Part 23

"'Bout Sam'l," she said, with a smile.

"Sam'l who?" he demanded keenly.

Sis hesitated, suddenly posed. "I--I disremember his--his--surname," she admitted.

"Did ye see him with Lar'bee?" he asked, his big pertinacious eyes on her face, expectant of immediate developments.

"I--I ain't never seen _him_. I--I reckon"--it seemed too terrible to contemplate--"I reckon he mus' be--daid." She had never before looked upon it in this light, and her heart sank.

"Friend o' Lar'bee's?" he persisted.

"I reckon so; he hed read 'bout him."

"Read 'bout him? Whar? In the 'Colb'ry Gazette'?" He lowered his voice respectfully, for to him personal mention in the 'Colbury Gazette' meant fame.

"Naw. In the Bible, o' course," said Sis, stiffly reproving.

He stared at her in blank amaze for a moment; then he smote his leg a sounding thwack, and burst into a howl of derisive laughter.

"Ye an' Lar'bee hed a pray'r-meetin', did ye? An', my son," he continued through his nose with a sanctimonious whine, turning to Joe, "did ye lead the saints in supplication, or raise the hyme-chune?"

Joe responded with a fat chuckle of delighted laughter, rejoiced to see his Mentor, the professor of many novel and distasteful arts of household economy, put to ridicule and out of countenance.

It was only for a moment. She turned acridly against the domestic insurgent.

"_He_ tuned up arterward. Joe done _his_ quirin' arter Lar'bee war gone, an' the wind riz, an' the rain kem down. He wisht an' wisht Lar'bee hed bided. He fairly blated fur skeer!"

"I never!" protested Joe in pouting indignation. "_I_ warn't 'feared o' the wind an' rain, nare one! 'T war the racket them dead ones kep' up in the Los' Time mine diggin' thar graves. This hyar house air right over the mine."

Ross's great shifting wild eyes widened as he looked from one to the other.

"Thar _ain't_ no dead ones diggin' thar graves!" cried Sis didactically. She must needs spend too many lonely hours here for that suggestion to be a welcome one. "Them ez dig ain't dead. Dad say jes' some boys, he reckon, a-moonshinin' or sech of a night in the Lost Time mine."

Rodolphus Ross rose to his feet. He was elated, confident. He snapped his fingers noisily in the air as he took two or three of the sideway paces usually preliminary to a clog dance, which accomplishment he had acquired by viewing what he termed a "minstrel show." He had long suspected Larrabee of moonshining, and here was the _locus in quo_. He had said that Larrabee's trail had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth; with what literal reason he had not dreamed. Notwithstanding his haste, however, he must needs tarry for a fleer.

"Gran'mammy Taft," he said, leering at the little girl, with her prim, antique aspect, "I never thunk ter find ye hobnobbin' with moonshiners."

"Lar'bee ain't no moonshiner," she protested, with swift alarm.

He joyed in her evident flutter.

"Ah, gran'mammy Taft, ye kin consider yerse'f under arrest fur aidin' an' abettin' in moonshinin', ye an' all yer fambly."

"Ye ain't no revenuer!" cried Sis, moving back a step, however. "Ye ain't 'lowed ter _purtend_ ter be one, nuther. I hearn o' a man in Persimmon Cove ez _purtended_ ter be a off'cer o' the law, an' got 'rested hisse'f. An' I would hev thunk enny-ways ez ye hed hed enough o' arrestin' folks fur fun, sence that time ye flung Lar'bee over the bluffs, an' nigh kilt him. Ef ye be so sharp set ter 'rest ennybody, go find Jack Espey an' 'rest him."

Ross was out of countenance. Nevertheless--"How many j'ints hev her tongue got?" he demanded of Joe, with a feint of serious interest.

