IX.

In the days that ensued, no trace of the fugitive was developed. Cap'n Lucy experienced a certain relief in the fruitless result of the extended search instituted by the friends that Espey had made in the Cove. In their opinion the conclusion was inevitable that, despite the lack of his horse, he had made good his escape, and did not lie wounded or dead in the jungle of laurel, awaiting their humane succor, or burial at their hands. He was glad that Espey was gone, doubtless never to return, and that the matrimonial problem was gone with him. He was not quite frank with Adelicia in regard to this expectation. Her constitutional hopefulness instantly adopted the general belief of Espey's safety as fact, and she fixed her expectant eyes on the future with such fidelity of certainty that it seemed they must constrain the return she so definitely awaited.

"He'll find out ez them off'cers 'lowed 'twar Jasper Lar'bee, an' never knowed they hed _him_. An' then, uncle Lucy, he won't be 'feared ter kem back," she said many times a day.

"Course not," assented Cap'n Lucy. "He'll be hyar afore long, jes' ez good lookin 'ez he knows how ter be."

It was perhaps a pious fraud, for the girl's despair and grief had been so wild that Cap'n Lucy was glad for her optimism to be reasserted on whatever terms and to have the pleasant thing in the house once more.

Luther had necessarily been enlightened by the recent events as to the sentimental phase of the matter; for Cap'n Lucy had hitherto sedulously kept it secret, since he did not favor a fugitive from justice as a suitor for his niece, and was determined to break off the affair at all hazards. Luther looked with disapproval upon his father's crafty methods.

"I dunno what ails ye ter make Ad'licia b'lieve ez Espey will kem back," he once ventured to say aside to his father. "He air sure ter 'low ez they never tuk him fur Lar'bee, else he wouldn't hev tried ter break away."

"Luther," said Cap'n Lucy, "I hev noticed ez a man air obleeged ter hev a powerful strong stommick ter be able ter tell the truth at all times. An' ez I git old, I hev sorter got the deespepsy."

The son merely gazed at him with a sort of literal-minded bovine stare, as he sought to entertain this statement of the moral effect of debility.

"An' then, whenst I war a leetle boy," continued Cap'n Lucy, "I war bit by a rattlesnake; an' sometimes whenst I hear myself sayin' sech ez air agin the actial fac' it don't s'prise me none, fer I know it air jes' a leetle meanderin' o' the venom o' the sarpient in me yit, 'kase, ye know, he war a deceiver from the beginning."

What impression the strange and unexpected events had made upon the impassive and reserved Julia, none had taken thought to observe. The demonstrative, expressive characteristics of the other members of the household filled the domestic stage. It was only when the poignancy of Adelicia's grief and anxiety had given way to a resolutely patient and hopeful waiting, and Cap'n Lucy's vehement interest had subsided into a trivial occupation with the passing details of life, that it chanced to be noticed that Julia was wont to sit idle at her spinning, the thread in one hand, the other lifted as if to regulate the whirl of the motionless flax-wheel; her wonderful blue eyes fixed upon the distant purple mountains, glimpsed through the parting of the gourd vines above the porch; her head, with its smooth plaits of glossy hair, held up and alert; some unspoken thought upon her marble face that filled every still line with meaning.

"Ye 'pear ter be palsied, Julia," said the unobservant Luther, smoking his pipe on the porch one evening. "Ye hain't moved hand or foot fur a solid hour."

She started slightly at the sound of his voice, fixing her attention on him with obvious effort. Her mind was evidently coming back from distant removes, and Adelicia, with vague curiosity, demanded suddenly,--

"What air you-uns studyin' 'bout, Julia, whenst ye air lookin' like that?"

"Studyin' an' a-studyin'," said Julia, dropping her hands in her lap and leaning back in the chair, her eyes once more turning to the high, massive mountains afar off as if they possessed some magnetic attraction, "'bout'n whar pore, pore Jack Espey kin be now, an' how powerful cur'ous 'twar ez ye wouldn't marry him whenst he axed ye."

