“And you,” she said in a lower voice, “used to be”—­But the rest of her sentence was lost in the switch of the whip and the jump of her horse, but he thought the word was “kinder.”

Perhaps this was why, after he watched her canter away, he went back to the garden, and from the bruised and trampled strawberry bed gathered a small basket of the finest fruit, covered them with leaves, added a paper with the highly ingenious witticism, “Picked up with you,” and sent them to her by one of the Chinamen.  Her forcible entry moved Li Sing, his foreman, also chief laundryman to the settlement, to reminiscences: 

“Me heap knew Missy Wells and ole man, who go dead.  Ole man allee time make chin music to Missy.  Allee time jaw jaw—­allee time make lows—­allee time cuttee up Missy!  Plenty time lockee up Missy topside house; no can walkee—­no can talkee—­no hab got—­how can get?—­must washee washee allee same Chinaman.  Ole man go dead—­Missy all lightee now.  Plenty fun.  Plenty stay in Blown’s big house, top-side hill; Blown first-chop man.”

Had he inquired he might have found this pagan testimony, for once, corroborated by the Christian neighbors.

But another incident drove all this from his mind.  The little stream—­the life blood of his garden—­ran dry!  Inquiry showed that it had been diverted two miles away into Brown’s ditch!  Wells’s indignant protest elicited a formal reply from Brown, stating that he owned the adjacent mining claims, and reminding him that mining rights to water took precedence of the agricultural claim, but offering, by way of compensation, to purchase the land thus made useless and sterile.  Jackson suddenly recalled the prophecy of the gloomy barkeeper.  The end, had come!  But what could the scheming capitalist want with the land, equally useless—­as his uncle had proved—­for mining purposes?  Could it be sheer malignity, incited by his vengeful cousin?  But here he paused, rejecting the idea as quickly as it came.  No! his partners were right!  He was a trespasser on his cousin’s heritage—­there was no luck in it—­he was wrong, and this was his punishment!  Instead of yielding gracefully as he might, he must back down now, and she would never know his first real feelings.  Even now he would make over the property to her as a free gift.  But his partners had advanced him money from their scanty means to plant and work it.  He believed that an appeal to their feelings would persuade them to forego even that, but he shrank even more from confessing his defeat to them than to her.

He had little heart in his labors that day, and dismissed the Chinamen early.  He again examined his uncle’s old mining claim on the top of the slope, but was satisfied that it had been a hopeless enterprise and wisely abandoned.  It was sunset when he stood under the buckeyes, gloomily looking at the glow fade out of the west, as it had out of his boyish hopes.  He had grown to like the place.  It was the hour, too, when the few flowers he had cultivated gave back their pleasant odors, as if grateful for his care.  And then he heard his name called.