American fiction -- 19th century; Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
of her circumvolving heels, and vainly imploring assistance. Again and
again she would dash by the applauding groups, adding the aggravation
of her voice to the danger of her heels, until suddenly wheeling, she
would gallop to Carter's Pond, and deposit her luckless freight in the
muddy ditch. This practical joke was repeated until one Sunday she was
approached by Juan Ramirez, a Mexican vaquero, booted and spurred, and
carrying a riata. A crowd was assembled to see her discomfiture. But,
to the intense disappointment of the camp, Jinny, after quietly
surveying the stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the
little cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually
prevented all pursuit by her skilled antagonist. From that day she
forsook the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among
the pine head-boards and cold "hic jacets" of the dead.
Happy would it have been if this circumstance, which resulted in the
one poetic episode of her life, had occurred earlier; for the cemetery
was the favorite resort of Miss Jessie Lawton, a gentle invalid from
San Francisco, who had sought the foot-hills for the balsam of pine and
fir, and in the faint hope that the freshness of the wild roses might
call back her own. The extended views from the cemetery satisfied Miss
Lawton's artistic taste, and here frequently, with her sketch-book in
hand, she indulged that taste and a certain shy reserve which kept her
from contact with strangers. On one of the leaves of that sketch-book
appears a study of a donkey's head, being none other than the grave
features of Jinny, as once projected timidly over the artist's
shoulder. The preliminaries of this intimacy have never transpired, nor
is it a settled fact if Jinny made the first advances. The result was
only known to the men of Sawyer's Bar by a vision which remained fresh
in their memories long after the gentle lady and her four-footed friend
had passed beyond their voices. As two of the tunnel-men were
returning from work one evening, they chanced to look up the little
trail, kept sacred from secular intrusion, that led from the cemetery
to the settlement. In the dim twilight, against a sunset sky, they
beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly toward them. With a delicate
instinct, new to those rough men, they drew closer in the shadow of the
bushes until she passed. There was no mistaking the familiar
grotesqueness of Jinny; there was no mistaking the languid grace of
Miss Lawton. But a wreath of wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from
her long ears floated Miss Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous,
girlish smile was upon Miss Jessie's face, as fresh as the azaleas in
her hair. By the next day the story of this gentle apparition was
known to a dozen miners in camp, and all were sworn to secrecy. But
the next evening, and the next, from the safe shadows of the woods they
watched and drank in the beauty of that fanciful and all unconscious
procession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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