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“Is there any of you that knows me?”

There was no reply.

“Think again! I lived at Marysville in ’53. Everybody knew me there, and everybody had the right to know me. I kept the Polka saloon until I came to live with Jim. That’s six years ago. Perhaps I’ve changed some.”

The absence of recognition may have disconcerted her. She turned her head to the fire again, and it was some seconds before she again spoke, and then more rapidly:

“Well, you see I thought some of you must have known me. There’s no great harm done, anyway. What I was going to say was this: Jim here”–she took his hand in both of hers as she spoke–“used to know me, if you didn’t, and spent a heap of money upon me. I reckon he spent all he had. And one day–it’s six years ago this winter–Jim came into my back room, sat down on my sofy, like as you see him in that chair, and never moved again without help. He was struck all of a heap, and never seemed to know what ailed him. The doctors came and said as how it was caused all along of his way of life–for Jim was mighty free and wild-like–and that he would never get better, and couldn’t last long anyway. They advised me to send him to Frisco to the hospital, for he was no good to anyone and would be a baby all his life. Perhaps it was something in Jim’s eye, perhaps it was that I never had a baby, but I said ‘No.’ I was rich then, for I was popular with everybody–gentlemen like yourself, sir, came to see me–and I sold out my business and bought this yer place, because it was sort of out of the way of travel, you see, and I brought my baby here.”

With a woman’s intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke, slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions. Silent and expressionless, it yet spoke for her; helpless, crushed, and smitten with the Divine thunderbolt, it still stretched an invisible arm around her.

Hidden in the darkness, but still holding his hand, she went on:

“It was a long time before I could get the hang of things about yer, for I was used to company and excitement. I couldn’t get any woman to help me, and a man I dursen’t trust; but what with the Indians hereabout, who’d do odd jobs for me, and having everything sent from the North Fork, Jim and I managed to worry through. The Doctor would run up from Sacramento once in a while. He’d ask to see ‘Miggles’s baby,’ as he called Jim, and when he’d go away, he’d say, ‘Miggles; you’re a trump–God bless you’; and it didn’t seem so lonely after that. But the last time he was here he said, as he opened the door to go, ‘Do you know, Miggles, your baby will grow up to be a man yet and an honor to his mother; but not here, Miggles, not here!’ And I thought he went away sad–and–and–” and here Miggles’s voice and head were somehow both lost completely in the shadow.

“The folks about here are very kind,” said Miggles, after a pause, coming a little into the light again. “The men from the fork used to hang around here, until they found they wasn’t wanted, and the women are kind–and don’t call. I was pretty lonely until I picked up Joaquin in the woods yonder one day, when he wasn’t so high, and taught him to beg for his dinner; and then thar’s Polly–that’s the magpie–she knows no end of tricks, and makes it quite sociable of evenings with her talk, and so I don’t feel like as I was the only living being about the ranch. And Jim here,” said Miggles, with her old laugh again, and coming out quite into the firelight, “Jim- -why, boys, you would admire to see how much he knows for a man like him. Sometimes I bring him flowers, and he looks at ’em just as natural as if he knew ’em; and times, when we’re sitting alone, I read him those things on the wall. Why, Lord!” said Miggles, with her frank laugh, “I’ve read him that whole side of the house this winter. There never was such a man for reading as Jim.”