fancy, have left his post beside the treasure on the box.”

The slight sarcasm implied in this was enough to redden the expressman’s cheek in the light of the coach lamp which Yuba Bill had just unshipped and brought to the window. He would have made some tart rejoinder, but was prevented by Yuba Bill addressing the passengers: “Ye’ll have to put up with ONE light, I reckon, until we’ve got this job finished.”

“How long will it last, Bill?” asked the man nearest the window.

“Well,” said Bill, with a contemptuous glance at the elegant coach axe he was carrying in his hand, “considerin’ these purty first-class highly expensive hash choppers that the kempany furnishes us, I reckon it may take an hour.”

“But is there no place where we can wait?” asked the lady anxiously. “I see a light in that house yonder.”

“Ye might try it, though the kempany, as a rule, ain’t in the habit o’ makin’ social calls there,” returned Bill, with a certain grim significance. Then, turning to some outside passengers, he added, “Now, then! them ez is goin’ to help me tackle that tree, trot down! I reckon that blitherin’ idiot” (the stranger with the lantern, who had disappeared) “will have sense enough to fetch us some ropes with his darned axe.”

The passengers thus addressed, apparently miners and workingmen, good humoredly descended, all except one, who seemed disinclined to leave the much coveted seat on the box beside the driver.

“I’ll look after your places and keep my own,” he said, with a laugh, as the others followed Bill through the dripping rain. When they had disappeared, the young journalist turned to the lady.

“If you would really like to go to that house, I will gladly accompany you.” It was possible that in addition to his youthful chivalry there was a little youthful resentment of Yuba Bill’s domineering prejudices in his attitude. However, the quiet, observant passenger lifted a look of approval to him, and added, in his previous level, half contemptuous tone:—

“You’ll be quite as well there as here, madam, and there is certainly no reason for your stopping in the coach when the driver chooses to leave it.”

The passengers looked at each other. The stranger spoke with authority, and Bill had certainly been a little arbitrary!

“I’ll go too,” said the passenger by the window. “And you’ll come, won’t you, Ned?” he added to the express messenger. The young man hesitated; he was recently appointed, and as yet fresh to the business—but he was not to be taught his duty by an officious stranger! He resented the interference youthfully by doing the very thing he would have preferred NOT to do, and with assumed carelessness—yet feeling in his pocket to assure himself that the key of the treasure compartment was safe—turned to follow them.

“Won’t YOU come too?” said the journalist, politely addressing the cynical passenger.

“No, I thank you! I’ll take charge of the coach,” was the smiling rejoinder, as he settled himself more comfortably in his seat.

The little procession moved away in silence. Oddly enough, no one, except the lady, really cared to go, and two—the expressman and journalist—would have preferred to remain on the coach. But the national instinct of questioning any purely arbitrary authority probably was a sufficient impulse. As they neared the opened door of what appeared to be a four-roomed, unpainted, redwood boarded cabin, the passenger who had occupied the seat near the window said,—

“I’ll go first and sample the shanty.”

He was not, however, so far in advance of them but that the others could hear quite distinctly his offhand introduction of their party on the threshold, and the somewhat lukewarm response of the inmates. “We thought we’d just drop in and be sociable until the coach was ready to start again,” he continued, as the other passengers entered. “This yer gentleman is Ned Brice, Adams & Co.‘s expressman; this yer is Frank Frenshaw, editor of the ‘Mountain Banner;’ this yer’s a lady, so it ain’t necessary to give HER name, I reckon—even if we knowed it! Mine’s Sam Hexshill, of Hexshill & Dobbs’s Flour Mills, of Stockton, whar, ef you ever come that way, I’ll be happy to return the compliment and hospitality.”

The room they had entered had little of comfort and brightness in it except the fire of pine logs which roared and crackled in the adobe chimney. The air would have been too warm but for the strong west wind and rain which entered the open door freely. There was no other light than the fire, and its tremulous and ever-changing brilliancy gave a spasmodic mobility to the faces of those turned towards it, or threw into stronger shadow the features that were turned away. Yet, by this uncertain light, they could see the figures of a man and two women. The man rose and, with a certain apathetic gesture that seemed to partake more of weariness and long suffering than positive discourtesy, tendered seats on chairs, boxes, and even logs to the self-invited guests. The stage party were surprised to see that this man was the stranger who had held the lantern in the road.

“Ah! then you didn’t go with Bill to help clear the road?” said the expressman surprisedly.

The man slowly drew up his tall, shambling figure before the fire, and then facing them, with his hands behind him, as slowly lowered himself again as if to bring his speech to the level of his hearers and give a lazier and more deliberate effect to his long-drawn utterance.

