The Bell-Ringer of Angels | Page 9

about fifty, and turned up the whites of my eyes
instead of the ends of my moustache! She's mighty smart! Then the
Postmaster has got his wife and three daughters out from the States,
and they've asked me to come over to their church festival next week. It
isn't our church, of course, but I suppose it's all right."
This and much more with the volubility of relieved feelings. When he

stopped, out of breath, Madison said, "I have had a visitor since you
left--Mr. McGee."
"And his wife?" asked Arthur quickly. Madison flushed slightly. "No;
but he asked me to go and see her."
"That's HER doin', then," returned Arthur, with a laugh. "She's always
lookin' round the corners of her eyes at me when she passes. Why, John
Rogers was joking me about her only yesterday, and said McGee would
blow a hole through me some of these days if I didn't look out! Of
course," he added, affectedly curling his moustache, "that's nonsense!
But you know how they talk, and she's too pretty for that fellow
McGee."
"She has found a careful helpmeet in her husband," said Madison
sternly, "and it's neither seemly nor Christian in you, Arthur, to repeat
the idle, profane gossip of the Bar. I knew her before her marriage, and
if she was not a professing Christian, she was, and is, a pure, good
woman! Let us have no more of this."
Whether impressed by the tone of his brother's voice, or only affected
by his own mercurial nature, Arthur changed the subject to further
voluble reminiscences of his trip to Angel's. Yet he did not seem
embarrassed nor disconcerted when his brother, in the midst of his
speech, placed the candle and the Bible on the table, with two chairs
before it. He listened to Madison's monotonous reading of the evening
exercise with equally monotonous respect. Then they both arose,
without looking at each other, but with equally set and stolid faces, and
knelt down before their respective chairs, clasping the back with both
hands, and occasionally drawing the hard, wooden frames against their
breasts convulsively, as if it were a penitential act. It was the elder
brother who that night prayed aloud. It was his voice that rose higher
by degrees above the low roof and encompassing walls, the level river
camp lights that trembled through the window, the dark belt of
riverside trees, and the light on the promontory's crest--up to the
tranquil, passionless stars themselves.
With those confidences to his Maker this chronicle does not lie--

obtrusive and ostentatious though they were in tone and attitude.
Enough that they were a general arraignment of humanity, the Bar,
himself, and his brother, and indeed much that the same Maker had
created and permitted. That through this hopeless denunciation still
lingered some human feeling and tenderness might have been shown by
the fact that at its close his hands trembled and his face was bedewed
by tears. And his brother was so deeply affected that he resolved
hereafter to avoid all evening prayers.





CHAPTER III.
It was a week later that Madison Wayne and Mr. McGee were seen, to
the astonishment of the Bar, leisurely walking together in the direction
of the promontory. Here they disappeared, entering a damp fringe of
willows and laurels that seemed to mark its limits, and gradually
ascending some thickly-wooded trail, until they reached its crest, which,
to Madison's surprise, was cleared and open, and showed an acre or two
of rude cultivation. Here, too, stood the McGees' conjugal home--a
small, four-roomed house, but so peculiar and foreign in aspect that it
at once challenged even Madison's abstracted attention. It was a tiny
Swiss chalet, built in sections, and originally packed in cases, one of
the early importations from Europe to California after the gold
discovery, when the country was supposed to be a woodless wilderness.
Mr. McGee explained, with his usual laborious care, how he had
bought it at Marysville, not only for its picturesqueness, but because in
its unsuggestive packing-cases it offered no indication to the curious
miners, and could be put up by himself and a single uncommunicative
Chinaman, without any one else being aware of its existence. There

was, indeed, something quaint in this fragment of Old World handicraft,
with its smooth-jointed paneling, in two colors, its little lozenge
fretwork, its lapped roof, overhanging eaves, and miniature gallery.
Inartistic as Madison was--like most men of rigidly rectangular mind
and principle--and accustomed to the bleak and economic sufficiency
of the Californian miner's cabin, he was touched strangely by its novel
grace and freshness. It reminded him of HER; he had a new respect for
this rough, sinful man who had thus idealized his wife in her dwelling.
Already a few Madeira