Part 10

That repulsion to the idea of taking life, and all its ramifications of moral responsibility, apart from the legal consequence, natural to the civilized man, had yielded in the deputy sheriff to his habitual mental impulses. His wild, fierce, shallow personality was in the ascendant once more.

"I'll guarantee ye, Bob," he declared, with his wonted swift smile of dark eyes and red lips and lifted meeting eyebrows. "Ef the g'loot is dead, he died resistin' arrest by the off'cer o' the law. Ef he be 'live, I be durned ef he don't hev cause ter resist the off'cer o' the law, fur I'll swar ter glory I'll nose out what this hyar Jasper Lar'bee hev been a-doin' of ter be so monst'ous afeard o' the bracelets bein' put onto him,--murder or moonshinin', it's all the same ter me. I'll set the bloodhounds o' the law onto him, sure! He hain't gin me sech a skeer ez this fur nuthin'!"

As the blood came surging hotly along its accustomed channels, his fury mounted higher. It jumped with his humor to threaten as living the man who he feared was dead. He sought to spurn that possibility from his consciousness. It renewed his confidence in himself, too, to protest so jauntily that if the man had lost his life it was in resisting the law legitimately enforced. He reviewed, with a burst of anger, the fright of the other two men and his own anxiety that had suffered this lapse of attention to his own interest, and allowed the true detail of the case to be rehearsed here publicly. Naught could obliterate this; naught could justify him save to prove that the surprised Jasper Larrabee had been guilty of some offense against the law, and was resisting arrest legally attempted.

"I'll fix him! I'll follow him like a bloodhound! I'll nose him out and pull him down! Bless God, I will!" he cried out with sudden vehemence. Then he turned roughly to his two companions. "Kem on, ye two mud-turkles! Ye got jes' about ez much life an' sperit ez a couple o' old tarripin. Stir yer stumps, bubby," to Luther. "Git yer lantern, an' bring yer slow bones along ter aid the off'cer o' the law! An' ye, too, my frien' in the winder, ez quiet ez a cat stealin' cream; ye 'pear ter be young an' able-bodied. I summons ye ter kem an' aid the off'cer o' the law!"

The tallow dip, which had been for some moments sputtering in the socket of the candlestick, suddenly flared up with a wide illumination, then sunk as suddenly almost to extinction, feebly rose again, and, in a gust of wind, was extinguished, leaving a tuft of red sparks on the drooping wick, and a pervasive odor of burning grease in the room and porch. Perhaps it was because of the brighter light for the moment, perhaps because of the keener observation of the officer, whose faculties were once more well in hand, but no one else had noticed a strange stillness in the figure of Adelicia, as she sat in her wonted place on the edge of the floor of the porch, leaning back against the post.

"One o' yer darters hev fainted, I b'lieve," he said to Cap'n Lucy. "Suthin' ails her." Then, turning away, "Kem on, fellers; mount an' git out'n this. We-uns hev been hyar too long now."

As Jasper Larrabee rode away in the little troop toward the scene of the disaster, to search for the body of the supposititious Jasper Larrabee, his mental faculties began to recover from the torpor of surprise which had benumbed them. That cautious self-control which sometimes seems an added faculty in a certain type of law-breaker had held him mute as he watched the development of events. Now, as he began to take cognizance of the disclosures of the evening, he adhered of sober intention to the policy he had intuitively adopted. He feared the acknowledgment that he had received and harbored Jack Espey, a fugitive from justice, more than the acrimonious search of the deputy sheriff for the misdeeds of Jasper Larrabee. This, indeed, might result in his apprehension for the violation of the revenue laws, and the discovery of the moonshiner's lair, and this would mean many years of imprisonment; but the other might involve him, and possibly his mother as well, in a trial for murder, as accessories after the fact. It might be impossible to establish their ignorance of Espey's crime, and their lack of connivance in his escape. He had that pervasive terror of the law, as of technical and arbitrary construction of crime, common to the unlearned. His heart burned with rancor against his whilom friend. He would not recognize Espey's share in these ignorant terrors of the law. He argued that if his friend had been open with him, he would at least have been a free agent in receiving him, have had some voice in the degree of responsibility he assumed. As it was, his open-handed hospitality had been grossly imposed upon, and as a return he was given the choice of the jeopardy of a charge as accessory to a murder, or of an infringement of the revenue laws. He realized the whole drama as it had been enacted. He understood that Espey, conniving at the officer's mistake, and allowing him to suppose him to be Larrabee, had thus shielded his own identity as the fugitive from justice whom they sought. And this ruse Espey fancied was discovered, when the deputy, in his wild horse-play, had facetiously endeavored to handcuff him; he had therefore strenuously resisted, and thus had possibly come to his death. This possibility did not soften Larrabee toward him; perhaps he did not altogether accredit it at once, for death is difficult to realize even when a certainty. He dwelt upon his own danger, even more upon his mother's possible jeopardy; upon her untiring and laborious hospitality; upon his own labors which had rendered such entertainment practicable, for the money earned without her knowledge at the still went, much of it, to this pious use.

