Part 19

As if his masterful mood were not to be safely denied, her fingers fell upon the keys in the opening chords of the nocturne; and this was the beginning of what gradually grew to be an interval of suspended possibilities. Almost at once, Tregarvon realized that Richardia was playing only from the fingers outward--faultlessly, but mechanically; that Carfax was wandering from one window to another in a sort of aimless unrest; that Elizabeth was setting all her serene traditions at defiance by chatting eagerly, like an escaped school-girl, with Wilmerding.

A few minutes further along, when Carfax dragged a chair into the window recess and deliberately broke in upon Miss Wardwell and her companion, the spirit of disquietude seemed to seize upon the judge, also, since he wheeled his armchair to face the window group and did violence to all the Westwood House musical unities by joining in the low-toned conversation. This gave Tregarvon his excuse; and when the nocturne ran away at its close into delicate little improvisations, he spoke again in the guarded undertone.

“Hartridge may have told you that I accidentally surprised your secret yesterday afternoon. I did, you know; but I want you to be assured that it is as safe with me as it is with the professor, or with any of your friends who know it.”

If he were expecting any manifestation of surprise it was not forthcoming. So far from it, there was no break in the improvisation harmonies.

“Some day I hope it won’t be necessary to make a secret of it,” she replied evenly, matching his low tone.

“Does Elizabeth know?”

“Not yet. But I shall tell her.”

“Has she told you that our engagement is broken?”

Her nod was barely perceptible.

“I hope she told you that I didn’t break it.”

“Yes; she told me that, too.”

“You are not saying it, but deep down in your heart you are telling yourself that I have got only what was coming to me. Isn’t that true?”

The answer came from lips that were paling a little. “Ask yourself.”

“It _is_ true. And it is also true, perhaps, that I should have had this other whipping; the one I got yesterday afternoon when I was trying to meet Hartridge on his way back from the ‘Pocket.’”

She was still keeping her face averted.

“I can’t talk about that now, to any one--least of all, to you.”

He bent lower to make sure that the group at the other end of the room should not overhear.

“I want to meet the man. If I stay here on Mount Pisgah--if I don’t throw it all up and go home--I mean to do what I can to help. Once I shouldn’t have been big enough to say such a thing, Richardia; but--thank God--I’ve grown a little in the past few months. May I add that it is you who have shown me how to grow?”

She ignored the query and for the first time let him see her eyes: they were swimming, and there was a note in her voice that he had never heard before when she said: “You must not talk of giving up and going away; you are the one who can do the most to help when the time comes--if only----”

A clamorous banging of the door-knocker interrupted, and Aunt Phyllis put her turbaned head into the drawing-room to say, with her fat chin in the air and a fine scorn in her tone: “Po’ white man at de front do’, comed to ast faw Mistoo Tregarbin.”

Tregarvon obeyed the summons rather reluctantly and found Tryon on the veranda. The foreman had been running and was short of breath.

“You’d better come over--you an’ Mr. Carfax,” he broke out hurriedly. “We’ve done caught the dannymiter. He was aimin’ to blow us all to kingdom come, this time!”

“Who is it?” Tregarvon grated.

Tryon wagged his head mysteriously. “Hit ain’t Sawyer; hit’s the same skunk I been a-suspicionin’ ever sense we had that talk yisterday. You’ll see when you get thar’.”

Tregarvon went back to the drawing-room, meaning to cut Carfax out if possible without giving a general alarm. But Wilmerding overheard his whispered explanation to Carfax and so did Miss Wardwell; whereupon he spoke up quickly, briefing the story of the Ocoee troubles, and adding its latest sequel. The effect upon the master of Westwood House was instantaneous and militant.

“What’s that, suh? Tryin’ to dynamite yo-uh machinery whilst you and Mistuh Carfax are makin’ us a friendly visit heah at Westwood House?” he demanded, his deep voice rumbling in the wrath of outraged hospitality. “Richa’dia, daughtuh, get me my coat and hat; I’m goin’ oveh yondeh with these young gentlemen. No, Mistuh Tregarvon; don’t deny me that privilege, suh; yo-uh bein’ undeh my roof at the precise moment makes yo-uh quarrel _my_ quarrel, suh! You’ll give me a seat in yo-uh steam-wagon, and--daughtuh, my coat and hat, immediately, if you please. And fetch me the old shot-gun, too, my deah.”

