In The Carquinez Woods | Page 7

chimney-like opening, "without its being noticed. Even the smoke is
lost and cannot be seen so high."
The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it had
on hers. She looked at him intently.
"You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don't you?" she said,
with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality; "but I
don't see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods. So
you're going, are you? You might be more sociable. Good-by."
"Good-by!" He leaped from the opening.
"I say pardner!"
He turned a little impatiently. She had knelt down at the entrance, so as
to be nearer his level, and was holding out her hand. But he did not
notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.
"If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?"
He smiled. "Don't wait to hear."
"But suppose I wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?"
He hesitated. "Call me--Lo."
"Lo, the poor Indian?"*
"Exactly."
* The first word of Pope's familiar apostrophe is humorously used in
the Far West as a distinguishing title for the Indian.
It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young man's
height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular gravity of
demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion. He did not look

like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as a youthful chief might
have looked. There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin
shirt and moccasins; but before she could utter the half-sarcastic
comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as
an Indian might have done.
She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,
dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance. Yet this did not
darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous
light through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof than that which
came from the dim woodland aisles below. Nevertheless, she shivered,
and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some
half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the
preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she
would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an
attitude of rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth. When she
had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue
smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the
top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her eyes on the
darkest corner of the cavern, and became motionless.
What did she see through that shadow?
Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the
preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that would
not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which
everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she
had cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his
unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse, jilted.
And then the moment of delirium, when the light danced; the one wild
act that lifted her, the despised one, above them all--made her the
supreme figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by
half- startled, half-admiring men! "Yes," she laughed; but struck by the
sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern nervously, and
then dropped again into her old position.
As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that he
was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her revenge

against others; he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted;
and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown. She was what he,
what other men, had made her. And what was she now? What had she
been once?
She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might have
been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her
precocious little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either;
and then left her with a circus troupe, where she first tasted the power
of her courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those
flashes of triumph that left a fever in her veins--a fever that when it
failed must be stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything
that would keep her name a wonder in men's mouths, an envious fear to
women. She recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap
pleasures, and cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa! the
daring Teresa! the reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman, invincible as
a boy; dancing, flirting, fencing,