XVII.
It was a buoyant, elated spirit that Jasper Larrabee bore as he slipped swiftly away through the darkness and the woods, unaware of the sudden vehement search for him, unhearing the hue and cry. He had put his discovery to the test,--the most searching that he could devise. And not the man learned in letters, who even knew the stars by name, not the clear-headed, prosperous, efficient foreman, not the humbler handicraftsmen, could see that gracious, splendid stellular presence still shining,--shining down into the wilderness, doubtless with some message, some token, some personal relation, that would be in due season made known. He had no uncertainties; he had said to himself that if it were invisible to others he would accept it as a revelation to himself. For had he not seen it even as it first kindled in the blank spaces of the midnight sky?
He felt with a sort of surprise that his limbs were trembling as he went, his breath was short; more than once he paused, with a reeling sense as if he should fall, and he beheld the summit line of demarkation where the dark woods touched the clear sky describe a long curve upward, and once more sink to its place. He had not known the physical exhaustion that ensues upon strong and long-continued mental excitement. Beyond the moment's impatient realization he gave it no heed. He was glad, glad beyond all power of analysis, expectant, breathless, his eyes continually fixed upon the star, unmindful whither his failing feet carried him. He passed without a thought the door of the store of the Lost Time mine, from which so lately he had escaped as it were with his life in his hand. He might have seen, if he had chosen, the twinkle of Cornelia Taft's fire through the chinking, as she nodded on the hearth and vainly waited for her father's return to supper. He heard naught,--no voice from the woods, no stir of leaf, no sigh of wind, no lapsing of the alien sheets of water, not even the full rush of the stream from the portal of the Lost Time mine, loud, sinister, seemingly charged with cavernous echoes from those hidden haunted recesses whence it came, wild, turbulent, with thrice its normal volume hurling out into the black night. Only once he paused. The unseen air and the invisible moisture were at their jugglery again, weaving from nothingness wondrous symmetries of scrolls tenuous to the eye, marvelous winged suggestions endowed with the faculty of flight and airy poise, graces of fabric, tissues, fold on fold of impalpable pearl-tinted consistencies; and now a floating film passed before the star, and again it shone out more splendid still, and anon dimly through the gathering haze, and so was lost to sight.
Larrabee stood for a time spellbound, still gazing up into heaven. But winds were astir in the region of the clouds. Heavy purple masses, with here and there flocculent white drifts in their midst, and showing lines of white at their verges, were spreading over the sky; the temperature had fallen suddenly; he was shivering. Vagrant gusts seemed to issue from defiles of the mountain, and he heard the awakening of the pines. Out of sight of the star his flagging energies failed. The definite realization of his fatigue, his hunger, his faintness, pressed upon his aroused senses. He could hardly support his tottering limbs to the door of the Lost Time mine, and drag himself up on the rocks, out of the reach of the water, to rest, as he waited till the clouds should pass, till the sight of the star should be renewed to his longing gaze. Even in its eclipse, in a certain yearning sense of bereavement, in his disappointment, he had a patience and calm acquiescence begotten of confidence. For he should see it again. Was it not his own, his very own, charged with some unimagined significance to him? He shifted his posture once, reckoning upon its position in the sky, that it might not fail his sight the moment the baffling clouds should withdraw. He was conscious of a high degree of happiness despite his tremulous thrills of suspense. He gazed upward, as he reclined on the ledge of rock, with smiling eyes and a heart full of deep content. He had gone far enough within to have an upward view through the jagged portal of rough-hewn rocks. Beyond their edges the sky seemed of lighter tint, so black it was within. He could mark here how the clouds made sail, how swiftly the wind sped them. He watched a section of a branch close at hand sway in sight, and swing back on the wind, and once more wave, nodding, plumelike, into view. He heard the sharp bark of a fox outside in the woods; it roused far-away baying of drowsy hounds, and again all was still, but for the reverberation of the water loud against the echoing walls of the