XVI.

Jasper Larrabee stood transfixed, gazing at that tremulous, luminous astral presence with a strange superstitious thrill at his heart. It hardly seemed merely a star, so alien to his mind was its aspect in the erst untenanted spaces whence it blazed, so freighted with occult significance. Had the moment been charged with some wonderful apotheosis, some amplification of its pure white lustre into the benignant splendors of a vision of angels, the transformation could scarcely have exceeded the capacities of that breathless, insistent expectation which the ignorant mountaineer lifted toward it. For his was a simple faith, and his untaught mind had learned no doubts. And had never these nights of ours communion with celestial pursuivants? Did never the flutter of an angel's wing illumine far perspectives that darkle heavily over the earth? Was this rare fluid, which we call the air, so dense; were its sensitive searching vibrations, known as waves of light and sound, so dull, that it should feel naught, reveal naught, when the angel of the Lord flashed through the stars and the wind, through blossoming woods or bleak snows of deserts, and into the haunts and the homes of men?

So many had come! He did not know that they were alien to the nineteenth century, and that the most spiritual-minded of to-day would account for their sudden vision as from prosaic natural causes,--as mental aberration, or the distortions of a diseased fancy, or the meaningless phantasmagoria of somnolent cerebration. To him it seemed that they had been with man from the very beginning; and why should their presence here be stranger than his own? Their very numbers served to coerce credibility. So many had come! To kings, to wanderers in the wilderness, to prophets, to shepherds, in dreams and in the broad daylight, they came: to stand with a gleaming sword before the gates of Paradise, and to sing in the starry advent of a new day,--On earth peace, good will toward men; to bring the immortal lilies of the Annunciation, and to tread the ways of the fiery furnace; to touch the bursting bonds of saints in prison, and to roll away the stone from the sepulchre of all the world; to minister to the Christ alike in the shadows of Gethsemane and amongst the splendors of the Mount of the Transfiguration!

Larrabee was trembling in every limb, as the scenes trooped out before him in the vivid actuality of his recollections of the pages of the much-thumbed volume which he had left behind him when he had fled from the still in the Lost Time mine. He sank down upon the rocky verge of the precipice, amongst the clinging verdure of its jagged crevices. Some sweet-scented herb sent out its delicate incense under the pressure of his hands. A drowsy twitter of half-awakened nestlings came from the feathery boughs of a cedar-tree that a niche in the cliff hard by half nourished, half starved. The melancholy antiphony of the voices of the wilderness rose and fell in alternating strains, and at long intervals in a vague undiscriminated susurrus the night seemed to sigh.

He heard naught; he heeded naught. His unwinking gaze was fixed upon the wondrous star in the heavens, with that thronging association of angelic ministrants so definitely in his mind that he might have thought to see an amaranthine crown expanding from the rayonnant sidereal points, or the outline of a nearing pinion stretched strongly to cleave the ether. For so many had come!

But no! His imagination could compass no such apotheosis. The star remained a star. The exaltation of that moment of wild, vague, and breathless expectation exhaled slowly. A poignant sense of loss succeeded it. The prosaic details of the actual outer life pressed once more on his realization. He looked about him on the sombre wilderness, the black surly mountains, the itinerant mists, heedless whither, the steely glimmer here and there of the ponds where the water made shift to catch the reflection of the sky amidst the dun shadows, and sighed drearily with the sighing night.

He was penniless, shelterless, his life at the mercy of any chance that might favor his crafty enemy, his confidence betrayed by the fugitive whom he had succored, his liberty endangered, already a criminal in the eyes of the law,--an outcast, in truth, within a league of his home. From the nullity of the begloomed landscape the glance naturally rebounded, and the very obscuration of the earth lent glister and definiteness to the wonderful precision of the march of the constellations, as, phalanx after phalanx, they deployed, each in its allotted space and sequence, toward the west. And again his eyes dwelt upon that new splendor in the midst of them. How strange that it should suddenly blossom whitely forth among these old, old stars that had lighted the bosky ways of the garden of Eden! How strange that the sight of it should be vouchsafed to him--and why!

His pulses were tumultuously astir. All at once the thought that had been slowly framing itself in his mind took definite form. He wondered if it could be a sign for him, and of what!

