Chapter 20

"Here is your conviction, Mr. Dyckman--the original leaves taken from those books when you had them re-bound. I need your statement of the facts for quite another purpose."

"And if I refuse to make it? A cornered rat will fight for his life, Mr. Gordon."

"If you refuse I shall be reluctantly compelled to hand these papers over to our attorneys--reluctantly, I say, because you can serve me better just now out of jail than in it."

Dyckman made a final attempt to gain fighting space.

"It's an unfair advantage you're taking; at the worst, I am only an accessory. My principals will be here in a few days, and--"

"Precisely," was the cold rejoinder. "It is because your principals are coming home, and because they are not yet here, that I want your statement. Oblige me, if you please; my time is limited this morning."

There was no help for it, or none apparent to the fear-stricken; and for the twenty succeeding minutes the type-writer clicked monotonously in the small ante-room. Dyckman could hear his persecutor pacing the floor of the private office, and once he found himself looking about him for a weapon. But at the end of the writing interval he was handing the freshly-typed sheet to a man who was yet alive and unhurt.

Gordon sat down at his desk to read it, and again the roving eyes of the bookkeeper swept the interior of the larger room for the means to an end; sought and found not.

The eye-search was not fully concluded when Gordon pressed the electric button which summoned the young man who kept the local books of the Chiawassee plant across the way. While he waited he saw the conclusion of the eye-search and smiled rather grimly.

"You'll not find it, Dyckman," he said, divining the desperate purpose of the other; adding, as an afterthought: "and if you should, you wouldn't have the courage to use it. That is the fatal lack in your makeup. It is what kept you from taking the train last night with the money belt which you emptied this morning. You'll never make a successful criminal; it takes a good deal more nerve than it does to be an honest man."

The bookkeeper was sliding lower in his chair.

"I--I believe you are the devil in human shape," he muttered; and then he made an addendum which was an unconscious slipping of the under-thought into words: "It's no crime to kill a devil."

Gordon smiled again. "None in the least,--only you want to make sure you have a silver bullet in the gun when you try it."

Hereupon the young man from the office across the pike came in, and Gordon handed a pen to Dyckman.

"I want you to witness Mr. Dyckman's signature to this paper, Dillard," he said, folding the confession so that it could not be read by the witness; and when the thing was done, the young man appended his notarial attestation and went back to his duties.

"Well?" said Dyckman, when they were once more alone together.

"That's all," said Gordon curtly. "As long as you are discreet, you needn't lose any sleep over this. If you don't mind hurrying a little, you can make the ten-forty back to town."

Dyckman restrapped his books and made a show of hastening. But before he closed the office door behind him he had seen Gordon place the type-written sheet, neatly folded, on top of the thick packet, snapping an elastic band over the whole and returning it to its pigeonhole in the small safe.

Later in the day, Tom crossed the pike to the oak-shingled office of the Chiawassee Consolidated. His father was deep in the new wage scale submitted by the miners' union, but he sat up and pushed the papers away when his son entered.

"Have you seen this morning's _Tribune_?" asked Tom, taking the paper from his pocket.

"No; I don't make out to find much time for it before I get home o' nights," said Caleb. "Anything doin'?"

"Yes; they are having a hot time in Chicago and Pullman. The strike is spreading all over the country on sympathy lines."

"Reckon it'll get down to us in any way?" queried the iron-master.

"You can't tell. I'd be a little easy with Ludlow and his outfit on that wage scale, if I were you."

"I don't like to be scared into doin' a thing."

"No; but we don't want a row on our hands just now. Farley might make capital out of it."

Caleb nodded. Then he said: "Didn't I see Dyckman comin' out of your shanty 'long about eleven o'clock?"

"Yes; he came out to do me a little favor, and it went mighty near to making him sweat blood. Shall you need me any more to-day?"

"No, I reckon not. Goin' away?"

"I'm going to town on the five-ten, and I may not be back till late."

