# Peak and Prairie/A Rocky Mountain Shipwreck

"BIXBY'S Art Emporium" was a temple of such modest exterior that visitors were conscious of no special disappointment upon finding that there was, if possible, less of "art" than of "emporium" within. A couple of show-cases filled with agate and tiger-eye articles, questionable looking "gems," and the like; a table in the centre of the shop piled high with Colorado views of every description; here and there on the walls a poor water-color or a worse oil-painting; a desultory Navajo rug on a chair: these humble objects constituted the nearest approach to "art" that the establishment could boast. The distinctive feature of the little shop was the show-case at the rear, filled with books of pressed wildflowers; these, at least, were the chief source of income in the business, and ​therefore Marietta spent every odd half-hour in the manufacture of them. A visitor, when he entered, was apt to suppose that the shop was empty; for the black, curly head bent over the work at the window behind the back counter was not immediately discernible. It was a fascinating head, as the most unimpressionable visitor could not fail to observe when the tall figure rose from behind the counter,—fascinating by reason of the beautiful hair, escaping in soft tendrils from the confining knot; fascinating still more by reason of the perfect grace of poise. The face was somewhat sallow and very thin; care and privation had left their marks upon it. The mouth was finely modelled, shrewd and humorous; but it was the eyes, dark, and darkly fringed as those of a wood-nymph, that dominated the face; one had a feeling that here was where the soul looked out. To hear Marietta speak, however, was something of a disenchantment; her tone was so very matter-of-fact, her words so startlingly to the point. If the soul looked out at the eyes, the lips at least had little to say of it.
The visitor, if a stranger, had an excellent opportunity of making his observations on these points, for Marietta usually remained ​standing, in a skeptical attitude, behind the distant counter until he had shown signs of "business" intentions. She was very ready to stand up and rest her back, but she had no idea of coming forward to indulge an aimless curiosity as to the origin and price of her art treasures. An old customer, on the other hand, was treated with an easy good-fellowship so marked that only those who liked "that sort of thing" ever became old customers.
"Well, how's everything?" was the usual form of greeting, as the tall willowy figure passed round behind the counters and came opposite the new-comer.
"Did your folks like the frame?" would come next, if the customer chanced to have had a frame sent home recently. Marietta was agent for a Denver art firm, which framed pictures at a "reasonable figure"; or rather, Jim was the agent, and Jim being Marietta's husband, and too sick a man of late to conduct his business, did not have to be reckoned with.
In spite of the fact that she was generally known as "Mrs. Jim," many people forgot that Marietta had a husband, for he was never visible now-a-days. But Marietta never forgot, never for one single instant, the wasted ​figure in the easy chair at the window above the shop, the pale sunken face with the shining eyes, turned always toward the stairway the instant her foot touched the lower step. The look of radiant welcome that greeted her as often as her head appeared above the opening on a level with the uneven deal floor, that look was always worth coming up for.
She did not bring her work and sit upstairs with Jim, because there was but one small window in the dingy, slant-roofed loft, that served as bed-chamber, kitchen, and parlor, and she knew he liked to sit at the window and watch the panorama of the street below. The broad, sunny Springtown thoroughfare, with its low, irregular wooden structures, likely, at any moment, to give place to ambitious business "blocks"; with its general air of incompleteness and transitoriness brought into strong relief against the near background of the Rocky Mountains, was alive with human interest. Yet, singularly enough, it was not the cowboy, mounted on his half-broken bronco that interested Jim; not the ranch wagon, piled high with farm produce, women, and children; not even the Lame Gulch "stage,"—a four-seated wagon, so crowded with rough-looking men that their legs dangled outside like fringe ​on a cowboy's "shaps,"—none of these sights made much impression on the sick man at his upper window. The work-a-day side of life was far too familiar to Jim to impress him as being picturesque or dramatic. What he did care for, what roused and satisfied his imagination, was what was known in his vocabulary as "style." It was to the "gilded youth" of Springtown that he looked for his entertainment. He liked the yellow fore-and-aft buckboards, he enjoyed the shining buggies, especially when their wheels were painted red; dog-carts and victorias ranked high in his esteem. He knew, to be sure, very little about horses; their most salient "points" escaped him: he gave indiscriminate approval to every well-groomed animal attached to a "stylish" vehicle, and the more the merrier! It is safe to declare that he was a distinctly happier man from that day forward on which Mr. Richard Dayton first dazzled the eyes of Springtown with his four-in-hand.
