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A Niece of Snapshot Harry’s
by
She gave a quick laugh. “Don’t be frightened. It’s bought and paid for. Uncle Harry don’t touch passengers’ fixin’s; that ain’t his style. You oughter know that.” Yet in spite of her laugh, he could see the sensitive pout of her lower lip.
“I was only thinking,” he said hurriedly and sympathetically, “that it was too fine for me. But I will be proud to keep it as a souvenir of you. It’s not too pretty for THAT!”
“Uncle gets me these things. He don’t keer what they cost,” she went on, ignoring the compliment. “Why, I’ve got awfully fine gowns up there that I only wear when I go to Marysville oncet in a while.”
“Does he take you there?” asked Brice.
“No!” she answered quietly. “Not”–a little defiantly–“that he’s afeard, for they can’t prove anything against him; no man kin swear to him, and thar ain’t an officer that keers to go for him. But he’s that shy for ME he don’t keer to have me mixed with him.”
“But nobody recognizes you?”
“Sometimes–but I don’t keer for that.” She cocked her hat a little audaciously, but Brice noticed that her arms afterwards dropped at her side with the same weary gesture he had observed before. “Whenever I go into shops it’s always ‘Yes, miss,’ and ‘No, miss,’ and ‘Certainly, Miss Dimwood.’ Oh, they’re mighty respectful. I reckon they allow that Snapshot Harry’s rifle carries far.”
Presently she faced him again, for their conversation had been carried on in profile. There was a critical, searching look in her brown eyes.
“Here I’m talkin’ to you as if you were one”–Mr. Brice was positive she was going to say “one of the gang,” but she hesitated and concluded, “one of my relations–like cousin Hiram.”
“I wish you would think of me as being as true a friend,” said the young man earnestly.
She did not reply immediately, but seemed to be examining the distance. They were not far from the canyon now, and the river bank. A fringe of buckeyes hid the base of the mountain, which had begun to tower up above them to the invisible stage road overhead. “I am going to be a real guide to you now,” she said suddenly. “When we reach that buckeye corner and are out of sight, we will turn into it instead of going through the canyon. You shall go up the mountain to the stage road, from THIS side.”
“But it is impossible!” he exclaimed, in astonishment. “Your uncle said so.”
“Coming DOWN, but not going up,” she returned, with a laugh. “I found it, and no one knows it but myself.”
He glanced up at the towering cliff; its nearly perpendicular flanks were seamed with fissures, some clefts deeply set with stunted growths of thorn and “scrub,” but still sheer and forbidding, and then glanced back at her incredulously. “I will show you,” she said, answering his look with a smile of triumph. “I haven’t tramped over this whole valley for nothing! But wait until we reach the river bank. They must think that we’ve gone through the canyon.”
“They?
“Yes–any one who is watching us,” said the girl dryly.
A few steps further on brought them to the buckeye thicket, which extended to the river bank and mouth of the canyon. The girl lingered for a moment ostentatiously before it, and then, saying “Come,” suddenly turned at right angles into the thicket. Brice followed, and the next moment they were hidden by its friendly screen from the valley. On the other side rose the mountain wall, leaving a narrow trail before them. It was composed of the rocky debris and fallen trees of the cliff, from which buckeyes and larches were now springing. It was uneven, irregular, and slowly ascending; but the young girl led the way with the free footstep of a mountaineer, and yet a grace that was akin to delicacy. Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl’s fashion, she was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude and rustic surroundings. It was the same slim shoe-print which had guided him that morning. Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing curiously at the cliff side. Brice followed the direction of her eyes. On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly wind was flapping heavily, like a raven’s wing, or as if still saturated with the last night’s rain. “That’s mighty queer!” said Flo, gazing intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which had a vague, weird suggestion. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”