Tom's business in South Tredegar was unimportant. There was a word or two to be said personally in the ear of Hanchett, the senior member of the firm of attorneys intrusted with the legal concernments of Gordon and Gordon, and afterward a solitary dinner at the Marlboro. But the real object of the town trip disclosed itself when he took an electric car for the foot of Lebanon on the line connecting with the inclined railway running up the mountain to Crestcliffe Inn. He had not seen Ardea since the midwinter night of soul-awakenings; and Alecto's finger was still pressing on the wound inflicted by the closed doors of Mountain View Avenue and his father's misdirected sympathy.

He found Major Dabney smoking on the hotel veranda, and his welcome was not scanted here, at least. There was a vacant chair beside the Major's and the Major's pocket case of long cheroots was instantly forthcoming. Would not the returned Bachelor of Science sit and smoke and tell an old man what was going on in the young and lusty world beyond the mountain-girt horizons?

Tom did all three. His boyish awe for the old autocrat of Paradise had mellowed into an affection that was almost filial, and there was plenty to talk about: the final dash in the technical school; the outlook in the broader world; the great strike which was filling all mouths; the business prospects for Chiawassee Consolidated.

The moment being auspicious, Tom sounded the master of the Deer Trace coal lands on the reorganization scheme, and found nothing but complaisance. Whatever rearrangement commended itself to Tom and his father, and to Colonel Duxbury Farley, would be acceptable to the Major.

"I reckon I can trust you, Tom, and my ve'y good friend, youh fatheh, to watch out for Ardea's little fo'tune," was the way he put it. "I haven't so ve'y much longeh to stay in Paradise," he went on, with a silent little chuckle for the grim pun, "and what I've got goes to her, as a matteh of cou'se." Then he added a word that set Tom to thinking hard. "I had planned to give her a little suhprise on her wedding-day: suppose you have the lawyehs make out that block of new stock to Mistress Vincent Farley instead of to me?"

Tom's hard thinking crystallized into a guarded query.

"Of course, Major Dabney, if you say so. But wouldn't it be more prudent to make it over in trust for her and her children before she becomes Mrs. Farley?"

The piercing Dabney eyes were on him, and the fierce white mustaches took the militant angle.

"Tell me, Tom, have you had _youh_ suspicions in that qua'teh, too? I'm speaking in confidence to a family friend, suh."

"It is just as well to be on the safe side," said Tom evasively. There was enough of the uplift left to make him reluctant to strike his enemy in the dark.

"No, suh, that isn't what I mean. You've had youh suspicions aroused. Tell me, suh, what they are."

"Suppose you tell me yours, Major," smiled the younger man.

Major Dabney became reflectively reminiscent. "I don't know, Tom, and that's the plain fact. Looking back oveh ouh acquaintance, thah's nothing in that young man for me to put a fingeh on; but, Tom, I tell you in confidence, suh, I'd give five yeahs of my old life, if the good Lord has that many mo' in His book for me, if the blood of the Dabneys didn't have to be--uh--mingled with that of these heah damned Yankees. I would, for a fact, suh!"

Tom rose and flung away the stub of his third cheroot.

"Then you'll let me place your third of the new stock in trust for her and her children?" he said. "That will be best, on all accounts. By the way, where shall I find Miss Ardea?"

"She's about the place, somewhahs," was the reply; and Tom passed on to the electric-lighted lobby to send his card in search of her.

Chance saved him the trouble. Some one was playing in the music-room and he recognized her touch and turned aside to stand under the looped portières. She was alone, and again, as many times before, it came on him with the sense of discovery that she was radiantly beautiful--that for him she had no peer among women.

It was the score of a Bach fugue that stood on the music-rack, and she was oblivious to everything else until her fingers had found and struck the final chords. Then she looked up and saw him.

There was no greeting, no welcoming light in the slate-blue eyes; and she did not seem to see when he came nearer and offered to shake hands.

"I've been talking to your grandfather for an hour or more," he began, "and I was just going to send my card after you. Haven't you a word of welcome for me, Ardea?"

Her eyes were holding him at arm's length.