This happened early in February and the day chanced to be a warm one, so that Jim's window was open. He was sitting there, gazing abstractedly at the Peak which rose, a great snowy dome, above Tang Ling's shop across the way. Jim seldom spoke of the mountains, ​nor was he aware of paying any special attention to them. "I ain't much on Nature," he had always maintained; and since Marietta admitted the same lack in herself there seemed to be nothing in that to regret. Yet it is nevertheless true that Jim had his thoughts, as he sat, abstractedly gazing at those shining heights, thoughts of high and solemn things which his condition brought near to him, thoughts which he rarely said anything about. To-day, as he watched the deep blue shadows brooding upon the Peak, he was wondering in a child-like way what Heaven would be like. Suddenly the musical clink of silver chains struck his ear, and the look of abstraction vanished. He had never heard those bridle chains before. Somebody had got something new! A moment more, and, with a fine rush and jingle, and a clear blast from the horn, the four-in-hand dashed by.
"Hurrah!" Jim cried huskily, as Marietta's foot trod the stair.
"I say, Jim! You seen 'em?"
She came up panting, for the stairs were very steep and narrow.
"Seen 'em? I rather guess! Wasn't it bully? Do you reckon they'll come back this way?"
​"Course they will! Don't you s'pose they like to show themselves off? And the horn! did you hear the horn, Jim? I wonder if that's the way they sound in Switzerland!"
She came up and stood with her hand on Jim's shoulder, looking down into the street.
"And just to think of it, Jim!" she said, a moment later. "They say he's made lots of money right here in mines! If we was in mines we might have made some."
"More likely to lose it," Jim answered. He was not of the stuff that speculators are made of.
The shop-bell rang, and Marietta hurried downstairs, to spend ten minutes in selling a ten-cent Easter card; while Jim sat on, forgetting his burden of weakness and pain, and all his far-away dreams, in anticipation of the returning four-in-hand.
In Marietta, too, the jingle of the four-in-hand had struck a new key-note; her thoughts had taken a new turn. If Mr. Dayton had made money in mines why should not she and Jim do the same? They needed it far more than he did. To him it only meant driving four horses instead of one; to them it might mean driving one horse once in a while. It might even mean giving up the tiresome, profitless ​shop, and going to live in a snug little house of their own, where there should be a porch for Jim in pleasant weather and, for cold days, a sitting-room with two windows instead of one where she could work at her flower-books, while they planned what they should do when Jim got well. She sat over her pressed flowers, which she handled with much skill, while she revolved these thoughts in her mind. She was busy with her columbines, a large folio of which lay on a table near by. At her left hand was a pile of square cards with scalloped edges, upon which the columbines were to be affixed; at her right was a small glass window-pane smeared with what she called "stickum." As she deftly lifted the flowers, one by one, without ever breaking a fragile petal, she laid each first upon the "stickum"-covered square of glass and then upon the Bristol-board. She was skilful in always placing the flower precisely where it was to remain upon the page, so that the white surface was kept unstained. Then she further secured each brittle stem with a tiny strip of paper pasted across the end. She lifted a card and surveyed her work critically, thinking the while, not of the wonderful golden and purple flower, holding its beautiful head with as stately a grace as if it were still swaying ​upon its stem, but of the great "mining-boom" that was upon the town, and of the chances of a fortune.