But Joe had deserted to the enemy. He thought that Sis was in the ascendant, and Ross's threat at once angered and terrified him. He received with pouting silence the officer's aside, while Sis went on triumphantly:--

"Dad say my granny Jiniway air kin somehows ter the high sher'ff's wife; an' whenst I go ter Colb'ry nex' week with dad, I be goin' ter go ter her house an' ax the high sher'ff ef he 'lows his dep'ties ter arrest people fur joke, an' _purtend_ ter be revenue off'cers, an' skeer leetle gals by arrestin' 'em, an' 'lowin' he'll take the whole fambly fur moonshinin'. My granny Jiniway's third cousin air the high sher'ff's wife!"

In the face of this genealogical detail, it was with a somewhat subdued spirit that Ross mounted the mare and set forth on his return; for the high sheriff was a man with a most attenuated sense of humor, a literal interpretation of the duties of his office, and notwithstanding the fact that Ross's willingness to ride long distances, in all manner of weather, relieved him of this the most irksome of duties to an inert temperament, he had begun to look doubtfully upon him, particularly since the untoward result of the facetious arrest of the supposed Larrabee, and Ross felt that his tenure was not altogether secure. As he passed the portal of the Lost Time mine, the thought of his quest recurred to his mind, and the important clue which he deemed he had obtained from the little girl's conversation. He no longer considered it important, for from the rough-hewn portal of the cavern poured forth the compressed stream of the divers subterranean currents, gathered together and hurled forth in a great spout, and with a plunging force that astonished him, remembering as he did the far tamer flow of the earlier season. He ascribed the change to the persistent autumn rains flooding some watercourse that doubtless pierced the hidden chambers. It filled the outlet within a few feet of the summit of the arch. Any entrance here was impossible; as for another opening to the mine, he looked about him upon the limitless tangled wilderness of wood and rock, the shifting beclouding mists, the endless skeins of the rain, and he swore between his big front teeth an oath which, despite the grotesque humor of its phraseology, had within it all the bitter profanity of his baffling disappointment. And in default of aught else on which to wreak his anger, he cruelly lashed Taft's mare; and so he went down to join the others at Kenniston's quarters amongst the shanties of the workmen in the Cove.

XIX.