darksome place. The sound affected his nerves; he was dizzy for a moment. Then something cold, clammy, suddenly struck him in the face. His heart seemed to stand still with the recollection of the spectral terrors of the place. The soft chill buffet came again and again, and the air was vaguely fanned about his brow before he recognized the noiseless flight of bats on their way to the outer darkness. He lay back upon the ledge, finding a solace in the mere posture of rest in his extreme fatigue, and once more watched the jagged black portal and the purple clouds with their hoary drifts, as in endless unbroken folds they rolled before the serene white splendors of that wondrous star. Again and again he would lift himself upon his elbow, fancying that the cloud textures waxed thin, and that presently, when they should fall away from before it, he would behold anew the sidereal incandescent glory that meant so much, that should mean more to him. Not once did his faith fail him. Not once did he doubt that the white fires of this star, which none else could see, were miraculously kindled and charged with some deep significance for him, with the vouchsafed will of God. For were not stars messengers in the olden time? Had he not read of one, supremely blessed and brilliant, which had led men, the wisest men, to the cradled Christ? As he lay back in the dense darkness, with the gathering clouds outside, and the air freighted with the sense of black noiseless invisible wings of creatures of ill favor and ill omen, he seemed to have a vision of that guiding star,--not a chill splendid crystalline glitter like his own, high, high in the sky, but low down in the dark east, and of a soft supernal silver sheen in the purple shadowy mist above the shadowy purple hills of Judea, that stretched out in ever-lengthening perspectives, as it fared on and slowly on its mystic way, for Bethlehem might still be far to seek.
And suddenly, with a start, Larrabee became aware that it was a real light at which he was gazing far down in the Lost Time mine. He had slept he knew not how long, nor in what danger, for the lantern whose starry lustre shone so far in the dark cavernous depths was swinging in the hands of one of two men who must have passed him as he lay dreaming and unconscious. He hardly dared move at first, so far those slanting, divergent rays extended from the white focus into the darkness. He lay still, struggling for a moment with the idea of the traditional spectres of the place, whose grisly renown had served to make it so solitary. It was the lantern which proved so redoubtable an exorcist. The sight of the little mundane contrivance appealed to his logical faculty as no mere theory of the impossibility of spectres could have done. He lifted himself cautiously on his elbow, and gazed down the vistas of the gloomy place with a suspicious, inquisitive worldly pulse beating in every vein. These were men in truth; and what was their mission here? One of them was singularly gesticulatory of manner. The other slouched heavily. It was the latter who had just lighted the lantern, for he was evidently throwing away a match, an article which the Lost Time store had made common in the Cove. Suddenly they were joined by a third figure, somehow detached from the darkness, for Larrabee could hardly have said whence he had approached, and who turned with a light, lithe motion, swinging to his shoulder an implement which the thickset man had handed him. It was a pick. How often Larrabee had heard its vibrations ring through these storied depths while he threaded the dark tunnel to the still, and shivered at the thought of the two dead miners digging and digging the graves these thirty years for their bones which only the waters had buried!
The lantern swayed, the shadows all flickered, the group was on the move. Larrabee sprang hastily to his feet to follow.
He could not easily judge how far the feeble glimmer led them, so rugged and winding was the way. Once, as the mouth of a submerged shaft yawned suddenly before his unprescient feet, he hesitated, half deterred; he was fain to skulk with the skulking shadows, lest the light should reveal his presence, and thus the dangers which his precursors braved menaced him doubly. He marveled that they dared the possibilities of the place, as he noted that the half-fallen timbers in a cross-cut through which they passed barely supported the masses of earth which any jar might dislodge. Everywhere was the sound of water working its secret will still on the ruins that it had made, and its tone added to the awe of the place, and the desolation, and the darkness, and the eerie effect of the bats that flew after the lantern and smote blindly against it.
