Diverging Roads

PROLOGUE

The tale of California's early days is an epic, an immortal song of daring, of hope, of the urge of youth to unknown trails, of struggle, and of heartbreak. Across the great American plains the adventurers came, scrawling the story of their passing in lines of blood; they came around the Horn in wind-jammers, beating their way northward in the strange Pacific; they forced their way into the wilderness, awakening California's hills from centuries-long sleep, and they pitched their tents and built their cabins by thousands in Cherokee Valley.

Those were the great days of Cherokee, days of feverish activity, of hard, fierce living, of marvelous event. The tales came down to Masonville, where the stage stopped to change horses, and drivers, express-messengers, and prospectors gathered in Mason's bar. The Chinese laundryman had found beside his cabin a nugget worth sixteen hundred dollars; the stage to Honey Creek had been held up just north of Cherokee Hill; Jim Thane had struck it rich on North Branch.

Mason, prospering, ordered a billiard-table sent up from San Francisco, built a dance-hall. Richardson came in with his family and put up a general store. Cherokee was booming; Cherokee miners came down with their sacks of gold-dust, and Masonville thrived.

But the great days passed. The time came when placer mining no longer paid in Cherokee, and the camp moved on across the mountains. Cherokee Valley was left behind, a desolate little hollow among the hills, denuded of its trees, disfigured here and there by the scars of shallow tunnels where hope still fought against defeat. A handful of dogged miners remained, and a few Portuguese families living in little cabins, harvesting a bare subsistence from the unwilling soil.

A few discouraged men came down to Masonville and took up homestead claims, clearing the chaparral from their rolling acres, sowing grain or setting out fruit-trees. They had wives and children; in time they built a school-house. Later the railroad came through, and there was a station and a small bank.

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever. The epic had ended in bad verse. Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like an old man sitting in the sun with his memories. And youth, taking up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther unknown trails and different adventure.

CHAPTER I

There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy. The scarred posts and notched edges of the board sidewalks show it; the paint on the little stations is sanded shoulder-high to prevent their whittling there. Energy struggles feebly under the weight of the slow, uneventful days; but its pressure is always there, an urge that becomes an irritation in young blood.

Helen Davies, pausing in the doorway of Richardson's store on a warm spring afternoon, said to herself that she would be glad never to see Masonville again. The familiar sight of its one drowsy street, the rickety wooden awnings over the sidewalks, the boys pitching horseshoes in the shade of the blacksmith-shop, was almost insupportable.

She did not want to stand there looking at it. She did not want to follow the old stale road home to the old farm-house, which had not changed since she could remember. She felt that she should be doing something, she did not know what.

A long purple curl of smoke unrolling over the crest of Cherokee Hill was the plume of Number Five coming in. Two short, quick puffs of white above the bronze mist of bare apricot orchards mutely announced the whistle for the grade.

Men sauntered past, going toward the station. The postmaster appeared in his shirt-sleeves, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with mail sacks down the middle of the street. The afternoon hack from Cherokee rattled by, bringing a couple of tired, dust-grimed drummers. And the Masonville girls, bare-headed, laughing, talking in high, gay voices, came hurrying from the post-office, from the drug-store, from one of their Embroidery Club meetings, to see Number Five come in. Helen shifted the weight of the package on her arm, pulled her sunbonnet farther over her face, and started home.

Depression and revolt struggled in her mind. She passed the wide, empty doorway of Harner's livery-stable, the glowing forge of the blacksmith-shop, without seeing them, absorbed in the turmoil of her thoughts. But at the corner where the gravel walk began, and the street frankly became a country road slipping down a little slope between scattered white cottages, her self-absorption vanished.

A boy was walking slowly down the path. The elaborate unconcern of his attitude, the stiffness of his self-conscious back, told her that he had been waiting for her, and a rush of dizzying emotion swept away all but the immediate moment. The sunshine was warm on her shoulders, the grass of the lawns was green, every lace-curtained window behind the rose-bushes seemed to conceal watching eyes, and the sound of her feet on the gravel was loud in her ears. She overtook him at last, trying not to walk too fast. They smiled at each other.

"Hello, Paul," she said shyly.

He was a stocky, dark-haired boy, with blue eyes. His father was dead, killed in a mine over at Cherokee. He had come down to the Masonville school, and they were in the same class, the class that would graduate that spring. He was studying hard, trying to get as much education as possible before he would have to go to work. He lived with his mother in a little house near the edge of town, on the road to the farm.

"Hello," he replied. He cleared his throat. "I had to go to the post-office to mail a letter," he said.

"Did you?" she answered. She tried to think of something else to say. "Will you be glad when school's over?" she asked.