Part 12

Somehow the void about the circle was not without melancholy intimations, the normal incident of departure, whether it be regretted or cause for gratulation. Perhaps because of the sudden disordered quiet and loneliness in the quitted scene, the unoccupied mind must needs always reach forward into the unknown journeyings, meeting in speculation the varied events denied to the home-abiding. Larrabee sat still for a time in the low red glow of the furnace fire, exchanging now and again an incidental comment with his companions on the subject of the journey and its chances. The intervals of silence grew longer; the shadows gathered and deepened; the younger man's head occasionally nodded grotesquely in sleep, but more than once, as Larrabee was about to rise to his feet, he saw in the obscurity the large bloodshot eyes opened and fixed soberly upon him. He had waited long; long for the certainty that Taft would not return on some forgotten errand; long for the drunken sleep that must needs overcome the inimical vigilance of the young moonshiner. He could wait no longer. With an abrupt, shrill cry like that of a savage panther, he flung himself upon his elder companion. Copley was a man of powerful physique, and his every muscle was developed by the heavy labor in which it was exercised. In his undiminished strength his age gave no advantage to his adversary, whose slight bulk he might have flung from him with a single arm but for the surprise and suddenness of the attack in which he was borne to the ground. All Larrabee's strength hardly sufficed to hold him there for a moment. There was a fierce struggle; a pistol ball whizzed by Larrabee's head, and the narrow precincts were filled with the echoes and with Copley's hoarse calls upon Sykes for help. The young fellow rose in response, stupidly echoing the cries of his own name, took one tottering step forward, and fell like a log, flabby, nerveless, helpless, on the floor. Larrabee wondered afterward that it could all be so quickly done. It was by virtue of surprise, desperation, sleight of hand, deftness, and quickness rather than by strength or courage. A meal bag served as a gag, and a rope, used in transporting the heavy barrels up the steep incline to the store, to pinion the arms and shackle the feet. Larrabee was almost exhausted by the capture of the first prisoner, and it was perhaps auspicious for his freedom that the young drunkard, beyond an ill-directed blow or two, could make no resistance. The rope was made fast around the solid masonry of the furnace; and as Larrabee contemplated his work, he felt sure that the two prisoners, one yet vainly struggling, the other already sleeping the sleep of the very drunk, would find no means of deliverance till Taft's return the next day.

