Flip: A California Romance | Page 4

intruding foot of hunter
and prospector; and the inquisitive patrol of the county surveyor had
only skirted its boundary. It remained for Mr. Lance Harriott to
complete its exploration. His reasons for so doing were simple. He had
made the journey thither underneath the stage-coach, and clinging to its
axle. He had chosen this hazardous mode of conveyance at night, as the
coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude
the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.
He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers as they
already knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed
it unwise to present himself in a newer reputation of a man who had
just slain a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was
offered. He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the
brushing branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely

distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road. Then,
more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the
steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness and
the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed, it
would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any
semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous reddish mask of dust
and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps
exaggerated in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a
drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud
of dust followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten
garments clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened
and upheld by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he
kept on his course.
Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once when he stopped and
leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the
distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more
musical interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot
trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the
interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed
with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and
trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed
and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the luxurious retreat of many
a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott. Without a
moment's hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped
cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop. His head
disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.
Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,-- his revolver
and tobacco pouch.
A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue jay alighted on the bank and
made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave
way to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between

the pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous
fascination. Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of
animated nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above
the bank. It was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this
wholesale process, washed himself and his light "drill" garments
entirely clean, but that he had, apparently by the same operation,
morally cleansed HIMSELF, and left every stain and ugly blot of his
late misdeeds and reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here
and there, was rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good humor and
youthful levity. His large blue eyes were infantine in their innocent
surprise and thoughtlessness. Dripping yet with water, and panting, he
rested his elbows lazily on the bank, and became instantly absorbed
with a boy's delight in the movements of the gopher, who, after the first
alarm, returned cautiously to abduct the tobacco pouch. If any familiar
had failed to detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust
and grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have
recognized in this blond faun the possible outcast and murderer. And,
when with a swirl of his spattering sleeve, he drove back the gopher in
a shower of spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted
his felonious