The Twins of Table Mountain | Page 5

by taking an uninvited seat beside him, and resting his chin on the palms of his hands. He did not eat, but simply transferred his inattention from the door to the table.\
"You're workin' too many hours in the shaft," continued Rand. "You're always up to some such d--n fool business when I'm not yer."\
"I dipped a little west to-day," Ruth went on, without heeding the brotherly remonstrance, "and struck quartz and pyrites."\
"Thet's you!--allers dippin' west or east for quartz and the color, instead of keeping on plumb down to the 'cement'!"*\
* The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,--the bed of a prehistoric river.\
"We've been three years digging for cement," said Ruth, more in abstraction than in reproach,--"three years!"\
"And we may be three years more,--may be only three days. Why, you couldn't be more impatient if--if--if you lived in a valley."\
Delivering this tremendous comparison as an unanswerable climax, Rand applied himself once more to his repast. Ruth, after a moment's pause, without speaking or looking up, disengaged his hand from under his chin, and slid it along, palm uppermost, on the table beside his brother. Thereupon Rand slowly reached forward his left hand, the right being engaged in conveying victual to his mouth, and laid it on his brother's palm. The act was evidently an habitual, half mechanical one; for in a few moments the hands were as gently disengaged, without comment or expression. At last Rand leaned back in his chair, laid down his knife and fork, and, complacently loosening the belt that held his revolver, threw it and the weapon on his bed. Taking out his pipe, and chipping some tobacco on the table, he said carelessly, "I came a piece through the woods with Mornie just now."\
The face that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that the twins could not be told apart. "Thet gal," continued Rand, without looking up, "is either flighty, or--or suthin'," he added in vague disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in question. "Don't tell me!"\
Ruth's eyes quickly sought his brother's, and were as quickly averted, as he asked hurriedly, "How?"\
"What gets me," continued Rand in a petulant non sequitur, "is that YOU, my own twin-brother, never lets on about her comin' yer, permiskus like, when I ain't yer, and you and her gallivantin' and promanadin', and swoppin' sentiments and mottoes."\
Ruth tried to contradict his blushing face with a laugh of worldly indifference.\
"She came up yer on a sort of pasear."\
"Oh, yes!--a short cut to the creek," interpolated Rand satirically.\
"Last Tuesday or Wednesday," continued Ruth, with affected forgetfulness.\
"Oh, in course, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday! You've so many folks climbing up this yer mountain to call on ye," continued the ironical Rand, "that you disremember; only you remembered enough not to tell me. SHE did. She took me for you, or pretended to."\
The color dropped from Ruth's cheek.\
"Took you for me?" he asked, with an awkward laugh.\
"Yes," sneered Rand; "chirped and chattered away about OUR picnic, OUR nose-gays, and lord knows what! Said she'd keep them blue- jay's wings, and wear 'em in her hat. Spouted poetry, too,--the same sort o' rot you get off now and then."\
Ruth laughed again, but rather ostentatiously and nervously.\
"Ruth, look yer!"\
Ruth faced his brother.\
"What's your little game? Do you mean to say you don't know what thet gal is? Do you mean to say you don't know thet she's the laughing-stock of the Ferry; thet her father's a d----d old fool, and her mother's a drunkard and worse; thet she's got any right to be hanging round yer? You can't mean to marry her, even if you kalkilate to turn me out to do it, for she wouldn't live alone with ye up here. 'Tain't her kind. And if I thought you was thinking of--"\
"What?" said Ruth, turning upon his brother quickly.\
"Oh, thet's right! holler; swear and yell, and break things, do! Tear round!" continued Rand, kicking his boots off in a corner, "just because I ask you a civil question. That's brotherly," he added, jerking his chair away against the side of the cabin, "ain't it?"\
"She's not to blame because her mother drinks, and her father's a shyster," said Ruth earnestly and strongly. "The men who make her the laughing-stock of the Ferry tried to make her something worse, and failed, and take this sneak's revenge on her. 'Laughing- stock!' Yes, they knew she could turn the tables on them."\
"Of course; go on! She's better than me. I know I'm a fratricide, that's what I am," said Rand, throwing himself on the upper of the two berths that formed the bedstead of the cabin.\
"I've seen her three times," continued Ruth.\
"And you've known me twenty years," interrupted his