That night, the rain, beating out its strong staccato rhythm on the old clapboards roofing the barn, made scant impression on Jasper Larrabee's senses; he slept soundly amongst the great elastic billows of the hay. As by degrees the downpour slackened, the comparative silence affected his half-dormant consciousness as sound had failed to do. He roused slightly from time to time, and presently was broad awake, to hear only the melancholy drip from the eaves and the chorus of far-away frogs beginning to pipe anew along the pools. He did not welcome his other self, that mysterious essence of thought and will that was torn with hopes and fed on regrets, and was prone to hold troublous disputations with yet another inner self, which on its part was always keen to find out every fault, to upbraid each cherished sin, and had an ugly trick of unmasking and setting in a strong unflattering light motives which might otherwise seem to be above suspicion. The humbler obvious entity known as Jasper Larrabee would, he often thought, be happier without so definite a development of either of these endowments, his mind or his conscience; for thus he learned from their functions to differentiate them. When this Jasper Larrabee was well fed, he was hearty and happy. The sun shone on him, and he sang till the woods rang. When he went down into the sunless depths of the Lost Time mine, every strong muscle rejoiced in the work, and his steady nerve, which is called courage, gave a zest to danger, whether the menace were of the law, or of the wild beast in the wilderness, or of the civilized savage amongst his own associates. If it had not been for his mind forever asking "Why?" and his conscience grimly protesting "Because," what a thriving, well-balanced physical organization Jasper Larrabee might have been! He knew others who were little more than body, who asked no questions and heard no answers; he held them far the happier for it, and he did not realize how much the duller. And so he hated the "Why?" and flinched from the "Because." And here they were in company, these choice spirits, in the suddenly silent midnight, with only the melancholy drip at long intervals from the eaves, the vague piping of frogs sounding afar off and failing again, and that strange preponderating sense of the proximity of the mountains although enshrouded and invisible in the mist. The sibilant rustle of the hay was loud in the stillness as he shifted his posture. He shifted it often, being anxious and restless, for his brace of companions were more censorious even than their wont as to that limited cheerful physique which he accounted Jasper Larrabee. He had had naught to eat but a few handfuls of grapes from the vines that clambered over the gable of the barn, and some unpalatable raw eggs found among the hay; and this fact of hunger gave a mighty grip to the poignancy of "Because." He had had naught to do all the long rainy day but to lie in the hay and look out through the crevices of the logs at the queer acorn-like roof of his mother's house, that had welcomed so many, and had no place now for him or for her. He watched with all the grief of an exile the children coming and going, and the gaunt Mrs. Timson wielding an unbridled authority, making the most of her usurpations; he heard, with the indignant objection that naturally appertains to the heir to the throne, her raucous raised voice in objurgation or command. Again and again these sounds came from the opaque blankness of the mist; for often the clouds obscured the little house altogether, and crowded through the crevices of the barn, and shifted back and forth. For the reason of the continuous fog he had delayed to inform the officer of the law and deliver Espey to him. Doubtless, in the idleness of his solitary day in the mine, Espey would be alert and hear an approach, and might escape through some aperture of the cavern other than the main entrance; the thick mists would then conceal him indubitably, and further his flight without the slightest scruple as to responsibility as accessory after the fact. Larrabee was waiting for the darkness that he might take Espey the more certainly, while his vigilance was relaxed in working at the forlorn enterprise of old Haight and his lieutenant "Tawm" in the mine. But in waiting Larrabee had fallen asleep, and the iteration of the steady rainfall was somnolent in its effects, and the hours drowsed by. He knew that it was past midnight before he noted the slant of a late-risen moon, golden, lustrous, dreamlike, softly shining through the crevices of the logs in one corner of the ramshackle old place. The sky was clearing, then. He rose hastily to his feet, and leaned out of the window. Clear! It was of a deeply limpid and definite blue, with white and gray clouds, moon-illumined, drawing back swiftly from vast expanses of this lucid ether all a-sparkle with the whiteness of the stars. With the dank earth so dark below, and the dully glamourous light of the moon in her last quarter, it seemed to him that he had never seen the stars so splendidly white. The next moment a sudden pang of suspense, of fear, that was like a bodily throe had wrested away his breath. He hardly realized that he had moved; he only knew that he had sprung down the rotting rungs of the old ladder and through the barn below, because he was standing outside the door upon the ground, gazing up, bareheaded, wild-eyed, in a frenzy of doubt, of anxiety, of a sort of unreasoning terror, at the skies. For the star--his star--was gone! It had vanished! Again and again, with the strong pulse of hope, he swept the heavens with eager search. Afterward he thought he remembered a dull leaden-hued minute object in the place of that splendid silver shining that had made his heart so glad. It had vanished,--its message withheld, its mystery unrevealed, like an illusion, like a fagged-out enthusiasm, like the futile words of a prayer without the fervor of faith. He could not believe it. Again and again he sought a new posture, a new hope. He followed its closer neighbors along the steeps of the mountain as they journeyed toward the west in the sky above. The tint of the heavens was changing presently,--a lighter blue. The golden moon grew of a pearl-like lustre. The stars waxed faint. The clouds were red. And here was the gray day hard upon him, and in the earth naught of value, for in the sky he had lost a star. How strong, how resistless of advance, was the riding up of the great sun! Get ye away, illusions, and glamours, and dreamers of dreams! Such a definite visible world! How full of fixed facts! He saw, as he stood, the shanties of the workmen in the Cove, where the mists were hustling off in great haste, as if too tenuous, too unsubstantial, too inutile, to hold ground in the face of the strong practicalities dawning over the horizon. The smoke was curling up from the chimney of Cap'n Lucy's cabin, where breakfast was cooking. The cows were at the bars. All the woods were lustrous with moisture, and splendidly a-glint with the yellow sunbeams striking aslant through them. The distant mountains were blue and amethyst and violet and purple,--a rhapsody of color. Here and there, as if the rain had painted them, boughs of sumach and sourwood were scarlet in the woods; the sweet-gum showed flecks of purple leaves, and the hickory had occasional flares of yellow. The goldenrod had burst into bloom, and with this seal of the autumnal season stamped upon the land came Julia along the road, her bonnet hanging on her shoulders, her head bare, her face like spring itself, her hands full of flowers that she scattered as she sang. How her fresh young voice rang against the turmoil of the current from the Lost Time mine, like some sudden burst of joy from out the fretted tides of a troubled life! As she tossed the flowers, and glanced over her shoulder to see where they fell, Larrabee crossed the log laid from one deeply gullied bank to the other side of the road, to serve foot passengers when the water was high in wet weather. She paused, and looked at him with a frown. The unwonted corrugations in her fair young brow changed her inexpressive face almost out of recognition. He stood in silent deprecation for a moment. His heart was sore. His life was full of trouble of many sorts and degrees. That æsthetic loss, that sense of bereavement because of his vanished star, outrankled them all.

