



Produced by Donald Lainson





SUSY, A STORY OF THE PLAINS


By Bret Harte


From: "ARGONAUT EDITION" OF THE WORKS OF BRET HARTE, VOL. 7

P. F. COLLIER & SON

NEW YORK




SUSY, A STORY OF THE PLAINS




CHAPTER I.


Where the San Leandro turnpike stretches its dusty, hot, and
interminable length along the valley, at a point where the heat and dust
have become intolerable, the monotonous expanse of wild oats on either
side illimitable, and the distant horizon apparently remoter than ever,
it suddenly slips between a stunted thicket or hedge of "scrub oaks,"
which until that moment had been undistinguishable above the long,
misty, quivering level of the grain. The thicket rising gradually in
height, but with a regular <DW72> whose gradient had been determined
by centuries of western trade winds, presently becomes a fair wood of
live-oak, and a few hundred yards further at last assumes the aspect of
a primeval forest. A delicious coolness fills the air; the long, shadowy
aisles greet the aching eye with a soothing twilight; the murmur
of unseen brooks is heard, and, by a strange irony, the enormous,
widely-spaced stacks of wild oats are replaced by a carpet of
tiny-leaved mosses and chickweed at the roots of trees, and the minutest
clover in more open spaces. The baked and cracked adobe soil of the now
vanished plains is exchanged for a heavy red mineral dust and gravel,
rocks and boulders make their appearance, and at times the road is
crossed by the white veins of quartz. It is still the San Leandro
turnpike,--a few miles later to rise from this canada into the upper
plains again,--but it is also the actual gateway and avenue to the
Robles Rancho. When the departing visitors of Judge Peyton, now owner
of the rancho, reach the outer plains again, after twenty minutes'
drive from the house, the canada, rancho, and avenue have as completely
disappeared from view as if they had been swallowed up in the plain.

A cross road from the turnpike is the usual approach to the casa or
mansion,--a long, low quadrangle of brown adobe wall in a bare but
gently sloping eminence. And here a second surprise meets the stranger.
He seems to have emerged from the forest upon another illimitable plain,
but one utterly trackless, wild, and desolate. It is, however, only
a lower terrace of the same valley, and, in fact, comprises the three
square leagues of the Robles Rancho. Uncultivated and savage as it
appears, given over to wild cattle and horses that sometimes sweep in
frightened bands around the very casa itself, the long south wall of the
corral embraces an orchard of gnarled pear-trees, an old vineyard, and
a venerable garden of olives and oranges. A manor, formerly granted by
Charles V. to Don Vincente Robles, of Andalusia, of pious and ascetic
memory, it had commended itself to Judge Peyton, of Kentucky, a modern
heretic pioneer of bookish tastes and secluded habits, who had bought it
of Don Vincente's descendants. Here Judge Peyton seemed to have
realized his idea of a perfect climate, and a retirement, half-studious,
half-active, with something of the seignioralty of the old slaveholder
that he had been. Here, too, he had seen the hope of restoring his
wife's health--for which he had undertaken the overland emigration--more
than fulfilled in Mrs. Peyton's improved physical condition, albeit
at the expense, perhaps, of some of the languorous graces of ailing
American wifehood.

It was with a curious recognition of this latter fact that Judge Peyton
watched his wife crossing the patio or courtyard with her arm around the
neck of her adopted daughter "Suzette." A sudden memory crossed his mind
of the first day that he had seen them together,--the day that he had
brought the child and her boy-companion--two estrays from an emigrant
train on the plains--to his wife in camp. Certainly Mrs. Peyton was
stouter and stronger fibred; the wonderful Californian climate had
materialized her figure, as it had their Eastern fruits and flowers, but
it was stranger that "Susy"--the child of homelier frontier blood and
parentage, whose wholesome peasant plumpness had at first attracted