By this time Wilmerding was declaring that he must not be left out; and in the momentary confusion Tregarvon saw that the judge’s daughter, while she was obeying her father’s commands, was pitiably agitated. Assuming that her anxiety was for her father’s safety, he ventured a word of assurance while she was holding the overcoat for the sleeves of which the judge was hastily fumbling.

“You mustn’t distress yourself--we are not going to let your father get hurt,” he protested.

“It’s--it’s not that!” she gasped; “it is something far worse.” Then, in an agonized whisper that he had to bend lower to hear: “This man they have taken; promise me that you will let him go before my--before any one else has seen him!”

Tregarvon promised blindly, striving to ignore this last of the maddening mysteries in an effort to be wholly loyal to the woman he loved. But as he committed himself the difficulties in the way of performance suddenly magnified themselves. With the judge taking part in the descent upon the scene of the capture, how was he to be kept from seeing and questioning the culprit? Tregarvon saw that he had promised that which he would most probably be unable to perform, but in the confusion of the hurried departure there was no chance to add the qualifying word, and it was left unspoken.

XXVII

Cloud-Wraiths

With Judge Birrell urging haste, the start for the burying-ground glade was made at once. Since Tregarvon’s car was large enough to hold them all, Wilmerding’s roadster was left behind. Carfax drove the touring-car, with Tryon clutching for handholds in the mechanician’s seat beside him. This arrangement left the broad tonneau seat for the other three; and the judge, with the gun between his knees, sat in the middle. When the big car shot away with its loading the master of Westwood was still calling down maledictions upon the heads of those who would besmirch the fair fame of the Southland by resorting to the methods of the assassin and the anarchist.

“Who are these scoundrels, Mistuh Tregarvon?” he demanded. “Just name me thei-uh names, suh!” And then, with the charming inconsistency of his kind: “This is a law-abiding community, suh, and you have wronged us by keeping silence so long; you have, for a fact, suh! But now we shall vindicate ou’selves. A little taste of a rope and a tree limb for this grand rascal yo-uh men have caught will make him tell us the names of his confederates and accomplices; and then, by the Lord Harry, suh, we’ll run these lawbreakuhs down with the dogs and hang them higheh than Haman!”

During the hurried cross-mountain run Tregarvon wrestled manfully with the problem thrust upon him by Richardia Birrell’s whispered appeal. How was he to prevent a meeting between the judge and the as yet unnamed man whom Tryon and Rucker had captured? The query was still unanswered when the yellow car skidded and slued around the turn into the old wood road. Despite the promise given by a fair day and a measurably clear evening, the night had suddenly thickened, with cloud wracks flying low over the mountain top to wrap the forest in mantlings of fleecy vapor silver-shot by the rays of a gibbous moon, but opposing a wall of blank opacity to the headlamps of the car. Tregarvon would have welcomed help from the chapter of accidents, but now that they were off the main road there was a fair chance that the accident might be too destructive.

“Easy, Poictiers!--you’ll scrap us if you don’t look out!” he cautioned, leaning forward to warn Carfax, who was boring into the cloud bank at reckless speed.

The words were scarcely uttered before there came a crunching of dry tree limbs under the wheels, a hiss of escaping air, and a jolting stoppage of the car as the brakes were applied.

“Punctured!” exclaimed the cautioner, and they all got out to investigate cause and consequence. The obstruction proved to be what it had seemed--the dry limb of a tree--and the result was a flat tire.

“It is dead wood, and it may have fallen of its own accord; or it may mean that your dynamiter has friends who would like to delay us,” Wilmerding offered. “On the bare chance, hadn’t we better sprint along and not wait to change tires? Your man, Rucker, may easily be having the time of his life trying to hold on to his prisoner.”

They sprinted accordingly, the judge taking the dog-trot as actively as his younger pace-setters, and stubbornly refusing to let Tregarvon relieve him of the burden of the heavy deer-gun. So running, they came in a few minutes to the site of the old burying-ground, and to the door of the tool shanty. Rucker admitted them at Tregarvon’s knock and call, and his report was brief and unenlightening. “No; nothin’ doin’ since we took him in--and the cuss won’t talk. But maybe you can make him loosen up.”