The sharpest sting of ingratitude is often the sense that the giver has been a fool. Larrabee harbored a surly grudge against himself as he rode silently on, and Luther, uncomprehending his friend's reason for not disclosing his identity, and suspecting that Jack Espey was the man they sought, was silent too. The loud voices of the others in acrimonious criminations and recriminations accented the stillness of the night, and the sound of their horses' hoofs as they filed along the mountain passes, multiplied by rock and ravine, and far echoes from distant heights, might have seemed the march of squadrons of cavalry.

The skies had taken on that unfamiliar aspect of the hours which straitly precede the dawn. Far, far, on their pauseless way the constellations fared. Stars were low in the west, which on these summer nights had seemed the familiars of the meridian. A strange sense of loneliness, of silence, pervaded the firmament. The breathless pause that heralds the miracle of dawn bated the pulses of nature. No more song of cicada, no more stir of wind. Once a meteor, with an incongruous irrelevance of effect, shot athwart the sky with its gleaming trail as of star-dust; the motion was like a sacrilege in the holy stillness and breathlessness of the world.

And suddenly in the midst of the myriad scintillations a brilliant white jewel was ablaze, which Jasper Larrabee could have sworn was not there before; pellucid, splendid, tremulous, a star of stars. He knew the skies only as the herder or the shepherd knows them in lonely, lowly paths of earth, but even an ignorant man may feel that the circuit below is narrow and the ways above are wide, and the heart is lifted up. Not the name of one of the stellular glories visible to the naked eye could he syllable, but he had marked them all; he was wont to dwell for hours upon their contemplation; he knew the contour of their most brilliant whorls and scintillating arabesques as he knew the intricacies of the woodland ways in the wilderness. He had drawn his horse hastily back upon the haunches, and again his eyes sought the alignment of the stars as his fancy had marshaled them. There was one more,--one that he had never before seen; one unknown to all the splendid nights that had ever shone upon the earth.

The voices of the men patrolling the slope below the point, where they had paused, rose excitedly on the still air. The horse was found, he gathered vaguely, dead, shot through the brain. The man was gone. The officer, in a frenzy of energy, beat the bushes far and near, lest the fugitive, wounded and disabled, might have crept away in the midst of them, and still lay hidden in the leafy covert. The hour wore away; the dawn came on apace, and, with the quest still fruitless, the officer presently mounted his horse and rode speedily off, fearing less, perchance, the review of his conduct by his superiors in the county town than the arbitration of the few citizens of the scantily settled region, who might take an inimical view of the disappearance of the guide of the jocose officer.

Only when the gray day came with the tremulous wind over the mountains, and the craggy ranges grew darkly distinct, and the unpeopled wooded valley distinct and vaguely drear, and the deep blue sky faded and was colorless, and one by one the stars noiselessly, invisibly slipped away without a trace, like some splendid promise never to be fulfilled, did Jasper Larrabee turn rein, perplexed and disquieted and greatly awed. For in his unlettered ignorance he had never heard of that simple fact known to astronomy as a temporary star.

IX.

