Treasure and Trouble Therewith: A Tale of CaliforniaBonner, Geraldine
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Treasure and Trouble Therewith: A Tale of California
Bonner, Geraldine
California -- Fiction
"I can see from here right into one of those rooms, and I'm pretty sure
there's a person lying on the floor--dead maybe. The electric light
fixture's down and may have got them."
Garland turned to Mrs. Meeker:
"You get out Prince and put him in the cart." Then to the man in the
window: "I'll go in and see. A soldier's just been here who says they've
cleaned the place out. There's maybe somebody hurt that they ain't seen."
"Hold on a minute and I'll go with you," called the other. "I'm a doctor
and I might come in handy. I'll be there in a jiff."
He vanished from the window, and before Prince was backed into the
shafts, walked up the carriage drive, neatly clad, cool and alert, his
doctor's bag in his hand.
"I was just looking at the place as I dressed. Queer sight--looks like a
doll's house. Bedding flung back over the footboards, the way they'd
thrown it when they jumped. Clothes neatly folded over the chairs. And
then in that third-story room I saw something long and solid-looking on
the floor. Seems to be tangled up in the coverlets. The electric light
thing's sprinkled all over it. That's what makes me pretty sure--hit 'em
as they made a break. Come on."
He and Garland made off as Pancha and Mrs. Meeker set to work on the
harnessing of Prince.
The soldiers had done their work. The hotel was empty--a congeries of
rooms left in wild disorder, opened trunks in the passages, clothes
tossed and trampled on the floors. As the men ran up the stairs, its
walls gave back the sound of their feet like a place long deserted and
abandoned to decay. The recurring shocks that shook its dislocated frame
sent plaster down, and called forth creaking protests from the wrenched
girders. The rear was flooded with light, streaming in where the wall
had been, and through open doors they saw the houses opposite filling in
the background like the drop scene at a theater.
The third floor had suffered more than those below, and they made their
way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass,
pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its
signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had
passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine hand. The
place looked as untenanted as a tomb. Anyone glancing over its blurred
ruin, no voice responding to a summons, might have missed the figure that
lay concealed by the bed and partly enwrapped in its coverings.
The doctor, kneeling beside it, pushed them off and swept away the litter
of glass and metal that had evidently fallen from the ceiling and struck
the woman down. She was lying on her face, one hand still gripping the
clothes, a pink wrapper twisted about her, her blonde hair stained with
the ooze of blood from a wound in her head. He felt of her pulse and
heart and twitching up her eyelids looked into her set and lifeless eyes.
"Is she dead?" Garland asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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