FullReads

This piece of highly involved wisdom quieted Melissa very much as a handkerchief stuffed into a sufferer’s mouth allays his pain. She went about the rest of the day silent and distressed.

At daybreak the next morning, Lysander harnessed the dun-colored mules and drove to Los Angeles.

The sun rose higher, and the warm dullness of a California summer day settled down upon the little mountain ranch. Heat seemed to rise in shimmering waves from the yellow barley stubble. The orange-trees cast dense shadows with no coolness in them, and along the edge of the orchard the broad leaves of the squash-vines hung in limp dejection upon their stalks. The heated air was full of pungent odors: tar and honey and spice from the sage and eucalyptus, with now and then a warmer puff of some new wild fragrance from far up the mountain-side.

“We’re a-goin’ to have three hot days,” said Mrs. Sproul, looking anxiously over the valley from the shelter of her husband’s hat. “Sandy’ll swelter, bein’ dressed up so. I do hope they won’t keep him long. He don’t know nothin’ about it, noway. Seems to me they might ‘a’ believed him, when he said so.”

Mother Withrow had fallen into a silence full of the eloquence of offended dignity, when Lysander disappeared. Like all tyrannical souls, she was beginning to feel a bitterness worse than that of opposition,–the bitterness of deceit. She knew that Lysander had deceived her, and the knowledge was bearing its fruit of humiliation and chagrin. The evident liberality of Forrester’s course in deeding her a share of the canon, greater, it was said, than the loss occasioned by the drying up of Flutterwheel Spring, had struck at the root of hatreds and preconceptions that were far more vital to her than the mere proprietorship of the water right. She felt hampered and defrauded by the circumstances that forbade her to turn and fling the gift back in his face. To this grim, gray-haired tyrant, dying of thirst seemed sweet compared with the daily bitterness of hearing her enemy praised for his generosity. She sat in the doorway fanning herself with her apron, and made no reply to her daughter’s anxious observation.

“I calc’lated to rub out a few things this mornin’,” continued Mrs. Sproul, “but somehow I don’t feel like settlin’ down to washin’ or anythin’; an’ the baby’s cross, bein’ all broke out with the heat. I wonder what’s become of M’lissy.”

“She’s up in the oak-tree out at the barn,” called William T. Sherman, who with other fraternal generals was holding a council of war over a gopher caught in a trap. “Letterlone; she’s as cross as Sam Patch.”

“M’lissy takes her paw’s death harder ‘n I calc’lated she’d do,” commented Minerva, virtuously conventional; “she’s a good deal upset.”

The old woman sniffed audibly.

“I reckon you’ll all live through it,” she said frostily.

Melissa, swinging her bare feet from a branch of the dense live oak in the barnyard, had watched Lysander’s departure with wistful eagerness, entirely unaware that he had divined her secret, and was mannishly averse to having the “women folks” of his family mixed up in a murder trial. Now that he was really gone, and she was left to the dreariness of her own reflections, she grew wan and white with misery.

“I had ought to ‘a’ told it,” she moaned. “If they don’t hang ‘im, they may put ‘im in jail, and that’s awful.” She thought of him, so straight and lithe and gay, grown pale and wretched; manacled, according to Ulysses’s graphic description, with iron chains so heavy that he could not rise; kept feebly alive on bread and water, and presided over by a jailer whose ingenious cruelty knew no limit but the liveliness of the boy’s fiendish imagination.

“A year or two,” Lysander had said, as if it were a trifle. She looked back a year, and tried to measure the time, losing herself in the hazy monotony of her past, and conscious only of the remoteness of certain events that served as landmarks in her simple experience,–events not yet two years distant.