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Read Ebook: Gabriel Conroy by Harte Bret
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Ebook has 2226 lines and 142724 words, and 45 pages
men, pointing to the chimney of the second hut.
There was no preliminary "hallo!" or hesitation now. The worst was known. They all passed rapidly to the opening, and disappeared within. When they returned to the surface they huddled together--a whispering but excited group. They were so much preoccupied that they did not see that their party was suddenly increased by the presence of a stranger.
THE FOOTPRINTS GROW FAINTER.
It was Philip Ashley! Philip Ashley--faded, travel-worn, hollow-eyed, but nervously energetic and eager. Philip, who four days before had left Grace the guest of a hospitable trapper's half-breed family in the California Valley. Philip--gloomy, discontented, hateful of the quest he had undertaken, but still fulfilling his promise to Grace and the savage dictates of his own conscience. It was Philip Ashley, who now standing beside the hut, turned half-cynically, half-indifferently toward the party.
The surgeon was first to discover him. He darted forward with a cry of recognition, "Poinsett! Arthur!--what are you doing here?"
Ashley's face flushed crimson at the sight of the stranger. "Hush!" he said almost involuntarily. He glanced rapidly around the group, and then in some embarrassment replied with awkward literalness, "I left my horse with the others at the entrance of the ca?on."
"I see," said the surgeon briskly, "you have come with relief like ourselves; but you are too late! too late!"
"Too late!" echoed Ashley.
"Yes, they are all dead or gone!"
A singular expression crossed Ashley's face. It was unnoticed by the surgeon, who was whispering to Blunt. Presently he came forward.
"Captain Blunt, this is Lieutenant Poinsett of the Fifth Infantry, an old messmate mine, whom I have not met before for two years. He is here, like ourselves, on an errand of mercy. It is like him!"
The unmistakable air of high breeding and intelligence which distinguished Philip always, and the cordial endorsement of the young surgeon, prepossessed the party instantly in his favour. With that recognition, something of his singular embarrassment dropped away.
"Who are those people?" he ventured at last to say.
"Their names are on this paper, which we found nailed to a tree. Of course, with no survivor present, we are unable to identify them all. The hut occupied by Dr. Devarges, whose body, buried in the snow, we have identified by his clothing, and the young girl Grace Conroy and her child-sister, are the only ones we are positive about."
Philip looked at the doctor.
"How have you identified the young girl?"
Philip remembered that Grace had changed her clothes for the suit of a younger brother who was dead.
"Only by that?" he asked.
"No. Dr. Devarges in his papers gives the names of the occupants of the hut. We have accounted for all but her brother, and a fellow by the name of Ashley."
"How do you account for them?" asked Philip with a dark face.
"Ran away! What can you expect from that class of people?" said the surgeon with a contemptuous shrug.
"What class?" asked Philip almost savagely.
Philip tried to combat this picture with his recollection of Grace's youthful features, but somehow failed. Within the last half-hour his instinctive fastidiousness had increased a hundredfold. He looked at the doctor, and said "Yes."
"Of course," said the surgeon. "It was the old lot. What could you expect? People who could be strong only in proportion to their physical strength, and losing everything with the loss of that? There have been selfishness, cruelty--God knows--perhaps murder done here!"
"Yes, yes," said Philip, hastily; "but you were speaking of this girl, Grace Conroy; what do you know of her?"
"Nothing, except that she was found lying there dead with her name on her clothes and her sister's blanket in her arms, as if the wretches had stolen the dying child from the dead girl's arms. But you, Arthur, how chanced you to be here in this vicinity? Are you stationed here?"
"No, I have resigned from the army."
"Alone!"
"Come, we will talk this over as we return. You will help me make out my report. This you know, is an official inquiry, based upon the alleged clairvoyant quality of our friend Blunt. I must say we have established that fact, if we have been able to do nothing more."
The surgeon then lightly sketched an account of the expedition, from its inception in a dream of Blunt to his meeting with Philip, with such deftness of cynical humour and playful satire--qualities that had lightened the weariness of the mess-table of Fort Bobadil--that the young men were both presently laughing. Two or three of the party who had been engaged in laying out the unburied bodies, and talking in whispers, hearing these fine gentlemen make light of the calamity in well-chosen epithets, were somewhat ashamed of their own awe, and less elegantly, and I fear less grammatically, began to be jocose too. Whereat the fastidious Philip frowned, the surgeon laughed, and the two friends returned to the entrance of the ca?on, and thence rode out of the valley together.
Philip's reticence regarding his own immediate past was too characteristic to excite any suspicion or surprise in the mind of his friend. In truth, the doctor was too well pleased with his presence, and the undoubted support which he should have in Philip's sympathetic tastes and congenial habits, to think of much else. He was proud of his friend--proud of the impression he had made among the rude unlettered men with whom he was forced by the conditions of frontier democracy to associate on terms of equality. And Philip, though young, was accustomed to have his friends proud of him. Indeed, he always felt some complacency with himself that he seldom took advantage of this fact. Satisfied that he might have confided to the doctor the truth of his connection with the ill-fated party and his flight with Grace, and that the doctor would probably have regarded him as a hero, he felt less compunction at his suppression of the fact.
Their way lay by Monument Point and the dismantled cairn. Philip had already passed it on his way to the ca?on, and had felt a thankfulness for the unexpected tragedy that had, as he believed, conscientiously relieved him of a duty to the departed naturalist, yet he could not forego a question.
"Is there anything among these papers and collections worth our preserving?" he asked the surgeon.
The doctor, who had not for many months had an opportunity to air his general scepticism, was nothing if not derogatory.
"No," he answered, shortly. "If there were any way that we might restore them to the living Dr. Devarges, they might minister to his vanity, and please the poor fellow. I see nothing in them that should make them worthy to survive him."
The tone was so like Dr. Devarges' own manner, as Philip remembered it, that he smiled grimly and felt relieved. When they reached the spot Nature seemed to have already taken the same cynical view; the metallic case was already deeply sunken in the snow, the wind had scattered the papers far and wide, and even the cairn itself had tumbled into a shapeless, meaningless ruin.
IN WHICH THE FOOTPRINTS ARE LOST FOR EVER.
"A se?orita--an American--desires an immediate audience."
"No, no, listen! I am only a poor, poor girl, without friends or home. A month ago, I left my family starving in the mountains, and came away to get them help. My brother came with me. God was good to us, Se?or, and after a weary tramp of many days we found a trapper's hut, and food and shelter. Philip, my brother, went back alone to succour them. He has not returned. Oh, sir, he may be dead; they all may be dead--God only knows! It is three weeks ago since he left me; three weeks! It is a long time to be alone, Se?or, a stranger in a strange land. The trapper was kind, and sent me here to you for assistance. You will help me? I know you will. You will find them, my friends, my little sister, my brother!"
The Commander waited until she had finished, and then gently lifted her to a seat by his side. Then he turned to his secretary, who, with a few hurried words in Spanish, answered the mute inquiry of the Commander's eyes. The young girl felt a thrill of disappointment as she saw that her personal appeal had been lost and unintelligible; it was with a slight touch of defiance that was new to her nature that she turned to the secretary who advanced as interpreter.
"You are an American?"
"Yes," said the girl, curtly, who had taken one of the strange, swift, instinctive dislikes of her sex to the man.
"How many years?"
"Fifteen."
The Commander, almost unconsciously, laid his brown hand on her clustering curls.
"Name?"
She hesitated and looked at the Commander.
"Grace," she said.
Then she hesitated; and, with a defiant glance at the secretary, added--
"Grace Ashley!"
"Give to me the names of some of your company, Mees Graziashly."
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