His Vanished Star

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, as 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 for a law-abiding occupation than a fox or a wolf. 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 reestablish 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 old 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 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 preempt 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 reestablishment 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 discouraging the advent into the Cove of strangers, 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 deus ex machina 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 spot, 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. There was a northwesterly 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 Captain Lucy’s cabin porch. A simple scheme enough, this, — that the one available site for the hotel should he thrown within the boundaries of Captain Lucy, who would not bargain, sell, or convey, and that thus the ill-omened caravansary should be 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 Captain 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. Captain Lucy was in possession, doubtless, of many hundred acres of Kenniston’s land. Now he grudged them to 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. Captain Lucy’s causticity, his arrogance, his insulting courage which belittled the possibilities of another man’s wrath, his intrencliment in the subservience of his household, and his preeminence 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 suddenly, 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 Captain 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 ole 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 interest. 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 and the gray rain and the grayer mist and the ochreous pools of water, seeing naught else till this massive equestrian figure took form and seemed to ride straight out of it all. 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. It might seem righteousness to cuff him. 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, his prominent front teeth appearing 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.

“ Cornsider’ble failin’ weather,” admitted Taft incidentally, and, seating himself in the chair indicated by Kenniston, he proceeded to take part in the conversation, his big booming voice rendering interruption impossible save as he listed.

“ I hev viewed you-uns afore at ole Cap’n Lucy Tems’s house,” he said to Kenniston, crossing his legs, and eying the steam casually as it rose from the damp boots under the persuasive heat of the stove. “Yes, sir, Taft is my name.”

“ I remember you very well,” replied Kenniston affably. “ Won’t you light your pipe ? ” He pushed a match holder and tobacco pouch across the table to him.

Taft, without comment, filled his pipe from an inexhaustible supply of tobacco that seemed always loose in his pocket; it was far stronger than that of his host, as the rank odor which rose on the air presently demonstrated. Rodolphus Ross had looked at him with a grin of hopeful anticipation, which shrunk at once when he recognized and adapted to his own needs the uses of the lucifer match.

“ Yes, sir,” Taft resumed, “ I war toler’ble sorry ter hear ’bout’n yer hotel bein’ burnt. I did n’t view it at the time.” He puffed the coals into a glow, and pulled away comfortably.

“ Meanes’ people on yearth, these liyar mountaineers ! ” cried Ross. “ They jes’ so durned ignorant they don’t know sin from salvation, nor law from lying.”

“ Then they ain’t ’sponsible,” remarked Taft coolly. He pressed down the burning tobacco in the bowl with a callous forefinger indurated by long practice to crowding his pipe, and resumed: “ I ’lowed it mought gin ye a start ef I war ter tell ye I hearn sev’ral men talkin’ ’boutburnin’ it, — longtime ago, ’fore it war begun.”

Kenniston was leaning back in his chair, much at his ease, noting with a sort of languid interest the intimations of force and ferocity in his visitor’s face: the keen sagacity, as rather the instinctive endowment of one of the lower orders of creation than belonging to an enlightened intelligence ; the beaklike nose ; the contradictory geniality of the full blue eye and broad floridity. He brought his tilted chair suddenly to the floor, leaned forward on the table, and barely caught himself in time to repress an exclusive gesture toward Rodolphus Ross, which, although it escaped that worthy, caused Taft a sharp regret for his precipitancy, and gave him a clue for the future.

The deputy sheriff was all a-clamor.

“ Why, now, my big bull o’ Baslian, ye hev got ter make that statement under oath with full partic’lars, — names, dates, and place ! ” He rose up on the opposite side of the monkey stove, with the lifter in his hand, with which he gesticulated imperatively.

Kenniston could hardly restrain his impatience.

“ Of course, Mr. Ross, of course, — all in due season,” he said irritably.

“ But abuse the authorities, in season an’ out, an’ ’low the devil will ketch the officer, in due course o’ jestice, ’fore the officer ’ll ketch the malefactor. I ain’t a-goin’ ter lose you, Mr. Durham, ye bet high on that! ” he added, turning to Taft.

“Mr. Taft expects to swear to the facts, of course,” said Kenniston. He paused abruptly, meditating a remonstrance with the tumultuous brute; but Ross’s very vulgarity, his clamorous brutality, the impossibility of reaching through his hardened exterior any sensitiveness, or pride, or sense of decorum, or whatever sanction may control the heart of a man who is a gentleman in jeans, gave him an advantage over a man of breeding which no culture could compass. Kenniston could not cope with him; his training had prepared him for no such encounter.

