Flip: A California Romance

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FLIP: A CALIFORNIA ROMANCE


By Bret Harte




CHAPTER I


Just where the track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like
the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue
shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit,
hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye
rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which
seemed to pant and quiver in the oven-like air, through rising dust, the
slow creaking of dragging wheels, the monotonous cry of tired springs,
and the muffled beat of plunging hoofs, it held out a promise of
sheltered coolness and green silences beyond. Sunburned and anxious
faces yearned toward it from the dizzy, swaying tops of stagecoaches,
from lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of
"mountain schooners," and from scorching saddles that seemed to weigh
down the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem that
the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it
appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the
valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden
crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and
enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest
exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous
exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba
buena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified,
distilled and evaporated in that mighty heat, and seemed to fire with
a midsummer madness all who breathed their fumes. They stung, smarted,
stimulated, intoxicated. It was said that the most jaded and foot-sore
horses became furious and ungovernable under their influence; wearied
teamsters and muleteers, who had exhausted their profanity in the
ascent, drank fresh draughts of inspiration in this fiery air, extended
their vocabulary, and created new and startling forms of objurgation.
It is recorded that one bibulous stage-driver exhausted description
and condensed its virtues in a single phrase: "Gin and ginger." This
felicitous epithet, flung out in a generous comparison with his favorite
drink, "rum and gum," clung to it ever after.

Such was the current comment on this vale of spices. Like most human
criticism it was hasty and superficial. No one yet had been known to
have penetrated deeply its mysterious recesses. It was still far below
the summit and its wayside inn. It had escaped the intruding foot of
hunter and prospector; and the inquisitive patrol of the county surveyor
had only skirted its boundary. It remained for Mr. Lance Harriott to
complete its exploration. His reasons for so doing were simple. He had
made the journey thither underneath the stage-coach, and clinging to its
axle. He had chosen this hazardous mode of conveyance at night, as the
coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude
the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.

He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers as they already
knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise
to present himself in a newer reputation of a man who had just slain
a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered.
He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the brushing
branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely
distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road. Then,
more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the
steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness
and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed,
it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any
semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous reddish mask of dust and
clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated
in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken
man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust
followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments
clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened and upheld
by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he kept on his
course.

Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once when he stopped and
leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the
distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical
interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot
trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the
interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed
with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and
trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed
and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the luxurious retreat of
many a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott. Without
a moment's hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped
cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop. His head
disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.
Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,--his revolver and
tobacco pouch.

A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue jay alighted on the bank and
made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way
to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the
pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination.
Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of animated
nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above the bank. It
was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this wholesale
process, washed himself and his light "drill" garments entirely clean,
but that he had, apparently by the same operation, morally cleansed
HIMSELF, and left every stain and ugly blot of his late misdeeds and
reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here and there, was
rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good humor and youthful levity.
His large blue eyes were infantine in their innocent surprise and
thoughtlessness. Dripping yet with water, and panting, he rested his
elbows lazily on the bank, and became instantly absorbed with a boy's
delight in the movements of the gopher, who, after the first alarm,
returned cautiously to abduct the tobacco pouch. If any familiar had
failed to detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust and
grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have recognized
in this blond faun the possible outcast and murderer. And, when with a
swirl of his spattering sleeve, he drove back the gopher in a shower of
spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted his felonious
hiding-place as a mere picnicking bower.

A slight breeze was unmistakably permeating the wood from the west.
Looking in that direction, Lance imagined that the shadow was less dark,
and although the undergrowth was denser, he struck off carelessly toward
it. As he went on, the wood became lighter and lighter; branches, and
presently leaves, were painted against the vivid blue of the sky. He
knew he must be near the summit, stopped, felt for his revolver, and
then lightly put the few remaining branches aside.

The full glare of the noonday sun at first blinded him. When he could
see more clearly, he found himself on the open western slope of the
mountain, which in the Coast Range was seldom wooded. The spiced thicket
stretched between him and the summit, and again between him and the
stage road that plunges from the terrace, like forked lightning into the
valley below. He could command all the approaches without being seen.
Not that this seemed to occupy his thoughts or cause him any anxiety.
His first act was to disencumber himself of his tattered coat; he then
filled and lighted his pipe, and stretched himself full-length on the
open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun. While smoking he
carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which had enveloped his
tobacco, and being struck with some amusing paragraph, read it half
aloud again to some imaginary auditor, emphasizing its humor with an
hilarious slap upon his leg.

