Belle of Bear City

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 361, 9 April 1903, Page 8

Belle of Bear City

I By WJI. PERRY BROWN. I

I I (Ooprrtcfct, INI, by Aatbors Sjndie*w ) •■rpwO YEAES without sight of a Y woman? What a Hfe! If one could have two years without sight of a man, now—" She glanced at Sterling meditatively from the hammock, as he swung one long leg over the arm of his chair and twiddled a raw gold nugget doing dubious duty as a watch charm. "Could you imagine such a horror?" lie quizzed. "It would be heavenly. Men grow wearisome when they fancy themselves in love. "All of them —0, most sweet satisfy ?" "M—'in —tell me about your life up there," she said, briskly. "Of course the cold must have been terrific, and -with no news, no papers, no women, no—er —" "No anything desirable, you might add, except the 'grub,' the fires, the gold dust and—yes, -there was one thing else which became to me, at least, more satisfactory than all the rest of our meager comforts." ■ This last with a steady, admiring Stare that caused Miss Lamar to slowly droop her eyelids, as if the long lashes might veil the faint blush that seemed to ripple beneath the white down of the rounded cheeks below. "And what was this eminently desirable thing?" she continued, imperiously. "We called her the Belle of Bear City. Fun!" he chuckled to himself. "You would have thought it dizzily absurd could you have seen us line up every morning and make our bows. We even reserved our smartest small talk for her —seemed as if she could hear, you know." "Why not, unless she was 'dizzily' deaf? Sa the most desirable thing turns out to be feminine after all. I might have guessed it. if there was a get-at-aK? woman inside the arctic circle. What was she—some Esquimau?" This last as a sort of debative challenge. "Not on your life. Neither was she a Siwash, ChHeat—nor any other Alaskan monstrosity. Ah! how we did adore that girl!" "Well, really!" Here Miss Lamar evinced sundry dignified symptoms of rising. "How do you reconcile this wtlayours.'ayingtwoyears in that horrid hole without seeing a woman?" "It is a soiemn, lugubrious fact," he gravely asserted, "that we did." "Wit is one thing. Mr. Sterling,"said she, adding hauteur to dignity. "Mendacity is quite another. Even actresses are supposed to know that." She ro:;e, darting at him a final glance, neither meditative nor debative. Had he not seen her look that Tery way at the unsuccessful suitor id "Hearts Are Trumps," her latest stage success? Was she really going? Appalled lest he had offended.3'et thrilled indefinably "that any thing he might say oculd be of more than zephyrlike importance to move her. Sterling timidly put out a detaining hand. "Please don't go." he ventured. "I had no idea of—of—you see, it was only a picture, after all." Miss Lamar paused tentatively, with her hand on. his chair back. "You seem overburdened with conundrums to-day," she commented. "Whj not solve them yourself?" "But, do you n->t understand?" "I am a poor hand at guessing. Beside*, it is too much trouble." Thii with a sort of dry weariness which, however, seemed to impel her to forget her previous intention and sink languidly back in the hammock. Sterling grasped his opportunity by linking his hands together around one drawn-up knee and gazing sleepily into vacancy, as if still mesmerized by the magic memory of the elusive Belle of Bear City. "There were seven of us fellows caged in one large cabin that winter. Most of us, being college bred, we herded together—birds of a feather, you know. It was a dreary time. No sun at all for three months, the mercury 50 degrees below or worse, with an ever bellowing surf grinding the mush ice along shore, and not a scrap of news, nor a woman nylrer than Nome City, 130 miles away. "Always excepting the mysterious Belle of Hear City," she interpolated, suppressing a strictly artificial yawn. "Poor thing! Alone among all those men—what did you say was the population?" "I did not say, but there must have been a hundred snowed in under the Tundra Bluffs, and every mother's son of us a man." He grinned feebly. "Always except—" she began again, when bis eyes »-t; ;P( | her to relent. —^——.l 1 1 I ■ 111 IIIJMI

