The swaying, creaking, Boomville coach had at last reached the level ridge, and sank forward upon its springs with a sigh of relief and the slow precipitation of the red dust which had hung in clouds around it. The whole coach, inside and out, was covered with this impalpable powder; it had poured into the windows that gaped widely in the insufferable heat; it lay thick upon the novel read by the passenger who had for the third or fourth time during the ascent made a gutter of the half-opened book and blown the dust away in a single puff, like the smoke from a pistol. It lay in folds and creases over the yellow silk duster of the handsome woman on the back seat, and when she endeavored to shake it off enveloped her in a reddish nimbus. It grimed the handkerchiefs of others, and left sanguinary streaks on their mopped foreheads. But as the coach had slowly climbed the summit the sun was also sinking behind the Black Spur Range, and with its ultimate disappearance a delicious coolness spread itself like a wave across the ridge. The passengers drew a long breath, the reader closed his book, the lady lifted the edge of her veil and delicately wiped her forehead, over which a few damp tendrils of hair were clinging. Even a distinguished-looking man who had sat as impenetrable and remote as a statue in one of the front seats moved and turned his abstracted face to the window. His deeply tanned cheek and clearly cut features harmonized with the red dust that lay in the curves of his brown linen dust-cloak, and completed his resemblance to a bronze figure. Yet it was Demorest, changed only in coloring. Now, as five years ago, his abstraction had a certain quality which the most familiar stranger shrank from disturbing. But in the general relaxation of relief the novel-reader addressed him.
"Well, we ain't far from Boomville now, and it's all down-grade the rest of the way. I reckon you'll be as glad to get a 'wash up' and a 'shake' as the rest of us."
"I am afraid I won't have so early an opportunity," said Demorest, with a faint, grave smile, "for I get off at the cross-road to Heavy Tree Hill."
"Heavy Tree Hill!" repeated the other in surprise. "You ain't goin' to Heavy Tree Hill? Why, you might have gone there direct by railroad, and have been there four hours ago. You know there's a branch from the Divide Railroad goes there straight to the hotel at Hymettus."
"Where?" said Demorest, with a puzzled smile.
"Hymettus. That's the fancy name they've given to the watering- place on the slope. But I reckon you're a stranger here?"
"For five years," said Demorest. "I fancy I've heard of the railroad, although I prefer to go to Heavy Tree this way. But I never heard of a watering-place there before."
"Why, it's the biggest boom of the year. Folks that are tired of the fogs of 'Frisco and the heat of Sacramento all go there. It's four thousand feet up, with a hotel like Saratoga, dancing, and a band plays every night. And it all sprang out of the Divide Railroad and a crank named George Barker, who bought up some old Ditch property and ran a branch line along its levels, and made a junction with the Divide. You can come all the way from 'Frisco or Sacramento by rail. It's a mighty big thing!"
"Yet," said Demorest, with some animation, "you call the man who originated this success a crank. I should say he was a genius."
The other passenger shook his head. "All sheer nigger luck. He bought the Ditch plant afore there was a ghost of a chance for the Divide Railroad, just out o' pure d----d foolishness. He expected so little from it that he hadn't even got the agreement done in writin', and hadn't paid for it, when the Divide Railroad passed the legislature, as it never oughter done! For, you see, the blamedest cur'ous thing about the whole affair was that this 'straw' road of a Divide, all pure wildcat, was only gotten up to frighten the Pacific Railroad sharps into buying it up. And the road that nobody ever calculated would ever have a rail of it laid was pushed on as soon as folks knew that the Ditch plant had been bought up, for they thought there was a big thing behind it. Even the hotel was, at first, simply a kind of genteel alms-house that this yer Barker had built for broken-down miners!"
"Nevertheless," continued Demorest, smiling, "you admit that it is a great success?"
"Yes," said the other, a little irritated by some complacency in Demorest's smile, "but the success isn't HIS'N. Fools has ideas, and wise men profit by them, for that hotel now has Jim Stacy's bank behind it, and is even a kind of country branch of the Brook House in 'Frisco. Barker's out of it, I reckon. Anyhow, HE couldn't run a hotel, for all that his wife--she that's one of the big 'Frisco swells now--used to help serve in her father's. No, sir, it's just a fool's luck, gettin' the first taste and leavin' the rest to others."
"I'm not sure that it's the worst kind of luck," returned Demorest, with persistent gravity; "and I suppose he's satisfied with it."
But so heterodox an opinion only irritated his antagonist the more, especially as he noticed that the handsome woman in the back seat appeared to be interested in the conversation, and even sympathetic with Demorest. The man was in the main a good-natured fellow and loyal to his friends; but this did not preclude any virulent criticism of others, and for a moment he hated this bronze-faced stranger, and even saw blemishes in the handsome woman's beauty.
"That may be YOUR idea of an Eastern man," he said bluntly, "but I kin tell ye that Californy ain't run on those lines. No, sir."
Nevertheless, his curiosity got the better of his ill humor, and as the coach at last pulled up at the cross-road for Demorest to descend he smiled affably at his departing companion.
"You allowed just now that you'd bin five years away. Whar mout ye have bin?"
"In Europe," said Demorest pleasantly.
"I reckoned ez much," returned his interrogator, smiling significantly at the other passengers. "But in what place?"
"Oh, many," said Demorest, smiling also.