Possibly from the relaxation of fatigue and the bath, which had become
a vapor one as he alternately rolled and dried himself in the baking
grass, his eyes closed dreamily. He was awakened by the sound of voices.
They were distant; they were vague; they approached no nearer. He rolled
himself to the verge of the first precipitous grassy descent. There was
another bank or plateau below him, and then a confused depth of olive
shadows, pierced here and there by the spiked helmets of pines.

There was no trace of habitation, yet the voices were those of some
monotonous occupation, and Lance distinctly heard through them the click
of crockery and the ring of some household utensil. It appeared to be
the interjectional, half listless, half perfunctory, domestic dialogue
of an old man and a girl, of which the words were unintelligible. Their
voices indicated the solitude of the mountain, but without sadness; they
were mysterious without being awe-inspiring. They might have uttered
the dreariest commonplaces, but, in their vast isolation, they seemed
musical and eloquent. Lance drew his first sigh,--they had suggested
dinner.

Careless as his nature was, he was too cautious to risk detection in
broad daylight. He contented himself for the present with endeavoring to
locate that particular part of the depths from which the voices seemed
to rise. It was more difficult, however, to select some other way of
penetrating it than by the stage road. "They're bound to have a fire
or show a light when it's dark," he reasoned, and, satisfied with that
reflection, lay down again. Presently he began to amuse himself by
tossing some silver coins in the air. Then his attention was directed to
a spur of the Coast Range which had been sharply silhouetted against
the cloudless western sky. Something intensely white, something so
small that it was scarcely larger than the silver coin in his hand, was
appearing in a slight cleft of the range.

While he looked it gradually filled and obliterated the cleft. In
another moment the whole serrated line of mountain had disappeared. The
dense, dazzling white, encompassing host began to pour over and down
every ravine and pass of the coast. Lance recognized the sea-fog, and
knew that scarcely twenty miles away lay the ocean--and safety! The
drooping sun was now caught and hidden in its soft embraces. A sudden
chill breathed over the mountain. He shivered, rose, and plunged again
for very warmth into the spice-laden thicket. The heated balsamic air
began to affect him like a powerful sedative; his hunger was forgotten
in the languor of fatigue; he slumbered. When he awoke it was dark. He
groped his way through the thicket. A few stars were shining directly
above him, but beyond and below, everything was lost in the soft, white,
fleecy veil of fog. Whatever light or fire might have betokened human
habitation was hidden. To push on blindly would be madness; he could
only wait for morning. It suited the outcast's lazy philosophy. He crept
back again to his bed in the hollow and slept. In that profound silence
and shadow, shut out from human association and sympathy by the ghostly
fog, what torturing visions conjured up by remorse and fear should have
pursued him? What spirit passed before him, or slowly shaped itself out
of the infinite blackness of the wood? None. As he slipped gently into
that blackness he remembered with a slight regret, some biscuits that
were dropped from the coach by a careless luncheon-consuming passenger.
That pang over, he slept as sweetly, as profoundly, as divinely, as a
child.




CHAPTER II.


He awoke with the aroma of the woods still steeping his senses. His
first instinct was that of all young animals; he seized a few of the
young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena vine that crept over his
mossy pillow and ate them, being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor
that seemed to soothe the cravings of his appetite. The languor of sleep
being still upon him, he lazily watched the quivering of a sunbeam that
was caught in the canopying boughs above. Then he dozed again. Hovering
between sleeping and waking, he became conscious of a slight movement
among the dead leaves on the bank beside the hollow in which he lay. The
movement appeared to be intelligent, and directed toward his revolver,
which glittered on the bank. Amused at this evident return of his
larcenous friend of the previous day, he lay perfectly still. The
movement and rustle continued, but it now seemed long and undulating.
Lance's eyes suddenly became set; he was intensely, keenly awake. It
was not a snake, but the hand of a human arm, half hidden in the moss,
groping for the weapon. In that flash of perception he saw that it was
small, bare, and deeply freckled. In an instant he grasped it firmly,
and rose to his feet, dragging to his own level as he did so, the
struggling figure of a young girl.

"Leave me go!" she said, more ashamed than frightened.

Lance looked at her. She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and
lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and
bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles,
like grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray,
presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,--at least they
were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered
allspice. Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny, deer-skin
color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes
on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun. She had
evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and
the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of
shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.
Lance let his grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then with
a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back to her.

She did not retreat, but continued looking at him in a half-surly
embarrassment.

"I ain't a bit frightened," she said; "I'm not going to run away,--don't
you fear."

"Glad to hear it," said Lance, with unmistakable satisfaction, "but why
did you go for my revolver?"

She flushed again and was silent. Presently she began to kick the earth
at the roots of the tree, and said, as if confidentially to her foot,--

"I wanted to get hold of it before you did."

"You did?--and why?"

"Oh, you know why."

Every tooth in Lance's head showed that he did, perfectly. But he was
discreetly silent.

