Part 21

"Ye 'low ez 'tain't enough money!" screamed the old man shrilly, and Larrabee recognized the clamors of the queer cracked voice which he had been wont to shudderingly mark in the tunnel that led to the still. "Ain't I done tole ye what I ain't never tole no other livin' man--I don't count Tawm--it air eighty-seben dollars! Yes, sir, nigh on ter a hundred, what I hed done sold my cabin an' lan' fur on Big Injun Mounting whenst I kem over hyar ter settle,--eighty-seben dollars in hard silver"--He broke off abruptly. Then, in the deep, hollow, blood-curdling tone which Larrabee had so often heard about the fireside, he cursed the Lost Time mine. His excitement was painful to witness, as Larrabee, still looking round the pile of broken rock, noted his feverish illumined eyes, the flush on his withered parchment-like cheek, the aimlessness and the quaking of his fluttering nerveless hand. Espey was gazing at him calmly, his face lighted by the lantern placed on the ground between them, and evidently believing that not a syllable he uttered had any foundation in fact.

"'Twar the day o' the floodin' o' the mine," old Haight mouthed and gesticulated vehemently. "Every durned thing went wrong that day! I war hyar a-workin'. I hed worked in mines over in Car'liny, an' war ekal ter all. I war toler'ble young an' nimble,--knowed ter be ez nimble ez a painter! An' one o' them durned buzzards workin' of the windlass drapped the whole contrivance, winch, rope, bucket, man, an' all, down inter the bottom o' the shaft; an' they couldn't make the man answer, an' 'lowed he war kilt. An' I--the devil's own fool--mus' ups an' volunteer ter go down an' git the windlass an' let 'em hoist it out, an' then let down the bucket agin an' fetch up the man--(I furgits his name, dad-burn him!--Tom, Jim, Pete, cuss him, whatever he be!) An' ez they war a sort o' harnessin' me up with ropes under my arms an' around my middle, I felt my leetle bag o' money a-poppin' 'bout in my pocket, an' 'peared ter me it mought pop out down in that deep onhandy shaft. An' I handed it ter the foreman ter keep fur me in his pocket,--he war a clever trusted man; I never tole the t'others, kase they war toler'ble hard cases, an' some men would kill a man fur a dollar an' a half; an' bless Gawd--eighty-seben dollars! An' down I goes! I hed about teched bottom when--hell broke loose! I 'lowed I hearn thunder: 'twar the water on a plumb tear, breakin' down the walls an' cavortin' like a herd o' wild cattle through the mine. Sech screechin's! The men ez helt the rope drapped it on my head an' run fur thar lives!"

With open mouth and shaking jaw, he rose up, and gazed eagerly about, while Espey wearily yawned and passed his hands across his eyes.

"It bust through about thar." He pointed about in real or fancied recognition of the course of the flood. "But over yander--the whole thing hev fell down an' caved in sence then, mighty nigh--'twar higher 'n the level o' the overflow, an' I stayed down thar in the shaft dry ez a bone. I stayed two days along o' that dead man. I furgits his name," he broke off in peevish irritation.

He sat down, readjusted his plaid shawl about his head, surmounted it again with his big broad hat, and recommenced:--

"Wall, they 'lowed at fust they'd work the mine agin,--didn't know what the damage war; an' ez they war pokin' 'bout, somebody 'membered me, an' when they fished me out'n the shaft I hed these hyar jiggets." He held up his shaking hands, and looked in exasperation from one to the other. "Some calls it the palsy, but the doctor, he 'lowed it kem from the narvous shock. An' the foreman, he hed done hed ter git drowned with my leetle bag o' money in his pocket." He rose to his feet, with a sudden steady blazing fire in his eyes. "But it's silver,--eighty--seben--dollars!" He pronounced the words as if they expressed the wealth of the Indies. "They air silver,--silver metal. Water can't hurt 'em, an' the leetle leather bag kep' 'em from scatterin'. The foreman's got 'em in his pocket. Mebbe he hain't got no pocket by this time, but he hain't got rid o' all his bones. The money'll be nigh his bones, an' I be goin' ter foller the wash o' that flood, afore the walls fell in on it, till I find 'em."