Only Taft’s great sonorous voice could overbear the deputy’s words, which sounded in his first utterance with the disjointed effect of Christmas firecrackers enlivening the booming of Christmas guns.

“ I ’ll make oath ter statements ez ter date an’ person, but not place, — I hev no call ter drag other folks inter sech. I dunno ez they fired the hotel; I only heard ’em threat it.

“ But why ? ” demanded Kenniston eagerly.

“ Deviltry, — deviltry, o’ course,” protested Ross. He had contrived to smirch his face in the careless handling of the poker of the monkey stove, which added a certain grotesque effect to his appearance, if one were in the mood to be amused by it.

Kenniston’s mood was far from such influences.

“ I must ask you to be quiet, sir,” he said, with acridity.

“ Ye must ? ” sneered Rodolphus Ross. “ An’ who war that ez ’lowed ef the local force war so ‘torpid,’ — torpid, ye hed it, — ye’d hev up private detectives from Bretonville ter settle the hash o’ these kentry varmints ? ”

He threw up his eyebrows almost to the smirches obliquely laid across his forehead, laughed with a gleam of white teeth and an intent widening of the dark eyes, the whole facial expression gone in an instant.

“Waal, we ain’t ‘torpid’ no longer.

‘ Wake up, snakes ! ’ Now, ole buck, answer my questions, an’ tell me why they war n’t willin’ ter let Mr. Kenniston build his hotel in the Cove.”

Kenniston folded his arms as he tilted himself back in his chair, and resigned the conversation to its unique leadership. The ceaseless motion of the falling lines of rain gave a spurious effect of motion to the great monastic forms of the mountains cowled with mists and robed in dreary hue, seeming continually in sad processional along the horizon. The ochreous pools near at hand had lost all capacity for reflection, although the dark green branches of the firs here and there bent above them, and the gray rain dripping from the fibrous fringes upon the unquiet tremulous surface took its color, and was seen no more. His returning glance met Taft’s eye as he Was about to speak, and somehow in that momentary contact a quiet understanding was established between them.

“ The reason, I reckon, they did n’t want Mr. Kenniston ter build his hotel hyar war kase ’t would bring too many strangers round.”

“ And what’s the objection to strangers ? ” asked Kenniston anxiously. It was not merely a retrospective interest that the question served. He asked for the future.

“ Waal, I reckon they hed some moonshinin’ or sech on hand,” returned Taft coolly.

“ Thar, now ! what did I tell ye ? ” vociferated Rodolphus Ross, appealing to Kenniston. “ An’ I ’ll bet this hyar Larrabee war one of ’em.”

Taft nodded, and Kenniston meditatively eyed the dull flashes from the stove, recollecting the strange conversation of Larrabee here, and his sudden significant betrayal of secret knowledge of the origin of the fire when it was mentioned.

“ Strangers air powerful onhealthy fur the moonshinin’ business,” said Taft, as a sort of corollary to his former statement.

“ Speak from experience ? ” sneered Rodolphus Ross.

“ I do so,” declared Taft unequivocally. Then turning to Kenniston, “ I sarved a prison term fur illicit distillin’ whenst I war a young man. I ’lowed, like all these other young muskrats, ez I could do what I pleased with my own corn an’ apples. But whenst I traveled all through six or seben States goin’ to the North, an’ seen this big kentry an’ sech, I knowed I war n’t ekal ter runnin’ agin its laws ; an’ whether thar’s reason in ’em or no, I ondertook ter keep ’em arterward.”

This unexpected confession disconcerted Ross in some sort. He silently eyed Taft, whose criminal experience seemed rather an error of an unripe judgment than the turpitude of law-breaking, and his candor in admitting it bluntly did not detract from the serious impression he had evidently made upon Kenniston. With Ross nothing was serious long. There was a sudden breaking up of the gloss of intentness in his round dark eyes, and as they shifted they fell upon the poker of the stove, and he once more thrust it through the bars and rattled it smartly.

“ I oughter say,” said Taft, meditatively sucking liis pipestem, "that ’twar Espey ez fust ’lowed ter burn ye out.

‘ Burn his shanty! ’ he say.”

