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                         ELEVEN POSSIBLE CASES.


FRANK R. STOCKTON, FRANKLIN FYLES, JOAQUIN MILLER, MAURICE THOMPSON,
INGERSOLL LOCKWOOD, EDGAR FAWCETT, BRAINARD GARDNER SMITH, KIRKE MUNROE,
NYM CRINKLE, ANNA KATHERINE GREEN, AND Q.


CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE._
1891.

[ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.]




CONTENTS.


1. THE ONLY GIRL AT OVERLOOK, _Franklin Fyles_

2. A THING THAT GLISTENED, _Frank R. Stockton_

3. A LION AND A LIONESS, _Joaquin Miller_

4. THE CHEATED JULIET, _Q._

5. THE MYSTIC KREWE, _Maurice Thompson_

6. STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A MILLION DOLLARS, _Ingersoll Lockwood_

7. A LOST DAY, _Edgar Fawcett_

8. A TRAGEDY OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES, _Brainard Gardner Smith_

9. THE BUSHWHACKER'S GRATITUDE, _Kirke Munroe_

10. THE END OF ALL, _Nym Crinkle_

11. SHALL HE MARRY HER? _Anna Katherine Green_




THE ONLY GIRL AT OVERLOOK.

BY FRANKLIN FYLES.




CHAPTER I.


Two names were used for the only girl at Overlook. In addressing her,
the men of the place always said "Miss Warriner." In mentioning her,
they often said "Mary Mite." The reason for this distinctive difference
was revealed by the sight of Miss Mary Warriner herself, as she sat on a
high stool behind a rude desk, under a roughly-boarded shelter, and with
rapid fingers clicked the key of a telegraphic instrument. There was a
perfect poise of quiet self-possession which would have been very
impressive dignity in an older and bigger person, and which, although
here limited by eighteen years and one hundred pounds, still made a
demand for respectful treatment. Therefore the men, when in her
presence, never felt like calling her anything else than "Miss
Warriner." If she had been less like a stately damsel in miniature, and
more like such a child as she was in size only; if her employment had
been something not so near to science as that of telegraphy, and not so
far off from juvenile simplicity; if her brown hair had been loosely
curled, instead of closely coiled, and if her skirts had stopped at her
ankles instead of reaching to her feet, then she might have been
nicknamed "Mary Mite" within her own hearing, as she was beyond it, by
those who described her smallness in a sobriquet. There may have been a
variance of opinion among those dwellers at Overlook who had made any
estimate of her composure, but if there was one who believed that she
merely assumed a reserve of manner because she was among two hundred
men, he had not yet tried his chances of exceptional acquaintance.

Overlook was crude and temporary. The inhabitants were making a roadbed
for a new railway at a spot where the job was extraordinary, requiring
an uncommonly large proportion of brain to brawn in the work. Those who
were mental laborers in the remarkable feat of engineering, or were at
least bosses of the physical toil, were the ones who had errands at the
telegraphic shed, and for whom Mary sent and received messages over the
wires. The isolated colony of workers was one hundred miles deep in a
wilderness of mountain and forest, but not as many seconds distant,
measured by the time necessary for electrical communication from the
construction company's headquarters in a great city.

"Must you wait for an answer?" Mary said, as she clicked the last word
of a message. "It's an hour since your first telegram went, and they
seem in no hurry to reply."

Polite indifference, and nothing else, was in her clear, gentle voice.
There was neither boldness nor shyness in the eyes that opened wide and
blue, as she lifted them from the paper to the man whom she questioned.
There was no more of a smile than of a pout on the mouth that worded the
inquiry. She did not indicate the faintest interest as to whether he
went or stayed, although she did suggest that he might as well go.

"I'd rather lounge here, if you don't mind," was Gerald Heath's answer.

Here the alertness of the placid girl was faintly shown by a quick
glance, but it was so furtive that the subject of her wariness did not
know his face was being scrutinized; and she was quickly convinced that
she was not the cause of his remaining, for he said: "I'll tell you why
I'm anxious about the telegram, and in a hurry to get it."

Gerald Heath had been lazily leaning against the makeshift desk of the
telegrapher, as he waited, and for pastime had whittled the smooth birch
sapling that formed its outer edge. He had chipped and shaved, after the
manner of those to whom a sharp pocket knife and a piece of wood provide
a solace. There had been no conversation, except a few words concerning
the messages. But now he heightened himself to six feet by standing
erect, and took on the outlines of a magnificent physique. His
proportions had not been realized before by the girl at the other side
of the counter. She comprehended, too, that if his somewhat unkempt
condition were changed to one which included a face cleaned of stubbed
beard, a suit of modish clothes to replace the half-worn corduroys, and
the shine of a silk hat and polished boots at his now dusty extremities,
he would become a young gentleman whose disregard might be an
appreciable slight. That was the conclusion which she reached without
any visible sign that her careless eyes were conveying any sort of
impression to her mind. As it was, he looked an unusually burly specimen
of the men to whom isolation from city life had imparted an aspect of
barbarians. Before he had uttered another word she realized that he was
wholly engrossed in the matter of his telegrams, and had no thought of
the individuality of the listener. Not only was she not the thing that
made him wait, but she might as well have been old, ugly, or a man, if
only she had ears to hear.