In the arrogations of poor humanity of the higher things, in the infinite breadth of the claim of an immortal soul, vast incongruities meet. The extreme might seem reached in the ignorant mountaineer, the moonshiner obnoxious to the law, the poverty-stricken laborer, seeing with the wild preëmptions of fancy this star, all newly and miraculously alight in the sky, as charged with some mysterious relation to his infinitesimally petty and restricted life. But once admit the idea of an immortal spirit, heir of all knowledge, made a little lower than the angels, to be crowned with glory and honor, the climax of development, and even the splendors of the star are as naught.

Larrabee had no cultivated sense of comparison. His tenacious nature laid hold upon the idea of an intimate personal intention, a sign in the heavens, with a blunt and stalwart appropriation.

He rose swiftly to his feet. So different a spirit animated him that it seemed a different path from that which he had trod as he had plodded slowly up the mountain, with hesitating steps and frequent uncertain pauses. Now he went deftly down the rugged and far darker way, brushing amongst bushes and vines, and be-showered with the perfumed drops that his hasty transit shook from their boughs; swiftly slipping through the shifting mists that now hid the sky, and again revealed the glister of that great star amidst a myriad others at the vanishing point of a perspective of seemingly precipitous white ascents, as the uncertain light cleft the glimmering vapors. He looked up to it, as it were, through a defile between these impalpable white cliffs, from the dark abysses of the night; and then the gauzy medium interposed, and without the faint light of the stars the night was black again. His pace did not slacken. He went forward as confidently in the darkness as if he were led by the definite capacity of sight, trusting to that instinct of woodcraft almost as keen as sense itself. Sometimes, indeed, his foot struck against a branch, torn by the wind from the trees and left to wither in the rugged path; or the splash of a pool beneath his inadvertent step broke the silence of his journey, as these unaccustomed incidents of the way asserted their presence as obstacles. He never hesitated, nor doubted, nor deviated. He seemed led through the darkness by his will. He was aware in some mysterious sort of the looming propinquity of great trees or the locality of jagged rocks; he avoided the verge of cliffs and abysses with that keen, accurate discernment of an unascertained faculty, as a somnambulist might have done. As far as his recognized intelligence was concerned, he was down in the Cove before he knew it, for the way was still sloping, the footing rocky and uneven. A long slanting burnished gleam of orange light appearing suddenly before him, revealing the white mists, and making the darkness a definite visible blackness rather than merely charged with a sense of sightlessness, he deemed only one of those transient lines of lightning reflected in the temporary ponds that he had marked earlier in the evening. It did not flicker, however, and die away. As he stared forward, he perceived, beyond a darkly lustrous interval, a parallel line of yellow brilliance,--another, and still another; and he became aware that he was amongst the workmen's shanties, the lights of which were mirrored in the water. Presently illusory shimmering squares were visible in the mists which marked the open doors. A croaking frog by the waterside ceased suddenly, as, with more decided step, Larrabee skirted the pool and approached. He felt rather than saw the shadowy creature's leap from before his foot, again an elastic spring along the margin, and a splash as the frog jumped into the water, and the long lines of gilded light were broken into a thousand concentric shoaling curves. Voices sounded close at hand, and then the whole little settlement became vaguely visible,--the cabins further apart than they had seemed at the distance; a banjo was strumming at the most remote, and as Larrabee walked up to the nearest, boldly, in the avenue of light that the open door blazed out in the darkness, he saw within the man whom he sought, bending his frowning brow over a paper in his hand. In the other hand Kenniston held a cigar, which at long intervals he put between his lips; then he pulled energetically at it as if merely to keep it alight, and with no definite experience or expectation of nicotian solace. The county surveyor, on the contrary, on the other side of the table, puffed his pipe systematically, his eyes half closed, his grizzled bearded face showing in repose amongst the wreaths of smoke, his conscience discharged of every detail of the great science of mensuration which he sought to apply to the various parcels of land owned or claimed by his fellow-man. He had answered so much at random the occasional remarks of his host on the subject of the processioning that it became very apparent to Kenniston that he did not propose to work at his vocation out of office hours, as it were. From the consideration of futility as well as decorum, Kenniston had relapsed into silently comparing the calls of the deed with the notes he had made of the day's work, and only unconsciously did an interjection of irritation and disgust escape him.