Half-an-hour had passed since the shop-bell had last tinkled, and Marietta was beginning to think of making Jim a flying call, when she heard his cane rapturously banging the floor above. This was the signal for her to look out into the street, which she promptly did, and, behold! the four-in-hand had stopped before the door, a groom was standing at the leaders' heads, and the master of this splendid equipage was just coming in, his figure looming large and imposing in the doorway.
"Good morning, Mrs. Jim," he called before he was well inside the shop. "I want one of your ten-dollar flower-books."
Quite unmoved by the lavishness of her customer, Marietta rose in her stately way, and drew forth several specimens of her most expensive flower-book. Dayton examined them with an attempt to be discriminating, remarking that the book was for some California friends of his wife who were inclined to be "snifty" about Colorado flowers.
"That's the best of the lot," Marietta volunteered, singling out one which her customer had overlooked.
​"So it is," he replied; "do it up for me, please."
This Marietta proceeded to do in a very leisurely manner. She was making up her mind to a bold step.
"Say, Mr. Dayton," she queried, as she took the last fold in the wrapping paper; "what's the best mine to go into?"
"The best mine? Oh, I wouldn't touch one of them if I were you!"
"Yes, you would, if you were me! So you might as well tell me a good one or I might make a mistake."
She held her head with the air of a princess, while the look of a wood-nymph still dwelt in her shadowy eyes, but words and tone meant "business."
"How much money have you got to lose?"
"Oh, fifty or a hundred dollars," she said carelessly.
Dayton strolled to the door and back again before he answered. He was annoyed with Mrs. Jim for placing him in such a position, but he did not see his way out of it. The next man she asked might be a sharper. His ideas of woman's "sphere" were almost mediæval, but somehow they did not seem to fit Mrs. Jim's case.
​"Well," he said at last with evident reluctance; "the 'Horn of Plenty' doesn't seem to be any worse than the others, and it may be a grain better. But it's all a gamble, just like roulette or faro, and I should think you had better keep out of it altogether."
The "Horn of Plenty"! It was a name to appeal to the most sluggish imagination; the mere sound of it filled Marietta with a joyful confidence. Within the hour she had hailed a passing broker and negotiated with him for five hundred shares of the stock at twenty cents a share.
It was not without a strange pang, to be sure, that she wrote out her check for the amount; for just as she was signing her name the unwelcome thought crossed her mind that the person who was selling that amount of stock for a hundred dollars must believe that sum of money to be a more desirable possession than the stock! She felt the meaning of the situation very keenly, but she did not betray her misgivings. As she finished the scrawling signature she only lifted her head with a defiant look, and said: "If anybody tells Jim, I'll chew 'em up!"
Inches, the broker, thus admonished, only laughed. Indeed, the thing Inches admired ​most in Mrs. Jim was her forcible manner of expressing herself. He admired and liked her well enough, for that and for other reasons, to take a very disinterested pleasure in putting her in the way of turning an honest penny.
The broker's faith in the "Horn of Plenty" was almost as implicit as Marietta's own, and it was with no little pride that he brought the certificate in to her the following day, and unfolded it to her dazzled contemplation. It was a very beauteous production done in green and gold, the design being suggestive and encouraging. It represented a woman clad in green, pointing with a magic golden wand in her left hand toward a group of toiling green miners, while from a golden cornucopia in her right she poured a shower of gold upon an already portentous pyramid of that valuable metal, planted upon a green field.
As Marietta refolded the crisply rustling paper, Inches bent his head toward her and said, confidentially: "She's bound to touch fifty cents inside of thirty days;" and Marietta, still thinking of the bountiful lady of the golden cornucopia, believed him.
"Inside of thirty days" the "H. O. P.," as it was familiarly called, was selling at forty-​five cents, and the world was very much agog on the subject. There had been fluctuations in the meanwhile, fluctuations which Marietta watched with eager intentness. Once, on the strength of disquieting rumors about the management, the stock dropped to sixteen cents and Marietta's hopes sank accordingly; she felt as if she had picked Jim's pocket. But the "H. O. P." soon rallied, and day by day it crept upwards while Marietta's spirits crept upwards with it, cautiously, questioningly. Should she sell? Should she hold on? If only she might talk it over with Jim! That was something she poignantly missed; she had never had a secret from Jim before. To make up for her reticence on this point she used to tell him more minutely than ever of all that went on in the shop below. Jim thought he had never known Marietta so entertaining.