The light was set down presently, and as the men seemed stirring about their work Larrabee ventured to approach nearer behind a pile of broken rock in the darkness, and mopped the cold perspiration from his brow. He caught his breath at the sight of the faces which the lantern revealed.
For they were all recruited from his mother's hearth. Some crazy folly, doubtless, of old man Haight had drawn him here. He had been one of the miners before that catastrophe which had closed the work forever; Larrabee remembered in what deep, blood-curdling tones he was wont to curse the Lost Time mine. And his daughter Jerusha's husband,--it had always been a marvel where and how he obtained the whiskey he so indubitably consumed; perhaps, in consideration of his age and infirmities, Mrs. Larrabee furnished a too ample allowance of liquor to old man Haight, who, for services rendered in this wild enterprise, furnished his son-in-law.
"We-uns hev been toler'ble good customers o' the Lost Time still," Larrabee muttered sarcastically.
And there was Jack Espey! The sanity of _his_ presence here was easily demonstrable; nowhere else could he so safely be. How he had chanced to coöperate in this strange work with the dotard and the sot was soon explained.
"Gimme a holt o' that thar grub," he said gruffly, with a look of poignant hunger on his thin face.
Old Haight, with a deprecatory expression and shaking hand, made haste to give him a small basket, of the queer shape and aspect which bespoke the work of the Indians of Quallatown. The young man voraciously thrust his hand into its narrow mouth, and as he drew forth its meagre contents gave vent to his disappointment.
"My Lord!" he exclaimed, "is that all? An' ye expec' me ter kem hyar night arter night--from--from"--the effort of his heavy flight of imagination showed in his face--"from 'way over yander whar I live now, an' holp ye dig an' sech, an' gin me sech forage ter work on ez that!" He pointed contemptuously at the food, albeit his mouth was full.
"Now, now, Jack, now, bubby, lemme tell you," expostulated the old man, his jaw quivering painfully as he spoke, and his wrinkled face showing, in the glimmer of the lantern, at once grotesque and piteous, encircled as it was by the brilliant hues of a little shawl of Mrs. Larrabee's, in which his head was tied up for protection against the weather, and which was surmounted by his hat. "Ye dunno how durned hard it war ter git that much. This hyar Henrietty Timson hev got us down on half rations, mighty short commons. 'Tain't like 'twar whenst you-uns lived with us, Jack. Oh my! Oh my, no!" and he shook his queerly upholstered head as he sat quaking and shivering on a ledge of the rock. He impressed Larrabee as much out of place,--so habituated was he to the sight of the old man in the chimney corner,--as the oven, or pot, or crane, or any other naturalized appurtenance of the fireside might have been. He let his veinous old shaking hands fall on his knees with a gesture deeply significant of grief. "I wisht ter Gawd," he cried, "ez S'briny war hyar!"
He pronounced her name as if she were a sort of minor providence, as indeed she had been to him.
"Leetle as ye hed, ye mought hev brung it sooner," grumbled Jack, stuffing the half of a very fat, very heavy biscuit into his mouth.
"Law, Jack," cried the old man, "we-uns air plumb 'feared ter leave the house sooner,--even arter all war bedded up for the night. That thar 'oman hev got her pryin' nose in every mortal thing; 'pears ter me the longest, sharpest nose I even seen," he added injuriously, and with sudden sprightly interest, "ain't it, Tawm?"
His fellow-sufferer from its pointed inquisitiveness had seemed about to fall asleep in a heavy, shapeless lump, but he roused himself at this to add his testimony with some sincere acridity.
"Longes' an' sharpes' _I_ ever seen," he protested thickly, "an' I hev known 'em p'inted an' drawn out to _de_-straction." His snore followed so promptly that one might have doubted whether he had spoken at all; his remark presented the phenomenon of a waking parenthesis, as it were, in the midst of the somnolent text.