Again and again in his durance Larrabee had prefigured how swift would be his flight along the tunnel to the free outer air. Now he feebly plodded, and trembled, and faltered, and again went groping along the densely black way, essaying to keep a straight line, but feeling himself continually touching the wall, now on the right, and again on the left, in his zigzag course. Once he paused with an alert start. A sound of human voices had struck his ear, and at the merest possibility that his escape was not complete, certain, every flaccid, exhausted muscle was tense again. He lifted up his head, hardly breathing, that he might listen, but heard only the uncontrolled motion of his own heart plunging like an unruly horse. All else was silent in the black stillness of the deeps of the earth, save for the slight purling of the thread of a stream which farther on intersected the tunnel. No stir, no sound from the still-room, his late prison-house, where his jailers lay bound hand and foot; and yet he had thought he heard voices--human voices--words--he could almost have sworn it. And suddenly the sound came again. This time he recognized it,--louder than its custom, more distinct, for he had heard it before,--the sound of the strange, unexplained voices that at long intervals were wont to reverberate along the tunnel of the Lost Time mine, and that were accounted by the moonshiners echoes from their own wrangles or mirth or talk as they toiled. He was certain that it did not come now from the still; his fear that his work had been slack, and that his comrades were liberated, was without foundation, but an earthly rational fear is a wonderful exorcist of a ghostly terror. Otherwise, when he thought of it afterward, he felt that he must have been struck dead with the horror of it, when he suddenly heard, close at hand, the sound dulled by the dense medium of the earth, a word of command, as it were, in a queer, strained, false-ringing voice, and then the regular strokes of a pick cleaving the earth with a workmanlike steadiness and precision. His blood ran cold; for his credulity harbored no doubts. It was the sound of the drowned miners, lost in the flooded shafts, still vainly digging the graves that the niggard earth denied them. The thought mended his speed; he flew like a shuttlecock from side to side of the narrow passage, where he could but grope, for the lack of a lantern; and although he often put forth his hands expecting to touch the boards of the partition at the further end, he thrust into his palms a score of the hairy splinters of the reverse side of the rude puncheons long before he could have reasonably expected to reach his goal. He observed none of the precautions and silence common to the moonshiners in their exits from the still; and indeed the feat was hardly expected to be attempted in the dense darkness. He dropped one of the boards, and the deep, cavernous, clamorous echo coming up from the hollow vaults below almost overwhelmed him, as it resounded again and again. He had lost control of his nerves. He stumbled over the empty boxes and barrels in the room beneath the store, tumbled up the ladder, and as he clambered from the door beneath the counter he realized for the first time that the room was built, as were many of the meaner cabins of the region, without a window, depending on the door for ventilation and light. This was a matter of precaution with Taft, and being a not uncommon feature in the district occasioned no surprise; but Larrabee trembled as he remembered that it was Taft's cautious habit to lock the door when he himself was not in the store. Feeling that the bars were in place against the battens, he was apprised that it had been thus secured by the worthies down at the still, and perchance the key was now in Copley's pocket. His only resource would be to retrace his way, all the toil and risk of his escape to be repeated. But no, the bolt turned in his hand, and as he stepped into the passage outside his eyes were dazzled almost to blindness by a tallow dip blazing in the hand of little Cornelia Taft, summoned by the noise to investigate its source. Behind her, looking over her head, was Joe's round, careless, plump face. Larrabee was little less staggered by the monition that there might be other persons at hand in the house than by the expression of Cornelia's prim, disapproving, unfriendly, intelligent little countenance. The next instant he cared for neither; a salient change in the aspect of the cabin claimed his attention. The open passage between the two rooms had been boarded up, and a stout door fitted in, barred and bolted, on which gleamed a strong new lock. There was no key visible. He gazed at the lock with greedy eyes, silent, till the girl's question had been twice repeated.

"Me--doin' hyar? Oh, I been doin' some work fur yer dad," he said, more at ease, for he had seen her occasionally as he came and went, presumably in the character of customer, and he detected recognition in her calm and non-committal countenance. "I got shut up in thar,--mought hev been noddin',--an' I war 'feared the door war locked." He advanced upon the outer door.

"Ye can't git out'n that one," said the little girl coolly; "hit's locked on the outside, an' dad hev goned away ter the cross-roads with the key in his pocket."

Larrabee's first impulse was to try his strength to burst it open, and once more that salutary monition of the probable presence of others in the house controlled him. He turned toward the door of the opposite room, partly to settle this doubt, and partly to discover--it had never before occurred to him to notice--whether it had a window. The room was vacant, and his eager eyes ranged the walls in vain for an aperture.

"It's like a trap," he muttered, as he sunk exhausted into a chair. "What ails 'Renzo ter lock up the house an' make off with the key, an' leave you-uns inside by yerse'fs?" he demanded.

The two children had followed him into the room. Joe stood by the door, holding by the frame, swaying back and forth, attempting some distortion of attitude impossible to the human configuration; but the little girl had seated herself staidly in a chair opposite, and showed herself not averse to conversation.

"'Kase thar be sech a lot o' strange, idle folks in the Cove," said the prim Miss Cornelia, with an expression of strong disapprobation.

Larrabee could not restrain an exclamation of surprise. It was indeed like a new world, the familiar Cove, so long he had been shut out of it.

"What folks?" he asked succinctly.

"Them ez hev been building the new hotel," said Sis. "Them, in course."

"What they doin' now? Ain't they buildin'?" he hazarded tentatively.

"Naw,"--the small Cornelia Taft pursed up her lips contemptuously,--"jes' a-roamin' round the Cove in gangs, a-foolin' an' a-idlin', an', my sakes, a-drinkin' whiskey, thick ez bees!"