“Well—no!” he said slowly. “I—didn’t—go—with—no—Bill—to—help—clear—the road! I—don’t—reckon—TO go—with—no—Bill—to—clear—ANY road! I’ve just whittled this thing down to a pint, and it’s this—I ain’t no stage kempany’s nigger! So far as turnin’ out and warnin’ ‘em agin goin’ to smash over a fallen tree, and slap down into the canyon with a passel of innercent passengers, I’m that much a white man, but I ain’t no NIGGER to work clearing things away for ‘em, nor I ain’t no scrub to work beside ‘em.” He slowly straightened himself up again, and, with his former apathetic air, looking down upon one of the women who was setting a coffee-pot on the coals, added, “But I reckon my old woman here kin give you some coffee and whiskey—of you keer for it.”

Unfortunately the young expressman was more loyal to Bill than diplomatic. “If Bill’s a little rough,” he said, with a heightened color, “perhaps he has some excuse for it. You forget it’s only six months ago that this coach was ‘held up’ not a hundred yards from this spot.”

The woman with the coffee-pot here faced about, stood up, and, either from design or some odd coincidence, fell into the same dogged attitude that her husband had previously taken, except that she rested her hands on her hips. She was prematurely aged, like many of her class, and her black, snake-like locks, twisting loose from her comb as she lifted her head, showed threads of white against the firelight. Then with slow and implacable deliberation she said:

“We ‘forget’! Well! not much, sonny! We ain’t forgot it, and we ain’t goin’ to forget it, neither! We ain’t bin likely to forget it for any time the last six months. What with visitations from the county constables, snoopin’s round from ‘Frisco detectives, droppin’s-in from newspaper men, and yawpin’s and starin’s from tramps and strangers on the road—we haven’t had a chance to disremember MUCH! And when at last Hiram tackled the head stage agent at Marysville, and allowed that this yer pesterin’ and persecutin’ had got ter stop—what did that yer head agent tell him? Told him to ‘shet his head,’ and be thankful that his ‘thievin’ old shanty wasn’t burnt down around his ears!’ Forget that six months ago the coach was held up near here? Not much, sonny—not much!”

The situation was embarrassing to the guests, as ordinary politeness called for some expression of sympathy with their gloomy hostess, and yet a selfish instinct of humanity warned them that there must be some foundation for this general distrust of the public. The journalist was troubled in his conscience; the expressman took refuge in an official reticence; the lady coughed slightly, and drew nearer to the fire with a vague but safe compliment to its brightness and comfort. It devolved upon Mr. Heckshill, who felt the responsibility of his late airy introduction of the party, to boldly keep up his role, with an equally non-committal, light-hearted philosophy.

“Well, ma’am,” he said, addressing his hostess, “it’s a queer world, and no man’s got sabe enough to say what’s the rights and wrongs o’ anything. Some folks believe one thing and act upon it, and other folks think differently and act upon THAT! The only thing ye kin safely say is that THINGS IS EZ THEY BE! My rule here and at the mill is jest to take things ez I find ‘em!”

It occurred to the journalist that Mr. Heckshill had the reputation, in his earlier career, of “taking” such things as unoccupied lands and timber “as he found them,” without much reference to their actual owners. Apparently he was acting upon the same principle now, as he reached for the demijohn of whiskey with the ingenuous pleasantry, “Did somebody say whiskey, or did I dream it?”

But this did not satisfy Frenshaw. “I suppose,” he said, ignoring Heckshill’s diplomatic philosophy, “that you may have been the victim of some misunderstanding or some unfortunate coincidence. Perhaps the company may have confounded you with your neighbors, who are believed to be friendly to the gang; or you may have made some injudicious acquaintances. Perhaps”—

He was stopped by a suppressed but not unmusical giggle, which appeared to come from the woman in the corner who had not yet spoken, and whose face and figure in the shadow he had previously overlooked. But he could now see that her outline was slim and graceful, and the contour of her head charming,—facts that had evidently not escaped the observation of the expressman and Mr. Heckshill, and that might have accounted for the cautious reticence of the one and the comfortable moralizing of the other.

The old woman cast an uneasy glance on the fair giggler, but replied to Frenshaw:

“That’s it! ‘injerdishus acquaintances!’ But just because we might happen to have friends, or even be sorter related to folks in another line o’ business that ain’t none o’ ours, the kempany hain’t no call to persecute US for it! S’pose we do happen to know some one like”—

“Spit it out, aunty, now you’ve started in! I don’t mind,” said the fair giggler, now apparently casting off all restraint in an outburst of laughter.