"I tell ye, it's good fur S'briny ter go, ter let we-uns savor how we miss her," said the old man. "Sech a house, Jack, sech quar'lin' an' scufflin' an' tormentin', f'om mornin' till night,--crowdin' _Me_ up on the h'a'thstone, an' shovin' _my_ cheer, an' talkin' 'bout useless cumberers, whenst I hev been treated with sech _re_-spec' by S'briny Lar'bee ez ef I hed been her own dad, stiddier jes' her husband's step-dad,--sech _re_-spec' an' hot vittles, an' the fus' sarved, an' the bes' o' everything!" His old face flushed with the recollection of the recent indignities offered him. "The pa'son tells ye ter lean on the Lord. Ef ye ain't got the grace ter do that, S'briny Lar'bee's a mighty good help!"
For the life of him, Jasper Larrabee could not harden his heart.
"Her pet tur-rkey air dead," old man Haight presently observed disconnectedly.
"Glad of it," said Jack callously. "I never seen a beast so pompered, an' fairly hanker ter git stepped on, forever flusterin' 'roun' the floor underfoot."
"_She_'ll be powerful sorry. She sot a heap o' store by it, an' doctored it cornsider'ble. She 'lowed it hed the quinsy." Then after a pause, "Whenst I gits my money back," said the old man meditatively, "I be goin' ter buy S'briny Lar'bee suthin' ez will s'prise her,--I dunno what. I studies on it some mighty nigh every day. A spry young filly, mebbe, or a good cow an' calf,--I dunno. I'd gin her the money, ef she wouldn't be sure ter fool it away on them wuthless triflin' cattle of chil'n an' folks she contrives fur all the time. I'd gin S'briny half o' the cold cash, an' ennyhow I lay off ter spend half fur a presint fur her."
Espey, his energies recruited by food, and perhaps willing to postpone the evil hour of shoveling and digging, looked up with a satiric eye and a rallying laugh.
"Whar's my sheer, ef ye be goin' ter gin Mis' Lar'bee haffen the money? Ye 'lowed Tawm hed hed his pay in whiskey,"--he cast a side glance at the bloated slumbering face and collapsed figure in the shadow,--"an' he's hed a plenty, too, fur he's nuthin' but a cag o' liquor set a-goin' on two legs; but I'm durned ef I'll take my pay out in Mis' Timson's sour yeast an' raw dough." He twirled the empty basket over contemptuously. "Ye 'lowed that night, three weeks ago, whenst I--ye--whenst we run on one another, an' s'prised one another, ez ye'd pay me solid silver ef I wouldn't tell nobody, but holp ye; now didn't ye?"
Espey's tone was so obviously that of one who speaks in flagrant jest that Larrabee perceived he gave the unknown enterprise no serious support or credence, and that he was only utilizing some preposterous delusion of the old man touching his work in the Lost Time mine to secure food to sustain him while he evaded the pursuit of the law.
"Ye 'low ez 'tain't enough money!" screamed the old man shrilly, and Larrabee recognized the clamors of the queer cracked voice which he had been wont to shudderingly mark in the tunnel that led to the still. "Ain't I done tole ye what I ain't never tole no other livin' man--I don't count Tawm--it air eighty-seben dollars! Yes, sir, nigh on ter a hundred, what I hed done sold my cabin an' lan' fur on Big Injun Mounting whenst I kem over hyar ter settle,--eighty-seben dollars in hard silver"--He broke off abruptly. Then, in the deep, hollow, blood-curdling tone which Larrabee had so often heard about the fireside, he cursed the Lost Time mine. His excitement was painful to witness, as Larrabee, still looking round the pile of broken rock, noted his feverish illumined eyes, the flush on his withered parchment-like cheek, the aimlessness and the quaking of his fluttering nerveless hand. Espey was gazing at him calmly, his face lighted by the lantern placed on the ground between them, and evidently believing that not a syllable he uttered had any foundation in fact.
