"Not on your side--not on your side," said Rice quickly. "Uncle Quincy may not have anted up in this matter o' feelin', nor seen his nephew's rise. You know how it is yourself in these things--being a lawyer and a fa'r-minded man--it's all on one side, ginerally! There's always one who loves and sacrifices, and all that, and there's always one who rakes in the pot! That's the way o' the world; and that's why," continued Rice, abandoning his slightly philosophical attitude, and laying his hand tenderly, and yet with a singularly significant grip, on Wells's arm, "we say to him, 'Hang on to that will, and uncle Quincy's memory.' And we hev to say it. For he's that tender-hearted and keerless of money--having his own share in this Ledge--that ef that girl came whimperin' to him he'd let her take the 'prop' and let the hull thing slide! And then he'd remember that he had rewarded that gal that broke the old man's heart, and that would upset him again in his work. And there, you see, is just where WE come in! And we say, 'Hang on to that will like grim death!'"
The lawyer looked curiously at Rice and his companions, and then turned to Wells: "Nevertheless, I must look to you for instructions," he said dryly.
But by this time Jackson Wells, although really dubious about supplanting the orphan, had gathered the sense of his partners, and said with a frank show of decision, "I think I must stand by the will."
"Then I'll have it proved," said Twiggs, rising. "In the meantime, if there is any talk of contesting"--
"If there is, you might say," suggested Wyngate, who felt he had not had a fair show in the little comedy,--"ye might say to that old skeesicks of a wife's brother, if he wants to nipple in, that there are four men on the Ledge--and four revolvers! We are gin'rally fa'r-minded, peaceful men, but when an old man's heart is broken, and his gray hairs brought down in sorrow to the grave, so to speak, we're bound to attend the funeral--sabe?"
When Mr. Twiggs had departed again, accompanied by a partner to guide him past the dangerous shoals of Tomlinson's grocery, Rice clapped his hand on Wells's shoulder. "If it hadn't been for me, sonny, that shark would have landed you into some compromise with that red-haired gal! I saw you weakenin', and then I chipped in.
I may have piled up the agony a little on your love for old Quince, but if you aren't an ungrateful cub, that's how you ought to hev been feein', anyhow!"
Nevertheless, the youthful Wells, although touched by his elder partner's loyalty, and convinced of his own disinterestedness, felt a painful sense of lost chivalrous opportunity.
. . . . . .
On mature consideration it was finally settled that Jackson Wells should make his preliminary examination of his inheritance alone, as it might seem inconsistent with the previous indifferent attitude of his partners if they accompanied him. But he was implored to yield to no blandishments of the enemy, and to even make his visit a secret.
He went. The familiar flower-spiked trees which had given their name to Buckeye Hollow had never yielded entirely to improvements and the incursions of mining enterprise, and many of them had even survived the disused ditches, the scarred flats, the discarded levels, ruined flumes, and roofless cabins of the earlier occupation, so that when Jackson Wells entered the wide, straggling street of Buckeye, that summer morning was filled with the radiance of its blossoms and fragrant with their incense. His first visit there, ten years ago, had been a purely perfunctory and hasty one, yet he remembered the ostentatious hotel, built in the "flush time" of its prosperity, and already in a green premature decay; he recalled the Express Office and Town Hall, also passing away in a kind of similar green deliquescence; the little zinc church, now overgrown with fern and brambles, and the two or three fine substantial houses in the outskirts, which seemed to have sucked the vitality of the little settlement. One of these--he had been told--was the property of his rich and wicked maternal uncle, the hated appropriator of his red-headed cousin's affections. He recalled his brief visit to the departed testator's claim and market garden, and his by no means favorable impression of the lonely, crabbed old man, as well as his relief that his objectionable cousin, whom he had not seen since he was a boy, was then absent at the rival uncle's. He made his way across the road to a sunny slope where the market garden of three acres seemed to roll like a river of green rapids to a little "run" or brook, which, even in the dry season, showed a trickling rill. But here he was struck by a singular circumstance. The garden rested in a rich, alluvial soil, and under the quickening Californian sky had developed far beyond the ability of its late cultivator to restrain or keep it in order. Everything had grown luxuriantly, and in monstrous size and profusion. The garden had even trespassed its bounds, and impinged upon the open road, the deserted claims, and the ruins of the past. Stimulated by the little cultivation Quincy Wells had found time to give it, it had leaped its three acres and rioted through the Hollow. There were scarlet runners crossing the abandoned sluices, peas climbing the court-house wall, strawberries matting the trail, while the seeds and pollen of its few homely Eastern flowers had been blown far and wide through the woods. By a grim satire, Nature seemed to have been the only thing that still prospered in that settlement of man.