"I ain't responsible for any disputed p'int, Mr. Kenniston," said the surveyor, sibilantly sucking his pipestem, his eyes quite closed, his feet upon the fender of the little stove. "Ye kin hev a jury o' good and lawful men ter examinate an' decide upon it; my business is ter run the line 'cordin' ter the calls an' the compass. That's all!"

Kenniston looked up, a sarcastic comment in his eyes; the mere possibility of submitting the question of the boundary of his land to the wild will of a jury of mountaineers, qualified by the surveyor, according to the law of processioning land, and met in those tangled precipitous woods to discriminate in matters mathematical and to settle questions of topographical fact, seemed to him so happy a travesty of the theory of law and justice that he could not forbear a scornful smile at his own probable plight when he should come forth from such unique adjudication of his interests.

"There's no disputed '_p'int_,'" he said, laughing satirically. "It's the whole confounded line from the Big Hollow Boulder to Wild Duck Falls!"

"'Cordin' ter the calls an' the compass," muttered the surveyor, fast succumbing to the unholy fascinations of a dream in which he found that in seeking to ascertain the area of a triangular body of land he achieved the petrifying result of transforming it to a square. Reason revolted; he woke with a snort, filliped off the ash from his pipe, adjusted himself anew in his chair, looked very wide awake, to be overtaken again by the same irreconcilable process and result.

In the diversion of Kenniston's attention he had lost the run of his ideas; he paused, puffed his cigar into a glow, pushed his chair slightly back from the table, glanced with lowering disaffection at the slumbering surveyor, and then mechanically about him at his surroundings.

The house was the roughest of shells, and hardly compact enough to withstand the floods of rain that had descended upon it to-day. In one corner the floor was still damp, the eaves outside dripped. Beyond a cot, a table, and a few chairs there was no furniture save Kenniston's valise, his gun in its case, which was never opened, and a monkey stove, an object of aversion to its æsthetic owner; for, despite its utility, its outline and atmosphere were a continual affront to him, and it suffered grossly from the comparison with the great open fires of the mountaineers' hearths, the incense of hickory and ash and pine, the flash and flame and sparkle of those humble illumined interiors.

The shadowy figure of a man standing in the doorway Kenniston did not immediately notice. Beyond a slight start, a mere matter of nerve (for he could hardly be surprised by aught that the mountaineers could say or do), he did not betray the unexpectedness of the apparition. He smoked silently, eying the intruder without salutation, as if he sought to shift the discourtesy of the lack of formality upon one who merely paused at the door of his domicile and surveyed its occupant; it was his rule not to encourage the mountaineers to come about, and he felt at liberty, with so untutored a folk, to depart from the decrees of decorum in such small matters, which were, however, exigent even with them. In this instance no offense seemed to be taken, no intentional lack perceived. Larrabee stood, his smiling dark eyes scanning Kenniston with a steadiness which apparently had other actuation than mere curiosity, his pale clear-cut face, his auburn hair, his alert strong pose, distinct in the crude white light of the unshaded kerosene lamp. Whether it were the natural commendation of a face and figure regularly handsome by the line and rule by which Kenniston was wont to apportion beauty; whether the exaltation of the discovery of the star, the spiritual audacity of the arrogation of a personal intimation in its manifestation, had touched Larrabee's expression with something strange, something aloof from the day, the time, and the people, Kenniston's jaded interest was stirred.

"Did you want to see me?" he demanded, at length. "Then come in."

Larrabee remained at the threshold, but he leaned against the wall, his big brown hat on the back of his head, as it rested against the rich veined amber and creamy tints of the yellow pine wood.

"Air you-uns the stranger-man ez hev been hyarabouts, buildin' the hotel an' sech?" he asked slowly.

Kenniston's eye became intent, hardening as he nodded. His thoughts flew instantly to that fair edifice and the collapse of all his plans, with the quick inference that here was information to come touching the incendiary. He felt his blood leap; by his pulsing veins he knew how it was burning into his face. He had that desire toward justice which should animate every civilized man, but although he sought to hold himself impartial, calm, circumspect to receive what might be a false accusation, it would have fared ill with Larrabee's enemy had he an old score to settle thus.

