by Bret Harte
and preoccupied all Hamlin's skill as ahorseman, even to the point of stopping his usual careless whistle.At the end of half an hour the track became level again, and he wasconfronted with a singular phenomenon.
He had entered the wood, and the trail seemed to cleave through afar-stretching, motionless sea of ferns that flowed on either side tothe height of his horse's flanks. The straight shafts of the trees roselike columns from their hidden bases and were lost again in a roofof impenetrable leafage, leaving a clear space of fifty feet between,through which the surrounding horizon of sky was perfectly visible.All the light that entered this vast sylvan hall came from the sides;nothing permeated from above; nothing radiated from below; the heightof the crest on which the wood was placed gave it this lateralillumination, but gave it also the profound isolation of some templeraised by long-forgotten hands. In spite of the height of these clearshafts, they seemed dwarfed by the expanse of the wood, and in thefarthest perspective the base of ferns and the capital of foliageappeared almost to meet. As the boy had warned him, the slide had turnedaside, skirting the wood to follow the incline, and presently the littletrail he now followed vanished utterly, leaving him and his horse adriftbreast-high in this green and yellow sea of fronds. But Mr. Hamlin,imperious of obstacles, and touched by some curiosity, continued toadvance lazily, taking the bearings of a larger red-wood in the centreof the grove for his objective point. The elastic mass gave way beforehim, brushing his knees or combing his horse's flanks with wide-spreadelfin fingers, and closing up behind him as he passed, as if toobliterate any track by which he might return. Yet his usual luck didnot desert him here. Being on horseback, he found that he could detectwhat had been invisible to the boy and probably to all pedestrians,namely, that the growth was not equally dense, that there were certainthinner and more open spaces that he could take advantage of by morecircuitous progression, always, however, keeping the bearings of thecentral tree. This he at last reached, and halted his panting horse.Here a new idea which had been haunting him since he entered the woodtook fuller possession of him. He had seen or known all this before!There was a strange familiarity either in these objects or in theimpression or spell they left upon him. He remembered the verses! Yes,this was the "underbrush" which the poetess had described: the gloomabove and below, the light that seemed blown through it like the wind,the suggestion of hidden life beneath this tangled luxuriance, which shealone had penetrated,--all this was here. But, more than that, here wasthe atmosphere that she had breathed into the plaintive melody of herverse. It did not necessarily follow that Mr. Hamlin's translation ofher sentiment was the correct one, or that the ideas her verses hadprovoked in his mind were at all what had been hers: in his easysusceptibility he was simply thrown into a corresponding mood ofemotion and relieved himself with song. One of the verses he had alreadyassociated in his mind with the rhythm of an old plantation melody, andit struck his fancy to take advantage of the solitude to try its effect.Humming to himself, at first softly, he at last grew bolder, and let hisvoice drift away through the stark pillars of the sylvan colonnade tillit seemed to suffuse and fill it with no more effort than the lightwhich strayed in on either side. Sitting thus, his hat thrown a littleback from his clustering curls, the white neck and shoulders of hishorse uplifting him above the crested mass of fern, his red sash the onefleck of color in their olive depths, I am afraid he looked muchmore like the real minstrel of the grove than the unknown poetess whotransfigured it. But this, as has been already indicated, was JackHamlin's peculiar gift. Even as he had previously outshone the vaqueroin his borrowed dress, he now silenced and supplanted a few flutteringblue-jays--rightful tenants of the wood--with a more graceful and airypresence and a far sweeter voice.
The open horizon towards the west had taken a warmer color from thealready slanting sun when Mr. Hamlin, having rested his horse, turnedto that direction. He had noticed that the wood was thinner there,and, pushing forward, he was presently rewarded by the sound of far-offwheels, and knew he must be near the high-road that the boy had spokenof. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, thereseemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's adviceand take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave thewood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmedrecesses. Once or twice--perhaps because he recalled the words of thepoem--that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life,and he had even fancied, here and there, a swaying of its plumed crests.Howbeit, he still lingered long enough for the open sunlight into whichhe had obtruded to point out the bravery of his handsome figure. Thenhe wheeled his horse, the light glanced from polished double bit andbridle-fripperies, caught his red sash and bullion buttons, struck aparting flash from his silver spurs, and he was gone!
