Cressy. Bret Harte
secure in his avowed predilection for the middle-aged wife of the proprietor of the Indian Spring hotel, looked upon her as a precocious chit with more than the usual propensity to objectionable “breathing.” Nevertheless the master was irritatingly conscious of her presence—a presence which now had all the absurdity of her ridiculous love-experiences superadded to it. He tried to reason with himself that it was only a phase of frontier life, which ought to have amused him. But it did not. The intrusion of this preposterous girl seemed to disarrange the discipline of his life as well as of his school. The usual vague, far-off dreams in which he was in the habit of indulging during school-hours, dreams that were perhaps superinduced by the remoteness of his retreat and a certain restful sympathy in his little auditors, which had made him—the grown-up dreamer—acceptable to them in his gentle understanding of their needs and weaknesses, now seemed to have vanished forever.
At recess, Octavia Dean, who had drawn near Cressy and reached up to place her arm round the older girl's waist, glanced at her with a patronizing smile born of some rapid free-masonry, and laughingly retired with the others. The master at his desk, and Cressy who had halted in the aisle were left alone.
“I have had no intimation yet from your father or mother that you were coming back to school again,” he began. “But I suppose THEY have decided upon your return?”
An uneasy suspicion of some arrangement with her former lover had prompted the emphasis.
The young girl looked at him with languid astonishment. “I reckon paw and maw ain't no objection,” she said with the same easy ignoring of parental authority that had characterized Rupert Filgee, and which seemed to be a local peculiarity. “Maw DID offer to come yer and see you, but I told her she needn't bother.”
She rested her two hands behind her on the edge of a desk, and leaned against it, looking down upon the toe of her smart little shoe which was describing a small semicircle beyond the hem of her gown. Her attitude, which was half-defiant, half-indolent, brought out the pretty curves of her waist and shoulders. The master noticed it and became a trifle more austere.
“Then I am to understand that this is a permanent thing?” he asked coldly.
“What's that?” said Cressy interrogatively.
“Am I to understand that you intend coming regularly to school?” repeated the master curtly, “or is this merely an arrangement for a few days—until”—
“Oh,” said Cressy comprehendingly, lifting her unabashed blue eyes to his, “you mean THAT. Oh, THAT'S broke off. Yes,” she added contemptuously, making a larger semicircle with her foot, “that's over—three weeks ago.”
“And Seth Davis—does HE intend returning too?”
“He!” She broke into a light girlish laugh. “I reckon not much! S'long's I'm here, at least.” She had just lifted herself to a sitting posture on the desk, so that her little feet swung clear of the floor in their saucy dance. Suddenly she brought her heels together and alighted. “So that's all?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Kin I go now?”
“Yes.”
She laid her books one on the top of the other and lingered an instant.
“Been quite well?” she asked with indolent politeness.
“Yes—thank you.”
“You're lookin' right peart.”
She walked with a Southern girl's undulating languor to the door, opened it, then charged suddenly upon Octavia Dean, twirled her round in a wild waltz and bore her away; appearing a moment after on the playground demurely walking with her arm around her companion's waist in an ostentatious confidence at once lofty, exclusive, and exasperating to the smaller children.
When school was dismissed that afternoon and the master had remained to show Rupert Filgee how to prepare Uncle Ben's tasks, and had given his final instructions to his youthful vicegerent, that irascible Adonis unburdened himself querulously:
“Is Cressy McKinstry comin' reg'lar, Mr. Ford?”
“She is,” said the master dryly. After a pause he asked, “Why?”
Rupert's curls had descended on his eyebrows in heavy discontent. “It's mighty rough, jest ez a feller reckons he's got quit of her and her jackass bo', to hev her prancin' back inter school agin, and rigged out like ez if she'd been to a fire in a milliner's shop.”
“You shouldn't allow your personal dislikes, Rupert, to provoke you to speak of a fellow-scholar in that way—and a young lady, too,” corrected the master dryly.
“The woods is full o' sich feller-scholars and sich young ladies, if yer keer to go a gunning for 'em,” said Rupert with dark and slangy significance. “Ef I'd known she was comin' back I'd”—he stopped and brought his sunburnt fist against the seam of his trousers with a boyish gesture, “I'd hev jist”—
“What?” said the master sharply.
“I'd hev played hookey till she left school agin! It moutn't hev bin so long, neither,” he added with a mysterious chuckle.
“That will do,” said the master peremptorily. “For the present you'll attend to your duty and try to make Uncle Ben see you're something more than a foolish, prejudiced school-boy, or,” he added significantly, “he and I may both repent our agreement. Let me have a good account of you both when I return.”
He took his hat from its peg on the wall, and in obedience to a suddenly formed resolution left the school-room to call upon the parents of Cressy McKinstry. He was not quite certain what he should say, but, after his habit, would trust to the inspiration of the moment. At the worst he could resign a situation that now appeared to require more tact and delicacy than seemed consistent with his position, and he was obliged to confess to himself that he had lately suspected that his present occupation—the temporary expedient of a poor but clever young man of twenty—was scarcely bringing him nearer a realization of his daily dreams. For Mr. Jack Ford was a youthful pilgrim who had sought his fortune in California so lightly equipped that even in the matter of kin and advisers he was deficient. That prospective fortune had already eluded him in San Francisco, had apparently not waited for him in Sacramento, and now seemed never to have been at Indian Spring. Nevertheless, when he was once out of sight of the school-house he lit a cigar, put his hands in his pockets, and strode on with the cheerfulness of that youth to which all things are possible.
The children had already dispersed as mysteriously and completely as they had arrived. Between him and the straggling hamlet of Indian Spring the landscape seemed to be without sound or motion. The wooded upland or ridge on which the schoolhouse stood, half a mile further on, began to slope gradually towards the river, on whose banks, seen from that distance, the town appeared to have been scattered irregularly or thrown together hastily, as if cast ashore by some overflow—the Cosmopolitan Hotel drifting into the Baptist church, and dragging in its tail of wreckage two saloons and a blacksmith's shop; while the County Court-house was stranded in solitary grandeur in a waste of gravel half a mile away. The intervening flat was still gashed and furrowed by the remorseless engines of earlier gold-seekers.
Mr. Ford was in little sympathy with this unsuccessful record of frontier endeavor—the fortune HE had sought did not seem to lie in that direction—and his eye glanced quickly beyond it to the pine-crested hills across the river, whose primeval security was so near and yet so inviolable, or back again to the trail he was pursuing along the ridge. The latter prospect still retained its semi-savage character in spite of the occasional suburban cottages of residents, and the few outlying farms or ranches of the locality. The grounds of the cottages were yet uncleared of underbrush; bear and catamount still prowled around the rude fences of the ranches; the late alleged experience of the infant Snyder was by no means improbable or unprecedented.
A light breeze was seeking the heated flat and river, and thrilling the leaves around him with the strong vitality of the forest. The vibrating cross-lights and