"'Twar the day o' the floodin' o' the mine," old Haight mouthed and gesticulated vehemently. "Every durned thing went wrong that day! I war hyar a-workin'. I hed worked in mines over in Car'liny, an' war ekal ter all. I war toler'ble young an' nimble,--knowed ter be ez nimble ez a painter! An' one o' them durned buzzards workin' of the windlass drapped the whole contrivance, winch, rope, bucket, man, an' all, down inter the bottom o' the shaft; an' they couldn't make the man answer, an' 'lowed he war kilt. An' I--the devil's own fool--mus' ups an' volunteer ter go down an' git the windlass an' let 'em hoist it out, an' then let down the bucket agin an' fetch up the man--(I furgits his name, dad-burn him!--Tom, Jim, Pete, cuss him, whatever he be!) An' ez they war a sort o' harnessin' me up with ropes under my arms an' around my middle, I felt my leetle bag o' money a-poppin' 'bout in my pocket, an' 'peared ter me it mought pop out down in that deep onhandy shaft. An' I handed it ter the foreman ter keep fur me in his pocket,--he war a clever trusted man; I never tole the t'others, kase they war toler'ble hard cases, an' some men would kill a man fur a dollar an' a half; an' bless Gawd--eighty-seben dollars! An' down I goes! I hed about teched bottom when--hell broke loose! I 'lowed I hearn thunder: 'twar the water on a plumb tear, breakin' down the walls an' cavortin' like a herd o' wild cattle through the mine. Sech screechin's! The men ez helt the rope drapped it on my head an' run fur thar lives!"
With open mouth and shaking jaw, he rose up, and gazed eagerly about, while Espey wearily yawned and passed his hands across his eyes.
"It bust through about thar." He pointed about in real or fancied recognition of the course of the flood. "But over yander--the whole thing hev fell down an' caved in sence then, mighty nigh--'twar higher 'n the level o' the overflow, an' I stayed down thar in the shaft dry ez a bone. I stayed two days along o' that dead man. I furgits his name," he broke off in peevish irritation.
He sat down, readjusted his plaid shawl about his head, surmounted it again with his big broad hat, and recommenced:--
"Wall, they 'lowed at fust they'd work the mine agin,--didn't know what the damage war; an' ez they war pokin' 'bout, somebody 'membered me, an' when they fished me out'n the shaft I hed these hyar jiggets." He held up his shaking hands, and looked in exasperation from one to the other. "Some calls it the palsy, but the doctor, he 'lowed it kem from the narvous shock. An' the foreman, he hed done hed ter git drowned with my leetle bag o' money in his pocket." He rose to his feet, with a sudden steady blazing fire in his eyes. "But it's silver,--eighty--seben--dollars!" He pronounced the words as if they expressed the wealth of the Indies. "They air silver,--silver metal. Water can't hurt 'em, an' the leetle leather bag kep' 'em from scatterin'. The foreman's got 'em in his pocket. Mebbe he hain't got no pocket by this time, but he hain't got rid o' all his bones. The money'll be nigh his bones, an' I be goin' ter foller the wash o' that flood, afore the walls fell in on it, till I find 'em."
There was something pathetic to Jasper Larrabee's sympathetic gaze in the record of the gradual failure of the old man's mental powers registered on the walls. He could easily distinguish, of course, the difference in the work wrought by numbers and with the expectation of valuable ore and this unique subterranean burrowing with only the object of old Haight's search in prospect. But at first accepted methods of mining had been held in regard with a due consideration of safety. The excavations had been carefully timbered, the débris of the ancient lumber serving for the purpose; the nature of the earth and rock all capably recognized either in the avoidance of obstacles or the seizure of advantage; the exact location of an old cross-cut definitely ascertained and intersected by the new tunnel, and utilized to further him on the way to some objective point, doubtless once definite in his mind, but now hazy and intermittent, or possibly lost altogether, for here and there, evidently at random, great vaults had been hollowed out and abandoned, and for a long time every precaution or thought of safety had been discarded. His plan and its feasibility were gone, and only his inadequate intention remained.