“Well,” said the old woman, with dogged desperation, “suppose, then, that that young girl thar is the niece of Snapshot Harry, who stopped the coach the last time”—

“And ain’t ashamed of it, either!” interrupted the young girl, rising and disclosing in the firelight an audacious but wonderfully pretty face; “and supposing he IS my uncle, that ain’t any cause for their bedevilin’ my poor old cousins Hiram and Sophy thar!” For all the indignation of her words, her little white teeth flashed mischievously in the dancing light, as if she rather enjoyed the embarrassment of her audience, not excluding her own relatives. Evidently cousin Sophy thought so too.

“It’s all very well for you to laugh, Flo, you limb!” she retorted querulously, yet with an admiring glance at the girl, “for ye know thar ain’t a man dare touch ye even with a word; but it’s mighty hard on me and Hiram, all the same.”

“Never you mind, Sophy dear,” said the girl, placing her hand half affectionately, half humorously on the old woman’s shoulder; “mebbe I won’t always be a discredit and a bother to you. Jest you hold your hosses, and wait until uncle Harry ‘holds up’ the next Pioneer Coach,”—the dancing devil in her eyes glanced as if accidentally on the young expressman,—“and he’ll make a big enough pile to send me to Europe, and you’ll be quit o’ me.”

The embarrassment, suspiciousness, and uneasiness of the coach party here found relief in a half hysteric explosion of laughter, in which even the dogged Hiram and Sophy joined. It seemed as impossible to withstand the girl’s invincible audacity as her beauty. She was quick to perceive her advantage, and, with a responsive laugh and a picturesque gesture of invitation, said:—

“Now that’s all settled, ye’d better waltz in and have your whiskey and coffee afore the stage starts. Ye kin comfort yourselves that it ain’t stolen or pizoned, even if it is served up to ye by Snapshot Harry’s niece!” With another easy gesture she swung the demijohn over her arm, and, offering a tin cup to each of the men, filled them in turn.

The ice thus broken, or perhaps thus perilously skated over, the passengers were as profuse in their thanks and apologies as they had been constrained and artificial before. Heckshill and Frenshaw vied with each other for a glance from the audacious Flo. If their compliments partook of an extravagance that was at times ironical, the girl was evidently not deceived by it, but replied in kind. Only the expressman who seemed to have fallen under the spell of her audacious glances, was uneasy at the license of the others, yet himself dumb towards her. The lady discreetly drew nearer to the fire, the old woman, and her coffee; Hiram subsided into his apathetic attitude by the fire.

A shout from the road at last proclaimed the return of Yuba Bill and his helpers. It had the singular effect of startling the party into a vague and uneasy consciousness of indiscretion, as if it had been the voice of the outer world of law and order, and their manner again became constrained. The leave-taking was hurried and perfunctory; the diplomatic Heckshill again lapsed into glittering generalities about “the best of friends parting.” Only the expressman lingered for a moment on the doorstep in the light of the fire and the girl’s dancing eyes.

“I hope,” he stammered, with a very youthful blush, “to come the next time—with—with—a better introduction.”

“Uncle Harry’s,” she said, with a quick laugh and a mock curtsey, as she turned away.

Once out of hearing, the party broke into hurried comment and criticism of the scene they had just witnessed, and particularly of the fair actress who had played so important a part, averring their emphatic intention of wresting the facts from Yuba Bill at once, and cross-examining him closely; but oddly enough, reaching the coach and that redoubted individual, no one seemed to care to take the initiative, and they all scrambled hurriedly to their seats without a word. How far Yuba Bill’s irritability and imperious haste contributed to this, or a fear that he might in turn catechise them kept them silent, no one knew. The cynically observant passenger was not there; he and the sole occupant of the box-seat, they were told, had joined the clearing party some moments before, and would be picked up by Yuba Bill later on.

Five minutes after Bill had gathered up the reins, they reached the scene of obstruction. The great pine-tree which had fallen from the steep bank above and stretched across the road had been partly lopped of its branches, divided in two lengths, which were now rolled to either side of the track, leaving barely space for the coach to pass. The huge vehicle “slowed up” as Yuba Bill skillfully guided his six horses through this narrow alley, whose tassels of pine, glistening with wet, brushed the panels and sides of the coach, and effectually excluded any view from its windows. Seen from the coach top, the horses appeared to be cleaving their way through a dark, shining olive sea, that parted before and closed behind them, as they slowly passed. The leaders were just emerging from it, and Bill was gathering up his slackened reins, when a peremptory voice called, “Halt!” At the same moment the coach lights flashed upon a masked and motionless horseman in the road. Bill made an impulsive reach for his whip, but in the same instant checked himself, reined in his horses with a suppressed oath, and sat perfectly rigid. Not so the expressman, who caught up his rifle, but it was arrested by Bill’s arm, and his voice in his ear!

“Too late!—we’re covered!—don’t be a d–d fool!”