A new light was breaking in on Larrabee. Taft had at first desired that he should leave the Cove,--slip away quietly; now, since it was infested with a troop of scattered workmen, apparently out of a job, all of whom had doubtless spent an idle hour agape over the story of the supposed Jasper Larrabee, the last nine days' wonder of the Cove,--the facetious freak of the pretended arrest, the miraculous escape of the fall from the cliffs, the mysterious disappearance, the suspicion of moonshining, and the threatened vengeance of the deputy sheriff,--it was scarcely probable that he could get away without exciting notice which might lead to recognition, pursuit, and arrest. He was safer at the still,--this he himself admitted now,--far safer in the depths of the earth; except, indeed, for Taft and his fellows.

"Did you-uns see the fire?" demanded Joe suddenly, still writhing and twisting against the door frame. "_I_ did!" in triumph.

"Ye wouldn't ef I hedn't a-woke ye up," said Sis, with acerbity. "I 'low ye didn't see much nohows, bein' so sleepy-headed."

Larrabee sat looking in surprise from one to the other, his questions anticipated by their eager relish of the subject.

"Dad never seen nuthin'!" cried the boy triumphantly.

"Dad wouldn't b'lieve thar war a fire till he went an' viewed the cinders of the hotel," said the girl.

The hotel! A sudden suspicion smote Larrabee, a recollection of the threat to burn the building which had originated amongst the moonshiners before a stone was laid in mortar or a timber lifted. He did the craft injustice in this instance; Taft and his associates had no part in the conflagration. But with Espey out of control, and Larrabee touched with the suspicion of moonshining, a chance word might fix upon the distillers this far more serious crime known to them both to have already been broached here. There was much reason for his detention,--too much. He must be going, and that shortly.

"I wonder ye all ain't 'feared o' burnin' up in hyar, locked up," he said suddenly, the catastrophe seeming to render the danger of fire more imminent, although he knew it to be the habit of the country folk to lock small children in when convenient to leave home without them.

The little girl's thin lip curled.

"Ef we-uns hain't got no mo' sense 'n ter set the house or ourse'fs afire, I reckon we'd be wuth ez much roasted ez raw," she replied.

"Dad, he locked the door so we-uns kin tell them stragglers ez he be gone, an' they can't git in ter trade fur drink," put in Joe.

Larrabee said nothing more. He knew full well that the children were not so alone as they seemed, since Copley, who was their mother's half-brother, was wont to be in the store, in Taft's absence, often enough to be at hand should he be required to suppress any disturbance; and being a near relative, he had a personal interest in their safety. Miss Cornelia Taft was a fine combination of her father's shrewdness and her grandmother's preciseness. As Larrabee felt her small, discerning eyes studying him, he became conscious that he was looking about wildly and with manifest anxiety as to his next step. He made an effort to allay her dawning curiosity.

"Things look powerful nice an' cle'n up in hyar," he remarked casually.

He was unprepared for the effect of his words. If Miss Cornelia Taft had a soul, it was expressed in her housewifely instincts. In a dozen frantic and funny juvenile misconceptions, the precepts brought from Mrs. Jiniway's domicile were put into practice here. The basis of them all, cleanliness and an effort for order, was plainly apparent, and Sis spent the better part of her days in seeking to impress upon Joe's unwilling mind the value of an occasional dish-washing, and the utility of wood ashes in scouring. An evil day, Joe considered it, when she came into his ragged, soapless, happy-go-lucky life; but Taft connived at their wranglings over their primitive housekeeping and Joe's subjection. "Keeps Sis busy, an' lets me git on her blind side,--ef she hev got enny blind side," he added grimly.

Her pallid face flushed, her eyes sparkled; she cast a glance of triumph at Joe, who had seated himself in a chair, and was twisting his bare feet in and out of the rungs in a way painful to witness, if not to experience, writhing his body to and fro, and rolling his head from side to side over the high back of the chair in a restless frivolity of motion that certainly had no family resemblance to the staid "manners" which Mrs. Jiniway's disciple exhibited.

She had entered volubly upon a detail of her exploits here in reforming Joe's misrule amongst the pots and pans and kettles.

"Dad's so 'way from home, an' Joe's so tur'ble shif'less," she complained.