"Do you think you deserve a welcome from any self-respecting woman?" she asked in low tones.

His smile became a scowl--the anger scowl of the Gordons.

"Why shouldn't I?" he demanded. "What have I done to make every woman I meet look at me as if I were a leper?"

She rose from the piano-stool and confronted him bravely. It was now or never, if their future attitude each to the other was to be succinctly defined.

"You know very well what you have done," she said evenly. "If you had a spark of manhood left in you, you would know what a dastardly thing you are doing now in coming here to see me."

"Well, I don't," he returned doggedly. "And another thing: I'm not to be put off with hard words. I ask you again what has happened? Who has been lying about me this time?"

Three other guests of the hotel were entering the music-room and the quarrel had to pause. Ardea had a nerve-shaking conviction that it would never do to leave it in the air. He must be made to understand, once for all, that he had sinned beyond forgiveness. She caught up the light wrap she had been wearing earlier in the evening and turned to one of the windows opening on the rear veranda. "Come with me," she whispered; and he followed obediently.

But there was no privacy to be had out of doors. There was a goodly scattering of people in the veranda chairs enjoying the perfect night and the white moonlight. Ardea stopped suddenly.

"You were intending to walk down to the valley?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I will walk with you to the cliff edge."

It was a short hundred yards, and there were many abroad in the graveled walks: lovers in pairs, and groups of young people pensive or chattering. So it was not until they stood on the very battlements of the western cliff that they were measurably alone.

"Has no one told you what happened last March--on the day of the ice storm?" she asked coldly.

"No."

"Don't you know it without being told?"

"Of course, I don't; why should I?"

His angry impassiveness shook her resolution. It seemed incredible that the most accomplished dissembler could rise to such supreme heights of seeming.

"I used to think I knew you," she said, faltering, "but I don't. Why don't you despise hypocrisy and double-dealing as you used to?"

"I do; more heartily than ever."

"Yet, in spite of that, you have--oh, it is perfectly unspeakable!"

"I am taking your word for it," he rejoined gloomily. "You are denying me what the most wretched criminal is taught to believe is his right--to know what he is accused of."

"Have you forgotten that night last winter when you--when I saw you at the gate with Nancy Bryerson?"

"I'm not likely to forget it."

She seized her courage and held it fast, putting maidenly shame to the wall.

"Tom, it is a terrible thing to say--and your punishment will be terrible. _But you must marry Nancy!_"

"And father another man's child?--not much!" he answered brutally.

"And father your own children--two of them," she said, with bitter emphasis.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" he said, with a deeper scowl. "So there are two of them, are there? That's why no woman in Mr. Farley's country colony is at home to me any more, I suppose." And then, still more bitterly: "Of course, you are all sure of this?--Nan has at last confessed that I am the guilty man?"

"You know she has not, Tom. Her loyalty is still as strong and true at it is mistaken. But your duty remains."

He was standing on the brink of the cliff, looking down on Paradise Valley, spread like a silver-etched map far below in the moonlight. The flare and sough of the furnace at the iron-works came and went with regular intermittency; and just beyond the group of Chiawassee stacks a tiny orange spot appeared and disappeared like a will-o'-the-wisp. He was staring down at the curious spot when he said:

"If I say that I have no duty toward Nan, you will believe it is a lie--as you did once before. Have you ever reflected that it is possible to trample on love until it dies--even such love as I bear you?"

"It is a shame for you to speak of such things to me, Tom. Consider what I have endured--what you have made me endure. People said I was standing by you, condoning a sin that no right-minded young woman should condone. I bore it because I thought, I believed, you were sorry. And at that very time you were deceiving me--deceiving every one. You have dragged me in the very dust of shame!"

"There is no shame save what we make for ourselves," he retorted. "One day, according to your creed, we shall stand naked before your God, and before each other. In that day you will know what you have done to me to-night. No, don't speak, please; let me finish. The last time we were together you gave me a strong word, and--and you kissed me. For the sake of that word and that kiss I went out into the world a different man. For the little fragment of your love that you gave me then, I have lived a different man from that day to this. Now you shall see what I shall be without it."

