Colonel Starbottle's Client. Bret Harte
There was no change in the formality; it was “Dear Miss Sarah,” and “Yours respectfully, Jo Corbin,” as usual. She was still secure. But her pretty brows contracted slightly as she read as follows:—
“I’ve always allowed I should feel easier in my mind if I could ever get to see Mrs. Jeffcourt, and that may be she might feel easier in hers if I stood before her, face to face. Even if she didn’t forgive me at once, it might do her good to get off what she had on her mind against me. But as there wasn’t any chance of her coming to me, and it was out of the question my coming to her and still keeping up enough work in the mines to send her the regular money, it couldn’t be done. But at last I’ve got a partner to run the machine when I’m away. I shall be at Shelbyville by the time this reaches you, where I shall stay a day or two to give you time to break the news to Mrs. Jeffcourt, and then come on. You will do this for me in your Christian kindness, Miss Dows—won’t you? and if you could soften her mind so as to make it less hard for me I shall be grateful.
“P. S.—I forgot to say I have had HIM exhumed—you know who I mean—and am bringing him with me in a patent metallic burial casket,—the best that could be got in ‘Frisco, and will see that he is properly buried in your own graveyard. It seemed to me that it would be the best thing I could do, and might work upon her feelings—as it has on mine. Don’t you?
“J. C.”
Miss Sally felt the tendrils of her fair hair stir with consternation. The letter had arrived a week ago; perhaps he was in Pineville at that very moment! She must go at once to the Jeffcourts,—it was only a mile distant. Perhaps she might be still in time; but even then it was a terribly short notice for such a meeting. Yet she stopped to select her newest hat from the closet, and to tie it with the largest of bows under her pretty chin; and then skipped from the veranda into a green lane that ran beside the garden boundary. There, hidden by a hedge, she dropped into a long, swinging trot, that even in her haste still kept the languid deliberation characteristic of her people, until she had reached the road. Two or three hounds in the garden started joyously to follow her, but she drove them back with a portentous frown, and an ill-aimed stone, and a suppressed voice. Yet in that backward glance she could see that her little Eumenides—Mammy Judy’s children—were peering at her from below the wooden floor of the portico, which they were grasping with outstretched arms and bowed shoulders, as if they were black caryatides supporting—as indeed their race had done for many a year—the pre-doomed and decaying mansion of their master.
CHAPTER III
Happily Miss Sally thought more of her present mission than of the past errors of her people. The faster she walked the more vividly she pictured the possible complications of this meeting. She knew the dull, mean nature of her aunt, and the utter hopelessness of all appeal to anything but her selfish cupidity, and saw in this fatuous essay of Corbin only an aggravation of her worst instincts. Even the dead body of her son would not only whet her appetite for pecuniary vengeance, but give it plausibility in the eyes of their emotional but ignorant neighbors. She had still less to hope from Julia Jeffcourt’s more honest and human indignation but equally bigoted and prejudiced intelligence. It is true they were only women, and she ought to have no fear of that physical revenge which Julia had spoken of, but she reflected that Miss Jeffcourt’s unmistakable beauty, and what was believed to be a “truly Southern spirit,” had gained her many admirers who might easily take her wrongs upon their shoulders. If her father had only given her that letter before, she might have stopped Corbin’s coming at all; she might even have met him in time to hurry him and her cousin’s provocative remains out of the country. In the midst of these reflections she had to pass the little hillside cemetery. It was a spot of great natural beauty, cypress-shadowed and luxuriant. It was justly celebrated in Pineville, and, but for its pretentious tombstones, might have been peaceful and suggestive. Here she recognized a figure just turning from its gate. It was Julia Jeffcourt.
Her first instinct—that she was too late and that her cousin had come to the cemetery to make some arrangements for the impending burial—was, however, quickly dissipated by the young girl’s manner.
“Well, Sally Dows, YOU here! who’d have thought of seeing you to-day? Why, Chet Brooks allowed that you danced every set last night and didn’t get home till daylight. And you—you that are going to show up at another party to-night too! Well, I reckon I haven’t got that much ambition these times. And out with your new bonnet too.”
There was a slight curl of her handsome lip as she looked at her cousin. She was certainly a more beautiful girl than Miss Sally; very tall, dark and luminous of eye, with a brunette pallor of complexion, suggesting, it was said, that remote mixture of blood which was one of the unproven counts of Miss Miranda’s indictment against her family. Miss Sally smiled sweetly behind her big bow. “If you reckon to tie to everything that Chet Brooks says, you’ll want lots of string, and you won’t be safe then. You ought to have heard him run on about this one, and that one, and that other one, not an hour ago in our parlor. I had to pack him off, saying he was even making Judy’s niggers tired.” She stopped and added with polite languor, “I suppose there’s no news up at yo’ house either? Everything’s going on as usual—and—you get yo’ California draft regularly?”
A good deal of the white of Julia’s beautiful eyes showed as she turned indignantly on the speaker. “I wish, cousin Sally, you’d just let up talking to me about that money. You know as well as I do that I allowed to maw I wouldn’t take a cent of it from the first! I might have had all the gowns and bonnets”—with a look at Miss Sally’s bows—“I wanted from her; she even offered to take me to St. Louis for a rig-out—if I’d been willing to take blood money. But I’d rather stick to this old sleazy mou’nin’ for Tom”—she gave a dramatic pluck at her faded black skirt—“than flaunt round in white muslins and China silks at ten dollars a yard, paid for by his murderer.”
“You know black’s yo’ color always,—taking in your height and complexion, Jule,” said Miss Sally demurely, yet not without a feminine consciousness that it really did set off her cousin’s graceful figure to perfection. “But you can’t keep up this gait always. You know some day you might come upon this Mr. Corbin.”
“He’d better not cross my path,” she said passionately.
“I’ve heard girls talk like that about a man and then get just green and yellow after him,” said Miss Sally critically. “But goodness me! speaking of meeting people reminds me I clean forgot to stop at the stage office and see about bringing over the new overseer. Lucky I met you, Jule! Good-by, dear. Come in to-night, and we’ll all go to the party together.” And with a little nod she ran off before her indignant cousin could frame a suitably crushing reply to her Parthian insinuation.
But at the stage office Miss Sally only wrote a few lines on a card, put it in an envelope, which she addressed to Mr. Joseph Corbin, and then seating herself with easy carelessness on a long packing-box, languidly summoned the proprietor.
“You’re always on hand yourself at Kirby station when the kyars come in to bring passengers to Pineville, Mr. Sledge?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Yo’ haven’t brought any strangers over lately?”
“Well, last week Squire Farnham of Green Ridge—if he kin be called a stranger—as used to live in the very house yo father”—
“Yes, I know,” said Miss Sally, impatiently, “but if an ENTIRE stranger comes to take a seat for Pineville, you ask him if that’s his name,” handing the letter, “and give it to him if it is. And—Mr. Sledge—it’s nobody’s business but—yours and mine.”
“I understand, Miss Sally,” with a slow, paternal, tolerating wink. “He’ll get it, and nobody else, sure.”
“Thank you; I hope Mrs. Sledge is getting round again.”
“Pow’fully, Miss Sally.”
Having thus, as she hoped, stopped the arrival of the unhappy Corbin, Miss Sally returned home to consider the best means of finally disposing of him. She had insisted upon his stopping at Kirby and holding no communication with the Jeffcourts until he heard from her, and had strongly