The fore-legs of Luther's tilted chair came down to the floor with a thump. With a hand on either knee, and the cinders and burning tobacco dropping from his pipe unheeded to the floor, he sat fixedly staring at his silent sister. To his comprehension she was speaking her mind very unequivocally now. Despite the vaunted feminine quickness, Adelicia heard in it only personal upbraiding, for a certain remorse had made her sensitive on this score, and prone to protest her constraining dutifulness.

"I hed uncle Lucy's word agin it!" she exclaimed, with a rising flush and angry bright eyes.

Julia slowly shook her head, her eyes, her thoughts, far, far away. "I wouldn't hev keered fur no 'uncle Lucy's' word," she declared iconoclastically. "I reckon, ef the truth war knowed, dad hisself married ter suit his own taste. Leastwise, I ain't never hearn o' no old uncle or aunt or dad, or sech kinfolks, ez ondertook ter make a ch'ice in marryin' fur him."

"Waal, sir," Luther interposed, in a tone of shocked propriety, "settin' up hyar an' talkin' by the yard medjure 'bout marryin' an' men-folks, an' I'd bet my best heifer that Jack Espey ain't gin air one o' ye a single thought sence he lef' hyar. No, nor nare 'nother man. Ef the truth war knowed, ye hain't got a haffen chance apiece,--without it air 'Renzo Taft, down yander at the Lost Time mine, an' he can't make out which air the hardest favored 'twixt ye! Ye hed both better go ter work. Jack Espey'll never kem back agin. Dad jes' say he will ter pledjure Ad'licia. An', Julia, ef ye don't spin up that thar truck,"--he pointed with fraternal imperiousness at the wheel,--"ye'll be toler'ble scant o' new clothes, an' ye'll look wuss like a skeercrow 'n ye do now."

Julia received this taunt to her beauty with the equanimity of one whose title is unimpugnable; but Adelicia, all unheeding any subtler sense than the obvious meaning his words conveyed, protested against even this conjectural banishment of poor Jack Espey. He would come back, she declared. He had doubtless found out by this time that he was mistaken in supposing the officers cognizant of his true identity, and that they were jesting, thinking him still Larrabee. And now that the nine days' wonder had blown over, and people were interested in it no more, and so much was going on in the Cove to usurp public attention, she looked for him any time just to slip back in his old place. "I never kem out on the porch but I look ter see him in that thar cheer whar Luther be. I hev 'peared ter see him thar."

"That ain't the way I 'pear ter see him," said Julia suddenly. "I dreampt he war a-kemin' on his claybank horse, a-lopin' down the road, a-wavin' his big white hat at we-uns like he done that day he kilt the wolf an' fotched home the pelt. That's the way I view him ever sence I dreampt that dream."

"Then ye hev the nightmare," said Luther, surly and helpless to stem the tide of sentiment, "an' ye hain't got no mo' sense sleepin' than wakin'; fur that claybank roan will lope down these rocky roads no mo', partly through bein' dead, an' partly through old Miser Miggins hevin' gone down the gorge an' tuk off the critter's shoes. Ye better content yerself with the claybank roan ez a nightmare, fur ye ain't goin' ter view Espey an' the critter a-lopin' round no mo', no matter how much be a-goin' on in the Cove."

For the Cove was indeed in a phenomenal ferment. To the astonishment of the leisurely and dilatory mountaineers, the work on the new hotel had begun, and was being pushed forward on parallels inconceivable to their ideas of progress.

Cap'n Lucy, his mind recalled to his more immediate personal interests, watched it with a sort of avidity of observation from the porch of his own house, where he was wont to sit with his pipe. His sneer, his silent laugh, his acrid enigmatical phrases, grew frequent as the blasting for the cellars proceeded, and the flying fragments of rock, which had elicited such formidable prognostication, fell far short of his cabin or his inclosures, indeed seldom coming to the ground beyond the jungle of laurel at the base of the great natural terrace, the site of the work.

"He didn't git the edzact range, Luther," he would say in affected surprise; or, sarcastically, "This hyar Kenn'ston would hev made a powerful spry gunner in the old war times,--sech a eye for distances!"

