The moment he walked into the orchard he knew he was nearing home. He could not hear them, but he knew the gnomes were near. Over and over he called to them, but they did not come.
“Perhaps they do not like the moonlight,” he said.
At the foot of a large peach tree, he dug his hole—three feet across and very deep. All night he worked on it, stopping to listen awhile and then digging deeper and into the cool earth. Although he heard nothing, was positive that he was nearing them. Only when the daylight came did he give up and retire into the bushes sleep.
In midmorning Bert Munroe walked out to look at a coyote trap and found the hole at the foot of the tree. “What the devil!” he said. “Some kids must have been digging a tunnel. That’s dangerous! It’ll cave in on them, or somebody will fall into it and get hurt.” He walked back to the house, got a shovel and filled up the hole.
“Manny,” he said to his youngest boy, “you haven’t been digging in the orchard, have you?”
“Uh-uh!” said Manny.
“Well, do you know who has?”
“Uh-huh!” said Manny.
“Well, somebody dug a deep hole out there. It’s dangerous. You tell the boys not to dig or they’ll get caved in.”
The dark came and Tularecito walked out of the brush to dig in his hole again. When he found it filled up, he growled savagely, but then his thought changed and he laughed. “The people were here,” he said happily. “They didn’t know who it was, and they were frightened. They filled up the hole the way a gopher does. This time I’ll hide and when they come to fill the hole, I’ll tell them who I am. Then they will love me.”
And Tularecito dug out the hole and made it much deeper than before, because much of the dirt was loose. Just before daylight, he retired into the brush at the edge of the orchard and lay down to watch.
Bert Munroe walked out before breakfast to look at his trap again, and again he found the open hole. “The little devils!” he cried. “They’re keeping it up, are they? I’ll bet Manny is in it after all.”
He studied the hole for a moment and then began to push dirt into it with the side of his foot. A savage growl spun him around. Tularecito came charging down upon him, leaping like a frog on his long legs, and swinging his shovel like a club.
When Jimmie Munroe came to call his father to breakfast, he found him lying on the pile of dirt. He was bleeding at the mouth and forehead. Shovelfuls of dirt came flying out of the pit.
Jimmie thought someone had killed his father and was getting ready to bury him. He ran home in a frenzy of terror, and by telephone summoned a band of neighbors.
Half a dozen men crept up on the pit. Tularecito struggled like a wounded lion, and held his own until they struck him on the head with his own shovel. Then they tied him up and took him in to jail.
In Salinas a medical board examined the boy. When the doctors asked him questions, he smiled blandly at them and did not answer. Franklin Gomez told the board what he knew and asked the custody of him.
“We really can’t do it, Mr. Gomez,” the judge said finally. “You say he is a good boy. Just yesterday he tried to kill a man. You must see that we cannot let him go loose. Sooner or later he will succeed in killing someone.”
After a short deliberation, he committed Tularecito to the asylum for the criminal insane at Napa.
Five
HELEN VAN DEVENTER was a tall woman with a sharp, handsome face and tragic eyes. A strong awareness of tragedy ran through her life. At fifteen she had looked like a widow after her Persian kitten was poisoned. She mourned for it during six months, not ostentatiously, but with a subdued voice and a hushed manner. When her father died, at the end of the kitten’s six months, the mourning continued uninterrupted. Seemingly she hungered for tragedy and life had lavishly heaped it upon her.
At twenty-five she married Hubert Van Deventer, a florid, hunting man who spent six months out of every year trying to shoot some kind of creature or other. Three months after the wedding he shot himself when a blackberry vine tripped him up. Hubert was a fairly gallant man. As he lay dying under a tree, one of his companions asked whether he wanted to leave any message for his wife.
“Yes,” said Hubert. “Tell her to have me mounted for that place in the library between the bull moose and the bighorn! Tell her I didn’t buy this one from the guide!”
Helen Van Deventer closed off the drawing room with its trophies. Thereafter the room was holy to the spirit of Hubert. The curtains remained drawn. Anyone who felt it necessary to speak in the drawing room spoke softly. Helen did not weep, for it was not in her nature to weep, but her eyes grew larger, and she stared a great deal, with the vacant staring of one who travels over other times. Hubert had left her the house on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and a fairly large fortune.
Her daughter Hilda, born six months after Hubert was killed, was a pretty, doll-like baby, with her mother’s great eyes. Hilda was never very well; she took all the children’s diseases with startling promptness. Her temper, which at first wore itself out with howling, became destructive as soon as she could move about. She shattered any breakable thing which came into the pathway of her anger. Helen Van Deventer soothed and petted her and usually succeeded in increasing the temper.
When Hilda was six years old, Dr. Phillips, the family physician, told Mrs. Van Deventer the thing she had suspected for a long time.
“You must realize it,” he said. “Hilda is not completely well in her mind. I suggest that she be taken to a psychiatrist.”
The dark eyes of the mother widened with pain. “You are sure, doctor?”
“Fairly sure. I am not a specialist. You’ll have to take her to someone who knows more than I do.”
Helen stared away from hint. “I have thought so too, doctor, but I can’t take her to another man. You’ve always had the care of us. I know you. I shouldn’t ever be sure of another man.”
“What do you mean, ‘sure’?” Dr. Phillips exploded.
“Don’t you know we might cure her if we went about it right?”
Helen’s hands rose a trifle, and then dropped with hopelessness. “She won’t ever get well, doctor. She was born at the wrong time. Her father’s death—it was too much for me. I didn’t have the strength to bear a perfect child, you see.”
“Then what do you intend to do? Your idea is foolish, if I may be permitted.”
“What is there to do, doctor? I can wait and hope. I know I can see it through, but I can’t take her to another man. I’ll just watch her and care for her. That seems to be my life.” She smiled very sadly and her hands rose again.
“It seems to me you force hardships upon yourself,” the doctor said testily.
“We take what is given us. I can endure. I am sure of that, and I am proud of it. No amount of tragedy can break down my endurance. But there is one thing I cannot bear, doctor. Hilda cannot be taken away from me. I will keep her with me, and you will come as always, but no one else must interfere.”
Dr. Phillips left the house in disgust. The obvious and needless endurance of the woman always put him in a fury. “If I were Fate,” he mused, “I’d be tempted to smash her placid resistance too.”
It wasn’t long after this that visions and dreams began to come to Hilda. Terrible creatures of the night, with claws and teeth, tried to kill her while she slept. Ugly little men pinched her and gritted their teeth in her ear, and Helen Van Deventer accepted the visions as new personalities come to test her.
“A tiger came and pulled the covers,” Hilda cried in the morning.
“You mustn’t let him frighten you, dear.”
“But he tried to get his teeth through the blanket, mother.”
“I’ll sit with you tonight, darling. Then he can’t come.”
She began to sit by the little girl’s bedside until dawn. Her eyes grew brighter and more feverish with the frenzied resistance of her spirit.
One thing bothered her more than the dreams. Hilda had begun to tell lies. “I went out into the garden this morning, mother. An old man was sitting in the street. He asked me to go to his house, so I went. He had a big gold elephant, and he let me ride on it.” The little girl’s eyes were far away as she made up the tale.