Part 24
Lorenzo Taft's plans were very perfectly calculated and adjusted to the probabilities. There had been no rift in his judgment. Nowhere could he find fault or flaw in his reasoning. A lucky chance had fired the hotel, and freed his hands from the smirch of the firebrand and the possible penalties of arson. The moving of the great monument of boundary had thrown the only available site for the hotel on the Kenniston tract well within Cap'n Lucy's lines when the land was processioned, and thus the summer swallow must needs alight elsewhere, and the commercial interests of moonshining would thereby be promoted. Each detail had fallen out exactly as he had planned. Success seemed the essential sequence. Only Espey's frantic fear of arrest had precipitated all the untoward events which had advanced parallel after parallel, and forced him to his last defenses. And these one might think were most sagacious and adequate. The foolish drunken boy, whose tongue might work mischief, was within the hour hustled out of the country. Every trace of the forbidden vocation was demolished beyond the possibility of detection. If Larrabee should seek revenge by informing, he could prove naught, not even his own complicity. It would seem but the groundless accusation of malice. And Taft had even taken time by the forelock by avowing his former illegal practices, his prison record, his familiarity with the motives and manœuvres of moonshiners, and insidiously casting suspicion on Larrabee, ascribing to him an adequate motive for moving the Big Hollow Boulder, in the eyes of the law a felony.
No possible flaw in his reasoning from the premises from which he argued. He had guarded himself logically, boldly, with great perspicacity, from enmity, from revenge. It never for one moment occurred to him to devise protection from good will!
Kenniston and Ross, even in the excitement of the emergency, and the tumultuous tide of Larrabee's eager explanations when he suddenly burst in upon them as they sat smoking together after breakfast, could but take heed of the subtler sub-current of significance in his disclosure. More than once they exchanged glances charged with a meaning deeper than he wot of.
"Thar's a shaft," he cried, "an old air-shaft, a-nigh that thar tunnel! Ef ye'll rig up a windlass, or let yer men put me down with a rope, I'll find Taft, an' the t'others too, ef they be thar yit."
"You'll drown yourself, or fall, or suffocate with gas," Kenniston said tentatively, looking about for his hat, and pausing to cast a keen glance at Larrabee.
"I'll resk it--I'll resk it--fur him and Espey too--an' I dunno what my mother would do ef old grand-daddy Haight war ter kem ter sech an e-end! Oh, I'll resk it! An' Taft, he ain't a bad man when all's said. Taft's mighty clever sometimes."
"I think he's the worst man I ever saw," said Kenniston, as he flung away his cigar.
A call for volunteers and the offer of a reward by Kenniston secured no companion to Larrabee in his venture when the workmen looked down into the dark shaft, with its crumbling sides, and sound of tumbling waters, and chill dank foul breath. They only manifested their good will in their alacrity in adjusting and adapting such appliances as they could to insure Larrabee's safety as far as possible. Kenniston doubted at the time whether he ought to permit the jeopardy; being assured, however, that the effort would be made at all events, but without the advantage of the heavy cables and pulleys which had been used in building the hotel, and which his compliance offered, he yielded. Afterward he was disposed to take great credit to himself for several devices which facilitated the enterprise, and from his knowledge of mechanical resources he doubtless insured its success; he bore the honors of the rescue,--which Larrabee at the peril of his life achieved,--with all the unblushing effrontery of an officer whose command has won a battle.
He was in a glow of enthusiasm for the nonce, and he continued the rôle of benefactor with more genuine pleasure than had lately fallen to his jaded susceptibility. He placed eighty-seven silver dollars in a worn leather bag, a tobacco pouch of one of the workmen, to be given to old Haight when he should be sufficiently recovered, with the pious fiction that his own money had been found in the shaft. "This will keep the old mole from burrowing again," he said.
His abounding good nature was very thorough when once aroused. His heart was touched by Espey's forlorn plight, as he lay panting on the grass, and the pallor of his young face marked by the dread of life that had just succeeded the dread of death.
"Can't you make out to let up on Espey, somehow?" he said aside to Rodolphus Ross, whose clumsy pranks of delight at the successful outcome of this most exciting episode were like the extravagant joviality of a gamboling Newfoundland dog, and not unpleasing to his interlocutor from their common bond of sympathy.
"Who? Espey?" He paused, turning his lighted dark eyes on Kenniston, his peaked hat shading his elevated eyebrows and surprised face. "I ain't hyar arter Espey no more. I'm arter the fire-bug, ye know. That thar man ez Espey shot in Tanglefoot Cove hev got well o' the pip, or the gapes, or whatever the weak-kneed chicken took from the bullet; an' this hyar warrant fur arrest hev been kerried round in my pocket till it's mighty nigh wore out." He took the ragged paper from his pocket and shook out its tatters, and laughed and grimaced in the very face of its august authority. "Go on, boy, go on! I wouldn't put the county ter charges ter board ye!" he said to Espey.
