elpless, recognized a
friend, and played with his blond beard and long silken mustache, and
took other liberties--as the helpless are apt to do. And when he had
built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other mysteries of
woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds. At the close of two such
foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the
schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face, as she sat upon the sloping
hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in very much the same
attitude as he had lain when first they met. Nor was the similitude
greatly forced. The weakness of an easy, sensuous nature that had found
a dreamy exaltation in liquor, it is to be feared was now finding an
equal intoxication in love.

I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this himself. I know that he
longed to be doing something--slaying a grizzly, scalping a savage,
or sacrificing himself in some way for the sake of this sallow-faced,
gray-eyed schoolmistress. As I should like to present him in a heroic
attitude, I stay my hand with great difficulty at this moment, being
only withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction
that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my
fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some
uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who
rescues, will forgive the omission.

So they sat there, undisturbed--the woodpeckers chattering overhead and
the voices of the children coming pleasantly from the hollow below.
What they said matters little. What they thought--which might have been
interesting--did not transpire. The woodpeckers only learned how
Miss Mary was an orphan; how she left her uncle's house, to come to
California, for the sake of health and independence; how Sandy was an
orphan, too; how he came to California for excitement; how he had lived
a wild life, and how he was trying to reform; and other details, which,
from a woodpecker's viewpoint, undoubtedly must have seemed stupid, and
a waste of time. But even in such trifles was the afternoon spent; and
when the children were again gathered, and Sandy, with a delicacy which
the schoolmistress well understood, took leave of them quietly at the
outskirts of the settlement, it had seemed the shortest day of her weary
life.

As the long, dry summer withered to its roots, the school term of Red
Gulch--to use a local euphuism--"dried up" also. In anot