"Lfuu'i," he pleaded, "Yon queens of tha stage have your trials, of course, bat they are apt to be those resulting from satiety rather than, starvation. We seven got so that we h-aled the sight of each other only a degree less than -we abhorred the average Cityite- caohed in the other cabins. Fling a dozen society swells into a pig aty and they will herd together; not because they weary of each other less, but to avoid the pigs." "No wonder she was popular." Satirical emphasis—feminine emphasis on the personal pronoun. "How and when did *he arrive ?" "In an old newspaper some fellow unexpectedly fished from his chest. Thereshe wason the front page, photogravured to the life. Rare and radiant she looked to us poor devils socially starving under the north star. ATlinook squaw from St. Michaels-with her hair done up in bead.-* and tisli oil would have soothed our e3'«sight. Imagine the effect thisravishingvision produced upon, our esthetic sensibilities, as we tacked her up on the wall and worshiped. The golden calf of the Israelites was nothing by comparison. "Dear mel All this masculine splutter over a mere picture?" And such is the divine perversity of the sex that she seemed vaguely disappointed. "Sure. But such a picture! It grew upon us as a Botticelli Madonna is said to permeate your very being if you only look at it long enough. At least that was the way I came to feel." "Yes?" Miss Lamar's lip curled; for little as she professed to care for man in the abstract it did not seem right that man as an individual should waste his adoration on a picture, while the real article abounded in other parts of the globe. "Yes," he blandly continued, "I was the seventh man, you know. That is, I came into our meas- as number seven, which, being considered a lucky numeral—l say!" he suddenly sat bolt upright. "Are you at all superstitious?" "Of course, I am." She shuddered sympathetically. "If you had been No. 13 now—" "I think I should have given up right there; but being the seventh man, I said to myself: I will find the original of this picture some fine day." "Aha!" with a chilling accent, as if to show that her interest in the Belle of Bear City would relapse into indifference if that aggravating creature pushed berself beyond the photogravure stage of existence. "I kept on saying it all winter," continued Sterling, abstractedly. "Later on, when we struck it rich and the others forgot, I would go up to her ladyship, after a wash and brush-up, and repeat my vow. Then the boys would satirically intimate that our belle had made at least one permanent mash." As Sterling enthused himself over his words, Miss Lamar beoame ironically skeptical. 'This is good enough for 8 play. We must consult Fitch." Fitoh was her manager. "But when luck evinced itself in a more solid way by making you suddenly rich, I suppose her ladyship had to take a gallery seat—" "On the contrary, she became my 'bright particular* more than ever. I had named my claim 'Bear City Belle's, No. 7.' How the boys did laugh. But when I began to sluice out ten dollars to the pan, they said No. 7 was all right, and that the Belle was no flirt—" Here Sterling, with a aide glanoe at the actress, meditatively added: "I have often wondered if they were right." . "I euppose you found that out long ago, if there was an original to that photo—or was it a newspaper? They print anyone's picture nowadays; literally anyone's. It is rather a distinction to be let alone. Mine, you ask? Look on the news stands. Such caricatures!" "Such divinities!" he interrupted, eagerly. "I loved your picture long before I saw you over the footlights. Then I made myself known—" "By persecuting poor Fitch until he had to do something to rid him* self of you." "And now—am I not your slave? Dear Gertrude, if I may call you so; have you not guessed my riddle? Where are your intuitions? You know I love you deeply, devotedly—" "Alas! Poor Belle of Bear City!" She raised her arms in a mock tragic gesture. "Has the magic seven failed her, who brought luck to you) Oh, faithless swain!" He saw that she was not displeased, though it seemed likely that she had guessed but half his riddle. Rising, he made a sudden dash through the open window of a room near where they sat on the summer hotel piazza, but returning almost instantly, holding out a batteredlooking newspaper print, framed in costly ebony, with an inscription, in Sterling's script beneath, on which Miss Lamar studiously fixed her eyes, while the faint rose tint on her cheeks deepened into m deMeate glow. "The Original Belle of Bear City," she read aloud. M Ood bias* her! Where shall I find her?" When their eye* met again, Sterling realised that she had guessed the other half of his riddle. "Where shaH I fmd hart" lie echoed. "I want to tell her lam aof faithless, but faithful—always." "Here," said Miss Lamar, adding to her blush an even mora convincing smile, as she resigned both hands to his eager clasp. "Foolish boy! You aasgM &av* told me weeks ago." "Old Omar Khayyam understood my feelings," returned Sterling. "Listen to the Persian sage: " "Those whom wltk love wevenfatp __U torewe.isJsotear,'u »