A picture as definite as if it were the reality of pigments and canvas glowed suddenly before his contemplation, —the red walls of his den a-flicker in the flare of the furnace fire, the burnished gleam of the copper, the burly forms of the tubs of mash, familiars of the brown gloom, and the circle of faces, definite with those sharply marked shadows and striking high lights that a strong artificial glow elicits from the darkness. For his life he could not repress a long-drawn sigh, and then he shifted his position and cleared his throat raucously. But the picture, like many another masterpiece of the painter Memory, was not on general exhibition. For all its close detail and strong salience and brilliant reality of hue, it was invisible to Kenniston. As to the regretful sigh, fat men are often wont to sigh for very fatness, and it passed without significance.

After a thoughtful pause, “ Did it ever occur to you that this Larrabee is a crank,” asked Kenniston, “ what you call, and very aptly, touched-in-the-head ? ”

“ Who ? Larrabee ? ” exclaimed Taft vehemently, all alert once more, his eyes on fire, his angry breath quick. “ He ’s smart ez the very devil! Don’t you let him pull the wool over yer eyes with the lunacy purtense.”

Rodolphus Ross gave a final rasping clatter of the poker between the bars; then flung it, resounding, down upon the floor. He rose to his feet, stamping with first one and then the other to shake out his trousers from their persistent kneed effect, and, turning to Taft, he said, with an offhand manner, “ Now, look-a-hyar, Prize Beef, when did ye an’ this sca’ce buzzard Larrabee meet the last time ? ” The "Prize Beef ” apparently perceived no sort of offense in this form of address.

“ I ain’t viewed him in — I dunno when. I ’lowed he lied lef’ the kentry till he war up at my store, a few nights ago. I war n’t thar, but my leetle gal, she seen him.”

The sly, predatory look was in Rodolphus Ross’s eyes. He lifted his knee and smote it as if he had discovered a very apt coincidence.

Taft hesitated; then he said, “Ye’d better go up yander an’ talk ter my leetle darter bout’n it.” He hesitated once more. He feared that Copley might be inadequate to the situation, but, with his ever alert suspicions, he would doubtless fly at the very sight of a stranger; and as to Sis, he could rely upon Rodolphus Ross’s address and manner to arouse the enmity of old Mrs. Jiniway’s disciple in etiquette, and he knew of old that Sis was wont to give her adversary no quarter. A dozen of such as Rodolphus Ross would hardly be a handful for Sis. He would learn naught from her which he wanted to know. “ Take my mare out thar, bein’ ready saddled,” he said hospitably. “ I ’ll wait hyar till ye kem back.”

Contrariety was the breath of the deputy’s life. The congeniality of his vocation lay much in the opposition of his duties to the desires of those of his fellow-men with whom he was brought into official contact. He earnestly wished to negative Taft’s suggestion, but the possibility of getting at closer quarters with Larrabee, of once more finding his trail, which had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, was stronger for the moment. His enmity had not grown cold; it was the stronger the more it was baffled. He lingered a moment; then, turning up his collar, stuffing the lower ends of his trousers into his spurred boots, and pulling down the broad rim of his hat all around to afford eaves to conduct the rain from his head, he plunged out into the steady torrents with a discordant yawp that made the little shanty ring.

Taft gazed thoughtfully after him as he vaulted into the saddle and rode off with a good deal of unnecessary heel-andtoe exercise in the region of the animal’s ribs. The restive mare apparently resented the ungentle treatment, for the last that was seen of mount and rider was a profile rampant against the blank white expanse of the closing mists ere they were enveloped in the opaque multitudinous folds.

“ They tell me that Gawd made man,” said Taft at last. “’Pears ter me ez the Almighty slighted that job, sure.”

Kenniston was a man of painfully orderly instincts. He could not satisfactorily resume the conversation without gathering up the poker, the lifter, and other appurtenances of the stove which Ross had scattered about the little zinc square on which it sat, replacing them, rearranging the writing materials, newspapers, tobacco, and cigars on the table, and stirring the fire to brightness and a possibility of burning. As he threw himself into his chair he marked how the encroaching mists had invested the house. Not half a dozen paces of the path remained visible from the door ; even upon the threshold the vapor hung in vague white wreaths, to vanish in the heat, and be replaced by white clouds floating in with a rolling motion, —never disappearing utterly, but venturing no further. On the roof and in the invisibilities of the white mists outside they could hear the chilly rain still steadily falling. The seeming isolation gave a certain confidential character to the conversation even before its developments warranted this condition.

