XV.

As Julia entered her father's house, quite fresh and dry after the tumults of the storm, each of the group gathered about the fireside was too insistently preoccupied at the moment to notice the discrepancy between her spotless attire and the aspects of the weather, except indeed Luther. The details of their attire she marked at once, and dimpled at the sight. These rain-lashed victims of the processioning had hustled themselves into their cast-off gear; and albeit the fashions of the day were not exigent in the Cove, very forlorn appeared these ancient garments, having long ago seen the best of their never very good days. Cap'n Lucy's brown coat was like a russet old crinkled leaf, as it clung, out of shape and ruffled by unskillful folding, about him; Luther wore one of his own of former years, far too small now for his burly shoulders that threatened to burst out of it at every seam, and his long arms that protruded their blue shirt-sleeves only half covered from the elbow. He met her glance with a resentful glare, as if he could imagine now no cause for mirth, which was untimely in its best estate. His Sunday coat graced the form of Jasper Larrabee, who sat on the other side of the fire, and who albeit not of the processioning party, had been caught in the rain in coming hither. Although as tall as Luther, he was much more slender, and he seemed to have shrunk, somehow, in the amplitude of his host's big blue coat. He gave Julia a formal greeting, and was apparently much perturbed by the untoward state of mind in which he found Cap'n Lucy. And indeed Cap'n Lucy's face seemed to have adopted sundry wrinkles from his coat, so old, so awry, so crinkled, so suggestive of better days, had it suddenly become. Julia was reminded all at once of the business interests at stake.

"How did the percessionin' turn out, dad?" she inquired, as she stood with her hand on the back of a chair, and looked across the fire at him.

If any eyes might watch Fortune's wheel undismayed, whether it swing high or low, one might deem them these surely, with perpetual summer blooming there, as if there were no frosts, no winter's chill, no waning of time or love or life. What cared she for land or its lack?

The fore-legs of Cap'n Lucy's chair came to the floor with an irascible thump. He turned and surveyed the room; then, looking at her, "Air yer eyesight good?" he demanded.

"Toler'ble," she admitted.

"D'ye see that thar contraption?" he continued, leaning forward, and pointing with great _empressement_ at a spinning-wheel in the corner.

"I see it," she said, meeting his keen return glance.

"D'ye know what it's made fur?" he inquired, dropping his voice, and with an air of being about to impart valuable information.

"Fur spinning" she answered wonderingly.

"Oh, ye know, do ye? Then--mind it."

And thus he settled the woman question, in his own house at least, and repudiated feminine interest and inquisitiveness in his business affairs, and spurned feminine consolation and rebuke as far as he could,--poor Cap'n Lucy!

Larrabee had that sense of being ill at ease which always characterizes a stranger whose unhappy privilege it is to assist at a family quarrel. He was divided by the effort to look as if he understood nothing of ill temper in the colloquy, and the doubt as to whether he did not appear to side with one or the other,--to relish Julia's relegation to the spinning-wheel, or to resent Cap'n Lucy's strong measures; or perhaps he might seem lightly scornful of both.

He gazed steadily out of the open door, where a great lustrous copper-tinted sky glassed itself in myriads of gleaming copper-tinted ponds made in every depression by the recent rains; between were the purplish-black mountains cut sharply on the horizon. He heard a mocking-bird singing, and what a medley the frogs did pipe! Then rushed out into the midst the whir of Julia's spinning-wheel, which made all other songs of the evening only its incidental burden. She sat near the door, her figure imposed upon those bright hues of sky and water as if she were painted on some lustrous metal. Their reflection was now and again on her hair; she might have seemed surrounded by some glorious aureola. Not that he definitely discerned this. He only felt that she was fairer than all women else, and that the evening gleamed. The bird's song struck some chord in his heart that silently vibrated, and the whir of her wheel was like a hymn of the fireside. He wished that he had never left it for Taft and his gang, and the hope of making money for a home of his own, since his mother's hospitality had well-nigh left him homeless. The thought roused him to a recollection of his errand.

"I kem hyar ter git yer advices, Cap'n Lucy," he began.

Cap'n Lucy turned upon him a silent but snarling face. He needed all his "advices" for himself.

"I ain't got nuthin' ter hide from you-uns," Larrabee continued, after a pause for the expected reply. "Ye know all I do,"--a fleeting recollection of the still came over him,--"that I'm able ter tell," he added; for the idea of betraying the secrets involving Taft and the other moonshiners had never entered his mind.

Cap'n Lucy's scornful chin was tossed upward.

"We-uns feel toler'ble compliminted," he averred, "ter hev it 'lowed ez we-uns knows _all_ you-uns do, fur that's a heap, ez ye air aimin' ter tell."

"I mean--I went ter say, Cap'n Lucy"--Jasper Larrabee's words, in their haste, tripped one over the other, as they sought to set their meaning in better array.

