Who Was My Quiet Friend?

"Stranger!"

The voice was not loud, but clear and penetrating. I looked vainly up and

down the narrow, darkening trail. No one in the fringe of alder ahead; no

one on the gullied slope behind.

"O! stranger!"

This time a little impatiently. The California classical vocative, "O," always

meant business.

I looked up, and perceived for the first time on the ledge, thirty feet

above me, another trail parallel with my own, and looking down upon me

through the buckeye bushes a small man on a black horse.

Five things to be here noted by the circumspect mountaineer. FIRST, the

locality,--lonely and inaccessible, and away from the regular faring of

teamsters and miners. SECONDLY, the stranger's superior knowledge of

the road, from the fact that the other trail was unknown to the ordinary

traveler. THIRDLY, that he was well armed and equipped. FOURTHLY, that

he was better mounted. FIFTHLY, that any distrust or timidity arising from

the contemplation of these facts had better be kept to one's self.

All this passed rapidly through my mind as I returned his salutation.

"Got any tobacco?" he asked.

I had, and signified the fact, holding up the pouch inquiringly.

"All right, I'll come down. Ride on, and I'll jine ye on the slide."

"The slide!" Here was a new geographical discovery as odd as the second

trail. I had ridden over the trail a dozen times, and seen no

communication between the ledge and trail. Nevertheless, I went on a

hundred yards or so, when there was a sharp crackling in the underbrush,

a shower of stones on the trail, and my friend plunged through the

bushes to my side, down a grade that I should scarcely have dared to

lead my horse. There was no doubt he was an accomplished rider,--

another fact to be noted.

As he ranged beside me, I found I was not mistaken as to his size; he

was quite under the medium height, and but for a pair of cold, gray eyes,

was rather commonplace in feature.

"You've got a good horse there," I suggested.

He was filling his pipe from my pouch, but looked up a little surprised,

and said, "Of course." He then puffed away with the nervous eagerness of

a man long deprived of that sedative. Finally, between the puffs, he asked

me whence I came.

I replied, "From Lagrange."

He looked at me a few moments curiously, but on my adding that I had

only halted there for a few hours, he said: "I thought I knew every man

between Lagrange and Indian Spring, but somehow I sorter disremember

your face and your name."

Not particularly caring that he should remember either, I replied half

laughingly, that, as I lived the other side of Indian Spring, it was quite

natural. He took the rebuff, if such it was, so quietly that as an act of

mere perfunctory politeness I asked him where he came from.

"Lagrange."

"And you are going to--"

"Well! that depends pretty much on how things pan out, and whether I

can make the riffle." He let his hand rest quite unconsciously on the

leathern holster of his dragoon revolver, yet with a strong suggestion to

me of his ability "to make the riffle" if he wanted to, and added: "But just

now I was reck'nin' on taking a little pasear with you."

There was nothing offensive in his speech save its familiarity, and the

reflection, perhaps, that whether I objected or not, he was quite able to

do as he said. I only replied that if our pasear was prolonged beyond

Heavytree Hill, I should have to borrow his beast. To my surprise he

replied quietly, "That's so," adding that the horse was at my disposal

when he wasn't using it, and HALF of it when he was. "Dick has carried

double many a time before this," he continued, "and kin do it again; when

your mustang gives out I'll give you a lift and room to spare."

I could not help smiling at the idea of appearing before the boys at Red

Gulch en croupe with the stranger; but neither could I help being oddly

affected by the suggestion that his horse had done double duty before.

"On what occasion, and why?" was a question I kept to myself. We were

ascending the long, rocky flank of the divide; the narrowness of the trail

obliged us to proceed slowly, and in file, so that there was little chance for

conversation, had he been disposed to satisfy my curiosity.

We toiled on in silence, the buckeye giving way to chimisal, the westering

sun, reflected again from the blank walls beside us, blinding our eyes with

its glare. The pines in the canyon below were olive gulfs of heat, over

which a hawk here and there drifted lazily, or, rising to our level, cast a

weird and gigantic shadow of slowly moving wings on the mountain side.

The superiority of the stranger's horse led him often far in advance, and

made me hope that he might forget me entirely, or push on, growing

weary of waiting. But regularly he would halt by a bowlder, or reappear

from some chimisal, where he had patiently halted. I was beginning to

hate him mildly, when at one of those reappearances he drew up to my

side, and asked me how I liked Dickens!

Had he asked my opinion of Huxley or Darwin, I could not have been

more astonished. Thinking it were possible that he referred to some local

celebrity of Lagrange, I said, hesitatingly:--

"You mean--"

"Charles Dickens. Of course you've read him? Which of his books do you

like best?"

I replied with considerable embarrassment that I liked them all,--as I

certainly did.

He grasped my hand for a moment with a fervor quite unlike his usual

phlegm, and said, "That's me, old man. Dickens ain't no slouch. You can

count on him pretty much all the time."