As he remained silent Kenniston spoke, with a view of urging forward the disclosure. "Have I ever seen you here before?"

Larrabee shook his head. "I hev never viewed you-uns ez I knows on." Then, after a pause, "Air you-uns a book-l'arned man?"

"Reasonably so," Kenniston said, with a slight laugh. He leaned his elbows on the table, holding his chin in his hand, which was half obscured by his full beard, and while he looked impatiently at his visitor his white teeth gnawed his underlip.

Larrabee hesitated. "Hev ye met up with the stars in yer readin'?" he finally blurted out.

A sudden look of blank disappointment crossed Kenniston's face.

"Stars!" he echoed in dismay. "Why, I thought you had come to give me some information about the cur that set fire to my house."

(It was a different kind of brute, but the fact of Bruin's agency was relegated to the state of things not revealed, which we denominate mystery.)

It was Larrabee's turn for impatience, and an affronted sense of interruption.

"I dunno nuthin' 'bout who burnt yer hotel"--He paused suddenly, the conviction all at once fully fledged in his mind that it was the deed of the moonshiners, to rid the Cove of its prospect of troublesome invaders. The recollection of Espey's threat rang in his ears as if the very vibrations of the words were audible upon the air: "Burn him out! Burn his shanty every time he gits it started!"

Larrabee suffered the sense of a nervous shock, so great was the revulsion from the subject that had engrossed him; for this reminiscence of all things he had least expected to meet here. He could hardly cope with it in the free outer air. It belonged so essentially to that other life of his, that underground world where he bore so different an identity, that it seemed to have thoughts and intentions and a conscience peculiar to itself. He had realized the dangers of the isolation in which he stood amongst those of his association, but he had thought himself safe here. Kenniston knew him neither by name nor face, and he was a stranger to all the workmen; since their advent into the Cove he had been held a prisoner in the Lost Time mine. Even a chance encounter with Rodolphus Ross he did not dread, for the officer had not been apprised of his identity on the night he had summoned him to search for the escaped Espey masquerading under the name of Larrabee.

The abrupt pause, the introverted look, the sudden recollection advertised in unmistakable characters upon his unguarded face, did not escape Kenniston's observation, now keen and all on the alert. For his heart was in this reprisal. If he had had naught to gain and much to risk, indeed much of certain loss, he would have pursued this injury to its ultimate and bitterest requital. All that was manly in him--his courage, his pugnacity, his tenaciousness, his self-respect, his vehement, insistent, vigorous personality, that could neither make nor keep covenant with concession, compromise, or defeat--rose to the occasion. He had cursed in his heart the lukewarmness of the authorities, who had opined that the mountaineers were mighty rough folks, mighty hard to catch, lived in a mighty difficult country, and who had offered him the half-veiled advice that they were mighty bad to run against, in lieu of the formulated and disciplined suspicions which he had expected, the canvassing of possible "fire-bugs," involving as sequence warrants for arrest, indictments, and other fierce and formidable engines of the law, set to work with full intent and expectation.

Here was a clue,--the first; and fortunately it had fallen into his own hands. However, it behooved him to be cautious, or the suggestion might be of as little ultimate value as if it were already given to the turbulent, ill-advised, precipitate deputy, or to his unsanguine, dubious, dilatory principal, with his wise saws about the lack of prudence involved in running against mountain folks, who were mighty hard to catch in the wilds of their difficult country.

Now and again the family of Cap'n Lucy had had an intimation of how pleasant Mr. Kenniston could be when he chose. It was reserved for Jasper Larrabee to experience the fascination of the full and ripened flavor, the bouquet, so to speak, of his geniality and good will. A second rapid covert survey from that altered point of view which one is apt to adopt when a personal interest looms in the background convinced Kenniston that his visitor was no fool. Although he intended to drop the subject for the present, he did not quit it abruptly.

