Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (25 page)

The Professor studied Sarah as they walked. “So, Sarah, tell me—you live alone in this charming wilderness?”

“I live with the wolves,” she said. “Beka is off hunting for quail.”

“With the wolves?” The Professor raised his eyebrows, beaming at her. “Beka is a wolf? That’s marvelous.”

“You’re the Wild Angel!” Cassidy said. “I’ve heard the miners talk about you. You come to rescue people in need.”

Sarah regarded him without comment.

“The Wild Angel,” the Professor repeated. “That would make a lovely stage name.” He nodded. “You must stay to dinner,” he told Sarah. “We must talk more. There are so many possibilities.”

Sarah hesitated. “Will you have biscuits?” she asked.

“If you want biscuits, I’ll make biscuits,” Cassidy said quickly.

“I will stay,” said Sarah.

It was curiosity that kept her there, as much as the promise of biscuits. She sat by the fire and watched as Professor Serunca ministered to Cassidy’s ankle with a Chinese liniment that reeked of strange herbs. He bound the injured joint with strips of linen, torn from a banner that had once said something about the merits of Chinese medicine (the letters had long since faded). While Cassidy made biscuits and fried salt pork, the Professor fetched the white mare (who had only run as far as the other side of the meadow) and treated the horse’s wounds with Chinese medicine and muttered words of comfort.

While they ate dinner, the Professor asked her what brought her down from the mountains.

“I’m looking for my friend Max,” Sarah told him. “Do you know him?”

“Max,” the Professor repeated thoughtfully. “I don’t believe I know the fellow.” He squinted at her, studying her face. “But perhaps we can help you find him. What does Max do?”

“He draws pictures,” she said. “He writes in a notebook.”

“I see. An artist, then. What does he do with these pictures?”

“Puts them in a book,” she said. “He showed me one.”

Cassidy had been listening carefully. Before he had left for California, he had done his best to research the place, gathering several popular accounts of travels in the gold fields. He had brought one of his favorites along. “Hey, Professor, I have a book by a fellow named Max Phillips…”

The Professor fetched the book from Cassidy’s rucksack. “
In the Diggings
, by Max Phillips,” Cassidy said, opening the book.

“There,” Sarah cried, pointing to the sketch facing the title page. “That’s the lake. Max drew that.” She smiled, remembering the sunny afternoon when Max had completed the sketch. She had taken him on a hike high above the valley to a place where the world opened beneath them.

Cassidy nodded, flipping through the pages until he reached the introduction, written by an editor at the publishing house. “Since the publication of
A Young Man’s Guide to the Gold Fields
, I have had the great pleasure of corresponding with Max Phillips,” Cassidy read aloud. “As Mr. Phillips is a man with no fixed address, I send my letters to Selby Hotel in Selby Flat, California. There, Mr. Phillips tells me, Mrs. Selby tucks them behind the barroom mirror to await his next visit. I have not met the redoubtable Mrs. Selby in person, but I have met her in the Mr. Phillips’s accounts of life in Selby Flat, and I feel I know her quite well.”

“Mrs. Selby!” Sarah was happy now. “Max told me about Mrs. Selby. She makes apple pie.”

The Professor nodded. “And she lives in Selby Flat. As it happens, we are on our way to Selby Flat for a performance. Would you like to come with us?”

Sarah hesitated only for a moment. Max had tried many times to persuade her to go with him to Selby Flat. The previous summer, she had promised him that she would accompany him the following year. “Yes,” she said. “And we’ll find Max.”

“If not, we’ll find out where he is,” the Professor said. “And perhaps, while we are there, you could join us in a performance. As the Wild Angel, I imagine you could be quite an attraction.” The Professor smiled at her. “I’m sure you’ve always dreamed of running away with the circus.”

Sarah frowned, confused.

Cassidy shook his head. “Professor, she was raised by wolves. She doesn’t know what a circus is.”

“She does now,” he said. “We are the circus, my child.” He lifted his hands in a grand gesture that encompassed Cassidy, the wagon, the animals. “We are the stuff that dreams are made of. The glitter and the glamour and the glory. Not for us the humdrum life of quiet desperation. I invite you to join us, to become a star glittering in the firmament.”