For a moment the light streamed unbrokenly through the wood. And thenit could be seen that the yellow mass of undergrowth HAD moved with thepassage of another figure than his own. For ever since he had enteredthe shade, a woman, shawled in a vague, shapeless fashion, had watchedhim wonderingly, eagerly, excitedly, gliding from tree to tree as headvanced, or else dropping breathlessly below the fronds of fern whenceshe gazed at him as between parted fingers. When he wheeled she had runopenly to the west, albeit with hidden face and still clinging shawl,and taken a last look at his retreating figure. And then, with a faintbut lingering sigh, she drew back into the shadow of the wood again andvanished also.
CHAPTER III
At the end of twenty minutes Mr. Hamlin reined in his mare. He had justobserved in the distant shadows of a by-lane that intersected his roadthe vanishing flutter of two light print dresses. Without a moment'shesitation he lightly swerved out of the high-road and followed theretreating figures.
As he neared them, they seemed to be two slim young girls, evidentlyso preoccupied with the rustic amusement of edging each other off thegrassy border into the dust of the track that they did not perceivehis approach. Little shrieks, slight scufflings, and interjections of"Cynthy! you limb!" "Quit that, Eunice, now!" and "I just call thatreal mean!" apparently drowned the sound of his canter in the soft dust.Checking his speed to a gentle trot, and pressing his horse close besidethe opposite fence, he passed them with gravely uplifted hat and aserious, preoccupied air. But in that single, seemingly conventionalglance, Mr. Hamlin had seen that they were both pretty, and that one hadthe short upper lip of his errant little guide. A hundred yards fartheron he halted, as if irresolutely, gazed doubtfully ahead of him, andthen turned back. An expression of innocent--almost childlike--concernwas clouding the rascal's face. It was well, as the two girls had drawnclosely together, having been apparently surprised in the midst of aglowing eulogium of this glorious passing vision by its sudden return.At his nearer approach, the one with the short upper lip hid thatpiquant feature and the rest of her rosy face behind the other'sshoulder, which was suddenly and significantly opposed to the advanceof this handsome intruder, with a certain dignity, half real, halfaffected, but wholly charming. The protectress appeared--possibly fromher defensive attitude--the superior of her companion.
Audacious as Jack was to his own sex, he had early learned thatsuch rare but discomposing graces as he possessed required a certainapologetic attitude when presented to women, and that it was only aplain man who could be always complacently self-confident in theirpresence. There was, consequently, a hesitating lowering of thishypocrite's brown eyelashes as he said, in almost pained accents,--
"Excuse me, but I fear I've taken the wrong road. I'm going to GreenSprings."
"I reckon you've taken the wrong road, wherever you're going," returnedthe young lady, having apparently made up her mind to resent each ofJack's perfections as a separate impertinence: "this is a PRIVATE road."She drew herself fairly up here, although gurgled at in the ear andpinched in the arm by her companion.
"I beg your pardon," said Jack, meekly. "I see I'm trespassing on yourgrounds. I'm very sorry. Thank you for telling me. I should have gone ona mile or two farther, I suppose, until I
came to your house," he added,innocently.
"A mile or two! You'd have run chock ag'in' our gate in another minit,"said the short-lipped one, eagerly. But a sharp nudge from her companionsent her back again into cover, where she waited expectantly for anothercrushing retort from her protector.
But, alas! it did not come. One cannot be always witty, and Jack lookeddistressed. Nevertheless, he took advantage of the pause.
"It was so stupid in me, as I think your brother"--looking atShort-lip--"very carefully told me the road."
The two girls darted quick glances at each other. "Oh, Bawb!" said thefirst speaker, in wearied accents,--"THAT limb! He don't keer."
"But he DID care," said Hamlin, quietly, "and gave me a good deal