"I say, Marietta, it's a shame you're nothing but a shop-keeper's wife!" he said to her one evening as she sat darning stockings by the lamp-light in the dingy attic room. "You'd ought to have been a duchess or a governor's wife or something like that, so's folks would have found out how smart you was."
​"Listen at him!" cried Marietta.
The words might have offended the taste of the governor who had failed to secure this valuable matrimonial alliance, but the poise of the pretty head, as she cast an affectionate look upon Jim, lying on the old sofa, would have graced the proudest duchess of them all.
Now the "Horn of Plenty" was a Lame Gulch stock, and, since the mining-camp of Lame Gulch had been in existence less than a year, the value of any mine up there was a very doubtful quantity. It was perhaps the proximity of the camp to Springtown, that fired the imagination of the Springtown public, perhaps the daily coming and going of people between the two points. Be that as it may, the head must have been a very level one indeed that could keep its balance through the excitement of that winter's "boom." There were many residents of Springtown who had a sentiment for the Peak, more intelligent and more imaginative than any Marietta could boast, yet it is probable that the best nature-lover of them all shared something of her feeling, now that she had come to regard the Peak as the mountain on the other side of which the Lame Gulch treasures lay awaiting their resurrection.
​"Just the other side of the Peak!" What magic in those words, spoken from time to time by one and another of the Springtown people. "Just the other side of the Peak!" Marietta would say to herself, lifting to the noble mountain eyes bright with an interest such as he in his grandest mood had never awakened there before.
Suppose the "Horn of Plenty" should go to a dollar!—to five dollars,—to ten dollars,—to twenty-five dollars! Her mind took the leap with ease and confidence. Had not Bill Sanders said that there were forty millions in it, and had he not seen the mine with his own eyes? Marietta had a mental picture of a huge mountain of solid gold, and when, to complete the splendor of the impression, men talked of "free gold," the term seemed to her to signify a buoyant quality, the quality of pouring itself out in spontaneous plenty. She heard much talk of this kind, for the "H. O. P." was the topic of the hour, and her customers discussed it among themselves. Forty millions almost in plain sight! That was forty dollars a share, and she had five hundred shares! And all this time she was thinking, not of wealth and luxury, but only of a snug cottage in a side street, where there should be two windows ​in the sitting-room, where she might sit and chat with Jim while she made her flower-books, planning what they should do when he got well. How little she asked; how reasonable it was, how fair! And if only the "H. O. P." were to go to five dollars a share she would venture it.
Meanwhile people were bidding forty-five cents, and Inches had called twice in one morning to ask if she would not sell at that price.
"What makes them want it so much?" she asked on the occasion of his second visit.
"Oh, just an idea they've got that it's going higher," Inches answered indifferently.
"Well, s'posing it is; why should I want to sell?"
"Why, you'd have made a pretty good thing in it, and you might like to have your bird in hand, don't you know?"
Marietta sat down to her flower-books and worked on composedly, while Inches still lingered.
"That's a real pretty painting of the Peak over there," he remarked presently, nodding his head toward a crude representation of that much-travestied mountain.
Marietta knew better, but she said nothing.
​"What do you ask for that now?" he persisted.
"Oh, I guess about a hundred dollars," she returned facetiously. "The Peak comes high now-a-days, 'cause Lame Gulch is right round on the other side."
There was another pause before the broker spoke again.
"Then, s'posing I could get you forty-six cents for your stock, would you take it? That's rather above the market price, you know."
"'Taint up to my price," said Marietta, trying to make a group of painter's brush look artistic.
"What would you take for it then?" asked Inches.
Marietta put down her work and drew herself up, to rest her back, and make an end of the interview at a blow.