In the days that ensued, no trace of the fugitive was developed. Cap'n Lucy experienced a certain relief in the fruitless result of the extended search instituted by the friends that Espey had made in the Cove. In their opinion the conclusion was inevitable that, despite the lack of his horse, he had made good his escape, and did not lie wounded or dead in the jungle of laurel, awaiting their humane succor, or burial at their hands. He was glad that Espey was gone, doubtless never to return, and that the matrimonial problem was gone with him. He was not quite frank with Adelicia in regard to this expectation. Her constitutional hopefulness instantly adopted the general belief of Espey's safety as fact, and she fixed her expectant eyes on the future with such fidelity of certainty that it seemed they must constrain the return she so definitely awaited.

"He'll find out ez them off'cers 'lowed 'twar Jasper Lar'bee, an' never knowed they hed _him_. An' then, uncle Lucy, he won't be 'feared ter kem back," she said many times a day.

"Course not," assented Cap'n Lucy. "He'll be hyar afore long, jes' ez good lookin 'ez he knows how ter be."

It was perhaps a pious fraud, for the girl's despair and grief had been so wild that Cap'n Lucy was glad for her optimism to be reasserted on whatever terms and to have the pleasant thing in the house once more.

Luther had necessarily been enlightened by the recent events as to the sentimental phase of the matter; for Cap'n Lucy had hitherto sedulously kept it secret, since he did not favor a fugitive from justice as a suitor for his niece, and was determined to break off the affair at all hazards. Luther looked with disapproval upon his father's crafty methods.

"I dunno what ails ye ter make Ad'licia b'lieve ez Espey will kem back," he once ventured to say aside to his father. "He air sure ter 'low ez they never tuk him fur Lar'bee, else he wouldn't hev tried ter break away."

"Luther," said Cap'n Lucy, "I hev noticed ez a man air obleeged ter hev a powerful strong stommick ter be able ter tell the truth at all times. An' ez I git old, I hev sorter got the deespepsy."

The son merely gazed at him with a sort of literal-minded bovine stare, as he sought to entertain this statement of the moral effect of debility.

"An' then, whenst I war a leetle boy," continued Cap'n Lucy, "I war bit by a rattlesnake; an' sometimes whenst I hear myself sayin' sech ez air agin the actial fac' it don't s'prise me none, fer I know it air jes' a leetle meanderin' o' the venom o' the sarpient in me yit, 'kase, ye know, he war a deceiver from the beginning."

What impression the strange and unexpected events had made upon the impassive and reserved Julia, none had taken thought to observe. The demonstrative, expressive characteristics of the other members of the household filled the domestic stage. It was only when the poignancy of Adelicia's grief and anxiety had given way to a resolutely patient and hopeful waiting, and Cap'n Lucy's vehement interest had subsided into a trivial occupation with the passing details of life, that it chanced to be noticed that Julia was wont to sit idle at her spinning, the thread in one hand, the other lifted as if to regulate the whirl of the motionless flax-wheel; her wonderful blue eyes fixed upon the distant purple mountains, glimpsed through the parting of the gourd vines above the porch; her head, with its smooth plaits of glossy hair, held up and alert; some unspoken thought upon her marble face that filled every still line with meaning.

"Ye 'pear ter be palsied, Julia," said the unobservant Luther, smoking his pipe on the porch one evening. "Ye hain't moved hand or foot fur a solid hour."

She started slightly at the sound of his voice, fixing her attention on him with obvious effort. Her mind was evidently coming back from distant removes, and Adelicia, with vague curiosity, demanded suddenly,--

"What air you-uns studyin' 'bout, Julia, whenst ye air lookin' like that?"

"Studyin' an' a-studyin'," said Julia, dropping her hands in her lap and leaning back in the chair, her eyes once more turning to the high, massive mountains afar off as if they possessed some magnetic attraction, "'bout'n whar pore, pore Jack Espey kin be now, an' how powerful cur'ous 'twar ez ye wouldn't marry him whenst he axed ye."

