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‘The last time I saw you dealing poker in Sacramento, Mr. Hamlin, I did not reckon to find you up here playing with a couple of kids.’

‘No!’ responded Mr. Hamlin suavely, ‘and yet I remember I was playing with some country idiots down there, and you were one of them. Well! understand that up here I prefer the kids. Don’t let me have to remind you of it.’

Nevertheless, Mr. Hamlin could not help noticing that for the next two or three days there were many callers at the ranch and that he was obliged in his walks to avoid the highroad on account of the impertinent curiosity of wayfarers. Some of them were of that sex which he would not have contented himself with simply calling ‘curious.’

‘To think,’ said Melinda confidently to her mistress, ‘that that thar Mrs. Stubbs, who wouldn’t go to the Hightown Hotel because there was a play actress thar, has been snoopin’ round here twice since that young feller came.’

Of this fact, however, Mr. Hamlin was blissfully unconscious.

Nevertheless, his temper was growing uncertain; the angle of his smart straw hat was becoming aggressive to strangers; his politeness sardonic. And now Sunday morning had come with an atmosphere of starched piety and well-soaped respectability at the rancho, and the children were to be taken with the rest of the family to the day-long service at Hightown. As these Sabbath pilgrimages filled the main road, he was fain to take himself and his loneliness to the trails and byways, and even to invade the haunts of some other elegant outcasts like himself – to wit, a crested hawk, a graceful wild cat beautifully marked, and an eloquently reticent rattlesnake. Mr. Hamlin eyed them without fear, and certainly without reproach. They were not out of their element.

Suddenly he heard his name called in a stentorian contralto. An impatient ejaculation rose to his lips, but died upon them as he turned. It was certainly Melinda, but in his present sensitive loneliness it struck him for the first time that he had never actually seen her before as she really was. Like most men in his profession he was a quick reader of thoughts and faces when he was interested, and although this was the same robust, long-limbed, sunburnt girl he had met, he now seemed to see through her triple incrustation of human vanity, conventional piety, and outrageous Sabbath finery an honest, sympathetic simplicity that commanded his respect.

‘You are back early from church,’ he said.

‘Yes. One service is good enough for me when thar ain’t no special preacher,’ she returned, ‘so I jest sez to Silas, “as I ain’t here to listen to the sisters cackle ye kin put to the buckboard and drive me home ez soon ez you please.”’

‘And so his name is Silas,’ suggested Mr. Hamlin cheerfully.

‘Go ’long with you, Mr. Hamlin, and don’t pester,’ she returned, with heifer-like playfulness. ‘Well, Silas put to, and when we rose the hill here I saw your straw hat passin’ in the gulch, and sez to Silas, sez I, “Ye kin pull up here, for over yar is our new boarder, Jack Hamlin, and I’m goin’ to talk with him.” “All right,” sez he, “I’d sooner trust ye with that gay young gambolier every day of the week than with them saints down thar on Sunday. He deals ez straight ez he shoots, and is about as nigh onto a gentleman as they make ’em.”’

For one moment or two Miss Bird only saw Jack’s long lashes. When his eyes once more lifted they were shining. ‘And what did you say?’ he said, with a short laugh.

‘I told him he needn’t be Christopher Columbus to have discovered that.’ She turned with a laugh toward Jack, to be met by the word ‘shake,’ and an outstretched thin white hand which grasped her large red one with a frank, fraternal pressure.

‘I didn’t come to tell ye that,’ remarked Miss Bird as she sat down on a boulder, took off her yellow hat, and restacked her tawny mane under it, ‘but this: I reckoned I went to Sunday meetin’ as I ought ter. I kalkilated to hear considerable about “Faith” and “Works,” and sich, but I didn’t reckon to hear all about you from the Lord’s Prayer to the Doxology [91] Doxology – praise to God sung during masses in Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and Protestant churches. . You were in the special prayers ez a warnin’, in the sermon ez a text; they picked out hymns to fit ye! And always a drefful example and a visitation. And the rest o’ the tune it was all gabble, gabble by the brothers and sisters about you. I reckon, Mr. Hamlin, that they know everything you ever did since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, and a good deal more than you ever thought of doin’. The women is all dead set on convertin’ ye and savin’ ye by their own precious selves, and the men is ekally dead set on gettin’ rid o’ ye on that account.’

‘And what did Seth and Mrs. Rivers say?’ asked Hamlin composedly, but with kindling eyes.

‘They stuck up for ye ez far ez they could. But ye see the parson hez got a holt upon Seth, havin’ caught him kissin’ a convert at camp meeting; and Deacon Turner knows suthin about Mrs. Rivers’s sister, who kicked over the pail and jumped the fence years ago, and she’s afeard a’ him. But what I wanted to tell ye was that they’re all comin’ up here to take a look at ye – some on ’em to-night. You ain’t afeard, are ye?’ she added, with a loud laugh.

‘Well, it looks rather desperate, doesn’t it?’ returned Jack, with dancing eyes.

‘I’ll trust ye for all that,’ said Melinda. ‘And now I reckon I’ll trot along to the rancho. Ye needn’t offer ter see me home,’ she added, as Jack made a movement to accompany her. ‘Everybody up here ain’t as fair-minded ez Silas and you, and Melinda Bird hez a character to lose! So long!’ With this she cantered away, a little heavily, perhaps, adjusting her yellow hat with both hands as she clattered down the steep hill.

That afternoon Mr. Hamlin drew largely on his convalescence to mount a half-broken mustang, and in spite of the rising afternoon wind to gallop along the highroad in quite as mischievous and breezy a fashion. He was wont to allow his mustang’s nose to hang over the hind rails of wagons and buggies containing young couples, and to dash ahead of sober carryalls that held elderly ‘members in good standing.’

An accomplished rider, he picked up and brought back the flying parasol of Mrs. Deacon Stubbs without dismounting. He finally came home a little blown, but dangerously composed.

There was the usual Sunday evening gathering at Windy Hill Rancho – neighbors and their wives, deacons and the pastor – but their curiosity was not satisfied by the sight of Mr. Hamlin, who kept his own room and his own counsel. There was some desultory conversation, chiefly on church topics, for it was vaguely felt that a discussion of the advisability or getting rid of the guest of their host was somewhat difficult under this host’s roof, with the guest impending at any moment. Then a diversion was created by some of the church choir practicing the harmonium with the singing of certain more or less lugubrious anthems. Mrs. Rivers presently joined in, and in a somewhat faded soprano, which, however, still retained considerable musical taste and expression, sang, ‘Come, ye disconsolate.’ The wind moaned over the deep-throated chimney in a weird harmony with the melancholy of that human appeal as Mrs. Rivers sang the first verse: —

‘Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish, Come to the Mercy Seat, fervently kneel; Here bring your wounded hearts – here tell your anguish, Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal!’

A pause followed, and the long-drawn, half-human sigh of the mountain wind over the chimney seemed to mingle with the wail of the harmonium. And then, to their thrilled astonishment, a tenor voice, high, clear, but tenderly passionate, broke like a skylark over their heads in the lines of the second verse: —