The task of redding up the Augean stables was slight in comparison, one might believe, to judge from her show of horror now and then, and there was considerable difference between the size of Sis and of Hercules. She had succeeded in reaching some sense of culinary propriety in Joe, or pride, for he now and again became sufficiently still to look poutingly sullen, and to ejaculate, "'Tain't true!" "'Twarn't!" and similar disaffected negations.

"I l'arnt all that whenst I lived with my granny," she concluded her exposition of the true methods of dealing with the trivet and the skillet and setting the house in order. "An' when we war done, we'd knit stockings an' tell tales."

"Tales 'bout what?" asked Larrabee, seeking to conciliate her, for he began to have a shrewd suspicion that she could aid him if she would. His interest was the more easily simulated, for he had a literary taste himself.

"Oh," she cried, with a little bounce forward, not unlike Joe's elasticity, "them in gineral we-uns hearn the rider read,--'bout Sam'l."

"I hev read 'bout Sam'l," said Larrabee quickly, with an air of playing willingly to her lead; and indeed she had struck him on his strong suit. "An' old Eli. Eli war an able man, but he never 'peared ter me ter hev much jedgmint."

"I jes' _lo-o-oved_ ter hear 'bout leetle Sam'l an' his mother, an' her a-bringin' of him new clothes. He wore a white shut, an' she brung him a leetle coat every year," continued Sis, with placid eyes shining with the delighted reminiscence of the little prophet's fine gear.

"Eli never could hev led the children of Isrul through the wilderness like Moses done," said Larrabee meditatively, reverting naturally to the elder character; whereas with Sis the _personnel_ of the Bible was chiefly juvenile, rarely attaining a greater height than four feet.

"Jes' ter think," she cried, "they put Moses whenst a baby in a leetle dug-out, an' anchored him 'mongst the willows under the ruver bank, an' lef' him by hisself! Don't ye know, he hollered an' hollered! An' he wondered whar all the folks war gone."

"An' Dan'l I hev read about," continued Larrabee.

"In the painters' den! Oo--oo!" The little girl shivered with a sort of enjoyment of the terror of the situation, drawing up her shoulders, and holding both hands over her mouth.

"He warn't 'feared. I reckon he mus' hev been a powerful hunter whenst young. I wonder ef he ever hed enny 'speriunce with wolf an' bar, an' sech?" Larrabee speculated.

"Them bars! Warn't that awful,--plumb turrible!" exclaimed Sis suddenly, her scanty brows knitted as she frowningly recoiled into the back of her chair, and her small eyes grew large. "Them two bars what eat them forty childern,--though 'tain't manners, an' it never war, ter make game o' yer elders."

"'Tain't true! No two bar ever eat forty childern. They'd hev bust!" Joe interposed realistically. "Sis jes' made that up out'n her own head."

"It air true," protested the little Biblical student. "I hearn the rider read it myself."

"Them childern war obleeged ter be sorter sizable ter hev quit bein' bald-headed tharse'fs, ef they war able ter run an' p'int thar fingers. An' shucks! I hev been sassier 'n that a many a time, an' no bar hev eat me yit," said Joe hardily.

"Ye air savin' up fur Satan, I reckon," retorted Miss Taft, with acerbity. "I hev a heap o' trouble with this boy," she added, turning a dreary, disgusted little face toward Larrabee.

Their unity of literary interest had fostered a degree of sympathy for her. "Ye oughter go down sometimes an' set at Tems's," he suggested. "He hev got a darter an' a niece, though they air older 'n ye be."

"I don't mind old folks," said Cornelia, evidently with no idea of the gradations of age. "I be used ter granny. I wisht dad would marry one of 'em at Tems's," she added.

Larrabee glanced keenly at her.

"What ails ye, ter say that?" he asked jealously.

"I'd like ter see a tuck took in Joe," said Sis bitterly.

She obviously spoke without further information or meaning. Larrabee rose restlessly, the interest of the literary symposium at an end.

"I wisht ye could let me out'n hyar somehows," he said, glancing uneasily about. Then, with a sudden recollection, "Ain't you-uns got a key ez would open the sto' door, what ye brung from yer granny's house? Mebbe 'twould open t'other."

"Dad took it; he didn't want the sto' do' opened whenst he hed locked it."

"Hain't you-uns got no mo' keys, no kind o' keys?"