"Look here, Mr. Inches," she said, with decision; "seeing you want the stock so bad, I guess I'll hold on to it!"
She was still holding on with unwavering persistence when, a few days after that, Dayton came into the shop. He wondered, as he entered the door, what could be the unpleasant association that was aroused in him by the ​familiar atmosphere of skins and dried flowers and general "stock in trade" which pervaded the place. No sooner did his eye fall upon Marietta coming towards him, however, than he recalled the distasteful part of adviser which had been forced upon him on the occasion of his last visit. He tried to think that he had washed his hands of the whole matter, but, "Mrs. Jim," he found himself saying; "did you go into mines the other day?"
"Yes."
"What did you buy?"
"H. O. P."
"What did you pay?"
"Twenty cents."
"Sold yet?"
"No."
Dayton took the little parcel she was handing him. He had come in for a lead-pencil and had bought, in addition, a stamp-box, a buttonhook, and a plated silver photograph frame, not one of which newly acquired treasures he had the slightest use for. They were very neatly tied up, however. He wished Mrs. Jim would stick to her legitimate business which she did uncommonly well.
"I think I would sell out my 'H. O. P.' if I were you," he said.
​"Isn't it going any higher?" she asked.
"Very likely; but it's a swindle."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean that the management's bad, and they don't know the first thing about what they've got, any way. Honestly, Mrs. Jim, it isn't safe to hold."
Marietta's heart sank; if she sold her stock what was to become of the little house with the two windows in the sitting-room? She did not reply, and Dayton went on:
"Of course," he said; "I can't tell that the thing won't go to a dollar, but there is really no basis for it. I've sold out every share I held, and I don't regret it, though it has gone up ten points since then."
Marietta regarded him attentively. There was no mistaking his sincerity,—and he probably knew what he was talking about.
"Well," she said at last, with a profound sigh; "I guess I'll do as you say. It worked pretty well the other time."
"That's right, Mrs. Jim, and supposing you let me have your stock. I can probably get you fifty cents for it in the course of the day."
She took the certificate from a drawer close at hand, and having signed it, she gave one ​lingering farewell look at the green lady and her golden horn.
"I may as well write a check for the amount now," Dayton said.
"But maybe you can't get it."
"More likely to get a little over. If I do I'll bring it in."
Dayton looked into her face as he spoke, and its beauty struck him as pathetic. There were lines and shadows there which he had not noticed before.
"I wish, Mrs. Jim," he said, "that you wouldn't do anything more in mines; it's an awfully risky business at the best. There isn't one of us that knows the first thing about it."
She gave him a sceptical look; was he so entirely sincere, after all?
"Some of you know enough about it to make an awful lot of money in it," she answered quietly.
"That isn't knowledge," he declared; "it's luck!"
"Comes to the same thing in the end," said Marietta.
If it had not been for those pathetic lines and shadows, Dayton would have turned on his heel then and there, disgusted with what seemed to him unfeminine shrewdness. As it ​was, he said: "Well, then, why not let me be your broker? I'm on the street half the time, and I could attend to your business a great deal better than you could."
Marietta did not commit herself to any agreement. She put her check away, still too regretful about the dreams she had relinquished, to rejoice in the mere doubling of her money.
Late in the afternoon she was paying a visit to Jim. In spite of the brilliant sunshine that flooded the little garret, at this hour, the place seemed dingier and drearier than ever. Jim, too, she thought, was not looking quite as well as usual; his hand as she took it was hot and dry. She knelt down beside him and they looked out at the Peak, rising grand and imposing beyond the low roofs. Marietta was thinking of the gold, "just round on the other side," but Jim's thoughts had wandered farther still; or was it, after all, nearer to the sick man with the wistful light in his eyes?
"I say, Marietta," he said, "I wonder what Heaven's like."
She had never heard him speak like that, and the words went to her heart like a knife. But she answered, gently:
"I guess we don't know much about it, Jim; only that it'll be Heaven."
​"I suppose when we get there, you and I, Springtown will seem very far away."
