I. CHINO’S WIFE
On the back porch of the “office,” young
Lockwood—his boots, stained with the mud
of the mines and with candle-drippings, on the rail—sat
smoking his pipe and looking off down the canon.
It was early in the evening. Lockwood, because
he had heard the laughter and horseplay of the men
of the night shift as they went down the canon from
the bunk-house to the tunnel-mouth, knew that it was
a little after seven. It would not be necessary
to go indoors and begin work on the columns of figures
of his pay-roll for another hour yet. He knocked
the ashes out of his pipe, refilled and lighted it—stoppering
with his match-box—and shot a wavering
blue wreath out over the porch railing. Then
he resettled himself in his tilted chair, hooked his
thumbs into his belt, and fetched a long breath.
For the last few moments he had been considering,
in that comfortable spirit of relaxed attention that
comes with the after-dinner tobacco, two subjects:
first, the beauty of the evening; second, the temperament,
character, and appearance of Felice Zavalla.
As for the evening, there could be no two opinions
about that. It was charming. The Hand-over-fist
Gravel Mine, though not in the higher Sierras, was
sufficiently above the level of the mere foot-hills
to be in the sphere of influence of the greater mountains.
Also, it was remote, difficult of access. Iowa
Hill, the nearest post-office, was a good eight miles
distant, by trail, across the Indian River. It
was sixteen miles by stage from Iowa Hill to Colfax,
on the line of the Overland Railroad, and all of a
hundred miles from Colfax to San Francisco.
To Lockwood’s mind this isolation was in itself
an attraction. Tucked away in this fold of the
Sierras, forgotten, remote, the little community of
a hundred souls that comprised the personnel
of the Hand-over-fist lived out its life with the
completeness of an independent State, having its own
government, its own institutions and customs.
Besides all this, it had its own dramas as well—little
complications that developed with the swiftness of
whirlpools, and that trended toward culmination with
true Western directness. Lockwood, college-bred—he
was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines—found
the life interesting.
On this particular evening he sat over his pipe rather
longer than usual, seduced by the beauty of the scene
and the moment. It was very quiet. The prolonged
rumble of the mine’s stamp-mill came to his ears
in a ceaseless diapason, but the sound was so much
a matter of course that Lockwood no longer heard it.
The millions of pines and redwoods that covered the
flanks of the mountains were absolutely still.
No wind was stirring in their needles. But the
chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato, was as incessant
as the pounding of the mill. Far-off—thousands
of miles, it seemed—an owl was hooting,
three velvet-soft notes at exact intervals. A
cow in the stable near at hand lay down with a long
breath, while from the back veranda of Chino Zavalla’s
cabin came the clear voice of Felice singing “The
Spanish Cavalier” while she washed the dishes.