There was something pathetic to Jasper Larrabee's sympathetic gaze in the record of the gradual failure of the old man's mental powers registered on the walls. He could easily distinguish, of course, the difference in the work wrought by numbers and with the expectation of valuable ore and this unique subterranean burrowing with only the object of old Haight's search in prospect. But at first accepted methods of mining had been held in regard with a due consideration of safety. The excavations had been carefully timbered, the débris of the ancient lumber serving for the purpose; the nature of the earth and rock all capably recognized either in the avoidance of obstacles or the seizure of advantage; the exact location of an old cross-cut definitely ascertained and intersected by the new tunnel, and utilized to further him on the way to some objective point, doubtless once definite in his mind, but now hazy and intermittent, or possibly lost altogether, for here and there, evidently at random, great vaults had been hollowed out and abandoned, and for a long time every precaution or thought of safety had been discarded. His plan and its feasibility were gone, and only his inadequate intention remained.

Larrabee started violently as the walls rang suddenly with the weird old voice, which, with its keen, false intonation, had so often struck terror to the stout hearts of the moonshiners of the Lost Time still. It was a voice of insistent command. He was urging his comrades to the work, and presently the regular strokes of the pick wielded by the stalwart "Tawm" set the echoes of the place to a hollow, melancholy iteration dreary to hear, and dismally blent with the rush of the cruel torrent. Espey's stroke seemed, in comparison, incidental and ineffective; but albeit both men worked apparently with a will, it was evidently quite at random, obeying implicitly now and again a gesture or command given in pursuance of some weak, wavering intention, and changed in a moment.

The accident which had put the secret into Larrabee's hands seemed to him now so natural that he marveled that it had not been earlier revealed. But doubtless the vocation of the lost miners had served to connect the stroke of the pick with their gruesome fate, and thus the very fact of the sound, which must otherwise have betrayed the enterprise, aided the spectral traditions and the consequent avoidance of the place to preserve it. Would Espey have dared, he asked himself, to venture within, had he not feared the living more than the dead? And but for his own recognition of the humble lantern and its necessarily human uses he would, for fear of the spectral miners, hardly have tracked the old miner to his new lead.

And suddenly, with the very thought, notwithstanding the perfectly natural solution of the mystery, he was solicitous as to the means of departure. He could not wait to follow that feeble lantern far enough in the background to insure his invisibility. He would not issue upon them now and advertise his discovery, and dismay the old dotard with his hopeless scheme. "I don't want to torment the pore old man," he said. He felt a keen thrill of savage joy to have discovered Espey's lair, but he would need some thought to secretly entrap him. "Fur ye air a mighty slick shirk, brother Jack," he said, with scorn. He was feeling some matches in his pockets, and judging of their number. Should they fail him before he reached the outer air, he could step aside and wait till the men should pass with the lantern. Its glimmer served now as long as the passage was comparatively straight; when it turned, himself out of the possibility of view, he struck the first match. The way was shorter than he had fancied. His store was not yet exhausted when he felt the warmer temperature from without, and saw the jagged outline of the portal and heard the melancholy dash of the rain; for it was once more "falling weather," and the sky was cloaked and gray.

As he hesitated outside, his mind intent upon Espey and the incidents of his career since he had been among them, there came to him the thought of the barn in which his whilom friend had been wont to spend so many idle and meditative hours. A good refuge, to be sure, for a fugitive from the law. The idea of comforts allured him as he recollected the great fragrant elastic masses of hay. A hiding-place as well. Here even Henrietta Timson would hardly find him, for the rotting ladder, from which many a rung was missing, afforded scant footing for a barn swallow, or a flying squirrel, or an athlete like himself or his friend. Sleep would recruit his energies, quiet solace his mind, a vacant interval of time clarify his intentions and fortify his resolves. He started up the mountain briskly; the thought of home, even in this humble, secret, half-outcast guise, warmed his heart. He did not feel the rain dash in his face. A prescience of October was unheeded in the melancholy cadences of the midnight wind. He hardly noted the deep gloom of the Cove, where an owl was wailing at intervals, and whence all the orange-tinted lights had vanished. As the chill of the failing season struck him, he shivered, but unconsciously. He had forged on past the Lost Time store almost to the crest of the ridge, where the homeward way diverged, when suddenly a dull subterranean thunder shook the air, and the earth seemed to tremble. He paused in astonishment.