Before he had finished she had turned from him gasping, choking, strangling in the grip of a mighty passion, new-born and yet not new. With the suddenness of a revealing flash of lightning she understood; knew that she loved him, that she had been loving him from childhood, not because, but in spite of everything, as he had once defined love. It was terrible, heartbreaking, soul-destroying. She called on shame for help, but shame had fled. She was cold with a horrible fear lest he should find out and she should be for ever lost in the bottomless pit of humiliation.

It was the sight of the little orange-colored spot glowing and growing beyond the Chiawassee chimneys that saved her.

"Look!" she cried. "Isn't that a fire down in the valley just across the pike from the furnace? It _is_ a fire!"

He made a field-glass of his hands and looked long and steadily.

"You are quite right," he said coolly. "It's my foundry. Can you get back to the hotel alone? If you can, I'll take the short cut down through the woods. Good night, and--good-by." And before she could reply, he had lowered himself over the cliff's edge and was crashing through the underbrush on the slopes below.

XXIX

AS BRUTES THAT PERISH

It was the office building of the pipe foundry that burned on the night of July fifteenth, and the fire was incendiary. Suspicion, put on the scent by the night-watchman's story, pointed to Tike Bryerson as the criminal. The old moonshiner, in the bickering stage of intoxication, had been seen hanging about the new plant during the day, and had made vague threats in the hearing of various ears in Gordonia.

Wherefore the small world of Paradise and its environs looked to see a warrant sworn out for the mountaineer's arrest; and when nothing was done, gossip reawakened to say that Tom Gordon did not dare to prosecute; that Bryerson's crime was a bit of wild justice, so recognized by the man whose duty it was to invoke the law.

It was remarked, also, that neither of the Gordons had anything to say, and that an air of mystery enveloped the little that they did. The small wooden office building was a total loss, but the night shift at the Chiawassee had saved most of the contents; everything of value except the small iron safe which had stood behind the manager's desk in the private office. The safe, as the onlookers observed, was taken from the debris and conveyed, unopened, across the road to the Chiawassee laboratory and yard office. Whether or not its keepings were destroyed by the fire, was known only to the younger Gordon, who, as the foreman of the Chiawassee night shift informed a _Tribune_ reporter, had broken it open himself, deep in the small hours of the night following the fire, and behind the locked door of the furnace laboratory.

At another moment South Tredegar newspaperdom might have made something of the little mystery. But there were more exciting topics to the fore. The great strike, with Chicago and Pullman as its storm-centers, was gripping the land in its frenzied fist, and the press despatches were greedy of space. Hence, young Gordon was suffered to open his safe in mysterious secrecy; to rebuild his burned office; and to let the incendiary, sufficiently identified by the watchman, it was believed, go scot-free.

With the greater land-wide interest to divert it, even Paradise failed to note the curious change that had come over the younger of the Gordons, dating from the night of burnings. But the few who came in contact with him in the business day saw and felt it. Miss Ackerman, the pipe-works stenographer, quit when her week was up. It was nothing that the young manager had said or done; but, as she confided to her sister, more fortunately situated in town, it was like being caged with a living threat. Even Norman, the trusted lieutenant, was cut out of his employer's confidence; and for hours on end in the business day the card "Not in" would be displayed on the glass-paneled door of the private room in the rebuilt office.

Not to make a mystery of it for ourselves, Tom had passed another milestone in the descent to the valley of lost souls. Or rather, let us say, he had taken a longer step backward toward the primitive. Daggered _amour-propre_ is rarely a benign wound. Oftener than not it gangrenes, and there is loss of sound tissue and the setting-up of strange and malevolent growth. With the passing of the first healthful shock of honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab dealt with Amasa became the one thing worth living for.

The first step was taken in secrecy. One day a stranger, purporting to be a walking delegate for the United Miners, but repudiated as such by check-weigher Ludlow, took up his residence in Gordonia and began to interest himself, quite unminer-like, in the various mechanical appliances of the Chiawassee plant, and particularly in the different sources of its water supply.