A supply of whiskey was on hand, for the ostensible purpose of reviving the victims of the Lost Time mine, as they were drawn up one by one from those treacherous depths, limp and pallid and fainting. But the quantity was sufficient to enable the company of rescuers subsequently to refresh themselves, and Kenniston genially treated the crowd. Some of the men now and then began to coil up the ropes, and again fell to discussing the jeopardy and the disastrous possibilities; and much hilarity and gratulation prevailed amongst the group in the dewy woods, still filled with the slant of the early morning sunshine, when Espey slipped away from it. His heart was still sore, as if it had forgotten to beat except with a dull throb of pain, unrealizing his change of fortune except to sullenly rebel against all the unnecessary woe that had fallen to his lot. As he went along the road, he scarcely noted a flower here and there on the soggy ground. The dash and fret of the stream from the portal of the Lost Time mine caught his attention. He marked its added volume, and, with his familiarity with the terrible subterranean chambers, he could picture to himself the obstacles which lay in its course, and which the blasting from the tunnel or the still-room had brought down. He trembled and grew cold with the thought of his jeopardy. He mechanically cursed anew Taft's name, as he had done again and again since his voice, his "partin' compliments," had been audible before the charge in the tunnel had been fired. He shuddered again as he recalled the sound of the water backing up ever higher and higher through those black dungeons, lisping and hissing its insidious threat through all the long night. How woeful it had been--with the wild terror of his companions to contemplate, till he was as wild with the terror of them as of his own fate--to look momently to meet death here, without a soul on earth to truly care, to anguish for him as he was anguished--He paused, the tenor of his thought breaking abruptly. Had he seen it before, or had he only fancied that cardinal flower lying in the sun on the gray rock by the water? Was it not thus that he should know that Julia had passed and had thought of him,--was not this their covenant? He doubtfully picked up the delicate spray--another; still, it might be an accident, a coincidence. A cluster of jewel-weeds lay caught in the bark of the log that served as footbridge, and swayed and glowed in the sun; it was in his hand when he reached the further bank. As far as one might hope to command a glimpse from the mine, the fragile tokens were scattered. They were full of dew; their breath allured him. They trembled as with some shy, timorous thought in his trembling hand. The color had come into his face; a light was in his eyes; his tired, troubled pulses were beating fast, strong, with a new rhythm. And as Julia, still loitering homeward, her head bare, her hands empty, heard a footstep behind her and turned, she saw him, all her garnered blossoms in his grasp, and all his heart in his eyes.
* * * * *
Kenniston, still elated, but somewhat tired out with the morning's excitements, upon reaching his quarters among the workmen's shanties, found Cap'n Lucy there awaiting an audience, and all unaware of the progress of events of so much moment elsewhere to-day. A rousing "cock-a-doodle-doo" might be a fair summary of Cap'n Lucy's discourse. His perplexities had vanished with the tangled twists of the rain, and he set forth boldly and with much detail his discovery of the moving of the boulder, the corner monument of boundary, his anxiety and doubt as to his proper course, and his realization that the surveyor's line had thrown much land which he knew was Kenniston's within his own domain.
A man of tact was Cap'n Lucy in his own way. He so glossed over his suspicions of Kenniston that albeit the latter detected them rather through the correlated circumstances than through the veneer of that section of his mind which it pleased Cap'n Lucy to present, he did not look upon them seriously. He was a stranger; the old man was densely ignorant, and his experience of life and comparative knowledge of men were limited indeed; and in truth it was apparently impossible to deduce from the facts any other interest than Kenniston's to be served by the moving of the boulder. Thus he silently forgave Cap'n Lucy for his suspected suspicions.
And Cap'n Lucy was heartily ashamed of them now.
"I know it air moved bodaciously--Big Hollow Boulder--corner mark--monimint o' boundary; an' now what air ye an' me goin' ter do 'bout that thar dad-burned line what's gone an' coiled itself like the plumb old Scorpion o' the Pit?"
"Procession the land again, and prosecute the man who moved the boulder," said Kenniston coolly.
And indeed justice had hardily overtaken Lorenzo Taft, for Kenniston's unwonted leniency did not hold out to include his offending. It seemed to him a very pretty play of cause and effect that so close upon the heels of Taft's accusations of Larrabee, and his subtle and successful hoodwinking of the practiced man of business, who made a point of knowing men, Taft should be hurrying to Colbury and the county jail, under the escort of the jubilant Rodolphus Ross and a posse of two or three stout fellows, to answer these very charges of arson and of feloniously moving a corner monument of boundary,--all because of Larrabee's voluntarily putting his life in jeopardy for his sake.