"Why, they air a-blastin' down thar in the Lost Time mine. Espey oughtn't ter let two bereft folks tech sech ez that; 'tain't safe."

Then he reflected that Espey himself had doubtless superintended the charges with due regard to their safety and his own. Nevertheless, he shook his head as he stood looking over his shoulder into the blank, unresponsive darkness. He heard no more, and presently he turned again and went his homeward way in the dark persistent dripping of the early autumn rain.

XVIII.

The anomaly of administering upon one's own estate Lorenzo Taft was permitted in some sort to experience. A definite realization of finality attended his meditations, at he sat bending over the embers in the great fireplace of the store, in the rain-clouded morning that rose upon the conclusion of his labors of removing the still and destroying all its approaches. His vocation was gone, and naught remained. He had no more affinity than a fox or a wolf for a law-abiding occupation. The possible profits that might stick to his hands in the process of the conversion of the goods upon the shelves from the wholesale ratio to the retail failed to allure him, for the store had never been aught but a "blind." The furrow was no thoroughfare. That wild gambling with the chances of the sun and wind and the rain in its season, and often out of its season, known as farming, and doubtless permitted by the law only because it insures its own punishment, was risky enough to jump with his humor, but the stakes were hopelessly inadequate. He could not look forward, and the glance backward over the shoulder needs a good conscience to commend the prospect.

Now and again he lifted his heavy boot and kicked the embers together fiercely, as if at great odds with his thoughts and his own counsels. Like many another, he undervalued his success, its hairbreadth jeopardies and its difficulty of attainment, now that it was fairly secured. It seemed to him a slight thing, the device of his quick wits to insure his safety, and his satisfaction in its triumphant exploitation had already evanesced. Had it been possible to reëstablish the status of yesterday, doubtless he would have hardily risked the discovery of the still, the disclosure of Larrabee, the capture of Espey, Dan Sykes's drunken tongue, and, as a result of these, the "shootin'-irons" of the "revenuers" and the sentence of the federal court. But gunpowder as a factor in a scheme admits of no second thoughts.

He even upbraided his own acumen that, in the emergency, he had sought with an eye single the safety of himself, his one remaining comrade, and the apparatus, regardless of all considerations of enmity. But now that judgment was satisfied and escape certain, vengeance clamored.

Whenever he thought of Larrabee outside, triumphant, free, enjoying an absolute immunity from the law by reason of the destruction of the moonshiners' lair, which rendered the discovery of his complicity impossible, Taft frowned heavily and swore beneath his breath, and kicked the unoffending embers into a new adjustment, so bitter was the fact that his own safety made Larrabee's protection complete. Even poor Dan Sykes's exile--and doubtless the young sot was well on the way to Texas by this time--was as necessarily a measure taken in Larrabee's behalf as if it were the dearest desire of Taft's heart to shield and screen him. The realization that, despite himself, Larrabee shared his security cheapened it. Less and less he realized its value. A turbulent pulse began to stir within his veins. His heavy cheek was red and pendulous beneath his yellow beard. Occasionally he dropped his lower jaw with an expression of angry dismay, so ill had the event fallen out with his liking. The sight of Copley wandering about the half-darkened house, lighted only by the fire and the pallid grayness from the door ajar opening upon the rainy outside world, as uneasy as a homeless cat, able to settle to nothing, his face a palimpsest of care and trouble and failure, overwritten again and again above the half-obliterated script of years agone, irritated him vaguely. Taft eyed him loweringly, as the two children in the opposite room besieged him for the detail of the adventures and dramatic "taking off" of a certain "black b'ar," a vanquished enemy of his earlier days, which he recounted as aimlessly as if the story were elicited by a wooden crank; but responding to a spirited encore, he plucked up heart of grace to add new and fresh particulars. His worn and not unkindly face did not ill become the armchair and the propinquity of the juvenile heads. His serenity, as the two resorted from contradiction to blows, smartly administered across him to his own great jeopardy, bespoke a grandfatherly tolerance, nearly related to affection, for the combatants. Without more masterful leading than his own mind could originate or his own propensities could furnish, he might spend the rest of his life at the plough-handles, and ask no better society, and hope for naught beyond his coarse garb and his coarser fare. He was growing old, and this might be a better prospect than the still could promise, with always the possibility of a federal prisoner's cell at the vanishing point of the long perspective.