It was a summer afternoon, and the clear, balmy weather was seasonable.
The removal of protective canvas had left the structure an open shed,
over the front of which hung the boughs of the two trees against whose
massive trunks it leaned. Gerald Heath reached up with both hands and
held the foliage aside.

"Do you get an unobstructed view?" he said. "Now, I've helped lay out
railroads through many a place, where it was a shame to let trains go
faster than a mile a day. I've surveyed routes that ought to provide
special trains for passengers with eyes in their heads--trains with
speed graduated between sixty miles an hour and sixty hours a mile. It
is an outrage on nature and art that travelers should ever be whisked
past Overlook without a good chance to see what we're looking at. That's
why I wrote to the president of the company a month ago, telling him how
a slight deviation from the surveyed line would enable passengers to get
what's in our view now. He asked how much the line would be lengthened
by my plan. 'A hundred yards,' I answered. And I submitted a map,
showing how the tracks, after coming out from the tunnel, might make a
small detour to this very spot, instead of going behind a mass of rocks
that will completely hide this----" and a comprehensive gesture of one
arm followed his sweep of vision.

Places that get their names on impulse are apt to have appropriate ones.
Camps of railway makers in a hitherto unbroken country are not often
miscalled. An ensuing town on the same site may be unmeaningly named as
a permanency, but the inspirations that afford transient nomenclature
are usually descriptive. It was so in the case of Overlook. The railway
tunneled through the mountain, and emerged at a height of 1000 feet
above a wide valley. Mary had daily, and all day long, sat overlooking
the prospect. It had astonished and enchanted her at first, but
familiarity had blunted the keenness of her appreciation. As shown to
her anew, it was like a fresh disclosure. Gerald Heath stood holding
aside the boughs, which otherwise obscured a part of the landscape, and
seemed like an exhibitor of some wondrously big and beautiful picture.
Miles away were hills rising behind one another, until they left only a
little of sky to be framed by the eave of the shed, as seen by the
telegrapher. The diversities of a wilderness, distantly strong in rugged
forms, but indistinct in details, became gradually definite and
particular as they came nearer, and were suggestive of conscious design,
where they edged a broken, tumultuous river. Overlook was shelved so
high on a precipitous mountain that, from Mary's point of vision, the
foreground almost directly underneath passed out of her sight, and it
was as though the spectator stood on a platform before a painted canvas,
too spacious for exhibition in an ordinary manner. But in this work the
shapes and the colors, the grandeur and the beauty were inconceivably
beyond human copying.

Gerald Heath appeared to feel, however, that if he was not the painter
of this enormous landscape, he at least had the proprietary interest of
a discoverer, and it was with something of the air of an art collector,
proudly extolling his choicest possession, that he turned his eyes from
it to Mary Warriner. The expression of admiration on her face, although
quiet and delicate, was quite satisfactory--for a moment only; and then
the denotement of delight passed out of her visage, as though expelled
by some physical pang. It was the suddenness of the change, for it was
of itself very slight, that made it perceptible. Gerald instinctively
turned to look for the cause.

Into the picture had come a human figure. A few yards in front of the
hut stood a man. In relation to the landscape far beyond he was
gigantic, and the shade of the trees made him devilishly black by
contrast with the sunlight of heaven that illumined the rest. He was
thus for an instant in silhouette, and it chanced that his sharp
outlines included a facial profile, with the points of a mustache and
beard giving satanic suggestion to an accidental attitude of malicious
intrusion. The illusion was almost startling, but it was momentary, and
then the form became the commonplace one of Tonio Ravelli, who walked
under the shelter.

"Do-a I eentrude?" he asked, with an Italian accent and an Italian
bearing. "I suppose no, eh? Thece ees a placa beesness."

Mary's small departure from a business-like perfunctory manner ended at
once. She took the scrap of paper which Ravelli laid on her desk, and
without a word translated its writing into telegraphic clicks. Ravelli
was a sub-contractor, and this was one of his frequent communications
with officials at the company's city office. The response was likely to
be immediate, and he waited for it.

"To get the full value of this view," Gerald Heath resumed, and now he
addressed himself to Mary directly, as though with almost a purpose of
ignoring Ravelli, to whose greeting he had barely responded, "you need
to come upon it suddenly--as I once did. We had been for months blasting
and digging through the mountain. Every day's duty in that hole was like
a spell of imprisonment in a dark, damp dungeon. And your men, Ravelli,
looked like a chain-gang of convicts."

"You woulda no dare say so mooch to their-a fa-ces," Ravelli retorted,
with an insolence that was unmistakably intentional.