"I was in hopes you could name some suspicious characters, or had heard some threatening talk, or"--

Once more he saw from his visitor's face that, inadvertently, he had again struck the nail on the head. His secret self-applause aided his self-denial in relinquishing so promising a line of investigation. The man must be made to talk freely, to disclose; his confidence must be secured.

"I have had heavy losses in this matter, and the officers seem of mighty little account. Every now and then I hope I'll hear of something some other way. I'm afraid to build again unless I know the fire-bug is somewhere else, or discover what I've done to set people against _me_."

Larrabee's face was at once softened and troubled. "Burn his shanty every time he gits it started," quoth Espey. And he that would work ill to one man would work ill to another: witness his own plight. His conscience began to stir. If, he thought, the whiskey tax were not in itself so tyrannical, so impracticable and obnoxious a thing, he might have admitted for the nonce that moonshining was in itself wrong.

Kenniston's eyes were studying his unconscious countenance. "Well," he said suddenly, "since it's nothing about my affairs, what can I do for you? Won't you have a chair?"

Larrabee shook his head silently. He stood for a few moments undecided. It might seem that his enthusiasm, so ruthlessly dragged down to earth, might hardly make shift to rise again; but it was strong of wing, as behooves that ethereal essence, and in his ignorant assumptions he thought that he had seen a sign in the heavens, a sign for him. The fervor of all that he had half doubting believed, and half believing doubted, fired his pulses once more. He cared naught for Espey and his troublous usurpations, the officer of the law, the moonshiner and his deadly feud, the incendiary, the necessity of heed to his words. He cared for naught under the moon. Once more his face had that illumined, exalted expression. As he leaned suddenly forward, with a keen anxiety, and said, "Air ye 'quainted with the stars by name, bein' a book-l'arned man?" Kenniston had a swift doubt of his sanity.

"Yes," he replied. And after a pause he asked the counter-question, "Are you interested in the stars?"

But Larrabee, still under the influence of the strong excitement that possessed him, did not answer directly.

"I kin read, but I hain't got but one book. The teacher what l'arned me ter read 'lowed ez the stars air named; they air numbered in a book. Hev ye l'arned sech?"

"Oh yes; I have studied astronomy," replied Kenniston capably. "I know their names."

"I know _them_; I dunno thar names," said Larrabee, making a definite distinction. "That's the reason I kem ter you-uns, hearin' ez ye air a book-l'arned man."

He turned his head and looked out into the night as he stood on the threshold. The mists had gone their ways. The clouds were far in the west. Above all, the clear, sombre field of the sky was thickly bespangled with stars, chill, keenly glittering, for below the night was very dark.

"Thar's a new one," he declared excitedly, "a new one never viewed afore! I seen it kindle up a matter of three week ago, three week an' better, an' it's thar now!"

Kenniston sat in silent amazement, looking steadily at him.

"Kem out!" Larrabee insisted, in tones strangely urgent. "Kem out an' see!"

Some subtle monition apprised Kenniston that there was something in the man's disclosure withheld; that it was not merely to bring his book-learning to bear upon the array of the stars that he was asked to step out of his door at this hour of the night. How often he had heard, as the climax of a feud, of a man in these mountains being summoned on some pretext out of his door to meet a murderous bullet fired by an enemy hidden in the dark! He was momentarily ashamed of this recollection as he glanced at the surveyor asleep close at hand; as he heard the rhythmic beat of feet on the shaking, ill-laid floor, and the patting of hands as some jovial young blade danced a "break-down" in one of the workmen's shanties to the strumming of the banjo, finding this far more congenial an occupation than shoving the jack plane.

Nevertheless, he had enemies, virulent, unscrupulous, powerful, as his short stay here might seem to attest, and what strange, fantastic vagary was this touching a new star! He would not refuse; that would impugn his courage even to himself, and he held it dear; and as he looked at Larrabee's face with its ever-smiling eyes, despite the intimation of something withheld, of trafficking with a mere subterfuge, he doubted as causeless his prudence. Moreover, this was a man of whom he must keep track, of whom he must know more. He was looking about the room as he rose. "Wait a minute," he said. "I have a strong glass here that may be of use."