Tregarvon still saw no way of keeping the judge out of it, and he held himself absolved from his promise by the sheer impossibility of doing what Richardia had begged him to do. The captive, wrist-bound with a turn or two of cord, was sitting hunched upon the edge of Rucker’s cot-bed. It was Carfax who picked up the lantern and flashed its light into the man’s face. “By Jove!” he exclaimed; “Morgan McNabb!” and Rucker nodded.

Judge Birrell sat upon the spare coil of rope and wiped his face with his handkerchief. His hands were trembling and he was breathing hard, but the smart run from the disabled automobile might have accounted for these disturbances. When he spoke to the prisoner his tone was sternly accusing.

“So it’s you, is it, Mo’gan McNabb?--turnin’ yo-uh teeth upon the hand that’s been feedin’ you? By the Lord Harry, you make me mighty sorry that I once saved you from going to the penitentiary, where you belong! Now, then, open yo-uh mouth and tell these gentlemen why you come heah dynamitin’ thei-uh machinery!”

The mountaineer’s lips were drawn back in a doglike snarl.

“I’ll see ’em damned befo’ I’ll open my haid to ’em, now, Judge Birrell! Lookee at this yere,” and he wrenched his tied hands around so that the judge might see.

“You don’t like the rope?” said the judge evenly. “Listen to me, Mo’gan; you McNabbs have lived on Westwood land, father and son, for fo’ generations, and you’ll open yo-uh head to me, suh! What quarrel have you got with the owneh of the Ocoee property? Ansuh me, if you don’t want anotheh tu’n o’ that rope taken around yo-uh neck, suh!”

The answer was as prompt as it was disconcerting. “I allow I got thess the same sort o’ quarrel ez you have, judge. Didn’t they-all steal the Ocoee f’om you in the first place?”

“That’s neithuh heah nor there!” was the stern rejoinder. “Would you give these gentlemen to understand that _I_ am yo-uh principal in these scandalous outrages? See heah, Mo’gan, we all know that you haven’t been actin’ on yo-uh own responsibility. Who has been puttin’ you up to all these deviltries?”

“If you don’t know, I reckon _I_ ain’t a-goin’ to be the one to tell you,” said the prisoner, relapsing into his former attitude of sullenness. Then, as if upon a second thought: “You ask Miss Dick, judge; I allow _she_ knows.”

The little pause of consternation which this statement precipitated was broken by an exclamation from Rucker.

“Look out yonder! Somebody’s set the leaves afire! My God! we left the dynamite out there!”

Carfax, who was standing beside the mechanician, wheeled quickly to face the open door. Out beyond the drill derrick a thin line of fire, driven by the freshening west wind and showing orange-colored under the mist-wraiths, was sweeping down upon the clearing. “Show me where you left the stuff!” he snapped at the mechanician, but even as he spoke, a fuse squibbed and the thunder of a terrific explosion shattered the forest silences, the concussion smashing the glass in the small square window, rocking the lightly built tool-house like the heaving of an earthquake, and bombarding it an instant later with a rain of falling _débris_. The judge, sitting upon the coil of rope, was not thrown down, but the five men who were standing were flung in a heap on the floor.

Tregarvon was the first to regain his feet and to reach the open. The cloud mantlings had been thrust aside for the moment, but the stir was full of gray dust and acrid with the fumes of the explosive. Where the derrick and the new power-plant had stood there was a mass of tangled wreckage, and the burying-ground glade looked as if it had been swept by a tornado. In the wan moonlight Tregarvon caught a glimpse of something moving under the trees beyond the wreck; then the moving object erected itself into the stature of a man.

One glance at the tall, frock-coated figure was enough. With a mad yell of rage, Tregarvon snatched the gun from the judge’s hands and gave chase, calling to the frock-coated man to stand or he would shoot. There was an instant of hesitation, seemingly of indecision; then the man turned and fled. And, as if to favor him, another scudding cloud settled upon the mountain top, burying forest and glade, the tangled wreck and the two runners in its fleecy depths.