“ How did the percessionin’ turn out ? ” Taft demanded.

“ The rain stopped it,” returned Kenniston, gloomily eying the thickening mists, while Taft critically but covertly observed him.

“ Satisfied ez fur ez it went, I s’pose ? ” Taft flicked off the ashes from his pipe, and pressed down the remainder of its contents with that salamander of a forefinger.

“ No,” said Kenniston irritably. “ It is a great surprise to me.”

“ Mr. Kenniston,” said Taft, with that blunt directness which so commended him to the experienced man and so warped his judgment, “ that thar Big Hollow Boulder, the beginning o’ yer survey, hev been bodaciously moved.”

Kenniston lifted his head quickly, the excitement of the moment showing red in his face. A half - scornful incredulity was in his eyes, almost on his lips. He was about to speak ; then paused doubtfully. The testimony of his recollections of Captain Lucy’s significant insistence on the phrase “ Big Hollow Boulder ” and a thousand satiric allusions to the stationary functions of a monument of boundary overwhelmed him for the moment; for their incongruity with a culpable knowledge or agency in the fact was more than inexplicable ; it was mysterious. There needed no dexterous jugglery with phrase and fact, however, to account for Luther’s furtive hang-dog manner and averted eye.

“ It seems impossible ! But I will not believe that old man Lucy had anything to do with moving it,” Kenniston began. He suddenly caught his lip and bit it hard. It was evident from his flaunting remarks that the old mountaineer had not been similarly generous to his neighbor.

“ A heap o’ land,” suggested the politic Taft. “ But then I s’pose ter run yer eastern line out would show whar yer corner is? ” He asked the question eagerly.

“ Oh no. Calls for permanent natural objects usually control calls for distance. I suppose that rule would hold fast in this instance. My eastern line can only run to the boulder, which is presumably immovable.”

Taft’s countenance fell. He had thought that the further survey of the eastern boundary would serve to reestablish the corner where the boulder should be ; and now Captain Lucy was invested with many hundred acres for which he had given no equivalent in goods, or money, or even occupancy.

“ I saw that something was mighty wrong with the line that the surveyor was running; and so did Captain Lucy, for that matter,” said Kenniston, revolving the events of the processioning. “ He looked dumfounded when he saw Wild Duck Falls in his boundary, and the hotel, — or rather the place where the hotel ought to be.”

Taft caught a quick inspiration. “ That’s it, — them boys is a moonshinin’ fur true. They must hev moved the boulder ter crowd ye out of a buildin’ site. An’ then they burnt the hotel.”

“ Well, they ’ve got me pretty badly crowded, — I ’ll say that for them.”

Kenniston was looking out of the door, with that sullen sense of injury and hopelessness which oppresses a city man in the country in bad weather. The world had slipped away, somehow ; he was left to the vague unresponsiveness of the inexpressive white mists; the rain would probably continue forever ; the day was of a longevity known to no other that had ever dawned; without the prompting of his watch he could not have said if it were morning or afternoon. The roof leaked ; the boots of his uncouth visitors tracked up the floor with red clay mud. A saddle in one corner gave out an obtrusive odor of leather, and the monkey stove, despite all this dankness, filled the room with that baking, dry, afflicting aroma common to all its kindred. His pugnacity was abated under these untoward conditions ; his enthusiasms were overwhelmed beneath the depression of the rain. He thought wistfully of Bretonville, and of a cozy corner in the reading-room of a certain club, and of his office, and sighed as his mind reverted to the jeopardy of the present, the futility of the money and thought he had spent here, and the froward tangle which must needs be untwisted if these unpromising assets were to be utilized at all.

“ Mus’ hev been Lar’bee an’ Espey a-moonshinin’.” Taft once more sought to prompt that inimical sense of injury. “ An’ moved the boulder bodaciously, — the corner landmark.”

“ A felony,” said Kenniston thoughtfully.

The patter of the rain came heavily through the silence, and in that bleak whiteness without they heard far away the wind rousing from its lair in furthest defiles. The terrors of its voice did not shake the mists ; only the sound touched a responsive chord of feeling, and the day was the drearier for the broken stillness.