"O, I didn't mean a reflection on them," said Gerald, disregarding the
other's quarrelsome aggressiveness. "We all look rascally in the mud,
drip, and grime of tunnel work. And your gang of swarthy Italians are
bound to have a demoniac aspect underground."

It was more careless than intentional that Gerald thus provoked Ravelli.
There had been dislike between them, growing out of friction between
their respective duties as a civil engineer and a sub-contractor, for
the former was necessarily a critic of the latter's work. But they had
never quarreled, and Gerald saw nothing in this occasion, as Ravelli
seemed to, for any outbreak of temper.

"Bettare be civ-vil with-a your tongue," Ravelli sneered.

"Well, I think so, too, as we are with a lady."

"Zat ees why-a I inseest you treat-a me as one gentleman."

So it seemed that he was especially regardful of how he figured in the
presence of Mary Warriner.

"Like one gentleman? Oh, I will treat you like two gentlemen--so
politely;" and Gerald began to again nonchalantly whittle the birchen
pole. "I was going to tell how, when at last we broke through the rock
at this end of the tunnel, I happened to be right there. A blast tore
out an aperture several feet wide. We saw daylight through the smoke. We
rushed pell-mell over the broken stone, and struggled with one another
to get through first. It was--why, it was you, Ravelli, wasn't it?--whom
I tussled with. Yes, we got into the breach together. You tried to push
me back. You couldn't--of course, you couldn't;" and the narrator's
reference to his own superior strength was exasperatingly accompanied by
a glance not free from contempt.

"Eet was-a all een fun," Ravelli smilingly explained to Mary, and then
his eyes turned darkly upon Gerald: "Eef eet had-a been one ear-nest
fight----," the different result was vaguely indicated by a hard clinch
of fists and a vicious crunch of teeth.

It was beyond a doubt that Ravelli could not bear to be belittled to
Mary; but she and Gerald were alike inattentive to his exhibition of
wrath.

"No prisoner was ever more exultant to escape," Heath went on, "than I
was to get out of that dark, noisome hole into clean sunlight. I ran to
this very spot, and--well, the landscape was on view, just as it is now.
It was like getting from gloom out into glory."

The young man's exuberant words were not spoken with much enthusiasm,
and yet they had sufficient earnestness to prove their sincerity. He had
stopped whittling, and his knife lay on the desk, as he turned his back
against the sapling and rested both elbows on it.

"So I've been writing to the president of the company, urging him to
deflect the route a trifle, so that passengers might come out of the
tunnel to see a landscape worth a thousand miles of special travel, and
to be had by going less than as many feet. This is the very latest day
for changing the survey. To-morrow will be too late. That is why I'm
telegraphing so urgently."

Click, click, click. Mary went to the telegraphic instrument. She
delivered the message by word of mouth, instead of taking it down in the
usual manner with a pen.

"Gerald Heath, Overlook," she translated from the metallic language of
the instrument. "Your idea is foolish. We cannot entertain it. Henry
Deckerman, president."

Gerald looked like a man receiving a jury's verdict involving great
pecuniary loss, if not one of personal condemnation, as he listened to
the telegram.

"Zat ees what-a I theenk," remarked Ravelli, with insolent elation; "you
ar-r-e one-a fool, as ze president he say."

Gerald was already angered by the dispatch. The taunting epithet was
timed to excite him to fury, which he impulsively spent upon the more
immediate provoker. He seized Ravelli by the throat, but without choking
him, and almost instantly let him go, as though ashamed of having
assailed a man of not much more than half his own strength and nearly
twice his age. With Italian quickness Ravelli grabbed Gerald's knife
from the desk, against which he was flung. He would have used it too, if
self-defense had been necessary, but he saw that he was not to be
further molested, and so he concealed the weapon under his arm, while
Gerald strode away, unaware of his escape from a stab.

"He is-a one beeg bully," said Ravelli, with forced composure. "Eef a
lady had-a not been here----"

"You tormented him," the girl interrupted. "I once saw the best-natured
mastiff in the world lose his temper and turn on a----" She stopped
before saying "cur," and added instead: "If he was foolish, you were not
very wise to tease him."

"He is-a what to you, zat you take-a hees part?"

She bit her lip in resentment, but made no reply.

"Pare-haps he is one-a lover oof you?"

Still she would not reply to his impertinence. That angered him more
than the severest rejoinder would have done.

"Oh, I am sure-a zat he ees one suitor."

She gave way at length to his provocation, and yet without any violent
words, for she simply said: "You are insulting, while he is at least
reasonably polite--when he heeds me at all, which isn't often."

"Not-a often? But some-what closely he heed-a you. See zat."

With an open palm he struck the place on the sapling where Gerald had
whittled. The spot was on the outer edge, where Mary could not see it
from her seat. She went around to the front of the primitively
constructed desk, or high counter, to gratify her curiosity. There she
saw that Gerald had