The fore-legs of Luther's tilted chair came down to the floor with a thump. With a hand on either knee, and the cinders and burning tobacco dropping from his pipe unheeded to the floor, he sat fixedly staring at his silent sister. To his comprehension she was speaking her mind very unequivocally now. Despite the vaunted feminine quickness, Adelicia heard in it only personal upbraiding, for a certain remorse had made her sensitive on this score, and prone to protest her constraining dutifulness.

"I hed uncle Lucy's word agin it!" she exclaimed, with a rising flush and angry bright eyes.

Julia slowly shook her head, her eyes, her thoughts, far, far away. "I wouldn't hev keered fur no 'uncle Lucy's' word," she declared iconoclastically. "I reckon, ef the truth war knowed, dad hisself married ter suit his own taste. Leastwise, I ain't never hearn o' no old uncle or aunt or dad, or sech kinfolks, ez ondertook ter make a ch'ice in marryin' fur him."

"Waal, sir," Luther interposed, in a tone of shocked propriety, "settin' up hyar an' talkin' by the yard medjure 'bout marryin' an' men-folks, an' I'd bet my best heifer that Jack Espey ain't gin air one o' ye a single thought sence he lef' hyar. No, nor nare 'nother man. Ef the truth war knowed, ye hain't got a haffen chance apiece,--without it air 'Renzo Taft, down yander at the Lost Time mine, an' he can't make out which air the hardest favored 'twixt ye! Ye hed both better go ter work. Jack Espey'll never kem back agin. Dad jes' say he will ter pledjure Ad'licia. An', Julia, ef ye don't spin up that thar truck,"--he pointed with fraternal imperiousness at the wheel,--"ye'll be toler'ble scant o' new clothes, an' ye'll look wuss like a skeercrow 'n ye do now."

Julia received this taunt to her beauty with the equanimity of one whose title is unimpugnable; but Adelicia, all unheeding any subtler sense than the obvious meaning his words conveyed, protested against even this conjectural banishment of poor Jack Espey. He would come back, she declared. He had doubtless found out by this time that he was mistaken in supposing the officers cognizant of his true identity, and that they were jesting, thinking him still Larrabee. And now that the nine days' wonder had blown over, and people were interested in it no more, and so much was going on in the Cove to usurp public attention, she looked for him any time just to slip back in his old place. "I never kem out on the porch but I look ter see him in that thar cheer whar Luther be. I hev 'peared ter see him thar."

"That ain't the way I 'pear ter see him," said Julia suddenly. "I dreampt he war a-kemin' on his claybank horse, a-lopin' down the road, a-wavin' his big white hat at we-uns like he done that day he kilt the wolf an' fotched home the pelt. That's the way I view him ever sence I dreampt that dream."

"Then ye hev the nightmare," said Luther, surly and helpless to stem the tide of sentiment, "an' ye hain't got no mo' sense sleepin' than wakin'; fur that claybank roan will lope down these rocky roads no mo', partly through bein' dead, an' partly through old Miser Miggins hevin' gone down the gorge an' tuk off the critter's shoes. Ye better content yerself with the claybank roan ez a nightmare, fur ye ain't goin' ter view Espey an' the critter a-lopin' round no mo', no matter how much be a-goin' on in the Cove."

For the Cove was indeed in a phenomenal ferment. To the astonishment of the leisurely and dilatory mountaineers, the work on the new hotel had begun, and was being pushed forward on parallels inconceivable to their ideas of progress.

Cap'n Lucy, his mind recalled to his more immediate personal interests, watched it with a sort of avidity of observation from the porch of his own house, where he was wont to sit with his pipe. His sneer, his silent laugh, his acrid enigmatical phrases, grew frequent as the blasting for the cellars proceeded, and the flying fragments of rock, which had elicited such formidable prognostication, fell far short of his cabin or his inclosures, indeed seldom coming to the ground beyond the jungle of laurel at the base of the great natural terrace, the site of the work.

"He didn't git the edzact range, Luther," he would say in affected surprise; or, sarcastically, "This hyar Kenn'ston would hev made a powerful spry gunner in the old war times,--sech a eye for distances!"

Adelicia, observing the circumstance, also remembering Kenniston's expressions of fear for their safety, only saw cause for gratulation.