“A felony,” he repeated, and fell a-musing. He vaguely repudiated the idea, and then bethought himself, contradictorily, of the strange subterfuge with which he had been summoned to the door. For no harm, surely, he argued. There was a certain fascination in the thought of the new star which the mountaineer had brought to his contemplation. Not a bad face, this star-gazer’s, and with a coloring which had always commended itself to his artistic sense. A good face and finely cut, he would have said but for that association of ideas, “ a felony,” that sudden conscious expression as of some guilty knowledge of the burning of the hotel. He could not believe it of his star-gazer, with his elated upward look ! He remembered afterward how he thought then that the dankness of the weather, in relaxing all manner of tension, had slackened his rigid standards and his taut personal exactions. He was morally limp, doubtless, as well as physically ; but he shrunk from the phrase in this application, and he considered that the most definite sensation of that most indefinite day was the relief he experienced when Rodolphus Ross came plunging out of the mists.

In high dudgeon the deputy was with the events and results of his mission, and he had wreaked his resentment on the unoffending animal. The mare’s sides showed the marks of his stinging lash, and she had retaliated as well as she could by perversely refusing to pause where he wished to dismount to avoid the pools. A false start or two dragged him through water knee-deep, and as he came into the house his eyes were flashing with his various anger, and his lip curled scornfully.

“ I tell ye,” he said to Taft, with his fractious mirthfulness, “thar’s money in that brat o’ yourn, that Cornelia Taft! Buy her a muzzle an’ a chain an’ jine a show, an’ she ’ll draw a crowd ez the Leetle She-B’ar o’ Persimmon Cove! Bless my boots ! I ’m glad I ’m all hyar. The leetle b’ar like ter tore me ter fringes ! ” he exclaimed metaphorically. He canted his head mockingly to one side as he threw himself into a chair beside the stove, seized the poker, and administered a rousing shake. “ I tell you what,” he said, eying Taft gloweringly, “ I’d keep her nails an’ teeth well pruned, my friend.”

For Miss Cornelia Taft and Rodolphus Ross had failed signally to hit it off amicably. Old Copley had watched the interview through the open door of the store with varying emotions of anxiety : first, lest Ross was a “ revenuer ” or a spy; then, lest, as an officer of the state law, he had some charge against them ; again, lest he cause Sis some apprehension ; and lastly, lest the temerity of the doughty Sis bring woe and wreck upon the devoted household. Joe cowered in a corner of the fireplace, leaning against the great jamb, essaying only a few of the writhings and twistings of his anatomy which he affected, and sometimes sitting still altogether, so did the interest of the colloquy overmaster the tendency of his muscles.

“ Hello, youngsters ! ” was Ross’s affable greeting as he tramped in when Joe opened the door. He flung himself into a chair before the fire, then turned and surveyed Sis, whose prim, pale, precise face looked more unfriendly and forbidding and negative than usual, as she sat, her hands demurely crossed on her lap, on the opposite side of the fireplace.

“ My Lord ! is this all ? I lowed yer dad bed a heap bigger gal ’n you. Some similar ter a shrunk-up gran’mammy ; ye look like ye mought hev lasted sence the flood. How’s yer fambly, ma’am ? ”

The juvenile heart resents a scoff. Cornelia Taft’s faculties were limited, but she gathered herself for revenge.

“ Waal, then,” he demanded, as she sat stiffly silent and insulted, “ how’s rats ? ”

“ I could n’t jedge,” she piped up suddenly. “ We-uns hain’t lied a terrier happen in hyar afore now fur a consider’ble time.”

He was fairly silenced for the nonce. Elated by the execution of her sally, and not propitiated by his subsequent effort to ignore the passage at arms, she took full advantage of the opportunity to harass him which was presented when he announced himself an officer of the law, and demanded to know when and where she had seen Larrabee the last time. No perverse adult witness could have more dexterously baffled him with indefinite statements ; and when he appealed from her to Joe, whose clumsy efforts to remember were hopelessly inadequate, her open glee was peculiarly tantalizing to Ross ; for none can so resent a jest as a confirmed joker. Then it was that he made his fatal false step.

“ Look-a-hyar, Small Female, leetle ez ye be, I ’ll arrest you-uns an’ kerry ye off ter jail, ef ye don’t spry up an’ answer my question.”