The inside passengers, still encompassed by obscurity, knew only that the stage had stopped. The “outsiders” knew, by experience, that they were covered by unseen guns in the wayside branches, and scarcely moved.

“I didn’t think it was the square thing to stop you, Bill, till you’d got through your work,” said a masterful but not unpleasant voice, “and if you’ll just hand down the express box, I’ll pass you and the rest of your load through free. But as we’re both in a hurry, you’d better look lively about it.”

“Hand it down,” said Bill gruffly to the expressman.

The expressman turned with a white check but blazing eyes to the compartment below his seat. He lingered, apparently in some difficulty with the lock of the compartment, but finally brought out the box and handed it to another armed and masked figure that appeared mysteriously from the branches beside the wheels.

“Thank you!” said the voice; “you can slide on now.”

“And thank you for nothing,” said Bill, gathering up his reins. “It’s the first time any of your kind had to throw down a tree to hold me up!”

“You’re lying, Bill!—though you don’t know it,” said the voice cheerfully. “Far from throwing down a tree to stop you, it was I sent word along the road to warn you from crashing down upon it, and sending you and your load to h-ll before your time! Drive on!”

The angry Bill waited for no second comment, but laying his whip over the backs of his team, drove furiously forward. So rapidly had the whole scene passed that the inside passengers knew nothing of it, and even those on the top of the coach roused from their stupor and inglorious inaction only to cling desperately to the terribly swaying coach as it thundered down the grade and try to keep their equilibrium. Yet, furious as was their speed, Yuba Bill could not help noticing that the expressman from time to time cast a hurried glance behind him. Bill knew that the young man had shown readiness and nerve in the attack, although both were hopeless; yet he was so much concerned at his set white face and compressed lips that when, at the end of three miles’ unabated speed, they galloped up to the first station, he seized the young man by the arm, and, as the clamor of the news they had brought rose around them, dragged him past the wondering crowd, caught a decanter from the bar, and, opening the door of a side room, pushed him into it and closed the door behind them.

“Look yar, Brice! Stop it! Quit it right thar!” he said emphatically, laying his large hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. “Be a man! You’ve shown you are one, green ez you are, for you had the sand in ye—the clear grit to-night, yet you’d have been a dead man now, if I hadn’t stopped ye! Man! you had no show from the beginning! You’ve done your level best to save your treasure, and I’m your witness to the kempany, and proud of it, too! So shet your head and—and,” pouring out a glass of whiskey, “swaller that!”

But Brice waved him aside with burning eyes and dry lips.

“You don’t know it all, Bill!” he said, with a half choked voice.

“All what?”

“Swear that you’ll keep it a secret,” he said feverishly, gripping Bill’s arm in turn, “and I’ll tell you.”

“Go on!”

“THE COACH WAS ROBBED BEFORE THAT!”

“Wot yer say?” ejaculated Bill.

“The treasure—a packet of greenbacks—had been taken from the box before the gang stopped us!”

“The h-ll, you say!”

“Listen! When you told me to hand down the box, I had an idea—a d–d fool one, perhaps—of taking that package out and jumping from the coach with it. I knew they would fire at me only; I might get away, but if they killed me, I’d have done only my duty, and nobody else would have got hurt. But when I got to the box I found that the lock had been forced and the money was gone. I managed to snap the lock again before I handed it down. I thought they might discover it at once and chase us, but they didn’t.”

“And then thar war no greenbacks in the box that they took?” gasped Bill, with staring eyes.

“No!”

Bill raised his hand in the air as if in solemn adjuration, and then brought it down on his knee, doubling up in a fit of uncontrollable but perfectly noiseless laughter. “Oh, Lord!” he gasped, “hol’ me afore I bust right open! Hush,” he went on, with a jerk of his fingers towards the next room, “not a word o’ this to any one! It’s too much to keep, I know; it’s nearly killing me! but we must swaller it ourselves! Oh, Jerusalem the Golden! Oh, Brice! Think o’ that face o’ Snapshot Harry’s ez he opened that treasure box afore his gang in the brush! And he allers so keen and so easy and so cock sure! Created snakes! I’d go through this every trip for one sight of him as he just riz up from that box and cussed!” He again shook with inward convulsions till his face grew purple, and even the red came back to the younger man’s cheek.

“But this don’t bring the money back, Bill,” said Brice gloomily.

Yuba Bill swallowed the glass of whiskey at a gulp, wiped his mouth and eyes, smothered a second explosion, and then gravely confronted Brice.

“When do you think it was taken, and how?”

“It must have been taken when I left the coach on the road and went over to that settler’s cabin,” said Brice bitterly. “Yet I believed everything was safe, and I left two men—both passengers—one inside and one on the box, that man who sat the other side of you.”