Sarah stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. She understood many of his words, but she got lost trying to follow the Professor’s rolling sentences. What did the stars have to do with any of this? She glanced upward, where the first stars glittered in the darkening sky. “A star?” she murmured.

“Of course you will be a star!” He leaned back on his elbows, gazing at the sky. “The brightest of all the stars in the heavens.”

She liked the Professor, even though she did not know what he was talking about. He reminded her a bit of Rolon—in charge of his pack but relaxed about his power.

“Of course, I can’t pay much,” he said, cocking his head and dropping his hands. “But surely you don’t care about that. A woman like you, a child of nature, doesn’t need much money. Do you?”

He paused for her to respond.

Sarah frowned, struggling to come to grips with his meaning. Did she need money? “What is money?” she asked. This was not a word that Max had taught her.

The Professor smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Exactly,” he said. “What is money to people like us? Money comes and money goes.”

He reached out to Cassidy, smiling, with a hand that was apparently empty. When he took his hand away from Cassidy’s ear, it was holding a coin. “Money,” he said. “It comes…” He closed his hand around the coin, then opened his hand. The coin was gone.

“Where did it go?” she asked.

“It vanished into thin air. It’s magic.”

She studied his face. He seemed very amused. “You are lying,” she said softly, a little puzzled.

“Of course!” His smile broadened. “That’s what magic is—a lie that you choose to believe.” He snapped his fingers and the coin was back. “Reality and illusion—it’s all a sham. And in the end, money is the greatest illusion of all. I remember a time in Shanghai when I was dead broke, busted, not a nickel to my name. But fate smiles on people like us….”

The Milky Way was twinkling overhead when the Professor finished a series of stories about how fate had smiled on him and his company. “And now we have this! A Wild Angel who comes from nowhere to our aid.” He beamed at Cassidy. “It’s a wonderful world, is it not?”

Sarah was strangely content. She had understood little of what the Professor had been saying in words, but he treated her like a member of his pack; he welcomed her. That was good.

The fire had died to embers. The air was sweet with pine smoke. A chorus of frogs sang from the nearby creek.

“It is a wonderful world,” Cassidy agreed. “And a wonderful life.”

Sarah lifted her head. She was not listening to him. She was attending to another voice—the distant howling of a wolf, almost too faint to be heard. While the others watched, she lifted her head and returned the call with a howl that started low and climbed the scale to a high sustained note that sent chills up Cassidy’s spine.

“Your friend Beka?” the Professor asked Sarah softly.

Sarah nodded. She stood, listening for Beka’s answering howl. There it was again—maybe a mile distant.

She smiled at the Professor. “I really must be going.” It was another of the polite phrases Max had taught her.

“Wait,” Cassidy said. “You can’t…”

But Sarah was no longer there to be told what she could not do. She vanished into the night, leaving the circus behind.

“I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.”

—Mark Twain

A
S A LITTLE GIRL
, Helen Harris had preferred climbing trees to dressing like a young lady and attending church. Her aunt Bridget, who had taken Helen in at age six and adopted her when her mother died, had broken her of this habit. But at age twenty-two, after abstaining from tree-climbing for more than sixteen years, Helen Harris found a use for the skills of her youth.

She was traveling with Miss Paxon. The two women had made camp halfway between Jones Bar and Selby Flat when a hungry black bear lumbered from the bushes and indicated an intense curiosity in the contents of their saddlebags.

Kicking off her shoes and hiking up her long skirts, Helen had scrambled up an oak tree in record time. Miss Paxon had followed, with alacrity. From a safe perch in the branches, the two women watched the bear claw open Helen’s saddlebag and thrust its head inside, snuffling loudly. The beast was, Helen suspected, smelling the horehound candy that Helen had secreted in the bottom.

Helen shook her head ruefully. Aunt Bridget would say that God was punishing Helen for self-indulgence. If Helen had not packed candy in her bag, the bear would not be rummaging through her things. Helen glanced at Miss Paxon. The older woman was watching the bear with interest and showed no signs of intending to blame this incident on Helen. Relieved, Helen returned her attention to the bear.

The bear pulled its head from the bag. Helen’s best shawl was now draped around its neck. Ignoring the shawl, the beast continued to claw at the bag, tossing out clothes and pamphlets until it reached a paper sack full of candy. Grabbing the bag in its mouth, the bear shook it vigorously, scattering candy on the ground and looking, Helen thought, as disapproving as her aunt would have looked under similar circumstances.

