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Page 61
Larry laughed again, albeit a little bitterly, for it seemed to him
that the excuse was fully justified; but the colonel said promptly,
"Dick's a fool, and you might have told him there were worse things
to be met on the road than bogies. Run away now, and see that the
niggers are on hand when the stage comes."
Two hours later the stage came with a clatter of hoofs and a cloud
of red dust, which precipitated itself and a dozen thirsty
travelers upon the veranda before the hotel bar-room; it brought
also the usual "express" newspapers and much talk to Colonel
Swinger, who always received his guests in a lofty personal fashion
at the door, as he might have done in his old Virginian home; but
it brought likewise--marvelous to relate--an ACTUAL GUEST, who had
two trunks and asked for a room! He was evidently a stranger to
the ways of Buena Vista, and particularly to those of Colonel
Swinger, and at first seemed inclined to resent the social attitude
of his host, and his frank and free curiosity. When he, however,
found that Colonel Swinger was even better satisfied to give an
account of HIS OWN affairs, his family, pedigree, and his present
residence, he began to betray some interest. The colonel told him
all the news, and would no doubt have even expatiated on his
ghostly visitant, had he not prudently concluded that his guest
might decline to remain in a haunted inn. The stranger had spoken
of staying a week; he had some private mining speculations to watch
at Wynyard's Gulch,--the next settlement, but he did not care to
appear openly at the "Gulch Hotel." He was a man of thirty, with
soft, pleasing features and a singular litheness of movement,
which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy complexion, at first
suggested a foreigner. But his dialect, to the colonel's ears, was
distinctly that of New England, and to this was added a puritanical
and sanctimonious drawl. "He looked," said the colonel in after
years, "like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a blank Yankee
parson." For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who may have
felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James River
were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.
It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its
future fortunes. "Gentlemen having propahty interests at the
Gulch, sah, prefer to stay at Buena Vista with another man of
propahty, than to trust to those new-fangled papah-collared,
gingerbread booths for traders that they call 'hotels' there," he
had remarked to some of "the boys." In his preoccupation with the
new guest, he also became a little neglectful of his old chum and
dependent, Larry Hawkins. Nor was this the only circumstance that
filled the head of that shiftless loyal retainer of the colonel
with bitterness and foreboding. Polly Swinger--the scornfully
indifferent, the contemptuously inaccessible, the coldly capricious
and petulant--was inclined to be polite to the stranger!
The fact was that Polly, after the fashion of her sex, took it into
her pretty head, against all consistency and logic, suddenly to
make an exception to her general attitude towards mankind in favor
of one individual. The reason-seeking masculine reader will rashly
conclude that this individual was the CAUSE as well as the object;
but I am satisfied that every fair reader of these pages will
instinctively know better. Miss Polly had simply selected the new
guest, Mr. Starbuck, to show OTHERS, particularly Larry Hawkins,
what she COULD do if she were inclined to be civil. For two days
she "fixed up" her distracting hair at him so that its silken floss
encircled her head like a nimbus; she tucked her oval chin into a
white fichu instead of a buttonless collar; she appeared at dinner
in a newly starched yellow frock! She talked to him with "company
manners;" said she would "admire to go to San Francisco," and asked
if he knew her old friends the Fauquier girls from "Faginia." The
colonel was somewhat disturbed; he was glad that his daughter had
become less negligent of her personal appearance; he could not but
see, with the others, how it enhanced her graces; but he was, with
the others, not entirely satisfied with her reasons. And he could
not help observing--what was more or less patent to ALL--that
Starbuck was far from being equally responsive to her attentions,
and at times was indifferent and almost uncivil. Nobody seemed to
be satisfied with Polly's transformation but herself.
But eventually she was obliged to assert herself. The third
evening after Starbuck's arrival she was going over to the cabin of
Aunt Chloe, who not only did the washing for Buena Vista, but
assisted Polly in dressmaking. It was not far, and the night was
moonlit. As she crossed the garden she saw Starbuck moving in the
manzanita bushes beyond; a mischievous light came into her eyes;
she had not EXPECTED to meet him, but she had seen him go out, and
there were always POSSIBILITIES. To her surprise, however, he
merely lifted his hat as she passed, and turned abruptly in another
direction. This was more than the little heart-breaker of Buena
Vista was accustomed to!
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