"He jes' means, uncle Lucy, ez it ain't no new thing," Adelicia interposed to expound, touched by the anxious contrition of the younger man, who was leaning eagerly forward, his elbow on his knee, toward the elder, and to allay the contrariety of spirit of "uncle Lucy."

"An' meddlin' ain't no new thing, nuther, with you-uns, Ad'licia," snarled Cap'n Lucy, much overwrought. "I wish ter Gawd, with all the raisin' an' trainin' I hev hed ter gin ye, I could hev larnt ye ter hold yer jaw wunst in a while whenst desir'ble, an' show sech manners ez--ez T'bithy thar kin." He pointed at the cat on the hearth, and gave a high, fleering laugh, in which the sarcastic vexation overmastered every suggestion of mirth.

A slight movement of Tabitha's ears might have intimated that she marked the mention of her name. Otherwise she passed it with indifference. With her skimpy, shabby attire,--her fur seemed never to flourish,--her meek air of disaffection with the ways of this world, her look of adverse criticism as her yellow eyes followed the movements of the family, her thankless but resigned reception of all favors as being less than she had a right to expect, her ladylike but persistent exactions of her prerogatives, gave her, somehow, the style of a reduced gentlewoman, and the quietude and gentle indifference and air of superiority of the manners on which Cap'n Lucy had remarked were very genteel as far as they went.

Adelicia seemed heedless of the mentor thus pointed out. She noisily gathered up her work, somewhat cumbrous of paraphernalia, since it consisted of a small cedar tub, a large wooden bowl, and a heavy sack of the reddest of apples which she was paring for drying, and carried it all around the fireplace to seat herself between the two parties to this controversy.

"Now, uncle Lucy, ye jes' got ter gin Jasper yer advices, an' holp him out'n whatever snap he hev got inter."

Her deep gray eyes smiled upon the young man, as the firelight flashed upon her glittering knife and the red fruit in her hand, although her delicate oval face was grave enough. Ever and again she raised her head, as she worked, to toss back the tendrils of her auburn hair which were prone to fall forward as she bent over the task. There was a moment's silence as Jasper vainly sought to collect his ideas.

"Tell on, Jasper," she exhorted him. "I'm by ter pertect ye now. An' ennyhows, uncle Lucy's bark is a long shakes wuss'n his bite."

She smiled encouragingly upon the suppliant for advice; her own face was all unmarred by the perception that matters had gone much amiss with the processioning of the land, for uncle Lucy was a man often difficult to please, and sometimes only a crumple in his rose leaf was enough to make him condemn the queen of flowers as a mere vegetable, much overrated. The girl's aspect was all the brighter as she wore a saffron-tinted calico blouse and apron with her brown homespun skirt, and she seemed, with her lighted gray eyes, her fair, colorless face, and her ruddy auburn hair, a property of the genial firelight, flickering and flaring on the bright spot of color which she made in the brown shadows where she sat and pared the red apples. She reverted in a moment to that proclivity to argue with Cap'n Lucy which was so marked in their conversation.

"An' who is the young men ter depend on in thar troubles, uncle Lucy, ef not the old ones?" she demanded.

"On the young gals, 'pears like," promptly retorted "uncle Lucy," pertinently and perversely.

Then he caught himself suddenly. In the impossibility, under the circumstances, to concentrate his mind exclusively on his own affairs, his interest in correlated matters was reasserted. It occurred to him that it behooved him to foster any predilection that Adelicia might show for any personable man other than the fugitive Espey. He could see naught but perplexity and complication of many sorts to ensue for himself and his household should Espey return; and although Cap'n Lucy selfishly hoped and believed that this was, in the nature of things, impossible, still he had reluctantly learned by bitter experience the fallibility of his own judgment. It seemed to him a flagrant instance of inconstancy on Adelicia's part, but Cap'n Lucy gave that no heed. Few men truly resent a woman's cruelty to another man. Adelicia might have brought all the youth in the county to despair, for all hard-hearted Cap'n Lucy would have cared. And thus her appeal for Jasper Larrabee was not altogether disregarded.

"Goin' ter set thar an' chaw on it _all_ day, Jasper?" he demanded acridly. "Whyn't ye spit it out?"

"Why," said Larrabee, "it's 'bout this hyar Jack Espey."

The apple dropped from Adelicia's hand, and rolled unheeded across the hearth; the spinning-wheel was suddenly silent, and Julia, all glorified in the deeply yellow glare about her, sat holding it still with one hand on its rim. Cap'n Lucy's head was canted to one side, as if he were prepared to deliberate impartially on some difficult proposition.

"This Jack Espey,--I met up with him at the cross-roads store, an' struck up a likin' fur him, an' brung him home an' tuk him in, an' he hev been thar with me fur months an' months--an'--an' he never tole me ez he hed enny cause ter shirk the law."