Helen’s Aunt Bridget was what many would call a God-fearing woman. God was, in fact, the only personage Aunt Bridget feared. Aunt Bridget was wealthy, having outlived a husband who had been a very successful banker. She was stubborn and did not put up with foolishness. She regarded horehound candy as one of many forms of foolishness.

Helen’s mother had died of a fever when Helen was six. When Helen remembered her mother, she remembered her laughter first. Her mother had been a happy woman, always laughing and joking. Helen remembered her papa as a pair of arms that held her and scratchy kisses that smelled sweetly of tobacco.

According to Aunt Bridget, Helen’s father had been a ne’er-dowell, some sort of criminal. Helen’s mother had met and married him against her family’s wishes. He had been sent away to the penitentiary when Helen was five, and Helen’s mother had come to live with Aunt Bridget.

According to Aunt Bridget, Helen was very lucky that Aunt Bridget had been there to take her and her mother in, and to keep Helen from the orphanage when her mother died. Helen was not entirely convinced that this was lucky, having wondered at times if the orphanage might not be a cheerier place than her aunt’s house, a mansion filled with ancient furniture and equally ancient servants.

Aunt Bridget disapproved of candy. She disapproved of dime novels. She disapproved of fun, and she disapproved of Helen. Aunt Bridget’s disapproval was, in a sense, the indirect cause of Helen’s current position in a tree.

When the American Temperance Society started a Chicago chapter, Helen’s aunt had been one of the first to join. After all, she disapproved of drinking. Aunt Bridget had taken a grim pleasure in the Society’s holy war against the demon rum, writing letters to the newspapers, singing hymns outside the local tavern, coercing family friends into signing the Temperance Pledge.

Helen, leading a sheltered life under her aunt’s control, had welcomed the Temperance Society activities. They had provided her with an opportunity to leave the house, to sing in the streets, and to catch a glimpse of another world—the dark and intriguing world of saloons and drunkards and the women who consorted with them.

Not long after the formation of the chapter, Miss Paxon, a Temperance lecturer who had letters of introduction from Society chapter presidents in New York and Boston, had come to town. When she arrived, she checked into a respectable downtown hotel, but that lasted only until Aunt Bridget met her. “You’ll be my guest for as long as you are in the city,” Aunt Bridget insisted.

And so Miss Paxon, a tall blond woman with piercing blue eyes, came to stay in one of Aunt Bridget’s many spare rooms. Helen’s aunt was very happy about this. Though Aunt Bridget did not say so, Helen knew that this was another skirmish in the ongoing war between her aunt and Mrs. Thompson, the president of the Temperance Society chapter. By having such an august visitor as her guest, Aunt Bridget had somehow won.

That Friday, Miss Paxon spoke at the Temperance Society’s regular evening meeting and told them of her mission. She was going to California, she told the assembled ladies. “The good Lord has called me to do his work and I, his humble servant, have promised to obey. I am called to California on a mission of love, a rescue mission, a holy mission to save the men of California.”

Miss Paxon was a powerful speaker, especially when it came to descriptions of drunkenness and depravity. The picture she painted of conditions in California had some women reaching for their handkerchiefs, while others (including Helen’s aunt) clenched their fists.

Helen sat at Aunt Bridget’s side, watching Miss Paxon exhort the crowd. As she watched, she wondered what it would be like to hear a call. Helen wanted very badly to go to California, that distant land of gold. Was that the same as hearing a call? She would gladly help Miss Paxon with her work. Helen suspected that was not the same as hearing a call, but maybe she just wasn’t listening hard enough.

At the podium, Miss Paxon warmed to her subject, speaking of the great work that she could do—if only she had the resolve, if only she had the courage, if only she had the support of the women of the nation. She lingered on this last part. She needed their prayers, but she needed more than that. She needed funding to support her work.

Her audience was greatly moved. They wept; they applauded. Mrs. Thompson passed through the audience with a little basket, and the assembled ladies reached into their purses and donated generously. Then Helen’s aunt stood up and said that she would, from her own pocket, match the money collected in Mrs. Thompson’s basket.