Taft could preëmpt no such demesne of mild content. His rankling regret for all that he had done, and done so well, in that it served his enemy perforce as one with himself, deepened as he began to realize that in escaping so great and imminent a danger none sustained appreciable injury but himself. He alone seemed at the end. He could not for years, perhaps, safely rehabilitate the still. A new place must be sought, a new trade established, new dangers guarded against; and complicated by his relations with Larrabee, at large and at enmity, a removal unobserved and a reëstablishment without pursuit seemed impossible. He dwelt with futile persistence on the peculiar adaptability of his hiding-place, now demolished forever. Nowhere else could he have commanded such advantages of seclusion. Surely nowhere else could his dangerous vocation have been so safely plied. He enumerated the varied precautions that he had observed, the dangers that he had successfully balked. All the chances of the world outside had run in his favor; even the mysterious burning of the hotel was strangely calculated to aid his design in preventing the advent into the Cove of summer sojourners, that might lead to the discovery of his lair. Doubtless, too, by this time, in addition, Kenniston's plans were definitely and forever baffled by the untoward result of processioning the land. And as the thought of it recurred to him he started suddenly, the color deepened in his face, and he beheld the events of which he had elected to play the motive power in a new and baleful light.

Certainly there was no flaw in his reasoning that stormy night when he had betaken himself in company with the wind and the rain, high up into the solitudes of the "bald" of the mountain. A wild night, with none else abroad save perchance a stray marauder of the furry gentry. Only the mists dogged his steps, and only the lightnings searched out his path. The gigantic boulder that seemed immovable, grim, gaunt, forbidding, the agency of giant powder set astir easily enough; and although the charge, accurately calculated for the purpose, was not sufficient to fracture the great mass, its equilibrium on the steep slope was destroyed. A wild turbulent dance it had as it hurled down the slope from the spot where the ebbing seas of centuries agone had left it stranded. A thunderous crashing voice it lifted as it went, and the thunder of the clouds seemed to reply. In the pallid dawn of the rainy day, Taft had crept back through the wet clouds of the summits and the spent winds lingering in the dank woods, to behold it lying there in this alien stop, as immovable of aspect as of yore, with great trees uprooted by the tempest athwart the rocky ledges about its path, and every trace of the action of powder effaced by the persistent rain. It marked a new corner for the beginning of Kenniston's survey; on a line with the old, it is true, but full five furlongs distant. It was a north-westerly line to be run out thence; the greater divergence would occur in the Cove, which fact Taft had learned as Kenniston made a swift plat of his irregularly shaped land with his cane on the floor of Cap'n Lucy's cabin porch. A simple scheme enough, this,--that the one available site for the hotel should be thrown within the lines of Cap'n Lucy, who would not bargain, sell, or convey, and thus the ill-omened caravansary crowded out of the space it was expected to occupy; for as yet Bruin's intervention as incendiary was among the uncovenanted things, and since the unlucky threat to burn the building had originated among the moonshiners Taft feared discovery should he apply the torch himself. A simple scheme, well planned and carried out with full effect,--and how should its completion so ill please its projector?