Tregarvon raced on for a breath-cutting space; guided solely by the crashing of the fugitive through the brier tangles and dry-leaf beds. Then he began to get his second wind, and again he shouted the command to halt. Since this seemed only to have the effect of hastening the thudding footsteps on ahead, he fired the gun, holding the muzzle high, as he thought and intended, but apparently not high enough, as the dreadful sequence immediately indicated. For, almost exactly coincident with the report of the gun, there was a shriek, the crash of a falling body, and silence.

At this the pursuer came down from the transporting heights of berserk rage with a shock that was sickening. “Oh, good Lord!” he gasped; “I’ve killed him!” Whereupon he flung the offending weapon afar and ran to confirm the horrifying conclusion.

He was still running in the direction from which the cry had come when the curious happening befell. As if the solid earth had been whisked away from beneath his feet he found himself whirling through empty space; falling through unfathomable depths of it, it seemed, before he collided with another world--a world of shocks and coruscating pains, of beatings and bruisings, and presently of grateful forgetfulness.

XXVIII

The Ocoee’s Answer

When Tregarvon recovered consciousness he knew at once what had happened to him. In the blind and hurried search for the body of the man he had presumptively shot he had fallen from the cliff edge; how far was still problematical, but far enough, as a painful roaring in his ears, a tightening agony in his forehead, and a bruised and stiffening ankle sufficiently testified.

His first thought was for his victim. The man might not have been killed outright; in which case he might be even now dying for the lack of timely help. The thought was insupportable and Tregarvon tried to rise. But the ankle, broken or twisted, he could not determine which, gripped him like a fanged wild beast and he fell back with a groan. None the less, in some way he must contrive to bring help. He felt in his pockets for matches. A heap of dry leaves furnished the kindling and a clear flame leaped up, hollowing out a small cavity of yellow light in the misty gloom. At this the fire-lighter saw that he was at the bottom of a deep, water-worn cleft opening back from the outer scarp of the cliff, and at right angles to it; a ravine which was little more than a crevice, save that it was large enough to have trees and shrubs growing in it.

He knew the crevice, though he had never explored it. It lay at a point almost exactly half-way between the glade and the tramhead. Knowing that the sound would not carry upward and backward over the cliff, he did not waste his breath in vain shoutings. The alternative was a fire signal. If the cloud would but lift a little, and he could gather enough of the dry leaves to make a glow, the light would guide those who must certainly, by this time, be searching for him.

This was his thought while he was nursing the handful of fire and adding more leaves to it. The blaze rose higher and the cavity in the gloom grew larger until it became a hemisphere, with the black scarp of the crevice wall for its flattened side. A thickly matted vine covered the face of the precipice, completely concealing the perpendicular surface upon which it climbed. At its roots in the crevice bottom the dry leaves were bedded a foot deep. Tregarvon was reaching painfully for the mass of fresh fuel when the fire licked out and caught it first. There was a puff of dense smoke, a fierce blaze, and then the climbing vine took fire and was brightly outlined in a network of short-lived flame.

All this was normal enough, but what followed was curiously abnormal. As the fire glowed hotter small fragments of the cliff face began to split off, and these fragments, falling into the burning leaf-bed, sprang alight with hissings and sputterings and much pungent smoke. Tregarvon, ignoring the throbbing ankle, dragged himself an agonizing foot or so nearer and secured one of the splintered fragments. _It was coal!_

Almost beside himself with excitement, he heaped more leaves upon the fire. By the light of the fresh upblaze he could make out the upper line of the great coal seam. It was at the height of a tall man’s head above the bottom of the cleft, well-defined, unmistakable; the roof shale of a vein fully six feet thick. Here, discovered in the moment of defeat, disaster, and woundings, was the Ocoee’s lavish answer to all the costly questionings.

“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so; if the heavens may be purchased with the gifts of the earth. The gifts are yours, Mr. Tregarvon; first by the right of inheritance, and now by the right of discovery.”

Tregarvon twisted himself into a sitting posture, gritting his teeth at the ankle’s protest and holding his head in his hands. At a little distance away sat the professor of mathematics, one long leg jack-knifed for a support, and the other stretched awkwardly upon a makeshift cushion of the fallen leaves.