Nevertheless, Kenniston listened mildly enough to Adelicia's earnest intercessions for Taft that evening, when he sat as of yore with the family circle around Cap'n Lucy's fireside; he seemed to find a certain fascination in the incongruities of her ingenious palliations and extenuations of his crime.
"He moughtn't hev been acquainted with the boulder ez a monimint o' boundary," she urged; and when the fallacy of this was demonstrated, "He mought hev been sorry an' wanted to put it back, but it war too heavy an' the hill war too high."
Whereupon Kenniston burst into satiric laughter.
"He's sorry enough now, I'll warrant you; and he'll be sorrier still before I'm through with him."
But although Adelicia's expertness in excuses for other people failed in this instance, Kenniston's purposes were frustrated by a wholesale jail delivery which occurred at Colbury shortly after, and Taft was among the jail-birds who took flight thence. He was never heard of again in the Cove. The thought of him at large and at enmity served to postpone the building of the hotel for a time. The plans for a great public edifice in Bretonville absorbed Kenniston in the immediate future, and finally he grew indifferent to the project of the mountain resort, and it was definitely abandoned.
Larrabee profited by Kenniston's advice, and availed himself of the "amnesty" proffered by the government to moonshiners about that time, and thenceforward the still knew him no more. The manufacture of "brush whiskey" was never resumed at the Lost Time mine. The store there became truly a centre of barter under the ministrations of old Copley and the power behind the throne, his niece, Cornelia Taft, who developed much of her father's decision and definiteness and shrewdness of character as she grew older, always tempered by Mrs. Jiniway's precepts, to which she rigidly adhered. She received much countenance, and guidance too, in these early years, from Adelicia, who persisted in following the bent of her own lenient inclination toward others, making the most of their good qualities and light of their foibles. It was a certain solace in the bitter loss of other illusions for which she was less charitable. She never could be brought to believe that Julia had not intentionally wiled her lover's heart away from her. It was a relief when these strained relations were at an end, when Julia and Espey were married, in defiance of Cap'n Lucy's opposition, and had gone to Tanglefoot Cove. Cap'n Lucy argued their much-mooted points of difference with Adelicia less than before, and deferred in silence to her. It was only when, in the winter evenings, Jasper Larrabee was wont to come and read aloud, as in the old days, that Cap'n Lucy rose to his normal temperature of contradiction, and controverted sundry hard sayings difficult to be incorporated in the life of a willful man, and contemned Jasper Larrabee's learning, and accused him of ignorantly perverting the Scriptures. Then it was that Adelicia's talents of optimism became transcendently apparent. She developed a wonderful craft of interpretation. Leaning over one arm of Cap'n Lucy's chair, while Jasper Larrabee leaned over the other with his book and page to show,--Cap'n Lucy, flustered and red-faced, acrid and belligerent, vociferating between them,--Adelicia would demonstrate that this doubtless meant the other, or it was plain to see that the reference was not general, thus including Cap'n Lucy, but was made directly to the character under discussion; whereby Cap'n Lucy, perceiving that no added burden of meekness or other Christian grace was to be laid upon him as essential to salvation, would permit himself to be pacified. And Adelicia's gifts grew by much exercise. Even Cap'n Lucy, always acute, became reluctantly aware of this, in some sort. "Ad'licia hav got so durned smart she kin mighty nigh explain away the devil," he fretted, unaware that this feat had already been accomplished by other and more pretentious theologians than Adelicia. The gossips said, in the Cove, that it was in the process of trying to "'square' Cap'n Lucy to the Scriptur's, or ter square the Scriptur's ter Cap'n Lucy," that Adelicia and Jasper fell in love with each other. Certain it is the days came in which neither had aught to regret, and Adelicia's optimism was triumphantly justified.
Even his vanished star came to be a tender memory to Larrabee rather than a poignant bereavement. Sometimes thinking of that dread descent into the crumbling old shaft of the Lost Time mine, with the chill sound of the tumbling waters below, the thick foul air in his every breath, the desperate straining of the ropes that so shook his nerves, the fragments of rock falling about his head, and his heart fairly failing him for fear, he deemed he had found the "leading" he had asked and had followed it. For since he could do naught for Christ, whose humble humanity is merged in the majesty of the great King of heaven, he might do somewhat for man whom He died to save.
He did not know that his star remained for a time a faint telescopic object and interested the speculation of astronomers, whose outlook from their wisdom was also limited as his from his ignorance. They merely accounted it one of those mysterious, unwonted apparitions, a stranger to all the astral hierarchy, prettily called "guest-stars" in the ancient Chinese records, and they knew after a time that the "Ke-sing dissolved." They did not dream that this celestial visitant could be charged with a moral mission; for in all the discoveries and advances of science, what mystic lens might serve to reveal the amaranthine wreath and the nearing pinion?
* * * * *
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