Courage is of the nature of an essence; one may not judge how it will pull the beam, nor is it dispensed by dry measure. Something seemingly inadequate, a breath of wind, a change of mind, or the chilling of the fervors of some futile and foolish enthusiasm, and behold the volatile element is dispersed through the air. The strain on Larrabee's nerves had been great. His sensibilities had waxed tender. He faltered before the definite bending of those delicately marked brows.

"Ye air out betimes, Julia?" he ventured propitiatingly, as she stoutly maintained silence. "What be ye a-doin' of with them flowers?"

"Sowin' 'em," said Julia instantly. "I expec' 'em ter bloom thar in the road ter mo' purpose 'n they ever did afore."

He cast a glance of wonderment at her. But her unfriendly manner, her cold eye, disconcerted him afresh, and nullified his surprise at her words.

"Air you-uns mad at me down at yer house?" he demanded eagerly.

"What fur?" she asked, with a keen, belligerent look that was mightily like Cap'n Lucy.

"'Bout my speakin' so free 'bout Espey, an' Cap'n Lucy not warnin' me an' my mother, knowin' him ter be sought fur murder?"

"Oh!" she cried, with airy causticity. "I hed furgot it."

He felt the covert fleer of this speedy dismissal. But with him pride was at a low ebb. He silently looked at her as she held a cardinal flower to her red lips, while her long-lashed blue eyes scanned the dewy bunch of jewel-weed and mountain snow and wild asters that filled her hands. The wind swayed her dark blue skirt as she stood on a great fragment of rock beside the running stream. It gave a certain volant effect to her pose, her flower-laden hands, her singular beauty; she seemed the very genius of the flowering season, its perfect personification.

"Waal, I'm glad o' that," he said humbly. "I need all my friends, an' all the comfort I kin git."

He paused, daunted in a measure by her unresponsiveness. But she was always silent, always undemonstrative, and perhaps her manner in this instance went for less than its worth.

"Julia," he said, "I hev hed a powerful strange 'sperience lately. An' it hev cast me down mightily. Not religious,--though I expected suthin' leadin' an' speritual out'n it. I viewed a new star in the sky."

She was looking at the flowers on the soggy road as if she cared for no other radiance than their gleam of earthy hue, albeit an evanescent glow.

"Nobody but me viewed it," he went on after a moment of unfruitful expectation. "I tried other folks, an' they seen nuthin'. An' by that I 'lowed it hed some charge fur me, some leadin'. Stars hev been messengers afore this." He interposed this affirmation of precedent for proof. His senses were keen. He had not failed to note the ring of incredulity in Kenniston's voice. He paused, thinking again of the wise men of the East, and the blessed path to the cradled Christ as the Star guided them. He sighed deeply as he plucked off the yellow plumes of a wayside spray of goldenrod. The fragments floated away on the stream, and he drearily lifted his haggard eyes to the broad whiteness of the day brightening over all the purple mountains and bronze-green valleys; here all miracles exhaled with the mists of the night and the evanescence of the stars. The atmosphere of the practical, the prosaic, the recognized and thrice-tried forces of nature was paramount. Naught seemed to exist that man in his ignorant cognoscence had not explored. But he had expected no miracle; he had sought no wonderful worldly gifts or graces. True, the will of God is much to know, but he had thought that with so signal an intimation a leading might be vouchsafed. Had not other men followed a star to Christ? And was there naught for him, no little thing for him to do? Did that gracious supernal stellular presence shine on him, and him alone, only to amaze, to baffle, to dismay him,--to find his life but poorly furnished, and to leave it empty?