The fact that Cap'n Lucy should profit by it Taft had heretofore hardly heeded, since this was the necessary incident of his own greater profit. Now, however, that treachery, as he esteemed it, had riddled the whole finespun web and brought it to naught, a turmoil of rage possessed him. It seemed some curious chicanery of fate that he alone should sustain loss, and that to others should accrue all the advantage of his subtle weavings of chance and fact, as if the threads still held fast. Cap'n Lucy was in possession, doubtless, of many hundred acres of Kenniston's land. He suddenly grudged them to Cap'n Lucy as he had never bethought himself to grudge them to Kenniston. Jealousy is an intimate passion, and insistently of the soil. The neighbor, the associate, the friend's friend,--it makes no far casts. Kenniston was beyond its restricted bounds.

Cap'n Lucy's causticity, his arrogance, his insulting courage which belittled the possibilities of another man's wrath, his intrenchment in the subservience of his household, and his preëminence in the esteem of his small world did not serve to commend him to his unwilling benefactor, who stood in immediate contemplation of his own loss. And as the radiant face of Julia appeared in the dim midst of Taft's recollection, he rose to his feet, his resolution taken in the instant. He had not forgotten the look in Larrabee's eyes when Espey had demanded of him whom he had been "a-courtin' at Tems's." Now, with Espey gone, and Larrabee foot-loose and free, it might chance that these hundreds of acres of which he had bereft Kenniston would one day fall into Larrabee's possession as his wife's inheritance, when Cap'n Lucy should go to his account,--which Taft doubted not would be a long one.

"I'll be dad-burned," he cried, "ef I'll stand by an' see Kenniston choused fur old Lucy or Lar'bee, air one!"

Few human motives are simple. The travesty of restitution served to cloak even to himself jealousy and grudging and revenge, and that mad impulse to hurl down and wreak woe upon those who had chanced to prosper in the dispensations which he had ordered himself, and which had wrought perversely to his injury. He had, however, nothing of the appearance or the manner of a subtle villain when he was on horseback in the slanting lines of rain, that multiplied till they hid the mountains near at hand, and erased the Cove, and nullified all the conditions of the familiar world. On the contrary, his bluff, bold, open aspect was of a reassuring geniality, notwithstanding its overbearing intimations, and served to identify him to Kenniston, as he lounged in his unsubstantial domicile, and looked out ruefully at the dull day with the gray rain and the grayer mist and the ochreous pools of water, seeing naught else till this massive equestrian figure materialized in its vaporous midst and seemed to ride straight out of it. Taft flung himself from his saddle with a decision which implied a mission; and despite Kenniston's intention to discourage the visits of the mountaineers, he could not, with so assured a guest, have withheld the customary greeting of hospitality without more definite rudeness than he had expected to adventure.

The new-comer was the more welcome since Kenniston's companion in keeping the monkey stove warm was Rodolphus Ross, who had come to the Cove for the purpose of examining the scene of the fire, and ferreting out the incendiary. He had, under the guise of questioning Kenniston on the subject, inflicted his society upon his restive host for the better part of an hour, now and then desisting from the discussion to work away at the damper of the monkey stove, which he patronizingly denominated a "smart little trick," albeit by reason of the heavy air and ill adjustment and the lack of adequate draught it was doing itself no credit. Ross experimented with an ardor and uninformed energy which threatened the total wreck of its constitution. The clatter of the metal was hardly more grating upon Kenniston's educated nerves than were his guest's speech and bearing. There was something in the exaggeration of the deputy's urban boorishness, the plaid of his ill-fitting garments, the hilarity of his vulgar townish impudence, that daunted a charitable acceptation of his foibles. So distasteful to Kenniston's cultured taste was the degree of sophistication acquired by the deputy sheriff, and with many a misconception adapted to his personality, that the absence of it seemed dignity in the mountaineer, and Taft's unvarnished address the unpolished substratum of good manners.

"How's ducks in the hills?" Ross greeted him, dropping the small poker, and looking up with bright dark eyes, the two prominent front teeth visible beneath the short upper lip. There was a moment of rabbit-like expectancy of expression; then his lips widened to a laugh as the burly stranger turned his serious, impressive face toward him.

"Air you-uns speakin' ter me, sir?" demanded Taft, in a grave, direct manner, his steady eye full upon him.

The airy deputy shifted ground for once. "Good day fur ducks," he modified his speech.