"I didn't know what you were hiding there for," she went on, still
addressing the tree, "and," looking at him sideways under her white
lashes, "I didn't see your face."

This subtle compliment was the first suggestion of her artful sex.
It actually sent the blood into the careless rascal's face, and for a
moment confused him. He coughed. "So you thought you'd freeze on to that
six-shooter of mine until you saw my hand?"

She nodded. Then she picked up a broken hazel branch, fitted it into the
small of her back, threw her tanned bare arms over the ends of it, and
expanded her chest and her biceps at the same moment. This simple action
was supposed to convey an impression at once of ease and muscular force.

"Perhaps you'd like to take it now," said Lance, handing her the pistol.

"I've seen six-shooters before now," said the girl, evading the
proffered weapon and its suggestion. "Dad has one, and my brother had
two derringers before he was half as big as me."

She stopped to observe in her companion the effect of this capacity of
her family to bear arms. Lance only regarded her amusedly. Presently she
again spoke abruptly:--

"What made you eat that grass, just now?"

"Grass!" echoed Lance.

"Yes, there," pointing to the yerba buena.

Lance laughed. "I was hungry. Look!" he said, gayly tossing some silver
into the air. "Do you think you could get me some breakfast for that,
and have enough left to buy something for yourself?"

The girl eyed the money and the man with half-bashful curiosity.

"I reckon Dad might give ye suthing if he had a mind ter, though ez a
rule he's down on tramps ever since they run off his chickens. Ye might
try."

"But I want YOU to try. You can bring it to me here."

The girl retreated a step, dropped her eyes, and, with a smile that was
a charming hesitation between bashfulness and impudence, said: "So you
ARE hidin', are ye?"

"That's just it. Your head's level. I am," laughed Lance unconcernedly.

"Yur ain't one o' the McCarty gang--are ye?"

Mr. Lance Harriott felt a momentary moral exaltation in declaring
truthfully that he was not one of a notorious band of mountain
freebooters known in the district under that name.

"Nor ye ain't one of them chicken lifters that raided Henderson's ranch?
We don't go much on that kind o' cattle yer."

"No," said Lance, cheerfully.

"Nor ye ain't that chap ez beat his wife unto death at Santa Clara?"

Lance honestly scorned the imputation. Such conjugal ill treatment as
he had indulged in had not been physical, and had been with other men's
wives.

There was a moment's further hesitation on the part of the girl. Then
she said shortly:

"Well, then, I reckon you kin come along with me."

"Where?" asked Lance.

"To the ranch," she replied simply.

"Then you won't bring me anything to eat here?"

"What for? You kin get it down there." Lance hesitated. "I tell you it's
all right," she continued. "I'll make it all right with Dad."

"But suppose I reckon I'd rather stay here," persisted Lance, with a
perfect consciousness, however, of affectation in his caution.

"Stay away then," said the girl coolly; "only as Dad perempted this yer
woods"--

"PRE-empted," suggested Lance.

"Per-empted or pre-emp-ted, as you like," continued the girl
scornfully,--"ez he's got a holt on this yer woods, ye might ez well see
him down thar ez here. For here he's like to come any minit. You can bet
your life on that."

She must have read Lance's amusement in his eyes, for she again dropped
her own with a frown of brusque embarrassment. "Come along, then; I'm
your man," said Lance, gayly, extending his hand.

She would not accept it, eying it, however, furtively, like a horse
about to shy. "Hand me your pistol first," she said.

He handed it to her with an assumption of gayety. She received it on her
part with unfeigned seriousness, and threw it over her shoulder like
a gun. This combined action of the child and heroine, it is quite
unnecessary to say, afforded Lance undiluted joy.

"You go first," she said.

Lance stepped promptly out, with a broad grin. "Looks kinder as if I was
a prisoner, don't it?" he suggested.

"Go on, and don't fool," she replied.

The two fared onward through the wood. For one moment he entertained the
facetious idea of appearing to rush frantically away, "just to see
what the girl would do," but abandoned it. "It's an even thing if she
wouldn't spot me the first pop," he reflected admiringly.

When they had reached the open hillside, Lance stopped inquiringly.
"This way," she said, pointing toward the summit, and in quite an
opposite direction to the valley where he had heard the voices, one
of which he now recognized as hers. They skirted the thicket for a few
moments, and then turned sharply into a trail which began to dip toward
a ravine leading to the valley.

"Why do you have to go all the way round?" he asked.

"WE don't," the girl replied with emphasis; "there's a shorter cut."

"Where?"

"That's telling," she answered shortly.

"What's your name?" asked Lance, after a steep scramble and a drop into
the ravine.

"Flip."

"What?"

"Flip."

"I mean your first name,--your front name."

