II.

Lorenzo Taft met the rain halfway to his own dwelling. He pulled his hat over his eyes and bent to his mare's neck before its fury, and although the animal now and again swerved from the bridle-path at the glare of the lightning, she carried her master steadily and fleetly enough; and it was not far from his reckoning of the hour that they should pass the Lost Time mine when a broad illumination of the skies revealed the great portal, gauntly yawning in the side of the range, where a tunnel had been made in the search for silver, and abandoned. He pulled up his dripping steed and seemed to listen. Water had risen within, evidently, from the infinite enmeshment of the underground streams and springs that vein the great range; he heard it lapping upon the rocks, as it came pouring along its channel in the tunnel. It played around the mare's fetlocks, and now and again the animal fretfully lifted her forefoot. Another flare of the weird, unearthly yellow light, more lingering, brighter, than the last, showed the swift clear flow of the current, the great bleak beetling rocks of the oval aperture, the trees on the mountain side high above it, and beyond, three hundred yards or so, a little log cabin set upon the slope, which was a gentler declivity here, surrounded by a few acres of cornfield, and the appurtenances of beehives, hen-house, and rickety barn common to the humbler dwellings of the region. He could even see, between the house and the steep ascent immediately behind it, the far-away crags, as the range rounded out, glimmering in the lightning down the vista thus formed.

It seemed the simplest of domestic establishments, and a forlorn little family group met his gaze as he opened the door and stepped within. The fire had dwindled to a few embers; a flickering flare from a handful of chips flung on in anticipation of his return, heralded by the sound of the mare's hoofs, showed the unplastered log room of the region, more unkempt than is usual, and betraying the lack of a woman's hand. The slight preparation for his reception was not the work of a boy of twelve, who sat soundly sleeping in a splint-bottomed chair, his whole attitude one of somnolent collapse, as if he had not a bone in his body, his round face white and freckled, his curly red hair growing straight up from his forehead, his slightly open red mouth of a merry carelessness of expression even in unconsciousness. On the opposite side of the fireplace a little girl was staidly seated. She had a narrow, white, formal little face; thin light brown hair, short and straight and smooth, put primly back behind her ears; a small mouth, with thin, precise lips; a meek eye, with a gentle lash. Her father looked at her with a sentiment of awe rising in his stalwart breast. "Consider'ble older'n the Newnited States, an' I hed ruther keep house for a regiment o' pa'sons," he commented silently.

She wore a checked homespun dress, spotlessly clean, a dark calico apron, high-necked, buttoned to the nape in the back, shoes and blue stockings, which are rare among the children in the mountains at this season; and despite her limited inches, she was as formidable a spectacle of perfect precocity and prim perfection as ever a man who liked to go his own gait had the pleasure of looking upon. Miss Cornelia Taft was entirely competent to see all that might be going on in her small world, and she had brought her own unalterable standards with her, in her pocket as it were, by which to judge.

There was a little unacknowledged weariness in her expression, and a certain stiffness as she got down out of her chair, which intimated that she was not quite equal physically to her resolution to sit up for him. He was about to requite this after the usual manner of those favored with this feminine attention, but she had begun to rake out some Irish potatoes roasting in the ashes, and Lorenzo Taft's remonstrance was subdued from his original intention.

"Look-a-hyar, Sis," he said, "whyn't ye go ter bed? Ye mustn't sit up waitin' fur me this time o' night. I don't eat no second supper, nohow."

But he was presently disposing of the refection of potatoes, corn bread, and buttermilk in great gulps, while she looked on with her inexpressive, unastonished eye.

"Whyn't ye make Joe go to bed?" he demanded, his mouth full, as he nodded at the sleeping boy.

The vaguest expression of prim repudiation was on her face. "He 'lowed he warn't sleepy," she said, with some capacity for sarcasm. She would have mended Joe as if he were a rag doll, but for his stalwart resistance. She did not expend herself in vain regrets. She had cast him and his tatters off forever, unless indeed he should come some day and sue to be made whole.

"Waal," said Lorenzo Taft, bending a perplexed brow upon her, "jes' let him be, an' ye go on upsteers an' go to bed. Ye'll never grow no higher ef ye set up so late in the night."

She turned obediently toward the stairs, or rather a rude ladder that ascended to the loft, while Lorenzo Taft paced back and forth in the room with a long, elastic stride, troubled and absent, and only conscious at the last moment that it was a look of the keenest curiosity that the little girl's placid eyes cast down upon him as she disappeared amongst the shadows of the loft.

He stood still, disproportionately perturbed, it might seem. Then he sought to reassure himself.

