



Produced by Donald Lainson





THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN AND OTHER STORIES


By Bret Harte




CONTENTS


I.   THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN

II.  AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG

III. THE GREAT DEADWOOD MYSTERY

IV.  A LEGEND OF SAMMTSTADT

V.   VIEWS FROM A GERMAN SPION





THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN.




CHAPTER I.


A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.


They lived on the verge of a vast stony level, upheaved so far above
the surrounding country that its vague outlines, viewed from the nearest
valley, seemed a mere cloud-streak resting upon the lesser hills. The
rush and roar of the turbulent river that washed its eastern base were
lost at that height; the winds that strove with the giant pines that
half way climbed its flanks spent their fury below the summit; for, at
variance with most meteorological speculation, an eternal calm seemed
to invest this serene altitude. The few Alpine flowers seldom
thrilled their petals to a passing breeze; rain and snow fell alike
perpendicularly, heavily, and monotonously over the granite bowlders
scattered along its brown expanse. Although by actual measurement an
inconsiderable elevation of the Sierran range, and a mere shoulder of
the nearest white-faced peak that glimmered in the west, it seemed
to lie so near the quiet, passionless stars, that at night it caught
something of their calm remoteness.

The articulate utterance of such a locality should have been a whisper;
a laugh or exclamation was discordant; and the ordinary tones of the
human voice on the night of the 15th of May, 1868, had a grotesque
incongruity.

In the thick darkness that clothed the mountain that night, the human
figure would have been lost, or confounded with the outlines of outlying
bowlders, which at such times took upon themselves the vague semblance
of men and animals. Hence the voices in the following colloquy seemed
the more grotesque and incongruous from being the apparent expression
of an upright monolith, ten feet high, on the right, and another mass of
granite, that, reclining, peeped over the verge.

"Hello!"

"Hello yourself!"

"You're late."

"I lost the trail, and climbed up the slide."

Here followed a stumble, the clatter of stones down the mountain-side,
and an oath so very human and undignified that it at once relieved the
bowlders of any complicity of expression. The voices, too, were close
together now, and unexpectedly in quite another locality.

"Anything up?"

"Looey Napoleon's declared war agin Germany."

"Sho-o-o!"

Notwithstanding this exclamation, the interest of the latter speaker was
evidently only polite and perfunctory. What, indeed, were the political
convulsions of the Old World to the dwellers on this serene, isolated
eminence of the New?

"I reckon it's so," continued the first voice. "French Pete and that
thar feller that keeps the Dutch grocery hev hed a row over it; emptied
their six-shooters into each other. The Dutchman's got two balls in
his leg, and the Frenchman's got an onnessary buttonhole in his
shirt-buzzum, and hez caved in."

This concise, local corroboration of the conflict of remote nations,
however confirmatory, did not appear to excite any further interest.
Even the last speaker, now that he was in this calm, dispassionate
atmosphere, seemed to lose his own concern in his tidings, and to have
abandoned every thing of a sensational and lower-worldly character in
the pines below. There were a few moments of absolute silence, and then
another stumble. But now the voices of both speakers were quite patient
and philosophical.

"Hold on, and I'll strike a light," said the second speaker. "I brought
a lantern along, but I didn't light up. I kem out afore sundown, and you
know how it allers is up yer. I didn't want it, and didn't keer to light
up. I forgot you're always a little dazed and strange-like when you
first come up."

There was a crackle, a flash, and presently a steady glow, which the
surrounding darkness seemed to resent. The faces of the two men thus
revealed were singularly alike. The same thin, narrow outline of jaw and
temple; the same dark, grave eyes; the same brown growth of curly beard
and mustache, which concealed the mouth, and hid what might have been
any individual idiosyncrasy of thought or expression,--showed them to
be brothers, or better known as the "Twins of Table Mountain." A certain
animation in the face of the second speaker,--the first-comer,--a
certain light in his eye, might have at first distinguished him; but
even this faded out in the steady glow of the lantern, and had no
value as a permanent distinction, for, by the time they had reached
the western verge of the mountain, the two faces had settled into a
homogeneous calmness and melancholy.

The vague horizon of darkness, that a few feet from the lantern still
encompassed them, gave no indication of their progress, until their feet
actually trod the rude planks and thatch that formed the roof of their
habitation; for their cabin half burrowed in the mountain, and half
clung, like a swallow's nest, to the side of the deep declivity that
terminated the northern limit of the summit. Had it not been for the
windlass of a shaft, a coil of rope, and a few heaps of stone and
gravel, which were the only indications of human labor in that stony
field, there was nothing to interrupt its monotonous dead level. And,
when they descended a dozen well-worn steps to the door of their cabin,
they left the summit, as before, lonely, silent, motionless, its long
level uninterrupted, basking in the cold light of the stars.