The door of the maligned monkey stove standing ajar emitted a ruddy glow of embers upon the yellow pine walls of the room, and toned down the white glare of the kerosene lamp. A deep, restful red hue might have attracted the eye from the farther side amongst the shadows, as Kenniston tossed a rug aside upon a chair to obscure a quick search through his valise. A pernicious habit, that of carrying his pistols at the bottom of his luggage, amongst his clean shirts, and he promised himself this should be the end of it. At the moment that he thrust the revolver into his pistol-pocket he picked up the field-glass from the cot. "Here it is," he said, and he followed his guest out of the door and into the dusky night.

It was still all vibrant with the twanging drone of the cicada and the windy note of the booming frogs. The air, damp and of clarified freshness, was pervaded with indeterminate fragrance, the blent perfume of some flower and the pungent aroma of weed and shrub and the balsamic fir. A cluster of great trees rose just outside of the little shell, and though many a star shone down in the interstices of the black fibrous foliage, Larrabee led the way out beyond them and into an open space. It was nearer the other cottages instead of farther away, as Kenniston had half expected. The suspicion, the half-dormant fear, the doubt in his mind, were giving place anew to his determination to keep his hand on this man, to win his confidence or to surprise his secret. All those genial arts of ingratiation at his command were once more brought into play. It was he who introduced the subject of their mission, as they paused on a slight eminence, with a clear view of the great fields of heaven before them.

"Now which is the star that you want to know more about?" he demanded, lifting the glass with a free gesture, and adjusting it to his eye.

"Don't ye see nuthin' oncommon?" the mountaineer asked, in a tense voice.

The strained tone struck Kenniston's attention, and he lowered the glass and looked through the baffling darkness at his companion, whose form could only be discriminated by some fine sense from the surrounding darkness by an effect of solidity, given one could hardly say how.

Kenniston, the glass swaying useless in his hand, gazed upward once more.

"No, I can't say I do," he replied wonderingly.

Larrabee suddenly came up close to him, taking him by the arm.

"Now, hyar, todes the east, an' yit a leetle todes the north, sorter slanchwise todes Big Injun Mounting, setting a mite ter the west from that, an' plumb west from Chilhowee, a bright, bright star,--with," he added, in a surprised tone, as if he had not before discerned this, "a sorter silver shine onto it."

Kenniston laughed slyly in his sleeve. One can hardly better appreciate the immense distance that mechanical appliance has brought man from his normal state of natural, unassisted faculties than in the effort to point out, with such accuracy as to enable another to distinguish, an object in those fair and foreign fields of heaven, by the unaided means of the index finger. A suffusion of self-gratulatory pride is apt to overspread the consciousness, the unit assuming the credit of all that the genius of invention has achieved in the generic name of mankind. Kenniston had not even a slight expectation of being able to distinguish the particular star, but the affectation of effort, in his own interests, in some sort constrained his will. He looked about the skies with that vague sense of recollection which animates one who turns the leaves of a volume written in a half-forgotten language. He had not been the familiar of the stars. His choicest ambitions had lifted him no further than a reasonably safe height for an attic, or those fantastic simulations of turrets, with which the new architecture apes _haud passibus æquis_ the old. He had naught in common with the full-pulsed aspiring audacity of those architects of eld who builded in the plain of Shinar; his was but a low-studded Babel. He had not cared for a higher outlook, and his building had no definite designs touching heaven. It had been so long since he had regarded the upper atmosphere other than barometrically that he hardly made shift to see the Swan arch her snowy neck from those great lakes of ether, whose indented shores seemed marked and foliage-fringed by the wooded summits of the Great Smoky Mountains. The assertive brilliance of Lyra he noted near the meridian, with the harp-strings all vibrant, doubtless, with that music of the spheres which we are told by the scientist is no longer a mere figment of poesy. The Cor Caroli gleamed pure and splendid amongst the mists of a struggling recollection. And where was Scorpio?--how low in the sky, how far to the southwest, how near to its setting! Through a water-gap of Chilhowee, cloven to the very heart of the range, he marked the gleaming coils. Of strangely melancholy intimations were the stars, seen so far through the steep wooded defile, dark and rugged on either hand; but he only remembered the relation of its early setting and the season, for it was near the end of September. How little building weather the year might spare him yet! How heavy the rains of to-day, and the west still harbored portents! Unless he relinquished all and left the field, baffled and beaten, he must have the incendiary behind the bars. To jail a suspect, at all events, would intimidate the lawless population, and point the moral of "Hands off!"