Adelicia, observing the circumstance, also remembering Kenniston's expressions of fear for their safety, only saw cause for gratulation.

"Mr. Kenn'ston 'lowed ez we-uns mought hev ter move an' leave home whilst the blastin' war goin' on!" she exclaimed. "An' he made a powerful mistake, uncle Lucy."

"So he did," said Cap'n Lucy, with a twinkling eye. "He air a great man fur movin' ginerally. He b'lieves in movin' things."

Luther, remembering the peripatetic corner-stone and the impending processioning, understood the allusion, but he had a foreboding of trouble, and his heart sunk within him. He was glad when the blasting was concluded, which it was shortly; for he feared a premature or ill-advised accusation, and it seemed to him that the meaning of those thinly veiled sarcasms must presently be revealed to others as well as to himself. The foundations were laid, and the framing of the building followed promptly; soon the gaunt skeleton of the hotel, an outline of modern frivolity and summer pleasuring and flimsy vastness, was incongruously imposed upon the silent, solemn mountain behind it, with the rugged, austere crags below it; with the unfamiliar mists shifting through it and drifting along corridor and ball-room and scaling the tower; with its prophetic shadow, like a line engraving, flung by the moonlight on the dark surface of the top of the dense forest below. More than once furious mountain storms assailed it; but its builder's philosophy had taken account of these inimical forces, and it held fast.

The unbroken mountain wind, however, played havoc with the light shanties of the workmen in this exposed situation on the promontory of rock, and when rebuilt the camp was moved below the terrace, down in a sort of gorge, shielded and safe, albeit the distance from the work was a matter of some inconvenience.

They proved civil folk, the town mechanics, and answered gravely many a queer question put from a vast distance in civilization and sophistication, albeit at arm's length from the natural body; for from far and near the mountaineers visited the unfinished structure. Often a wagon with a yoke of oxen would stand, the patient beasts humbly a-drowse, for an hour or so in the sandy road, while the jeans-clad owner would patrol the new building, solemnly stepping from timber to timber over the depths of the cellar, or with the utmost simplicity of assurance make a critical circuit about the whole, and offer suggestions looking toward improvements. Sometimes the visitor was of shyer gentry: a red fox was glimpsed early one morning, with brush in air, speeding along the joists of the ball-room; it might seem they would never know the weight of aught more graceful or agile; a deer, doubtless a familiar of the springs, was visible once, leaping wildly down the rocks in great elastic bounds, evidently hitherto unaware of the invaders of these preëmpted sylvan wilds. Others, too, of the ancient owners of the soil came on a more prosaic quest, but in the dead hour of darkness or the light of the midnight moon. A young bear, who had long harbored predatory designs upon a certain fat shoat, a denizen of that pig-pen of Cap'n Lucy's upon which the owner and Mr. Kenniston looked with such differing eyes, was brought to a pause, in a cautious reconnoitre, by the fragments of food, scraps from the workmen's dinner, which might be found by nosing about among the shavings. Perhaps it was this alone that led him about the angles and turns of the building; but as he went between the sparse substance of the timbers and their scant linear shadows that, in the sorcery of the moonlight, appeared hardly less real, he seemed as censorious a critic as Cap'n Lucy himself. Sometimes he would pause in his clumsy shamble, and, with the moonlight a-glitter in his small eyes, lift himself on his hind feet and gaze about the solitary building, indescribably melancholy in the loneliness and the wan, pensive sheen; grin with his white teeth, a-gleam with a sarcastic, snarling contempt; fall to all fours again; and, shrugging his heavy shoulders to his ears, scud along with the aspect of clumsy sportiveness common to his kind.

It chanced that a light, portable forge had been in use that day, in the process of the work; the foreman had himself looked to the extinction of the fire, albeit the scene of the operation was upon the solid rock, and far from any possible communication with the building. The wind could never have turned over the low apparatus set in the hollow of the ledges, but the bear could, and did. Then he sat down suddenly to lick his singed paw, for the metal was still hot. The fuel had been charcoal; it still sustained heat, and even combustion. There was a steady spark in a few of the scattered cinders, quickening, reddening, as the eager night air touched them. The shavings amongst which they had fallen, further down the slope, were slightly astir for a moment; then a timorous blaze sprang up along the more tenuous, lace-like, curling edges.