The simile of a "nest" as applied to the cabin of the brothers was no
mere figure of speech as the light of the lantern first flashed upon it.
The narrow ledge before the door was strewn with feathers. A suggestion
that it might be the home and haunt of predatory birds was promptly
checked by the spectacle of the nailed-up carcasses of a dozen hawks
against the walls, and the outspread wings of an extended eagle
emblazoning the gable above the door, like an armorial bearing. Within
the cabin the walls and chimney-piece were dazzlingly bedecked with the
party- wings of jays, yellow-birds, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and
the poly-tinted wood-duck. Yet in that dry, highly-rarefied atmosphere,
there was not the slightest suggestion of odor or decay.

The first speaker hung the lantern upon a hook that dangled from the
rafters, and, going to the broad chimney, kicked the half-dead embers
into a sudden resentful blaze. He then opened a rude cupboard, and,
without looking around, called, "Ruth!"

The second speaker turned his head from the open doorway where he was
leaning, as if listening to something in the darkness, and answered
abstractedly,--

"Rand!"

"I don't believe you have touched grub to-day!"

Ruth grunted out some indifferent reply.

"Thar hezen't been a slice cut off that bacon since I left," continued
Rand, bringing a side of bacon and some biscuits from the cupboard, and
applying himself to the discussion of them at the table. "You're gettin'
off yer feet, Ruth. What's up?"

Ruth replied 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 brother.

Ruth turned on his heel, and walked towards the door.

"That's right; go on! Why don't you get the chalk?"

Ruth made no reply. Rand descended from the bed, and, taking a piece of
chalk from the shelf, drew a line on the floor, dividing the cabin in
two equal parts.

"You can have the east half," he said, as he climbed slowly back into
bed.

This mysterious rite was the usual termination of a quarrel between the
twins. Each man kept his half of the cabin until the feud was forgotten.
It was the mark of silence and separation, over which no words of
recrimination, argument, or even explanation, were delivered, until
it was effaced by one or the other. This was considered equivalent to
apology or reconciliation, which each were equally bound in honor to
accept.

It may be remarked that the floor was much whiter at this line of
demarcation, and under the fresh chalk-line appeared the faint evidences
of one recently effaced.

Without apparently heeding this potential ceremony, Ruth remained
leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose
profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault
above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the
abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon the
ledge, he leaned far over the shelf that sustained their cabin,
and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long
undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told
him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling
with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect
a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices,
swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again
swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. He was roused from a
consideration of this phenomenon by a faint glow towards the east, which
at last brightened, until the dark outline of the distant walls of the
valley stood out against the sky. Were his other senses participating in
the delusion of his ears? for with the brightening light came the faint
odor of burning timber.

His face grew anxious as he gazed. At last he rose, and re-entered the
cabin. His eyes fell upon the faint chalk-mark, and, taking his soft
felt hat from his head, with a few practical sweeps of the brim he
brushed away the ominous record of their late estrangement. Going to the
bed whereon Rand lay stretched, open-eyed, he would have laid his hand
upon his arm lightly; but the brother's fingers sought and clasped his
own. "Get up," he said quietly; "there's a strange fire in the Canyon
head that I can't make out."

Rand slowly clambered from his shelf, and hand in hand the brothers
stood upon the ledge. "It's a right smart chance beyond the Ferry, and a
piece beyond the Mill, too," said Rand, shading his eyes with his hand,
from force of habit. "It's in the woods where--" He would have added
where he met Mornie; but it was a point of honor with the twins, after
reconciliation, not to allude to any topic of their recent disagreement.

Ruth dropped his brother's hand. "It doesn't smell like the woods," he
said slowly.

"Smell!" repeated Rand incredulously. "Why, it's twenty miles in a
bee-line yonder. Smell, indeed!"

Ruth was silent, but presently fell to listening again with his former
abstraction. "You don't hear anything, do you?" he asked after a pause.

"It's blowin' in the pines on the river," said Rand shortly.

"You don't hear anything else?"

"No."

"Nothing like--like--like--"

Rand, who had been listening with an intensity that distorted the left
side of his face, interrupted him impatiently.

"Like what?"

"Like a woman sobbin'?"

"Ruth," said Rand, suddenly looking up in his brother's face, "what's
gone of you?"

Ruth laughed. "The fire's out," he said, abruptly re-entering the cabin.
"I'm goin' to turn in."

Rand, following his brother half reproachfully, saw him divest himself
of his clothing, and roll himself in the blankets of his bed.

"Good-night, Randy!"

Rand hesitated. He would have liked to ask his brother another question;
but there was clearly nothing to be done but follow his example.

"Good-night, Ruthy!" he said, and put out the light. As he did so, the
glow in the eastern horizon faded, too, and darkness seemed to well up
from the depths below, and, flowing in the open door, wrapped them in
deeper slumber.


CHAPTER II.


THE CLOUDS GATHER.


Twelve months had elapsed since the quarrel and reconciliation, during
which interval no reference was made by either of the brothers to the
cause which had provoked it. Rand was at work in the shaft, Ruth having
that morning undertaken the replenishment of the