Larrabee started violently as the walls rang suddenly with the weird old voice, which, with its keen, false intonation, had so often struck terror to the stout hearts of the moonshiners of the Lost Time still. It was a voice of insistent command. He was urging his comrades to the work, and presently the regular strokes of the pick wielded by the stalwart "Tawm" set the echoes of the place to a hollow, melancholy iteration dreary to hear, and dismally blent with the rush of the cruel torrent. Espey's stroke seemed, in comparison, incidental and ineffective; but albeit both men worked apparently with a will, it was evidently quite at random, obeying implicitly now and again a gesture or command given in pursuance of some weak, wavering intention, and changed in a moment.
The accident which had put the secret into Larrabee's hands seemed to him now so natural that he marveled that it had not been earlier revealed. But doubtless the vocation of the lost miners had served to connect the stroke of the pick with their gruesome fate, and thus the very fact of the sound, which must otherwise have betrayed the enterprise, aided the spectral traditions and the consequent avoidance of the place to preserve it. Would Espey have dared, he asked himself, to venture within, had he not feared the living more than the dead? And but for his own recognition of the humble lantern and its necessarily human uses he would, for fear of the spectral miners, hardly have tracked the old miner to his new lead.
And suddenly, with the very thought, notwithstanding the perfectly natural solution of the mystery, he was solicitous as to the means of departure. He could not wait to follow that feeble lantern far enough in the background to insure his invisibility. He would not issue upon them now and advertise his discovery, and dismay the old dotard with his hopeless scheme. "I don't want to torment the pore old man," he said. He felt a keen thrill of savage joy to have discovered Espey's lair, but he would need some thought to secretly entrap him. "Fur ye air a mighty slick shirk, brother Jack," he said, with scorn. He was feeling some matches in his pockets, and judging of their number. Should they fail him before he reached the outer air, he could step aside and wait till the men should pass with the lantern. Its glimmer served now as long as the passage was comparatively straight; when it turned, himself out of the possibility of view, he struck the first match. The way was shorter than he had fancied. His store was not yet exhausted when he felt the warmer temperature from without, and saw the jagged outline of the portal and heard the melancholy dash of the rain; for it was once more "falling weather," and the sky was cloaked and gray.
As he hesitated outside, his mind intent upon Espey and the incidents of his career since he had been among them, there came to him the thought of the barn in which his whilom friend had been wont to spend so many idle and meditative hours. A good refuge, to be sure, for a fugitive from the law. The idea of comforts allured him as he recollected the great fragrant elastic masses of hay. A hiding-place as well. Here even Henrietta Timson would hardly find him, for the rotting ladder, from which many a rung was missing, afforded scant footing for a barn swallow, or a flying squirrel, or an athlete like himself or his friend. Sleep would recruit his energies, quiet solace his mind, a vacant interval of time clarify his intentions and fortify his resolves. He started up the mountain briskly; the thought of home, even in this humble, secret, half-outcast guise, warmed his heart. He did not feel the rain dash in his face. A prescience of October was unheeded in the melancholy cadences of the midnight wind. He hardly noted the deep gloom of the Cove, where an owl was wailing at intervals, and whence all the orange-tinted lights had vanished. As the chill of the failing season struck him, he shivered, but unconsciously. He had forged on past the Lost Time store almost to the crest of the ridge, where the homeward way diverged, when suddenly a dull subterranean thunder shook the air, and the earth seemed to tremble. He paused in astonishment.
"Why, they air a-blastin' down thar in the Lost Time mine. Espey oughtn't ter let two bereft folks tech sech ez that; 'tain't safe."
Then he reflected that Espey himself had doubtless superintended the charges with due regard to their safety and his own. Nevertheless, he shook his head as he stood looking over his shoulder into the blank, unresponsive darkness. He heard no more, and presently he turned again and went his homeward way in the dark persistent dripping of the early autumn rain.