"Mr. Kenn'ston 'lowed ez we-uns mought hev ter move an' leave home whilst the blastin' war goin' on!" she exclaimed. "An' he made a powerful mistake, uncle Lucy."

"So he did," said Cap'n Lucy, with a twinkling eye. "He air a great man fur movin' ginerally. He b'lieves in movin' things."

Luther, remembering the peripatetic corner-stone and the impending processioning, understood the allusion, but he had a foreboding of trouble, and his heart sunk within him. He was glad when the blasting was concluded, which it was shortly; for he feared a premature or ill-advised accusation, and it seemed to him that the meaning of those thinly veiled sarcasms must presently be revealed to others as well as to himself. The foundations were laid, and the framing of the building followed promptly; soon the gaunt skeleton of the hotel, an outline of modern frivolity and summer pleasuring and flimsy vastness, was incongruously imposed upon the silent, solemn mountain behind it, with the rugged, austere crags below it; with the unfamiliar mists shifting through it and drifting along corridor and ball-room and scaling the tower; with its prophetic shadow, like a line engraving, flung by the moonlight on the dark surface of the top of the dense forest below. More than once furious mountain storms assailed it; but its builder's philosophy had taken account of these inimical forces, and it held fast.

The unbroken mountain wind, however, played havoc with the light shanties of the workmen in this exposed situation on the promontory of rock, and when rebuilt the camp was moved below the terrace, down in a sort of gorge, shielded and safe, albeit the distance from the work was a matter of some inconvenience.

They proved civil folk, the town mechanics, and answered gravely many a queer question put from a vast distance in civilization and sophistication, albeit at arm's length from the natural body; for from far and near the mountaineers visited the unfinished structure. Often a wagon with a yoke of oxen would stand, the patient beasts humbly a-drowse, for an hour or so in the sandy road, while the jeans-clad owner would patrol the new building, solemnly stepping from timber to timber over the depths of the cellar, or with the utmost simplicity of assurance make a critical circuit about the whole, and offer suggestions looking toward improvements. Sometimes the visitor was of shyer gentry: a red fox was glimpsed early one morning, with brush in air, speeding along the joists of the ball-room; it might seem they would never know the weight of aught more graceful or agile; a deer, doubtless a familiar of the springs, was visible once, leaping wildly down the rocks in great elastic bounds, evidently hitherto unaware of the invaders of these preëmpted sylvan wilds. Others, too, of the ancient owners of the soil came on a more prosaic quest, but in the dead hour of darkness or the light of the midnight moon. A young bear, who had long harbored predatory designs upon a certain fat shoat, a denizen of that pig-pen of Cap'n Lucy's upon which the owner and Mr. Kenniston looked with such differing eyes, was brought to a pause, in a cautious reconnoitre, by the fragments of food, scraps from the workmen's dinner, which might be found by nosing about among the shavings. Perhaps it was this alone that led him about the angles and turns of the building; but as he went between the sparse substance of the timbers and their scant linear shadows that, in the sorcery of the moonlight, appeared hardly less real, he seemed as censorious a critic as Cap'n Lucy himself. Sometimes he would pause in his clumsy shamble, and, with the moonlight a-glitter in his small eyes, lift himself on his hind feet and gaze about the solitary building, indescribably melancholy in the loneliness and the wan, pensive sheen; grin with his white teeth, a-gleam with a sarcastic, snarling contempt; fall to all fours again; and, shrugging his heavy shoulders to his ears, scud along with the aspect of clumsy sportiveness common to his kind.

It chanced that a light, portable forge had been in use that day, in the process of the work; the foreman had himself looked to the extinction of the fire, albeit the scene of the operation was upon the solid rock, and far from any possible communication with the building. The wind could never have turned over the low apparatus set in the hollow of the ledges, but the bear could, and did. Then he sat down suddenly to lick his singed paw, for the metal was still hot. The fuel had been charcoal; it still sustained heat, and even combustion. There was a steady spark in a few of the scattered cinders, quickening, reddening, as the eager night air touched them. The shavings amongst which they had fallen, further down the slope, were slightly astir for a moment; then a timorous blaze sprang up along the more tenuous, lace-like, curling edges.