And then it was that Sis, bracing her small back, defied the majesty of the State of Tennessee as exemplified in Rodolphus Ross. So it came to open war. She was animated, too, by a partisan spirit for Larrabee. She remembered. with her infrequent approval, how he had conducted himself on the occasion in question ; how quiet, how gentle, he was, how observant of the graces of her housekeeping, how commendatory of her dominion over Joe. Their conversation had since been often in her mind ; she had rehearsed it as she sat in the gloaming on her stool before the flickering fire, with the history of the Biblical worthies of which it was redundant. With no one else could she talk of these things. With quick adulation she had transformed Larrabee into a hero, and she longed to see him again. Her tongue, being feminine, could not be held altogether, but she told Ross naught which he desired to hear. She sounded the praises of Larrabee on many a key, and “ disremembered ” persistently whether it was Friday or Monday, or last week or week before, when she had seen him.

“ Waal, what war he a-doin’ of hyar, ennyhows ? ” queried Ross.

“ Talkin’.”

’Bout what, gal ? ”

“ ’Bout no gal,” Miss Taft responded, with a flash of the eye.

“ Waal, then,” — even he was fain to concede, in the hope of finding some thoroughfare in thus beating about the bush, — “ ’bout what boy ? ”

She hesitated. She had not intended to cheapen the subject of her interest and enthusiasm by mention in this queer symposium. The talk with Larrabee had been in the nature of a confidence, as in the admiring canvass of mutual friends; she had a sense as if it were not the thing for general public and unworthy conversation. Nevertheless, her affinity for the subject constrained her. There was a light in her face, a placid softening of feature. Her flabby little colorless cheek mustered up a dimple.

“ 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 mils’ 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 liis 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, anil 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 hymecliune ? ”

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’ aider 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 war n’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.”

Rodolplius Ross rose to his feet. He was elated, confident. He snapped his fingers noisily in the air as he made 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 hobnobbing 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, nutlier. 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 ennyways 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 slier’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 Espey’s escape, 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 thought 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 her raucous raised voice in objurgation or command with the indignant objection that naturally appertains to the heir to the throne. 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 up. 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 pellucid 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 leadenhued 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 faggedout 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 Captain 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 Captain Lucy’s.

“ ’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 liev 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 this sly and complete supplanting. 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, wideeyed 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 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 found his worst fears realized, as he thought, at 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.

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 Captain 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 manoeuvres 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-nigli 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 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 manifested their good will only 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; but being assured that the effort would be made at all events, and 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 achieving the rescue 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 role of deus ex machina with more genuine pleasure than had lately fallen to his jaded susceptibility. He placed eightyseven 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. “ 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 firebug, 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 would n’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 there was much hilarity and gratulation 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 sullenly to rebel against all the unnecessary woe that had fallen to his lot. As he went along the road, he scarcely noted the flowers that lay 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 truly to 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 Captain Lucy there awaiting an audience, and all unaware of the progress of events of so much moment elsewhere to-day. A rousing “ cock-a-doo-dle-doo ” might be a fair summary of Captain 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 Captain Lucy in his own way. He so glossed over his suspicions of Kenniston that albeit the latter detected them rather through the correlated circumstances and the baffling mystery than through the veneer of that section of his mind which it pleased Captain 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 to be served by the moving of the boulder. Thus he silently forgave Captain Lucy for his suspected suspicions.

And Captain 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 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 Captain Lucy’s fireside; he seemed to find a certain fascination in the incongruities of her ingenious palliations and extenuations of his crime.

“ He mought n’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 was too heavy an’ the hill was 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 took place 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, Cornelia Taft, who developed much of her father’s decision and definiteness and shrewdness of character as she grew older, always tempered by old Mrs. Jiniway’s precepts, to which she rigidly adhered. She received countenance, and much guidance too, in these early years, from Adelicia, who persisted in following the bent of her own lenient inclination toward others, and 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, and Julia and Espey married, in defiance of Captain Lucy’s opposition, and went to Tanglefoot Cove. Captain 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 Captain 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 Captain Lucy’s chair, while Jasper Larrabee leaned over the other with his book and page to show, — Captain 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, including Captain Lucy, but was made directly to the character under discussion ; whereby Captain 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 Captain Lucy, always acute, became reluctantly aware of this, in some sort. “ Ad’licia hev 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’ll 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 bis 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 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 ?

Charles Egbert Craddock.