"I don't see it," he said, reverting to the prosecution of his intention to win the mountaineer's secret information as to the origin of the fire. "I'm sorry I can't see it, Mr.--Excuse me, what did you say your name is?"

His visitor had not said, but all thrown off his guard the young man replied promptly, "Lar'bee,--Jasper Lar'bee. Ef ye look jes' a leetle ter the right of that thar batch o' stars ez 'pears some similar ter a kyart-wheel"--He raised once more the futile inefficiency of his index finger.

But Kenniston was not looking. This name,--he placed it at once. In the short interview which he had had with the deputy sheriff touching the incendiary, without whose apprehension he feared to recommence the building, it had recurred repeatedly to Rodolphus Ross's lips coupled with many an imprecation. Kenniston had paid scant heed at the time to the story of the search for Espey, of the pretended arrest, of the escape of the supposed Larrabee and the inference of some crime which his flight fostered. It had all happened during his absence from the Cove, and shortly before the beginning of the building of the hotel. He could not conceive of any reasons for connecting one with the other; but this man indubitably knew something of the crime; his long and mysterious disappearance had baffled all the devices of the officers, and surely it was a strange subterfuge which had brought him hither. Strange to the minds of others as well, for sundry figures were detached now and again from the illumined thresholds near at hand; presently the foreman had joined the two, and several of the workmen approached, all pausing at intervals and craning their necks up toward the sky, having noticed the intent scrutiny of it, and expectant of some _lusus naturæ_,--comet, or aurora borealis, or other phenomenon,--the observation of which might serve to break the monotony. The resonant tone of the banjo now and again sounded loud in the damp air, as the musician who carried it under his arm jostled against one of the other men. Their attitudes and faces expressed an alert curiosity, for they were not altogether indistinguishable, the two star-gazers having insensibly changed their positions, and come within the line of light falling from one of the open doors.

"Some ter the right o' that batch o' stars ez be some similar ter a kyart-wheel," repeated Larrabee urgently.

"I don't know which you mean," replied Kenniston, drawing himself back to the subject with difficulty.

"Don't ye view one ez ye never viewed afore?" demanded Jasper breathlessly. "Ef ye know 'em, ye air 'bleeged ter see that thar one air strange!"

"Mr. Jackson,"--Kenniston turned to the foreman,--"do you see anything unusual in that sky?"

The foreman answered with a prompt and businesslike negative, and then appealed in turn to one of the workmen. None of them could perceive aught amiss, although they all turned about and critically surveyed the majesty of the heavens.

"It's a new star," protested Larrabee, unconsciously adopting the scientific term of description. "I seen it kindle up myself 'bout three weeks ago."

There was an astounded silence; then a resonance broke out abruptly as the young musician smote his bullet head with the banjo, apparently inadvertently, but with the view of intimating to his fellows that all was not accurately adjusted in the cranium of their queer visitor.

Kenniston hesitated for a moment. There lay in his mind the residuum, so to speak, of an impression that new stars or temporary stars are not of infrequent occurrence in the economy of worlds, rating time by the long astral lengths. He could not say at once,--such scant commerce he had had with the stars of late years, to be sure! His mind had reverted instantly to the question upon what pretext he should seek to detain the man. He only saw rather than noted the workmen slowly turning aside, the long lane of yellow light streaming through the door, the lustrous mirror-like suggestions in the darkness hard by where the pools lurked and the frogs were still croaking, the outlines of the clustering roofs of the other little buildings, shadowy in the deeper shadow, the dense woods surrounding all, and above the great amphitheatre of the mountains on every side. The voice of the foreman recalled him:--

"That's a queer customer. First crank I've seen here."

"Where is he?" cried Kenniston, with a start, the freedom of the criticism notifying him of the absence of its subject. "Stop him! Call him! Hold on to him!"

But the effort was vain. Larrabee had departed as suddenly, as tracklessly, as if the night had swallowed him up.