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"I WAS NOT LOOKING AT YOU-I WAS LOOKING AT ALAN."

THE CHOSEN VALLEY.1-- IV.

BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTE,

Author of "The Led-Horse Claim," " John Bodewin's Testimony," etc.

XII.

WITH PICTURE BY THE AUTHOR.

HE physical shock Alan had suffered worked no sudden regeneration of his character, but the joy of his restoration floated the business of the compromise off the reef on which it had struck. Norrisson was now the generous host, the fatherly sympathizer, and Dunsmuir's great boom of happiness swept all contention and bitterness out of his soul. For the time he had ceased to think of his wrongs; he was ashamed to haggle about the terms of a surrender which had lost for him its vital significance. What mattered who built the ditch, or how? He blessed God that he had his son. The question of managerial dictation to the chief engineer was not again raised; it was noticeable that all parties avoided it, and Westerhall sailed for the other side with the tacit understanding that all radical points of dispute were settled.

Alan had meant to take no advantage of his temporary importance. The household was prostrate before him; none of the old issues were revived between him and his father, except as he himself chose to revive them, in honest contrition. He had planned a different and much humbler home-coming. He had arranged the meeting in his own mind, very modestly, if also effectively; his father was to have seen him, first, with a pick in his hand, at work with the men. Perhaps he had counted on the robe and the ring and the feasting afterward. However, it had all been taken out of his hands, and his father had only his bare word for the intentions he was not strong enough as yet to put in practice: but Dunsmuir asked nothing, not even his boy's word. It was a specious content which could not last.

scraper-teams, hung like the smoke of an artillery engagement along the crests of the mesa. Where Dunsmuir had been wont to watch for the light of one lone cabin twinkling close to the shore, a galaxy blazed by night along both sides of the gulch above Job's cabin; and on the beach below were tents and camp-fires, and men and cattle, and all the dirt and paraphernalia of a huge contractor's-outfit.

The cabin was no longer a possible place for Margaret. She lived, now, at the house, and Job camped with the force and visited her on Sundays, as he used before they were married. But they were not at home, as they had been in their bit of a room below, where Margaret was mistress and Job was man of the house. Dolly tried to lure them out of the hot kitchen into the parlor off the dining-room, where she and Margaret held their domestic consultations; but it was not the same to Margaret-going deliberately to sit there with Job in his best clothes, with nothing to do, and members of the family passing in and out with smiles of "How do you do, Job?" and affable questions about the work.

Nothing in life persists like the essential nature of our individual needs and peculiarities; the smallest of them are often the most insistent. The household, having been drugged with extreme joy, came to itself after a while, and discovered that nothing, not even Alan, had changed: only the work had "started up and jostled them all out of their old places; and if it had brought them the long-looked-for rest and triumph and security, none of the elders had yet found it out. Job missed his old importance to the work; he missed Margaret, and thought that she worked too hard; and he sorely missed his home. He was not a skilled laborer. His record counted for little in the new organization, unless Dunsmuir found time to remember it. He had not been able to procure for Job any position better than that of a "pickhandle boss" under one of the sub-contractors. Job knew that his place could be filled at a day's notice. Dunsmuir was feeling keenly his private indebtedness to these tried friends, now that he had come, apparently, into his kingdom. He had intimated to Job that the closing deal had been hard upon him, financially. Job knew the water-right had not been sustained, and was not surprised; but he asked no 1 Copyright, 1892, by Mary Hallock Foote.

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Summer was advancing, ever deeper in dust. The sky was tarnished with haze. The sunsets were longer burning out in the west, in colors more tragic. The river had sunk in its bed, and the eery laugh was no more heard. There was another sound as night fell, which made music in Dunsmuir's ears- the roll of the contractor's wagon-trains moving into the cañon, as the force on the work increased. By day clouds of dust, from the slow procession of

VOL. XLIV.-69.

525

questions, and Dunsmuir could not bring himself to own that he had nothing to show for his share in his own scheme, after the years he had stood under it, but his salary and a trifle of stock not presently available. Debtors, who had respected his difficulties and accepted his promises, were "jumping" on him now that he was supposed to have made a prosperous alliance. Job and Margaret were treated with the distinction conferred upon relatives, and creditors in love: they were presumed to be willing to wait, and they waited; but the situation began to be felt, even on their side, now. If Dunsmuir could have talked with them openly, he might have drawn anew upon their lasting truth and warmth of feeling; but between his pride and soreness, and their pride and shyness, and their habit of waiting for the first word to come from him, the rift widened. Dunsmuir thought that, peasant-fashion, they distrusted him, and were feeling their pocket-injury; Job and Margaret thought him weakly uplifted, and oblivious of the past. They pitied him, as handworkers pity the man who works with his head whose results do not check with the plain demands of life.