"I got no leadin' out'n it," he said drearily. "It jes' disappeared somehows. I dunno ef ez suddint ez it kem or no, bein' ez several nights war rainy and clouded over. It's gone!"

Something in his dreary tone smote upon Julia's preoccupied faculties. Whether she harbored rancor against him for Jack Espey's sake, whether she resented his criticism of her father, whether she repelled the intrusion of the consciousness of any other emotion than the paramount emotion which possessed her, and love crowded out and trampled on pity, she spoke with a keen fling of satire.

"Waal, ef yer star hev petered out, ye hed better go an' get Ad'licia ter hearten ye up by tellin' ye ter take notice how many stars thar be lef'. Ye'll be lighted full well on occasion."

He flushed at the taunt, but love is of long patience.

"Air ye mad at Ad'licia?" he queried, interested in aught that touched Julia.

"Naw--yes"--She hesitated, interested herself. "That is, I can't holp bein' mad with the idjit fur bein' _sech_ a idjit."

"How is she a idjit?" demanded Larrabee.

"Fur not marryin' Jack Espey whenst she hed the chance. Dad an' Luther would hev stood off Ross an' sech cattle, or gin bond fur him an' patched up things somehow. Ye know they would. Ef I hed been in her place, now, an' ef he hed axed _me_"--

She paused abruptly, with a sort of appalled recognition of the sentiment that animated her. A sudden illumination had broken in upon her; her heart throbbed tumultuously with pleasure, or was it pain? For she loved Jack Espey; and he--oh, was it true that he loved Adelicia still? She hardly heeded or realized her self-betrayal. She did not see--so little did she care--the pallid dismay, the heartbreak, on Jasper Larrabee's face. He could not deceive himself,--it was too patent. He turned away with a bitter sense of resentment, another grudge toward Jack Espey for thus slyly and completely supplanting him. At that moment his eye fell upon the jagged rock about the entrance of the Lost Time mine, and he drew back in amazement.

"Why, where does all this water come from?" he exclaimed sharply. He wondered that he had not marked it before, despite his preoccupation. For the flow of the stream was quadrupled, its momentum every instant greater. Naught could enter now. The interior must be flooded anew. As he gazed at it, wide-eyed and dumfounded, a sudden enlightenment as to the phenomenon broke upon him. The blasting which he had heard,--he remembered it now; doubtless the concussion had brought down some mass of rock or earth, damming an underground current, and forcing its waters into the channel of the stream which partially emptied here, while the residue backed up and filled the spaces. He thought that Espey and the old man and "Tawm" had possibly made good their escape before it happened; but if not--and Taft--He remembered how close were the ghostly voices when he had last heard the false, cracked tones of command ring through the tunnel. Those ill-timbered galleries would fall to a certainty. He turned pale at the very thought of a living burial in the den of the still-room.

He did not hesitate. Without a word he sprang upon the log, crossed the water, and sped away like the wind, leaving Julia gazing in astonishment after him. He thought his worst fears were realized, when he reached the store of the Lost Time mine. His hasty question elicited from the children only the fact of the absence of Taft and Copley. He ran down into the cellar, to find the obliteration of the traces of the old door, which he recognized only as an added precaution since his departure. Doubtless some other method of entering the tunnel had been devised. An axe hacking through the chinking served to reveal the ruin of the tunnel, and to admit a strong and pervasive odor of gunpowder.