"I reckon I ain't much similar ter old Mis' Jinaway, nohow; an' ez she air useter a quiet, percise old 'oman's ways an' talk, I mus' seem toler'ble comical, bein' so big an' hearty, an' take big bites, an' talk loud, an' ride in the storm." He paused in the midst of his sophistry. Her look was so intelligent, so keenly inquisitive. "She's mighty leetle, but"--his caution had returned--"a ca'tridge o' giant powder ain't so powerful bulky. I hev got ter git somebody ter take keer o' her,--or ter take keer o' _me_, sure!"

If the small Cornelia Taft's curiosity had been excited by what she had already observed, she would have thought his subsequent proceedings very strange indeed, could she have supervised them. But her placid little eyelids had closed at last upon her calm little eyes, and a very few gentle homesick tears for a place where they washed the dishes, and swept the floors, and slept in an airy room with the firelight flickering, and mended their garments; if amusement must be had, what gay times she and her grandmother had enjoyed, to be sure, when they raced as they knit their stockings, pausing twice or thrice in the evening to compare speed and measure the accomplished hose! A very strange man she thought her father, and she would have thought him stranger still if she could have seen him presently take a lantern and cross the open passage to the other room of the log hut, which served as store. There were embers here as well, and as he locked the door again they showed the array of gear needed for a country trade,--knives, shoes, shears, saddles, harness, rope, a little calico, sugar, coffee, salt, and iron. There was a counter at one side, on which stood the scales. It seemed a very commonplace structure, unless one should see him open a door into it on the inner side. This was not a cupboard, which might have been convenient; it gave upon a door in the puncheon floor, which, lifted, showed a ladder leading to the cellar. He went through, feet foremost, closing the counter door after him as well as the other. He lighted his lantern, not with a coal or flint, as is usual, but with the more modern and progressive match, and then down the ladder he went very warily, for it was a somewhat slight structure, and he was a heavy man. It could be removed, too, in a moment, which added to its insecurity.

And still there was naught apparent which could justify so much caution. The lantern, now fairly alight, revealed empty boxes and barrels, and a scanty reserve of stock similar to the goods which the shelves above showed. He pushed a few boxes aside, took down a board or two of the wall in the rear, and in another moment was in one of the tunnels of the abandoned mine, the wall replaced behind him.

Surely, a man was never more ingeniously secure, he thought, as he went at a brisk pace into the depths of the mountain, and it would all be jeopardized by the influx into the Cove of a horde of tourists and summer sojourners that the projected hotel might bring. No exclusive aristocrat was ever more jealous of his seclusion from the roving of his kind than Lorenzo Taft. And then this danger of his own household, his own hearthstone; this silent, disapproving, prying, perfect little primness!

He crossed water once. He never crossed it without remembering the instinct of the deer pursued to put a running stream between its flight and the hunter. The rivulet, very narrow here, flowed in a rocky bed at a swift rate. This was a tributary of the larger torrent that had flooded the mine, and, together with the small output and the inadequate prospect, had caused the work to be abandoned. Two of the miners had been drowned in the catastrophe, and this circumstance had doubtless contributed to the solitude of the locality. It was a place of strange sounds, with the forever-echoing rocks, and few curiosity seekers had ever ventured farther than the great outer portal of the Lost Time mine. Into this tunnel, with which Taft had joined a tunnel of his own secret workmanship, the water had not risen, albeit the lower excavations were all submerged; and as he went dryshod, he heard the deft patter of his tread on the well-beaten "dirt" path multiplied behind him by the echoes into the semblance of many a following footfall. This illusion might have jarred less accustomed nerves, but Taft had heard this impalpable pursuit so long with impunity that he was hardly likely to heed it now. Something, however, that he sometimes heard, and that was more often silent, he had learned to watch for, to fearfully mark the sound when it came, and to note its absence with a shuddering sense of vacancy and a chill suspense. It was like the sound of a pick continually striking into the earth, not with a hurried or fitful stroke, but timed with a composed regularity characteristic of the steady workman. Sometimes it seemed far away, sometimes immediately overhead, and again just underfoot. Those who heard it accounted for it readily enough. Who had set the ghastly superstition afoot none might say, but the belief widely obtained that the two lost miners thus wrought continually in the depths of the mountain, digging the graves that had been denied them on the face of the earth. To Taft, the familiar of the dark, the weird, and the uncanny, it seemed a likely enough solution of the mystery, and he nothing doubted it. He could not account for another phenomenon, not so frequent, but often enough forced upon his contemplation to bring him to an anxious pause. Sometimes he heard, or thought he heard, voices, loud, resounding, distinct,--hailing, hallooing voices; and again so uncertain, so commingled, were these vibrations, so repetitious and faint, that he could not be sure that they were not merely echoes,--echoes of the talk and mirth of the group of moonshiners whom another turn of the underground passage showed him at their work in the broader space of a chamber of the mine, where the great timbers still stanchly supported the roofing masses of earth, and the walls of sandstone bore freshly the gaunt wounds that the blasting had wrought in their rugged sides.