Meanwhile Alan, beset by the new distractions about him, fell into the old restive languor over his books. The rumor and stir of the camps fired his blood; the town was nearer than ever, with horsemen posting back and forth, and livery-teams, and telegrams. He had promised himself that he would never "kick" again; but within six weeks after his pathetic home-coming he was imploring his father to give him a chance elsewhere. He brought forward an offer made him by Mr. Norrisson of a junior clerk's place in the company's office in town, on a salary which seemed riches to the boy's habitual impecuniosity. The offer had included a home for Alan in his patron's house. Norrisson had taken a fancy to the lad, had petted him enormously as his guest, prophesying him the future of a man of affairs. Dunsmuir could see how the magnificence of Norrisson's business ideas, his splendid, easy way of living, had affected Alan's imagination, as the luxury of his house affected his body just rescued from the pit. Few things could have been harder for Dunsmuir than to see his son drift from his own control under an influence which he profoundly distrusted: but the fact had to be faced; no more issues could be taken now. Alan must go the way of his temperament, even as Philip, from the alien house, had been drawn the way of his.

One afternoon, quite at the beginning of the cañon work, Philip had climbed the slope beneath the bluffs to paint a target for a reference point on a rock conspicuous from the opposite side. The buck-sage was out of bloom, and,

though seated close to the cave, he had not thought of its neighborhood until he heard footsteps, and saw Dolly loitering toward him. She had gone to seek a missing book in that unfrequented repository, and, seeing Philip at his tantalizing employment, curiosity dragged her to the spot. He took no notice till she was standing close behind him.

"That's a very queer target," said she. "What do you practise with?” "A Buff & Berger."

"What is a Buff & Berger?"

"It is a kind of transit they make in Boston.” “Oh. And are you really painting that thing because you must ?"

Philip had drawn a circle on the rock, and quartered it, and was now painting the opposite quadrants white and red.

"I, or some other man," he said. "Did you think I was painting it for its beauty or its deep significance?"

"Why, it might signify things," said Dolly, seating herself for conversation.

"What things, for example?"

"Of course I can't think of anything when you ask me. It might be a chief's signal, a kind of cross-tarrie, if there were anybody to rise or anything to rise for."

"There speaks the daughter of the Duinhéwassel."

"No," said Dolly, rather regretfully; "we are not a clan family, on my father's side. His forebears were Saxon and Whiggish, and nonconforming, and non-everything. They were 'kickers,' as Alan says. Of course, you know, I am no Jacobite at this late day; yet I think there was just as good praying on their side."

"And some very pretty men,'" said Philip, smiling. "Still, you must allow for the glamour of a lost cause. The histories for children seek rather to be picturesque, I think, than sternly just."

"They had the best songs," said Dolly," and when we are children'". - she returned his playful emphasis-"we fight as we sing." "And when we are men, we fight as our girls sing. I hear you wasting a lot of pathos, even now, on that waefu' name of Charlie."

He looked at her, as he took a fresh brushful of paint, and forced her to return his smile, which she did with the pleasing addition of a fine large blush. He could at any time make her blush, but he did not value the symptom, knowing how little a change of color or the absence of it signifies with these innocent young faces.

The blush made her suddenly serious. "I am thankful there are no such wasteful quarrels now," she said. "But the uneasy spirit never dies: when the fighting stops the schemes begin."

"Are you not friendly to the scheme?"

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their amenities'; how they would feel another's woe and hide the fault they see! My accent would be wrong, I should n't know their talk, and they would never care to know mine; and if I tried to be like them I should be affected."

Philip dissembled his intense amusement, and answered, "You are thinking of types." "Well, I should be a type. When one is in the right place one is taken as a matter of course. It is n't thought necessary to whisper, 'She grew up in a cañon!' No; I'd rather

"How many places have you ever seen out- dream of the Old Country and call it home, side the cañon?"

"None that I remember, unless you call the town a place."

"Why do you speak so scornfully? It is a very nice little town."

"You ought to think so, truly. It's a sort of relative of yours; you have the same name, and the same parent, is n't that what they say?" "Never mind what they say. Tell me some other things you have n't seen."

"But I 've never seen anything. If it's a list of my ignorances you want I might sit here all the afternoon."

"Begin, then, by all means. Have you ever seen the flag of your country, officially displayed?"

"Which is my country, I wonder? Alan says he would fight for the Stars and Stripes; but I should go with my father."

"Better postpone the decision till after your marriage."

"I shall never marry on that side, flag or no flag."

"Bien, but why?" asked Philip, opening his

eyes.

"Well, I should not care to marry beneath a certain class, the class I 'm supposed to belong to," she argued seriously; "yet I have not been bred like the women of that class. I should never feel at home with them."

"But what can you know of them?" "Oh, I have studied them for years; in the novels, you know, and in French-the tall girls with their high shoulders and their short upper lips, and the young men with their insolent Greek profiles."

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than go there to find myself without a country." "When you speak of the Old Country do you mean England or Scotland ? "

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Both; but I was born in India, in the Punjab, in the great days of my father's work. I wish he had stayed where they know what an engineer is. Here his record counts for nothing; he might as well be a tinker. Anybody who can run a hand-level is an engineer in America."