“You?” Tregarvon cried. “Did you fall over the cliff, too?”

“I think it was I who showed you the way,” Hartridge amended. “You are a very apt pupil, Mr. Tregarvon. I was scarcely well down here before you played the part of Jill.”

“Are you--are you hurt?”

“Not by your shot-gun charge, happily; but my leg is broken. And you?”

Tregarvon winced. “I have a cracked skull, I think, and an ankle that won’t let me get up. But about that gunshot; I didn’t fire at you; I shot into the air to make you stop. Just the same, you gave me a quick fit of the horrors. When you yelled, I thought I had inadvertently killed you. What made you run?”

The professor’s smile was a little rueful, and also a little shamefaced.

“What made you chase me?” he asked.

“Because I was hot--fighting mad. I wanted to drag you to an accounting on the spot. I don’t suppose you will be foolish enough to deny that you set the leaf fire that caused the explosion?”

“Since I was near enough to be blown up myself such a denial might have the weight of circumstantial evidence to support it,” was the quiet reply. “But I do not make the denial. It was I who set the leaves afire. I shall be greatly relieved if you can tell me that nobody was injured.”

“So far as I know the dynamite didn’t kill any of us. But tell me, did you start that fire knowing that the explosion would follow?”

“By no means. I may confess that I knew the dynamite had been placed; but I supposed, as the most ordinary matter of course, that your men had taken care of it when they captured their prisoner.”

“Then why did you light the fire?”

Again the quaint smile flitted across the face of the man who had always contrived to tell less than the sum total of all he knew.

“Once again, Mr. Tregarvon, you are going into the question of motives, which is a very large field, indeed. Let us say that I wished to make a diversion of some sort. Will that satisfy you?”

“No,” was the blunt reply.

“I am sorry; I am afraid it will have to suffice for the present.”

Tregarvon’s head was throbbing so painfully that he found it next to impossible to think clearly. But he would not desist.

“Hartridge, it has come to a show-down between us. I’m giving you fair warning. Once I did you an injustice--or thought I did--but this time you’ve given yourself away. When I get up and around again, I’m going to sift this thing to the ultimate bottom and somebody will be made to sweat blood for what has been done to-night. As matters stand now, you seem to be the man the officers will want first.”

Once more the professor smiled. “And yet you can’t say that I have ever wittingly done anything to harm you,” he offered mildly.

“That remains to be proved,” was the angry retort. “Meaning to, or not meaning to, you fired that dynamite a little while back; and you certainly have never strained yourself in any effort to help me. You knew that this big vein was here--you have known it all along!”

“This time you are not my guest, Mr. Tregarvon, and I may contradict you without blame. I did not know it.”

“Then why did you carve the Greek letter _pi_ on those two oak-trees below the glade? Or do you deny that, as well?”

“It is you who have found the value of _pi_,” said the one who was under accusation. “I am ashamed to confess that it baffled me. Some three years ago, two strange surveyors acting, as I learned afterward, in the interests of Consolidated Coal, ran many lines over this property of yours, which was then practically abandoned. I had no access to their note-books, of course, so I was obliged to work out my conclusions as best I could from their stakes. One of these conclusions was that the true vein would be found somewhere in this locality. Can you believe me thus far?”

“I’m trying to,” said Tregarvon. “Go on.”

“It is humiliating to have to acknowledge that, while all the line-running on the part of these strangers pointed to this immediate locality, I could never discover the outcrop. True, I never thought of looking in this particular crevice. But to preserve a record for possible future investigation, I made the marks on the two trees. The distance between the oaks, carefully measured and multiplied by _pi_, or three and the decimal one thousand, four hundred and sixteen, gives the distance around the cliff from the lower oak to the point somewhere below us where the intruding strangers drove their final stake.”

Tregarvon heaped more leaves upon the fire, which was threatening to die out.

“You are still miles beyond my comprehension,” he complained moodily. “On one hand, you stop at nothing to prevent me from finding out what you have just told me, and on the other you make what appears to be a very worthy and earnest effort to keep me from flinging myself into the maw of Consolidated Coal. How am I to reconcile such things?”