The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories. Bret Harte
nets, as he labored in the ooze and gravel of the still half-reclaimed river bed. He was far out on the Bar, within a stone's throw of the promontory. Suddenly his quick ear caught an unfamiliar cry and splash. Looking up hastily, he saw Mrs. McGee's red petticoat in the water under the singularly agitated boughs of an overhanging tree. Madison Wayne ran to the bank, threw off his heavy boots, and sprang into the stream. A few strokes brought him to Mrs. McGee's petticoat, which, as he had wisely surmised, contained Mrs. McGee, who was still clinging to a branch of the tree. Grasping her waist with one hand and the branch with the other, he obtained a foothold on the bank, and dragged her ashore. A moment later they both stood erect and dripping at the foot of the tree.
“Well?” said the lady.
Wayne glanced around their seclusion with his habitual caution, slightly knit his brows perplexedly, and said: “You fell in?”
“I didn't do nothin' of the sort. I JUMPED in.”
Wayne again looked around him, as if expecting her companion, and squeezed the water out of his thick hair. “Jumped in?” he repeated slowly. “What for?”
“To make you come over here, Mad Wayne,” she said, with a quick laugh, putting her arms akimbo.
They stood looking at each other, dripping like two river gods. Like them, also, Wayne had apparently ignored the fact that his trousers were rolled up above his bare knees, and Mrs. McGee that her red petticoat clung closely to her rather pretty figure. But he quickly recovered himself. “You had better go in and change your clothes,” he said, with grave concern. “You'll take cold.”
She only shook herself disdainfully. “I'm all right,” she said; “but YOU, Mad Wayne, what do you mean by not speaking to me—not knowing me? You can't say that I've changed like that.” She passed her hand down her long dripping braids as if to press the water from them, and yet with a half-coquettish suggestion in the act.
Something struggled up into the man's face which was not there before. There was a new light in his grave eyes. “You look the same,” he said slowly; “but you are married—you have a husband.”
“You think that changes a girl?” she said, with a laugh “That's where all you men slip up! You're afraid of his rifle—THAT'S the change that bothers you, Mad.”
“You know I care little for carnal weapons,” he said quietly. She DID know it; but it is the privilege of the sex to invent its facts and then to graciously abandon them as if they were only arguments. “Then why do you keep off from me? Why do you look the other way when I pass?” she said quickly.
“Because you are married,” he said slowly.
She again shook the water from her like a Newfoundland dog. “That's it. You're mad because I got married. You're mad because I wouldn't marry you and your church over on the cross roads, and sing hymns with you and become SISTER Wayne. You wanted me to give up dancing and buggy ridin' Sundays—and you're just mad because I didn't. Yes, mad—just mean, baby mad, Mr. Maddy Wayne, for all your CHRISTIAN resignation! That's what's the matter with you.” Yet she looked very pretty and piquant in her small spitefulness, which was still so general and superficial that she seemed to shake it out of her wet petticoats in a vicious flap that disclosed her neat ankles.
“You preferred McGee to me,” he said grimly. “I didn't blame you.”
“Who said I PREFERRED him?” she retorted quickly. “Much you know!” Then, with swift feminine abandonment of her position, she added, with a little laugh, “It's all the same whether you're guarded with a rifle or a Church Presbytery, only”—
“Only what?” said Madison earnestly.
“There's men who'd risk being SHOT for a girl, that couldn't stand psalm-singin' palaver.”
The quick expression of pain that passed over his hard, dark face seemed only to heighten her pretty mischievousness. But he simply glanced again around the solitude, passed his hand over his wet sleeve, and said, “I must go now; your husband wouldn't like me being here.”
“He's workin' in the claim,—the claim YOU gave him,” said Mrs. McGee, with cheerful malice. “Wonder what he'd say if he knew it was given to him by the man who used to spark his wife only two years ago? How does that suit your Christian conscience, Mad?”
“I should have told him, had I not believed that everything was over between us, or that it was possible that you and me should ever meet again,” he returned, in a tone so measured that the girl seemed to hear the ring of the conventicle in it.
“Should you, BROTHER Wayne?” she said, imitating him. “Well, let me tell you that you are the one man on the Bar that Sandy has taken a fancy to.”
Madison's sallow cheek colored a little, but he did not speak.
“Well!” continued Mrs. McGee impatiently. “I don't believe he'd object to your comin' here to see me—if you cared.”
“But I wouldn't care to come, unless he first knew that I had been once engaged to you,” said Madison gravely.
“Perhaps he might not think as much of that as you do,” retorted the woman pertly. “Every one isn't as straitlaced as you, and every girl has had one or two engagements. But do as you like—stay at home if you want to, and sing psalms and read the Scriptures to that younger brother of yours! All the same, I'm thinkin' he'd rather be out with the boys.”
“My brother is God-fearing and conscientious,” said Madison quickly. “You do not know him. You have never seen him.”
“No,” said Mrs. McGee shortly. She then gave a little shiver (that was, however, half simulated) in her wet garments, and added: “ONE saint was enough for me; I couldn't stand the whole church, Mad.”
“You are catching cold,” he said quickly, his whole face brightening with a sudden tenderness that seemed to transfigure the dark features. “I am keeping you here when you should be changing your clothes. Go, I beg you, at once.”
She stood still provokingly, with an affectation of wiping her arms and shoulders and sopping her wet dress with clusters of moss.
“Go, please do—Safie, please!”
“Ah!”—she drew a quick, triumphant breath. “Then you'll come again to see me, Mad?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, and even more gravely than before.
“But you must let me show you the way out—round under those trees—where no one can see you come.” She held out her hand.
“I'll go the way I came,” he said quietly, swinging himself silently from the nearest bough into the stream. And before she could utter a protest he was striking out as silently, hand over hand, across the current.
CHAPTER II.
A week later Madison Wayne was seated alone in his cabin. His supper table had just been cleared by his Chinese coolie, as it was getting late, and the setting sun, which for half an hour had been persistently making a vivid beacon of his windows for the benefit of wayfarers along the river bank, had at last sunk behind the cottonwoods. His head was resting on his hand; the book he had been reading when the light faded was lying open on the table before him. In this attitude he became aware of a hesitating step on the gravel outside his open door. He had been so absorbed that the approach of any figure along the only highway—the river bank—had escaped his observation. Looking up, he discovered that Mr. Alexander McGee was standing in the doorway, his hand resting lightly on the jamb. A sudden color suffused Wayne's cheek; his hand reached for his book, which he drew towards him hurriedly, yet half automatically, as he might have grasped some defensive weapon.
The Bell-ringer of Angel's