"Thanks," said Philip. "I am an American engineer."

Dolly nodded at him very sweetly. "I have no prejudices," she assured him; and when Philip laughed aloud, she was quite mystified. "I used to dream of nothing," she went on, "but how my father was ever to get this work done. I used to long for the power to help him. You know a girl's only way to get power is to marry it," she confided to him, as a great discovery. "I mean a girl like me, with no education, or genius of her own. Yes; it was actually one of my make-believes-I must have been in pinafores. There should come a rich traveler to visit the cañon who would be astonished at my father's daughter. I should have been, not as I am, you know, but a darkeyed, red and white wonderful beauty. But I would not listen to him till he had promised to back my father's scheme."

"He was to purchase your hand, then, by building the ditch?"

"Of course; what else?" "Was there a heart anywhere in the business?"

"There was his heart. Do you think I would marry a man that did not care for me?"

"And where was your heart, meanwhile?" "With my blessed, dear daddy," exclaimed Dolly, with perfect self-satisfaction.

"And these are the dreams of girlhood in a cañon! You must have read some very silly books."

"Isn't it a woman's duty to help her family?" "It is her first duty to be honest, if she can." "If we had always been free we might have been honest."

"Is that a tale ye borrow'?" Philip re

torted, "or is 't some words ye 've learned by rote'?"

Dolly was caught by the quotation, which she was pleased to call felicitous, and omitted to observe that Philip's reply was merely an evasion.

He continued to question her, enjoying the frank side-lights of biography her answers shed upon the family past.

"And was Alan born under the Stars and Stripes that he should declare for America?" "No; not he. We are twins, did you not know? After India we lived in a stupid house in Bedford Park while papa was looking up his scheme in this country. Sometimes we went to the sea, and sometimes to Dalgarnie, my grandmother's house in the north. Margaret tells us about those places till I think I can remember; but of course I cannot. I was but three when we came to the cañon; and there is something deadening in the sight of these bluffs that never change, and these lights and winds and sounds that go on from year to year. I wonder we are not all a little touched. I think we are a wee bit off, each one of us, in a way of our own." She crowded herself closer into a hollow of the slope, clasping her knees, and talking in a sing-song, drowsy monologue to the tune of the river and the breeze stirring the dry hillgrasses above their heads. Philip stole a look at her from time to time, and wantonly nursed his job.

"Yes; I surely think we have been at times a little warped," she mused aloud, encouraged by his silence. "There used to be a soundI think you have never heard it—a sound inside of all other sounds, like a ringing in the ears; I cannot describe it. We used to hear it when the river talked at night. Well, you cannot think how I used to dread that sound; it was like a wicked laugh. Margaret said it was 'unchancy.' And now it seems such perfect nonsense. I wonder I'm not ashamed to tell you. But the spell is broken now."

"I would have had it last long enough to include me," said Philip. "And so the cañon is quite spoiled, you think?" he questioned, half jealously.

"I did not say spoiled; not the same." "Still, you would not have liked to stay here as it was?"

"I should have had to, I fancy, whether I liked it or not. I could have kept my makebelieves. Now I don't care for them any more." "Ah," murmured Philip. "And the rich traveler what would you say to him now?" "I don't need him now: the work 's going on without him."

"But if the work should stop; how then? Would you be ready to make that same bargain ?"

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"You have noticed that, too? I think it does not like the work; and I am so sorry." "Is the bird supposed to be an omniscience that has to be propitiated?" "I knew you would laugh!

"But it is you who are laughing." "Do you know-there is no such bird." "You mean it is not set down in the birdbooks?"

"Not that we can find. And not one of us has ever traced the song. It is a shy singer; its voice, if you 've noticed, comes from far away, for all it's so piercing. We hear it only in shady, quiet places like the poplars or the big cut, or up in the shadow of the bluffs; and no one has ever heard it beyond the cañon. It was after we had the sorrow here: my mother was taken, and then it began to be heard, and only in those places that she loved. This I have never said to any one. When I was a little girl I used to think it meant that I was doing right or was going to be happy, whenever I heard the bird. It was my four-leaved clover, my new moon over the right shoulder. Did I not tell you we are a little touched?"

After a silence, Philip said: "Do you remember the first time that you deigned to look at me? You stood below the bluffs, and we heard the bird."

"Oh, if you mean that time! I was n't looking at you at all. I was looking at Alan," said Dolly, disingenuously; and as she spoke came the rare, piercing, faltering note, dropping through the silence. She could not help but look at him now; and Philip blessed the bird.

XIII.

"I HAVE Something for you," said Philip one day on his return from town, handing a neat parcel to Dolly.

"A jeweler's box for me? Who can it be from?"

"The rich traveler, I think, must be not far off. Seebright said it was for 'some of the cañon folks,' and as it seems to be a woman's toy I conclude it must be for you.”

Dolly was in a twitter of curiosity as she opened the velvet box, and turned its contents out upon her palm. The bauble's weight was

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