She hesitated, but he had won upon her somewhat obdurate predilections; his acquaintance with the heroes of the tales that she had learned at her grandmother's home was a pleasing and fresh bond of interest. She divined his sympathy, and had seen his approval of the works she had wrought in the service of order and cleanliness; he saw in her little prim face that she had keys at hand, and presently she nodded brightly.

"Let's try 'em," he urged, as if the experiment had a mutual interest.

It was a bunch of two or three rusty old keys which she produced, held together with a rough leather string, but they meant liberty and life to Larrabee. He could hardly be still long enough to clean and oil them before the attempt which should be decisive. The little girl rubbed one with a will, while he busied himself with the other. She held the candle as he knelt tremulously on the floor and applied them successively to the lock. One slipped in and turned futilely all round,--too small. The other would not even enter the keyhole.

As he knelt there, the tallow dip showed a white, set face. He was remembering his comrades, bound hand and foot down at the still, and prefiguring Taft's alarm,--which was in itself formidable in its valiant disregard of all but his own safety,--his resentment and revenge, when their imprisoned estate should be discovered to him. Whatever might betide in the world without, it was death, indubitably, to remain. He rose suddenly, almost overturning the child at his elbow, starting toward the door of the store to get some implement to serve to break the lock.

"Try a file," said Sis reasonably, misunderstanding his intention.

She was still holding the candle as he came back, its white light on her precise little face and smooth hair put primly behind her ears, and a tall womanly caricature of her aped her gestures as her shadow stretched up on the new poplar weather-boarding of the partition.

Her suggestion worked like a charm. A few moments of a sharp, rasping noise, while she set her little teeth, a second essay at the lock: the bolt slipped back as if made for the rusty old key that had worked no miracles before save that of opening old Mrs. Jiniway's "chist;" the door swung open. A glimpse of the windy night, the clouds, the tossing woods, and Sis, putting up the bars again, heard the last echo of Larrabee's swift step as he strode away.

XI.

The day fixed for processioning Kenniston's land dawned with an element of perplexity all its own to add to the troublous questions which it was expected to decide. The weather was the aptest illustration of uncertainty. The first gray light came with a rolling cloud and a dank wind sweeping along quick gusts of rain; then the sun rose, diffusive, promissory, with a great lavishness of red and yellow suffusions, a range and degree of rank, heavy color that seemed nearer to the hues of sunset than to the luminous purity and delicacy of wonted matutinal freshness. The slate-tinted clouds were massed once more, the beams failed, the wind brought the rain anew, and when it ceased at last, light mists were stealing along the heavy purple mountains, and rising from every chasm and depression; even far away amongst those vague contours, gray and dun-tinted and brown, that were like the first lifeless sketch of the dazzling azure ranges that the sunny days were wont to paint with such brilliant softness upon the fair field of the horizon, these vapors, white, soft, opaque, flocculent, could be seen. So from the furthermost reaches to the nearest limits invisibility was visibly garnered.

As Kenniston, perturbed because of the weather signs, turned ever and anon in his saddle, as he rode up and up the mountain to the tryst at the Big Hollow Boulder, he saw now the great outward bend of the mountain, with heavily wooded green slopes under the gray sky, all the coloring heightened by the impending tufty white of the masses of silent approaching vapor; the surly crags of the terrace dark with the moisture and the shadow; and the great black mass of the charred wood still sending up a slow, melancholy thread of smoke where the hotel lay in ruins. And again, looking over his shoulder to verify some half-forgotten detail of the scene, the trees twenty feet away were barely visible in the encompassing medium, so fleetly did the impalpable cloud press upon them. To him, unversed in mountain weather, the enterprise of the day seemed impracticable; and he was half surprised to see the surveyor, with his Jacob's staff and his chain-bearers, already waiting at the boundary corner. The figures of the group of men, with their horses picketed hard by, stood out against the inexpressive whiteness about them with the distinctness of sketches on otherwise blank paper. They were easily recognizable even from a distance, and Cap'n Lucy's slim proportions and grace of movement further served to differentiate him from the burlier forms of the others.

"Ah, colonel," called out Kenniston as he dismounted, "you here?"