"He war 'feared ter, I reckon, Jasper," said Adelicia.

"He never meant no harm, Jasper," the silent Julia broke in from where she sat in her dull red dress against the tawnily gilded glories of the western sky.

Beyond a mechanical "Hesh up, Ad'licia," Cap'n Lucy gave them no heed, but Luther glanced sharply from one to the other.

Jasper Larrabee replied in some sort: "Then he never treated me with the same confidence I done him. An', Cap'n Lucy," he continued, "ye yerse'f seen the e-end o' it. He purtended ter the sher'ff ter be _me_, an' tuk advantage o' my mother's callin' him 'sonny,' an' wore my name, an' went with 'em a-sarchin' fur hisse'f; an' whenst he got skeered, thinkin' ez they knowed him, he resisted arrest, an' kem nigh ter takin' the off'cer's life, whilst purtendin' ter be _me_, in my name!"

"He never meant no harm," faltered Adelicia, aghast at this showing against her absent lover.

"None in the worl'; he never went ter harm nuthin'," protested Julia's flutelike tones.

"Did ye kem hyar ter git my advices fur Jack Espey?" demanded Cap'n Lucy sourly. "He needs 'em, I know, but"--

"Naw, Cap'n Tems. I kem ter git 'em fur myse'f, fur I dunno which way ter turn. You-uns hyar saw the e-end o' it,--the night the dep'ty kem a-sarchin' fur Jasper Lar'bee, who he 'lowed he hed flung over the bluffs, an' I went along at his summons, knowin' 'twar Espey ez hed got away from him, purtendin' ter be _me_."

Cap'n Lucy nodded.

"Now I have hearn that dep'ty air in the Cove agin."

Cap'n Lucy remembered the dark, facetious, malicious face that the officer had borne as a spectator of the processioning of the land. He nodded again. "I hev seen him hyar ter-day."

"Ef I war knowed ter him ez Lar'bee, whenst he finds out 'twar Espey ez escaped that night, I mought be 'rested fur harborin' a fugitive, ez holpin' out the murder arter the fac'--an'--an' my mother--Espey gin me no chance, no ch'ice! Wouldn't ye 'low ez ennybody--_ennybody_--would hev tole me that, Cap'n Lucy, ter gin me the ch'ice o' dangerin' myse'f afore he tuk so much from me an' mine?"

Cap'n Lucy changed countenance. This was a new view of the matter. He had not judged from Larrabee's standpoint; for he himself had had full knowledge of the circumstances and the fact that they were withheld from Espey's entertainer. This was made suddenly manifest.

"Why, Jasper," expostulated Adelicia, her eyes full of tears, her vibrant tones tremulous with emotion, "he 'lowed ter we-uns ez he war sure the man wouldn't die o' the gunshot wound, bein' powerful big an' hearty; but he tuk out an' run, bein' turr'ble 'feared o' the law, and arrest an' lyin' in jail fur a long time, waitin', an' uncle Lucy said"--

She paused suddenly, for Jasper Larrabee had leaned forward in his chair, scanning the faces about him with a blank amazement so significant that it palsied the words on her tongue.

"Espey tole _you-uns_! An' Espey tole yer _uncle Lucy_! Why, then ye all knowed him ter be a runaway, an' ye knowed ez he war a-playin' his deceits on nobody but me an' my mother ez hed got him quartered on us, an' mebbe war liable ter the law fur it."

Adelicia, trembling, leaned back in her chair. Cap'n Lucy cast an infuriated glance upon her, and then, with a hasty, nervous hand, rubbed his brow back and forth, as if to stimulate his brain that offered no solution of the difficulty. Jasper Larrabee still sat leaning forward, his clear-cut face full of keen thought, a flush on his pale cheek, a fire kindling in his brown eyes, and a sarcastic smile curving his angry lips.

"My Gawd!" he exclaimed, "it is a cur'ous thing ez my mother ain't got a frien' in this worl'! She says she don't work fur thanks, an' I'll take my livin' oath she don't git 'em. That thar door o' the widder's cabin on the Notch hev stood open ter the frien'less day an' night since I kin remember. Her table's spread for the hongry. Her h'a'th's the home o' them ez hev no welcome elsewise an' elsewhere. An' her nigh neighbor an' old frien' sees a s'pected murderer quarter himself thar, an' bring s'picion an' trouble _ennyhow_, an' danger mebbe, on her an' hern. Ye mought hev advised Espey ter gin her her ch'ice, or leave. Ye mought hev done ez much ez that! My mother's a old 'oman; an' she's a proud 'oman, though ye moughtn't think it, an' the bare idee o' sech talk ez that,--of s'picion, an' arrest, an' jail,--it would kill her! it would kill her!"