Divested of his cloakings, this sham walking delegate was a Pinkerton man, detailed grudgingly from the Chicago storm-center on Tom's requisition. His task was to scrutinize Nancy Bryerson's past, and to identify, if possible, one or more of the three men who, in January of the year 1890, had inspected and repaired the pipe-line running from the coke-yard tank up to the barrel-spring on high Lebanon.

To the detective the exclusion card on Tom's door did not apply, and the conferences between the hired and the hirer were frequent and prolonged. If we shall overhear one of them--the final one, held on the day of the Farleys' return to Paradise and Warwick Lodge--it will suffice.

"It looks easy enough, as you say, Mr. Gordon," the human ferret is explaining; "but in point of fact there's nothing to work on--less than nothing. Three years ago you had no regular repair gang, and when a job of that kind was to be done, any Tom, Dick or Harry picked up a helper or two and did it. But I think you can bet on one thing: none of the three men who made that inspection is at present in your employ."

"In other words, you'd like to get back to your job at Pullman," snaps Tom.

"Oh, I ain't in any hurry! That job looks as if it would keep for a while longer. But I don't like to take a man's good money for nothing; and that's about what I'm doing here."

Tom swings around to his desk and writes a check.

"I suppose you have no further report to make on the woman?"

"Nothing of any importance. I told you where she is living--in a little cabin up on the mountain in a settlement called Pine Knob."

"Yes; but I found that out for myself."

"So you did. Well, she's living straight, as far as anybody knows; and if you can believe what you hear, the only follower she ever had was a young mountaineer named Kincaid. I looked him up; he's been gone from these parts for something over three years. He is ranching in Indian Territory, and only came back last week. You can check him off your list."

"He was never on, and I have no list," says the manhunter grittingly. "But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Beckham," passing the signed check to the other, "I shall begin where you leave off, and end by finding my man."

"I hope you do, I'm sure," says the Pinkerton, moved by the liberal figure of the check. "And if there's anything more the Agency can do--"

In the afternoon of the same day, when the self-dismissed detective was speeding northward toward Chicago and the car-burners, Tom saddled the bay and rode long and hard over a bad mountain cart track to the hamlet of Pine Knob. It was a measure of his abandonment that he was breaking his promise to Ardea; and another of his reckless singleness of purpose that he rode brazenly through the little settlement to Nan's door, dismounted and entered as if he had right.

The cabin was untenanted, but he found Nan sitting on the slab step of a rude porch at the back, nursing her child. She greeted him without rising, and her eyes were downcast.

"I've come for justice, Nan," he said, without preface, seating himself on the end of the step and flicking the dust from his leggings with his riding-crop. "You know what they're saying about us--about you and me. I want to know who to thank for it: what is the man's name?"

She did not reply at once, and when she lifted the dark eyes to his they were full of suffering, like those of an animal under the lash.

"I nev' said hit was you," she averred, after a time.

"No; but you might as well. Everybody believes it, and you haven't denied it. Who is the man?"

"I cayn't tell," she said simply.

"You mean you won't tell."

"No, I cayn't; I'm livin' on his money, Tom-Jeff."

"No, you are not. What makes you say that?"

"She told me I was."

"Who? Miss Dabney?"

Her nod was affirmative, and he went on: "Tell me just what she said; word for word, if you can remember."

The answer came brokenly.

"I was ashamed--you don't believe hit, but hit's so. I allowed it was _her_ money. When I made out like I'd run off, she said, 'No; it's his money 'at's bein' spent for you, and you have a right to it.'"

Tom was silent for a time; then he said the other necessary word.

"She believes I am the man who wronged you, Nan. It was my money."

The woman half rose and then sat down again, rocking the child in her arms.

"You're lyin' to me, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Hit's on'y a lie to make me tell!" she panted.

"No, it's the truth. I was sorry for you and helped you because--well, because of the old times. But everybody has misunderstood, even Miss Dabney."