The Twins of Table Mountain, and Other Stories. Bret Harte
that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that the twins could not be told apart. “Thet gal,” continued Rand, without looking up, “is either flighty, or—or suthin’,” he added in vague disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in question. “Don’t tell me!”
Ruth’s eyes quickly sought his brother’s, and were as quickly averted, as he asked hurriedly, “How?”
“What gets me,” continued Rand in a petulant non sequitur, “is that YOU, my own twin-brother, never lets on about her comin’ yer, permiskus like, when I ain’t yer, and you and her gallivantin’ and promanadin’, and swoppin’ sentiments and mottoes.”
Ruth tried to contradict his blushing face with a laugh of worldly indifference.
“She came up yer on a sort of pasear.”
“Oh, yes!—a short cut to the creek,” interpolated Rand satirically.
“Last Tuesday or Wednesday,” continued Ruth, with affected forgetfulness.
“Oh, in course, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday! You’ve so many folks climbing up this yer mountain to call on ye,” continued the ironical Rand, “that you disremember; only you remembered enough not to tell me. SHE did. She took me for you, or pretended to.”
The color dropped from Ruth’s cheek.
“Took you for me?” he asked, with an awkward laugh.
“Yes,” sneered Rand; “chirped and chattered away about OUR picnic, OUR nose-gays, and lord knows what! Said she’d keep them blue-jay’s wings, and wear ‘em in her hat. Spouted poetry, too,—the same sort o’ rot you get off now and then.”
Ruth laughed again, but rather ostentatiously and nervously.
“Ruth, look yer!”
Ruth faced his brother.
“What’s your little game? Do you mean to say you don’t know what thet gal is? Do you mean to say you don’t know thet she’s the laughing-stock of the Ferry; thet her father’s a d–d old fool, and her mother’s a drunkard and worse; thet she’s got any right to be hanging round yer? You can’t mean to marry her, even if you kalkilate to turn me out to do it, for she wouldn’t live alone with ye up here. ‘Tain’t her kind. And if I thought you was thinking of—”
“What?” said Ruth, turning upon his brother quickly.
“Oh, thet’s right! holler; swear and yell, and break things, do! Tear round!” continued Rand, kicking his boots off in a corner, “just because I ask you a civil question. That’s brotherly,” he added, jerking his chair away against the side of the cabin, “ain’t it?”
“She’s not to blame because her mother drinks, and her father’s a shyster,” said Ruth earnestly and strongly. “The men who make her the laughing-stock of the Ferry tried to make her something worse, and failed, and take this sneak’s revenge on her. ‘Laughing-stock!’ Yes, they knew she could turn the tables on them.”
“Of course; go on! She’s better than me. I know I’m a fratricide, that’s what I am,” said Rand, throwing himself on the upper of the two berths that formed the bedstead of the cabin.
“I’ve seen her three times,” continued Ruth.
“And you’ve known me twenty years,” interrupted his brother.
Ruth turned on his heel, and walked towards the door.
“That’s right; go on! Why don’t you get the chalk?”
Ruth made no reply. Rand descended from the bed, and, taking a piece of chalk from the shelf, drew a line on the floor, dividing the cabin in two equal parts.
“You can have the east half,” he said, as he climbed slowly back into bed.
This mysterious rite was the usual termination of a quarrel between the twins. Each man kept his half of the cabin until the feud was forgotten. It was the mark of silence and separation, over which no words of recrimination, argument, or even explanation, were delivered, until it was effaced by one or the other. This was considered equivalent to apology or reconciliation, which each were equally bound in honor to accept.
It may be remarked that the floor was much whiter at this line of demarcation, and under the fresh chalk-line appeared the faint evidences of one recently effaced.
Without apparently heeding this potential ceremony, Ruth remained leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon the ledge, he leaned far over the shelf that sustained their cabin, and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices, swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. He was roused from a consideration of this phenomenon by a faint glow towards the east, which at last brightened, until the dark outline of the distant walls of the valley stood out against the sky. Were his other senses participating in the delusion of his ears? for with the brightening light came the faint odor of burning timber.
His face grew anxious as he gazed. At last he rose, and re-entered the cabin. His eyes fell upon the faint chalk-mark, and, taking his soft felt hat from his head, with a few practical sweeps of the brim he brushed away the ominous record of their late estrangement. Going to the bed whereon Rand lay stretched, open-eyed, he would have laid his hand upon his arm lightly; but the brother’s fingers sought and clasped his own. “Get up,” he said quietly; “there’s a strange fire in the Canyon head that I can’t make out.”
Rand slowly clambered from his shelf, and hand in hand the brothers stood upon the ledge. “It’s a right smart chance beyond the Ferry, and a piece beyond the Mill, too,” said Rand, shading his eyes with his hand, from force of habit. “It’s in the woods where—” He would have added where he met Mornie; but it was a point of honor with the twins, after reconciliation, not to allude to any topic of their recent disagreement.
Ruth dropped his brother’s hand. “It doesn’t smell like the woods,” he said slowly.
“Smell!” repeated Rand incredulously. “Why, it’s twenty miles in a bee-line yonder. Smell, indeed!”
Ruth was silent, but presently fell to listening again with his former abstraction. “You don’t hear anything, do you?” he asked after a pause.
“It’s blowin’ in the pines on the river,” said Rand shortly.
“You don’t hear anything else?”
“No.”
“Nothing like—like—like—”
Rand, who had been listening with an intensity that distorted the left side of his face, interrupted him impatiently.
“Like what?”
“Like a woman sobbin’?”
“Ruth,” said Rand, suddenly looking up in his brother’s face, “what’s gone of you?”
Ruth laughed. “The fire’s out,” he said, abruptly re-entering the cabin. “I’m goin’ to turn in.”
Rand, following his brother half reproachfully, saw him divest himself of his clothing, and roll himself in the blankets of his bed.
“Good-night, Randy!”
Rand hesitated. He would have liked to ask his brother another question; but there was clearly nothing to be done but follow his example.
“Good-night, Ruthy!” he said, and put out the light. As he did so, the glow in the eastern horizon faded, too, and darkness seemed to well up from the depths below, and, flowing in the open door, wrapped them in deeper