Flip and Found at Blazing Star | Page 5

Bret Harte

again, as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or
corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young
girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged
from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.
"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"
Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.
"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went

on. "Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."
In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that the
voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or
frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain
kind of pleased curiosity.
"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went into
the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along at a
brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I found."
It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met Cass's
eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in the grass. It
was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so incongruous, so
perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying there, so ghastly
ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity to adjust itself to
the surrounding landscape, that it affected him with something more
than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only stare at it blankly.
"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"
Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have
seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but
presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand
protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way
and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of
cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles
to the sky. It was a dead man. So palpably dead that life seemed to have
taken flight from his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and degraded by
them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would have been less
insulting to humanity. The head had fallen back, and was partly hidden
in a gopher burrow, but the white, upturned face and closed eyes had
less of helpless death in them than those wretched enwrappings. Indeed,
one limp hand that lay across the swollen abdomen lent itself to the
grotesquely hideous suggestion of a gentleman sleeping off the
excesses of a hearty dinner.

"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"
Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded
curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the
helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown
paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt cellar, and matted hair proved the
only record.
"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to
relinquish his burden. "May be you'll find another wound."
But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older
civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a
present inquest.
"Perhaps you'd better ride on, Miss, afore you get summoned as a
witness. I'll give warning at Red Chief's Crossing, and send the coroner
down here."
"Let me go with you," she said, earnestly, "it would be such fun. I don't
mind being a witness. Or," she added, without heeding Cass's look of
astonishment, "I'll wait here till you come back."
"But you see, Miss, it wouldn't seem right--" began Cass.
"But I found him first," interrupted the girl, with a pout.
Staggered by this preemptive right, sacred to all miners, Cass stopped.
"Who is the coroner?" she asked.
"Joe Hornsby."
"The tall, lame man, who was half eaten by a grizzly?"
"Yes."
"Well, look now! I'll ride on and bring him back in half an hour.
There!"

"But, Miss--!"
"Oh, don't mind ME. I never saw anything of this kind before, and I
want to see it ALL."
"Do you know Hornsby?" asked Cass, unconsciously a trifle irritated.
"No, but I'll bring him." She wheeled her horse into the road.
In the presence of this living energy Cass quite forgot the helpless dead.
"Have you been long in these parts, Miss?" he asked.
"About two weeks," she answered, shortly. "Good-by, just now. Look
around for the pistol or anything else you can find, although I have
been over the whole ground twice already."
A little puff of dust as the horse sprang into the road, a muffled shuffle,
struggle, then the regular beat of hoofs, and she was gone.
After five minutes had passed, Cass regretted that he had
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