"I don't know, Jim," Marietta said, looking still out toward the Peak, but thinking no longer of the gold on the other side. "I shouldn't like any of our life together ever to seem very far away."
Just then the sound of the horn rang musically down the street and a moment later the brake went by. The horses' heads were toward home and they knew it; the harness jingled and glittered. On the brake were half-a-dozen well-dressed people laughing and talking gaily; health and prosperity seemed visibly in attendance upon that little company of fortunates. They passed like a vision, and again the sound of the horn came ringing down the street.
Jim turned and looked at Marietta who had been almost as excited as he. A thousand thoughts had chased themselves through her brain as the brake went by. She sighed in the energetic manner peculiar to her, and then she said: "O Jim! If you could only be like that for just one day!"
Perhaps he had had the same thought but her words dispelled it.
"Never mind, Etta," he said. "I wouldn't change with him;" and Marietta shut away ​the little speech in her heart to be happy over at her leisure.
The next day the invalid was not as well as usual and Mrs. Jim spent half her time running up and down stairs. Inches came in in the course of the day and offered her sixty cents for her "Horn of Plenty," and she thought with a pang how fast it was going up. The thought haunted her all day long, but she could not leave Jim to take any steps toward retrieving her opportunity, and after that first visit Inches did not come in again. She took out her big check once or twice in the course of the day and looked at it resentfully; and as she brooded upon the matter, it was borne in upon her with peculiar force that she had made a fatal blunder in exchanging her "chances" for that fixed, inexpansive sum. Had it not been cowardly in her to yield so easily? Supposing Dayton himself had lacked courage at the critical moment; where would his four-in-hand have been to-day? She was sure that no timid speculator had ever made a fortune; on the contrary, she had often heard it said that a flash of courage at the right moment was the very essence of success in speculation. She remembered the expression "essence of success."
​By the time evening came the fever of speculation was high in her veins, and urged on by her own brooding fancies, uncontradicted from without, unexposed to the light of day, she did an incredible thing.
As she drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up was stiff and scratchy; the sound of it was like a challenge to the outer world to come and pass judgment upon her. She flung the pen to one side in nervous trepidation, and then she searched until she found one that was soft and pliable, and went whispering over the paper like a fellow-conspirator.
This was what she wrote:
"Dear Mr. Dayton,
"I want to go into the 'Horn of Plenty' again, and I can't get away to attend to it. I enclose your check, and one of my own for $400. Please buy me what the money will bring. They say it isn't a swindle, and any way I want some. You said to come to you, and ​that was the same as saying you'd do it, if I asked you to. I don't care what you pay; get what you can for the money.
"Yours truly,
"M. Bixby."
Another morning found Jim so ill that they sent for the doctor. On the same day Inches came in and offered seventy-five cents for the stock. Marietta had not told him that it was sold and she did not propose to do so. In the afternoon the price had "jumped" to ninety cents, but by that time she was too anxious about Jim to care.
For five weeks the "Art Emporium" was closed, and in that time the face of the world had changed for Marietta. She realized the change when she came downstairs and opened the shop again. It was impossible to feel that life was restored to its old basis. There was a change too in her, which was patent to the most casual observer. It was, indeed, a very wan and thin Marietta that at last came forward to meet her customers; her eyes looked alarmingly big, and though nothing could disturb the pose of the beautiful head, there was a droop in the figure, that betokened bodily and mental exhaustion.
A good many customers came in to make ​Easter purchases,—for the following Sunday was Easter,—and many others to inquire for Jim. As the old, familiar life began to reassert itself, as she began to feel at home again in the old, accustomed surroundings, her mind recurred, in a half-dazed way, to her speculation. She did not herself know much about it, for Dayton had never sent her her certificate. Probably he had come with it when the shop was closed. She supposed she must be too tired to have much courage; that must be why her heart sank at the thought of what she had done. She was sitting by the work-table, her head in her hands, pondering dully. At the sound of the shop-bell she looked up, mechanically, and saw Inches coming in.
