"That's the way to take it," said the woman, putting her own good-humored interpretation upon Mrs.Tucker's expression."Now, look here! I'll tell you all about it." She carefully selected the most comfortable chair, and sitting down, lightly crossed her hands in her lap."Well, I left here on the 13th of last January on the ship Argo, calculating that your husband would join the ship just inside the Heads.That was our arrangement, but if anything happened to prevent him, he was to join me in Acapulco.Well! He didn't come aboard, and we sailed without him.But it appears now he did attempt to join the ship, but his boat was capsized.There, now, don't be alarmed! he wasn't drowned, as Patterson can swear to--no, catch HIM! not a hair of him was hurt; but I--I was bundled off to the end of the earth in Mexico, alone, without a cent to bless me.For true as you live, that hound of a captain, when he found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated all his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch.If I hadn't met a man down there that offered to marry me and brought me here, I might have died there, I reckon.But I did, and here I am.Iwent down there as your husband's sweetheart, I've come back as the wife of an honest man, and I reckon it's about square!"There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied, so contagiously good-humored in the woman's perfect moral unconsciousness, that even if Mrs.Tucker had been less preoccupied her resentment would have abated.But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchres of his memory and disinter his deeply buried thoughts.
"You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs.Capting Baxter--ez used to be French Inez of New Orleans--hez told ye.Ye kin take everything she's unloaded.And it's only doin' the square thing to her to say, she hain't done it out o' no cussedness, but just to satisfy herself, now she's a married woman and past such foolishness.But that ain't neither here nor there.The gist of the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was at the tienda the day after she sailed and after his boat capsized." He then gave a detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary but truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already known that the following week he visited the Summit House and was surprised to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he ever sailed from Monterey.
"But why was this not told to me before?" said Mrs.Tucker, suddenly."Why not at the time? Why," she demanded almost fiercely, turning from the one to the other, "has this been kept from me?""I'll tell ye why," said Patterson, sinking with crushed submission into a chair."When I found he wasn't where he ought to be, I got to lookin' elsewhere.I knew the track of the hoss I lent him by a loose shoe.I examined; and found he had turned off the high road somewhere beyond the lagoon, jist as if he was makin' a bee line here.""Well," said Mrs.Tucker, breathlessly.
"Well," said Patterson, with the resigned tone of an accustomed martyr, "mebbe I'm a God-forsaken idiot, but I reckon he DID come yer.And mebbe I'm that much of a habitooal lunatic, but thinking so, I calkilated you'ld know it without tellin'."With their eyes fixed upon her, Mrs.Tucker felt the quick blood rush to her cheeks, although she knew not why.But they were apparently satisfied with her ignorance, for Patterson resumed, yet more gloomily:--"Then if he wasn't hidin' here beknownst to you, he must have changed his mind agin and got away by the embarcadero.The only thing wantin' to prove that idea is to know how he got a boat, and what he did with the hoss.And thar's one more idea, and ez that can't be proved," continued Patterson, sinking his voice still lower, "mebbe it's accordin' to God's laws."Unsympathetic to her as the speaker had always been and still was, Mrs.Tucker felt a vague chill creep over her that seemed to be the result of his manner more than his words."And that idea is...?" she suggested with pale lips.
"It's this! Fust, I don't say it means much to anybody but me.
I've heard of these warnings afore now, ez comin' only to folks ez hear them for themselves alone, and I reckon I kin stand it, if it's the will o' God.The idea is then--that--Spencer Tucker--WASDROWNDED in that boat; the idea is"--his voice was almost lost in a hoarse whisper--"that it was no living man that kem to me that night, but a spirit that kem out of the darkness and went back into it! No eye saw him but mine--no ears heard him but mine.I reckon it weren't intended it should." He paused, and passed the flap of his hat across his eyes."The pie, you'll say, is agin it," he continued in the same tone of voice,--"the whiskey is agin it--a few cuss words that dropped from him, accidental like, may have been agin it.All the same they mout have been only the little signs and tokens that it was him."But Mrs.Baxter's ready laugh somewhat rudely dispelled the infection of Patterson's gloom."I reckon the only spirit was that which you and Spencer consumed," she said, cheerfully."I don't wonder you're a little mixed.Like as not you've misunderstood his plans." Patterson shook his head."He'll turn up yet, alive and kicking! Like as not, then, Poindexter knows where he is all the time.""Impossible! He would have told me," said Mrs.Tucker, quickly.
Mrs.Baxter looked at Patterson without speaking.Patterson replied by a long lugubrious whistle.
"I don't understand you," said Mrs.Tucker, drawing back with cold dignity.
"You don't?" returned Mrs.Baxter."Bless your innocent heart!
