PAGE 10
The Withrow Water Right
by
Mrs. Withrow gave him a withering glance.
“Forrester sent you, did ‘e? You miser’ble old jelly-fish! You’re a nice match fer Forrester, you are!”
She pushed her loaves angrily under the stove, to the discomfiture of the cat, who, being thus rudely disturbed, yawned and stretched, and curved its back to the limit of spinal flexibility, as it rubbed against the old woman’s knees.
III.
The California winter had blossomed and faded. The blaze of the poppies on the mesa had given place to the soft, smoky tint of the sage, and almost insensibly the cloudless summer had come on.
Work had commenced in Sawpit Canon. Unwillingly, and after much wrangling, the old woman had yielded to the evident fairness of Forrester’s offer. Even in yielding, however, she had permitted herself the luxury of defiance, and had refused to appear before a notary in the valley to sign the deed. If it afforded her any satisfaction when that official was driven to the door by Colonel Forrester, and entered her kitchen, carrying his seal, and followed by an admiring and awestricken group of children, she did not display it by the faintest tremor of her grim countenance. She had held the end of the penholder gingerly while she made her “mark,” and it was when old Withrow had been banished from the room, and the notary, in a bland, perfunctory way, had made her acquainted with the contents of the document, and inquired whether she signed the same freely and voluntarily, that she deigned to speak.
“Did Nate Forrester tell you to ask me that?” she demanded, darting a quick glance through the open door at the Colonel, who sat in his road-wagon under the trailing pepper-tree, flicking the flies from his roadster’s back. “Ef he did, you tell ‘im fer me that the man don’t live that kin make me do what I don’t want to. An’ ef he thinks the two or three kaigs of wine he’s poured into that poor, miser’ble, sozzlin’ old man o’ mine has had anything to do with me signin’ this deed, he’s a bigger fool than I took ‘im to be, an’ that’s sayin’ a good deal.”
And with this ample though somewhat novel declaration of freedom from marital compulsion the notary was quite willing to consider the majesty of the law satisfied, and proceeded to affix his seal on its imposing star of gilded paper, a process which drew the children about him in a rapidly narrowing circle from which he was glad to escape.
“Damn it,” he said, as he climbed into the road-wagon and tucked the robe about his legs,–“damn it, Colonel, I thought you were popular with the gentler sex; but there certainly seems to be a coolness between you and the old lady,” and the two men drove off, laughing as they went.
The document they had left behind them, which made Mrs. Withrow the owner of Flutterwheel Spring, “being the most southerly spring on the west side of Sawpit Canon,” had lain untouched upon the table until Lysander had taken it in charge, and it was this lofty indifference on the part of his mother-in-law that had justified her in the frequent boast that, “whatever she’d done, she hadn’t stirred out of her tracks, nohow.”
So at last the stillness of Sawpit Canon was invaded. Poindexter had come from San Gabriel Mission, and with him a young engineer from Los Angeles,–a straight, well-made young fellow, whose blue flannel shirt was not close enough at the collar to hide the line of white that betokened his recent escape from civilization. There were half a dozen workmen besides, and the muffled boom of blasting was heard all day among the boulders. At night, the touch of a banjo and the sound of men’s voices singing floated down from the camp among the sycamores.
This camp was a bewildering revelation to Melissa, who carried milk to the occupants every evening. The Chinese cook, who came to meet her and emptied her pail, trotting hither and thither, and swearing all the time with a cheerful confidence in the purity of his pigeon English, was not to her half so much a foreigner and an alien as was either of the two men who occupied the engineer’s tent. They raised their hats when she appeared among the mottled trunks of the sycamores. One of them–the younger, no doubt–sprang to help her when her foot slipped in crossing the shallow stream, and the generous concern he manifested for her safety, and which was to him the merest commonplace of politeness, was to Melissa a glimpse into Paradise.