"Good morning, Mrs. Jim," he said. "How's your husband?"
"Jim's better, thank you," she replied, and the sound of her own confident words dispelled the clouds.
Inches looked at her narrowly, and then he began pulling the ears of a mounted fox-skin that was lying on the counter, as he remarked casually: "Hope you got rid of your 'H. O. P.' in time."
"In time?" she asked. "In time? What do you mean?"
​"Why, before they closed down. You sold out, I hope?"
There was a sudden catch in her breath.
"Yes, I sold out some time ago."
"Glad of that," he declared, with very evident relief, suddenly losing interest in the fox's ears. Inches had none of Dayton's prejudices in regard to woman's "sphere," but he was none the less rejoiced to know that this particular woman, with the tired-looking eyes, had not "got hurt," as he would have put it.
"It's been a bad business all round," he went on, waxing confidential as he was prone to do. "Why, I knew a man that bought twenty thousand shares at a dollar-ten three weeks ago, just before she closed down, and he's never had the sand to sell."
"What could he get to-day?" Marietta asked. Her voice sounded in her ears strange and far away.
"Well, I don't know. I was offered some at six cents, but I don't know anybody that wants it."
Marietta's throat felt parched and dry, and now there was a singing in her ears; but she gave no outward sign.
"Pretty hard on some folks," she remarked.
"I should say so!"
​There was a din in her ears all that afternoon, which was perhaps a fortunate circumstance, for it shut out all possibility of thought. It was not until night came that the din stopped, and her brain became clear again,—cruelly, pitilessly clear.
Deep into the night she lay awake tormenting herself with figures. How hideous, how intolerable they were! They passed and repassed in her brain in the uncompromising search-light of conscience, like malicious, mouthing imps. They were her debts and losses, they stood for disgrace and penury, they menaced the very foundation of her life and happiness.
Doubtless the man who had put many thousands into the "Horn of Plenty," and had lacked the "sand" to sell, would have wondered greatly that a fellow-creature should be suffering agony on account of a few hundred dollars. Yet he, in his keenest pang of disappointment, knew nothing whatever of the awful word "ruin"; while Marietta, staring up into the darkness, was getting that lesson by heart.
The town-clock striking three seemed to pierce her consciousness and relieve the strain. She wished the sofa she was lying upon were not so hard and narrow; perhaps if she were ​more comfortable she might be able to sleep, and then, in the morning, she might see light. Of course there was light, somewhere, if she could only find it; but who ever found the light, lying on a hard sofa, in pitchy darkness? Perhaps if she were to get up and move about things would seem less intolerable. And with the mere thought of action the tired frame relaxed, the straining eyes were sealed with sleep, the curtain of unconsciousness had fallen upon the troubled stage of her mind.
And when, at dawn, Jim opened frightened eyes, and struggled with a terrible oppression to speak her name, Marietta was still sleeping profoundly.
"Etta!" he gasped. "O, Etta!"
And Marietta heard the whispered name, and thrusting out her hands, as if to tear away a physical bond, broke through the torpor that possessed her, and stood upon her feet. She staggered, white and trembling, to Jim's bedside, and there, in the faint light, she saw that he was dying.
"Etta, Etta," he whispered, "I want you!"
She sank upon her knees beside him, but the hand she folded in her own was already lifeless.
​Slowly the light increased in that dingy garret, until the sun shone full upon the face of the Peak, fronting the single window of the chamber in uncompassionate splendor. Occasional sounds of traffic came up from the street below; the day had begun. And still Marietta knelt beside the bed, clasping the hand she loved, with a passionate purpose to prolong the mere moment of possession that was all that was left her now, all it was worth being alive for. He wanted her, he wanted her,—and oh, the years and years that he must wait for her, in that strange, lonely, far-away heaven!
"Jim, Jim," she muttered from time to time, with a dry gasp in her throat, that almost choked her; "Jim, O Jim!"
