GABRIEL CONROY.[1]
BY BRET HARTE.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
MRS. CONROY HAS AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
The hot weather had not been confined to San Francisco. San Pablo Bay had glittered, and the yellow currents of the San Joaquin and Sacramento glowed sullenlwith a dull sluggish lava-like flow. No breeze stirred the wild oats that drooped on the western slope of the Contra Costa hills; the smoke of burning woods on the Eastern hill-sides rose silently and steadily; the great wheat-fields of the intermediate valleys clothed themselves humbly in dust and ashes. A column of red dust accompanied the Wingdam and One Horse Gulch Stagecoach, a pillar of fire by day as well as by night, and made the fainting passengers look longingly toward the snow-patched Sierras beyond. It was hot in California; few had ever seen the like, and those who had were looked upon as enemies of their race. A rashly scientific man of Murphy's Camp who had a theory of his own, and upon that had prophesied the probable recurrence of the earthquake shock, concluded he had better leave the settlement until the principles of meteorology were better recognized and established.
It was hot in One Horse Gulch—in the oven-like Gulch, on the burning sands and scorching bars of the river. It was hot even on Conroy's Hill, among the calm shadows of the dark-green pines—on the deep verandas of the Conroy cottage orné. Perhaps this was the reason why Mrs. Gabriel Conroy, early that morning after the departure of her husband for the mill, had evaded the varnished and white-leaded heats of her own house and sought the more fragrant odors of the sedate pines beyond the hill-top. I fear, however, that something was due to a mysterious note which had reached her clandestinely the evening before, and which, seated on the trunk of a prostrate pine, she was now re-perusing.
I should like to sketch her as she sat there. A broad-brimmed straw hat covered her head, that, although squared a little too much at the temples for shapeliness, was still made comely by the good taste with which—aided by a crimping-iron—she had treated her fine-spun electrical blonde hair. The heat had brought out a delicate dewy color in her usually pale face, and had heightened the intense nervous brightness of her vivid gray eyes. From the same cause, probably, her lips were slightly parted, so that the rigidity that usually characterized their finely chiseled outlines was lost. She looked healthier; the long flowing skirts which she affected, after the fashion of most petite women, were gathered at a waist scarcely as sylph-like and unsubstantial as that which Gabriel first clasped after the accident in the fatal cañon. She seemed a trifle more languid—more careful of her personal comfort, and spent some time in adjusting herself to the inequalities of her uncouth seat, with a certain pouting peevishness of manner that was quite as new to her character as it was certainly feminine and charming. She held the open note in her thin, narrow, white-tipped fingers, and glanced over it again with a slight smile. It read as follows:
"At ten o'clock I shall wait for you at the hill near the Big Pine! You shall give me an interview if you know yourself well. I say beware! I am strong, for I am injured! VICTOR."
Mrs. Conroy folded the note again, still smiling, and placed it carefully in her pocket. Then she sat patient, her hands clasped lightly between her knees, the parasol open at her feet—the very picture of a fond confiding tryst. Then she suddenly drew her feet under her sidewise with a quick, nervous motion, and examined the ground carefully with sincere distrust of all artful lurking vermin who lie in wait for helpless womanhood. Then she looked at her watch.
It was five minutes past the hour. There was no sound in the dim, slumbrous wood, but the far-off sleepy caw of a rook. A squirrel ran impulsively half-way down the bark of the nearest pine, and catching sight of her tilted parasol, suddenly flattened himself against the bark, with outstretched limbs, a picture of abject terror. A bounding hare came upon it suddenly and had a palpitation of the heart that he thought he
- ↑ Copyright, 1876, by Bret Harte. All rights reserved.