Cap'n Lucy sat almost stunned, as under an arraignment. He pulled mechanically at his pipe, but his head was sunk on his breast, and his face was gray and set. The circumstances so graphically placed before him seemed to have no relation to those of his recollection; they wore a new guise. He had known all his life instances of collision in which powder and lead had played more or less a tragic part; but the rôle of the law had always been subsidiary and inadequate in the background of the scene, sometimes represented only by an outwitted officer, and the jollity of details of hairbreadth escapes. This construction of crime was beyond his purview of facts. He did not know, or he did not remember, that aught that others than the principal could do subsequent to a crime might render them liable as accessory after the fact. Espey had, in a fight, shot his antagonist,--such things were of frequent occurrence in Cap'n Lucy's memory. He never expected to see or to hear of the beagles of the law on the trail of the fugitive; his care, and his only care, was to prevent his niece from marrying an expatriated man while expatriated.

He thought now with a grievous sense of fault of old "Widder Lar'bee,"--her softness, her kindness, her life of care for others; and then he thought of Rodolphus Ross and his crude brutality, his imperviousness to any sanctions, his rough interpretation of fun, his eagerness to shield his own lapses of official vigilance, his grudges against the supposed Larrabee, and his threats. What mischief might a chance word work!

The dusky red of the last of the evening glow was creeping across the floor. All the metallic yellow glare was tarnished in the sky. Instead were strata of vaporous gray and slate tints alternating with lines of many-hued crimson, graduated till the ethereal hue of faintest rose ended the ascending scale of color. Still the frogs chorused and still the bird sang, but shadows had fallen, and they were not all of the night. Something of melancholy intimations drew his eyes to the purple heights without as Jasper Larrabee spoke.

"Waal, I'm her friend, ef she ain't got nare nother." And then, as if he felt he were arrogating unduly to his purpose, "An' I s'pose I'm a friend o' my own, too, an' I know _I_ ain't got nare nother. I kem hyar ter-night fur yer advices, Cap'n Tems; but ez ye don't 'pear ter have none ter gimme, I b'lieve I'll take my own. I'll settle this thing for myse'f. I'll find Jack Espey! I'll track him out. I'll run him down. I'll arrest him myse'f, an' I'll deliver him ter the law. An' let the door o' the jail that he opened fur me be shut an' barred on him!" There was a concentrated fury in his face as he said this. "I won't hide no mo' like a beast o' the yearth in a den in the ground, consortin' with wuss'n wolves an' bar an' painters. I won't skulk homeless like a harnt no mo' through the woods. I won't shirk the sher'ff no mo' fur Jack Espey's crimes, an' 'kase I done him nuthin' but good an' kindness! I'll find him,--the yearth can't kiver him so I can't find him,--an' I'll deliver him ter the law!"

He stood for one moment more, and then he strode across the room to the door, his shadow blotting out the last red light of the day, leaving the circle about the fire gazing wistfully and aggrieved after him, except Luther, who was picking up the borrowed coat which Larrabee had tossed aside as he passed.

Outside the night had fallen suddenly. The west was clouded, despite the lingering red strata, and the twilight curtailed. He looked through purple tissues of mists that appeared to have the consistency of a veil, to where yellow lights already gleamed through the shadows. They came from the shanties of the workmen beneath the cliffs, on which the ruins of the hotel had at last ceased to smoke. He hardly knew whither to turn. What pressure for explanations, what unbearable inquisitive insistence, would meet him at home, where Henrietta Timson reigned in the stead of his mother, he could well forecast; to venture near the Lost Time mine, within reach of Taft, was, he knew, as much as his life was worth. He hesitated now and again, as he went aimlessly up the road; regretting his outbreak at the Tems cabin; coveting its shelter, its fireside, the companionship of the home group; half minded to return thither; but resentment because of their half-hearted friendship, as he deemed it, pride and anger and shame, conspired to withhold him. Once again, as he ascended the mountain, he turned and looked down at the cluster of orange-tinted lights from the workmen's shanties that clung so close together in the depths of the purple valley, and he hesitated anew. White mists were abroad on their stealthy ways; a brooding stillness held the clouds; the mountains loomed sombre, melancholy, against them, indistinguishable and blent with them toward the west, save when the far-away lightnings of the past storm fluctuated through their dense gray folds, and showed the differing immovable outline of the purple heights. In the invisible pools below these transient flashes were glassed, shining through the gloom. The reflection of stars failed midway, because of the mist. There were few as yet in the sky, but as he lifted his eyes he beheld again, immeasurably splendid in the purple dusk, that sudden kindling of ethereal, palpitating, white fire which he had marked once before,--that new and supernal star, strange to all familiar ways of night hitherto, shining serene, aloof, infinitely fair above the melancholy piping mountain wilds and the troublous toils of the world.