By-and-by, when the sun was high in the heavens, and all the world was abroad, she got upon her feet, and went about the strange new business that death puts upon the broken-hearted.
The day after the funeral was the third of April, and Marietta knew that all her April bills were lying in the letterbox, the silent menace which had seemed so terrible to her the other day. Well,—that at least was nothing to her now. So much her heart-break had ​done for her, that all the lesson of ruin she had conned through those horrible black hours, when Jim was dying and she did not know it,—that lesson at least had lost its meaning. Ruin could not hurt Jim now, and she?—she might even find distraction in it,—find relief.
She went down into the dimly lighted shop, where the shades were closely drawn in the door and in the broad show-window. In that strange midday twilight, she gathered up her mail, and then she seated herself in her old place behind the counter, and began the examination of it.
There were all the bills, just as she had anticipated; bills for food and bills for medicine; bills for all those useless odds and ends which made up her stock in trade, which she and Jim had been so proud of a few years ago when they first came to Springtown. She wrote out the various sums in a long column, just to look at them all together, and to feel how little harm they could do her; and in the midst of the dull, lifeless work, she came upon a letter which did not look like a bill. As she drew it from the envelope, two slips of paper fell out of it, two slips of paper which she picked up and read, with but a dazed, bewildered attention. They were the checks she had sent to ​Dayton a month ago; his own check for $250; hers for $400.
Marietta, in her humble joys and sorrows, had never known the irony of Fate, and hence she could not understand about those checks. The meaning of the letter was blurred as she read it. It was from Dayton. He could not know that Jim was dead, for he said nothing of it. But if there was any one who did not know that Jim was dead, could it be true? Her heart gave a wild leap, and she half rose to her feet. What if she were to run up those stairs, quickly, breathlessly? Oh, what then?
But the stillness of the closed shop, the strange half-light that came through the drawn shades, her own black dress, recalled her from that swift and cruel hope, and again she set herself to read the letter.
The words all seemed straight enough, if she could only make sense of them. He had but just read her letter, being returned that morning from the East. The letter had come the day he left town, and thinking that it was a receipted bill, he had locked it up, unopened, in his desk. He feared that Mrs. Jim had been anxious about the matter, and he hastened to relieve her mind. While he apologized for his ​own carelessness, he congratulated her upon her escape.
"He congratulates me, he congratulates me!" she whispered hoarsely; "O my God!"
She did not yet comprehend the letter nor the checks which had fluttered to the floor. It was only the last sentence that she took note of, because of its jarring sense.
Suddenly the meaning of it all broke upon her. Those were her checks! Ruin had evaded her! She could not prove upon it her loyalty to Jim, her loyalty to grief. Fate had shipwrecked her, and now it was decreed that the sun should shine and the sea subside in smiling peace. It was more than she could bear. She flung the letter from her, and, stooping, she picked up the checks and crushed them in her clenched hands. How dared they come back to mock at her! How dared Fate take her all, and toss her what she did not value! How dared—Heaven? Was it Heaven she was defying? Ah! she must not lose her soul, Heaven knew she would not lose her soul—for Jim's sake!
She opened her clenched hands and smoothed out the checks, patiently, meekly; and then she went on with the bills, a strange calm in ​her mind, different from the calm of the last three days.
And then, for the first time, it struck her that the bills were all made out to Jim.
James Bixby,
    to Hiram Rogers, Dr.
       to James Wilkins, Dr.
          to Fields & Lyman, Dr.
It was his name that would have been disgraced, not hers; his memory would have been stained. She turned white with terror of the danger past.
After a while she put the bills aside, and drew out her folios of pressed flowers. It seemed a hundred years since she had worked upon them. How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers;—the regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden, anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!
And soon Marietta found herself doing the old, accustomed work with all the old skill, and ​with a new grace and delicacy of touch. And when the friends in her old home which she had left for Jim's sake, urged her to come back to them, she answered, no;—she would rather stay in Colorado and do her flower-books;—adding, in a hand that scrawled more than usual with the effort for composure:
"They are my consolation."