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And there, sitting in the lamplight, was the American lady a slender, thoughtful enchantress with eyes as dark and glowing as the wine. Thus it was that Robert Louis Stevenson first saw Fanny Osbourne. A few days later Mrs. Osbourne's eighteen-year-old daughter Isobel wrote in a letter: "There is a young Scotchman here, a Mr. Stevenson.
One day in San Francisco, shortly after the marriage, her daughter, upon entering a room, stopped with a sudden shock, startled by the unaccustomed sound of a light happy laugh, the first she remembered ever having heard from the lips of her mother. For the first time she realized what a sad and bitter life Fanny Osbourne's had been.
He was roundly taken to task by a public-spirited reporter, and babbled meaningless excuses; he did not know, he said, that the force now falling in on us at Yolo was so large. It was his business to know. What is he paid for? That force has been ten days at least turning the east of the Mar Mountains, a week at least on our own side of the frontier. Where were Osbourne's wits?
"Lochaber King," read the Master, from his catalog. "H'm! That's Colonel Osbourne's greatest pup. Remember, we saw him at Westminster? It's nip-and-tuck, between him and Lad; with a little in this dog's favor. Tough luck!" "Oh, this has been just one of those days nobody wants!" mourned the Mistress.
"Well, she gave it to me to-day, and the hat and the parasol," said Constance, with a sort of resigned bitterness. "She said she had got the outfit at Osbourne's, last month, and she thought it would look stunning on me, and wouldn't I like to wear it to the club this afternoon?" "Well ?" Susan said, as the other paused. "Why not?" "Oh, why not!" echoed Connie, with mild exasperation.
Stevenson had a strange and dramatic meeting with Samuel Osbourne's second wife, a quiet, gentle little woman whom he married soon after his divorce from Fanny Van de Grift.
Gambling went on night and day, and the killing of men over the games still happened often enough. In the diary of a pioneer of that time, Samuel Orr, of Alameda, who later married one of Mrs. Osbourne's sisters, Cora Van de Grift, I find this entry: "This is the hardest place I ever struck. I saw two men killed to-day in a gambling fight."
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