How the destructive element fared, whether by slow, insidious, fearful degrees, as of conscious but furtive evil intent, or as animated by a wild, tumultuous, riotous impulse, more and more rapacious with impunity, as of some turbulent, maddened thing escaping control, none but Bruin might say, for, save the impassive, neutral night, the event had no other witness. Before the flames had fairly taken hold of the studs and joists his cowardly fears had gained the ascendency over his gluttony. More than once he paused, in gnawing his trophy of a beef bone, to growl fiercely, his remonstrant, surprised eyes illuminated by this alien flicker. As the skies began to redden, and the pale moonlight to fail, and the great massive mountains to appear, dark and weird, from the deep and silent seclusions of the night, he left his booty and retreated toward the verge of the woods, pausing now and again in the dun-colored shadows, all veined with shifting pulsations of red and white, to look with eyes aglow, reflecting the fire, upon its ravages, growling fiercely at times; then, with his recurrent fears, setting out once more on a lumbering run.

Perchance the reflection flung upon the clouds, all lurid and alight, before which the stars shrank away invisible, apprised the traveler journeying in far-away coves and ranges, or the herder of the lofty solitudes of the balds, or the hunter in distant coverts, of the disaster in progress before the nearest neighbors were roused. The angry glare of the conflagration seemed to pervade the world, like the vivid searching terrors of the red day of doom, when the workmen, down in their sheltered nook beneath the crags and the dense shadows of the forest, discovered the untoward fate of their handiwork. Into the crevices of the batten shutters of Cap'n Lucy's glassless windows the keen rays at last pierced, like some sinister, pestilential, dazzling sunburst, illuminating the homely scenes with an uncanny flare, and displacing the broken dreams with a terrified awakening.

Naught could be done. It might be accounted a spectacle in some sort,--to watch the airy acrobatic feats of the lithe flames leaping from beam to brace, from joist to rafter, of the three tall stories, seeming of vaster proportions with all their detail illustrated in these living tints upon the subsidiary, flickering night. There was a series of wild, dancing, tangled blazes a-whirl in the lengths of the ball-room, white and red and orange and blue, an uncanny rout. High up on the battlemented turret a vermilion banner flaunted suddenly out to the moon, and then it was struck amidst a myriad of sparks, and the echoes clamored out against the crashing of the tower.

For days thereafter the smoking, charred ruin was the terminus of many a pilgrimage amongst the simple folk of the region, who had never beheld wreckage on such a scale. The idle workmen hovered about it, dispirited and anxious, awaiting orders. There was much mysterious talk of incendiarism, and a rumor pervaded the Cove that the matter had already been reported in this light to the authorities, and that Rodolphus Ross was on his way to the scene of action.

Cap'n Lucy, seated on the rocks about the limpid spring, at a comfortable distance from the hot, smouldering mass, smoked his pipe, as he contemplated it, in more placidity of mind than had for some time fallen to his share. He was not a man who would deliberately seek to injure his enemy in person or property; but Cap'n Lucy was eminently human, and he could but admire the wisdom of the uncovenanted dispensations of Providence, through which Mr. Kenniston's game was, as he conceived it, so handsomely blocked. He had a most buoyant sense of irresponsibility in the matter.

"I ain't so much as once spoke to the Lord 'bout'n that man," he said privately to Luther, as if his prayers must needs have been inflammable.

He was not the only one of the spectators who thought, in view of the magnitude of the ruin, that the whole project was necessarily ended, and who looked on Kenniston's invasion of the Cove as a thing already of the past. It was a matter of very general surprise when the "town man" suddenly reappeared upon the scene in a bounding fury, and, in the metaphorical phrase of the mountaineers, "primed and loaded for b'ar." They little dreamed how literal a reason he had to hold a grudge against Bruin.