"Flip."

"Flip! Oh, short for Felipa!"

"It ain't Flipper,--it's Flip." And she relapsed into silence.

"You don't ask me mine?" suggested Lance.

She did not vouchsafe a reply.

"Then you don't want to know?"

"Maybe Dad will. You can lie to HIM."

This direct answer apparently sustained the agreeable homicide for some
moments. He moved onward, silently exuding admiration.

"Only," added Flip, with a sudden caution, "you'd better agree with me."

The trail here turned again abruptly and re-entered the canyon. Lance
looked up, and noticed they were almost directly beneath the bay thicket
and the plateau that towered far above them. The trail here showed signs
of clearing, and the way was marked by felled trees and stumps of pines.

"What does your father do here?" he finally asked. Flip remained silent,
swinging the revolver. Lance repeated his question.

"Burns charcoal and makes diamonds," said Flip, looking at him from the
corners of her eyes.

"Makes diamonds?" echoed Lance.

Flip nodded her head.

"Many of 'em?" he continued carelessly.

"Lots. But they're not big," she returned, with a sidelong glance.

"Oh, they're not big?" said Lance gravely.

They had by this time reached a small staked inclosure, whence the
sudden fluttering and cackle of poultry welcomed the return of the
evident mistress of this sylvan retreat. It was scarcely imposing.
Further on, a cooking stove under a tree, a saddle and bridle, a few
household implements scattered about, indicated the "ranch." Like most
pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that
had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay.
The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely
torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with
the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles,
battered hats, soleless boots, frayed stockings, cast-off rags, and
the crowning absurdity of the twisted-wire skeleton of a hooped skirt
hanging from a branch. The wildest defile, the densest thicket, the most
virgin solitude, was less dreary and forlorn than this first footprint
of man. The only redeeming feature of this prolonged bivouac was the
cabin itself. Built of the half-cylindrical strips of pine bark, and
thatched with the same material, it had a certain picturesque rusticity.
But this was an accident of economy rather than taste, for which
Flip apologized by saying that the bark of the pine was "no good" for
charcoal.

"I reckon Dad's in the woods," she added, pausing before the open door
of the cabin. "Oh, Dad!" Her voice, clear and high, seemed to fill
the whole long canyon, and echoed from the green plateau above. The
monotonous strokes of an axe were suddenly pretermitted, and somewhere
from the depths of the close-set pines a voice answered "Flip." There
was a pause of a few moments, with some muttering, stumbling, and
crackling in the underbrush, and then the sudden appearance of "Dad."

Had Lance first met him in the thicket, he would have been puzzled to
assign his race to Mongolian, Indian, or Ethiopian origin. Perfunctory
but incomplete washings of his hands and face, after charcoal burning,
had gradually ground into his skin a grayish slate-pencil pallor,
grotesquely relieved at the edges, where the washing had left off,
with a border of a darker color. He looked like an overworked Christy
minstrel with the briefest of intervals between his performances. There
were black rims in the orbits of his eyes, as if he gazed feebly out of
unglazed spectacles, which heightened his simian resemblance, already
grotesquely exaggerated by what appeared to be repeated and spasmodic
experiments in dyeing his gray hair. Without the slightest notice of
Lance, he inflicted his protesting and querulous presence entirely on
his daughter.

"Well, what's up now? Yer ye are calling me from work an hour before
noon. Dog my skin, ef I ever get fairly limbered up afore it's 'Dad!'
and 'Oh, Dad!'"

To Lance's intense satisfaction the girl received this harangue with
an air of supreme indifference, and when "Dad" had relapsed into an
unintelligible, and, as it seemed to Lance, a half-frightened muttering,
she said coolly,--

"Ye'd better drop that axe and scoot round getten' this stranger some
breakfast and some grub to take with him. He's one of them San Francisco
sports out here trout fishing in the branch. He's got adrift from his
party, has lost his rod and fixins, and had to camp out last night in
the Gin and Ginger Woods."

"That's just it; it's allers suthin like that," screamed the old man,
dashing his fist on his leg in a feeble, impotent passion, but without
looking at Lance. "Why in blazes don't he go up to that there blamed
hotel on the summit? Why in thunder--" But here he caught his daughter's
large, freckled eyes full in his own. He blinked feebly, his voice fell
into a tone of whining entreaty. "Now, look yer, Flip, it's playing
it rather low down on the old man, this yer running' in o' tramps and
desarted emigrants and cast-ashore sailors and forlorn widders and
ravin' lunatics, on this yer ranch. I put it to you, Mister," he said
abruptly, turning to Lance for the first time, but as if he had already
taken an active part in the conversation,--"I put it as a gentleman
yourself, and a fair-minded sportin' man, if this is the square thing?"