Lissome shapes crept along the terraces between the stolid
wooden statues, or, bolder, scampered the whole length of the great
veranda. In the lulling of the wind the breath of the woods was
everywhere; even the aroma of swelling sap--as if the ghastly stumps
on the deforested slope behind the hotel were bleeding afresh in the
dewless night--stung the eyes and nostrils of the sleepers.
It was, perhaps, from such cause as this that Barker was awakened
suddenly by the voice of the boy from the crib beside him, crying,
"Mamma! mamma!" Taking the child in his arms, he comforted him, saying
she would come that morning, and showed him the faint dawn already
veiling with color the ghostly pallor of the Sierras. As they looked at
it a great star shot forth from its brethren and fell. It did not fall
perpendicularly, but seemed for some seconds to slip along the slopes
of Black Spur, gleaming through the trees like a chariot of fire. It
pleased the child to say that it was the light of mamma's buggy that
was fetching her home, and it pleased the father to encourage the boy's
fancy. And talking thus in confidential whispers they fell asleep once
more, the father--himself a child in so many things--holding the smaller
and frailer hand in his.
They did not know that on the other side of the Divide the wife and
mother, scared, doubting, and desperate, by the side of her scared,
doubting, and desperate accomplice, was flying down the slope on her
night-long road to ruin.
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