XXVIICloud-Wraiths
WITH Judge Birrell urging haste, the start for the burying-ground glade was made at once. Since Tregarvon’s car was large enough to hold them all, Wilmerding’s roadster was left behind. Carfax drove the touring-car, with Tryon clutching for handholds in the mechanician’s seat beside him. This arrangement left the broad tonneau seat for the other three; and the judge, with the gun between his knees, sat in the middle. When the big car shot away with its loading the master of Westwood was still calling down maledictions upon the heads of those who would besmirch the fair fame of the Southland by resorting to the methods of the assassin and the anarchist.
“Who are these scoundrels, Mistuh Tregarvon?” he demanded. “Just name me thei-uh names, suh!” And then, with the charming inconsistency of his kind: “This is a law-abiding community, suh, and you have wronged us by keeping silence so long; you have, for a fact, suh! Butnow we shall vindicate ou’selves. A little taste of a rope and a tree limb for this grand rascal yo-uh men have caught will make him tell us the names of his confederates and accomplices; and then, by the Lord Harry, suh, we’ll run these lawbreakuhs down with the dogs and hang them higheh than Haman!”
During the hurried cross-mountain run Tregarvon wrestled manfully with the problem thrust upon him by Richardia Birrell’s whispered appeal. How was he to prevent a meeting between the judge and the as yet unnamed man whom Tryon and Rucker had captured? The query was still unanswered when the yellow car skidded and slued around the turn into the old wood road. Despite the promise given by a fair day and a measurably clear evening, the night had suddenly thickened, with cloud wracks flying low over the mountain top to wrap the forest in mantlings of fleecy vapor silver-shot by the rays of a gibbous moon, but opposing a wall of blank opacity to the headlamps of the car. Tregarvon would have welcomed help from the chapter of accidents, but now that they were off the main road there was a fair chance that the accident might be too destructive.
“Easy, Poictiers!—you’ll scrap us if you don’tlook out!” he cautioned, leaning forward to warn Carfax, who was boring into the cloud bank at reckless speed.
The words were scarcely uttered before there came a crunching of dry tree limbs under the wheels, a hiss of escaping air, and a jolting stoppage of the car as the brakes were applied.
“Punctured!” exclaimed the cautioner, and they all got out to investigate cause and consequence. The obstruction proved to be what it had seemed—the dry limb of a tree—and the result was a flat tire.
“It is dead wood, and it may have fallen of its own accord; or it may mean that your dynamiter has friends who would like to delay us,” Wilmerding offered. “On the bare chance, hadn’t we better sprint along and not wait to change tires? Your man, Rucker, may easily be having the time of his life trying to hold on to his prisoner.”
They sprinted accordingly, the judge taking the dog-trot as actively as his younger pace-setters, and stubbornly refusing to let Tregarvon relieve him of the burden of the heavy deer-gun. So running, they came in a few minutes to the site of the old burying-ground, and to the door of the tool shanty. Rucker admitted them at Tregarvon’s knock and call, and his report wasbrief and unenlightening. “No; nothin’ doin’ since we took him in—and the cuss won’t talk. But maybe you can make him loosen up.”
Tregarvon still saw no way of keeping the judge out of it, and he held himself absolved from his promise by the sheer impossibility of doing what Richardia had begged him to do. The captive, wrist-bound with a turn or two of cord, was sitting hunched upon the edge of Rucker’s cot-bed. It was Carfax who picked up the lantern and flashed its light into the man’s face. “By Jove!” he exclaimed; “Morgan McNabb!” and Rucker nodded.
Judge Birrell sat upon the spare coil of rope and wiped his face with his handkerchief. His hands were trembling and he was breathing hard, but the smart run from the disabled automobile might have accounted for these disturbances. When he spoke to the prisoner his tone was sternly accusing.
“So it’s you, is it, Mo’gan McNabb?—turnin’ yo-uh teeth upon the hand that’s been feedin’ you? By the Lord Harry, you make me mighty sorry that I once saved you from going to the penitentiary, where you belong! Now, then, open yo-uh mouth and tell these gentlemen why you come heah dynamitin’ thei-uh machinery!”
The mountaineer’s lips were drawn back in a doglike snarl.
“I’ll see ’em damned befo’ I’ll open my haid to ’em, now, Judge Birrell! Lookee at this yere,” and he wrenched his tied hands around so that the judge might see.
“You don’t like the rope?” said the judge evenly. “Listen to me, Mo’gan; you McNabbs have lived on Westwood land, father and son, for fo’ generations, and you’ll open yo-uh head to me, suh! What quarrel have you got with the owneh of the Ocoee property? Ansuh me, if you don’t want anotheh tu’n o’ that rope taken around yo-uh neck, suh!”
The answer was as prompt as it was disconcerting. “I allow I got thess the same sort o’ quarrel ez you have, judge. Didn’t they-all steal the Ocoee f’om you in the first place?”
“That’s neithuh heah nor there!” was the stern rejoinder. “Would you give these gentlemen to understand thatIam yo-uh principal in these scandalous outrages? See heah, Mo’gan, we all know that you haven’t been actin’ on yo-uh own responsibility. Who has been puttin’ you up to all these deviltries?”
“If you don’t know, I reckonIain’t a-goin’ to be the one to tell you,” said the prisoner, relapsinginto his former attitude of sullenness. Then, as if upon a second thought: “You ask Miss Dick, judge; I allowsheknows.”
The little pause of consternation which this statement precipitated was broken by an exclamation from Rucker.
“Look out yonder! Somebody’s set the leaves afire! My God! we left the dynamite out there!”
Carfax, who was standing beside the mechanician, wheeled quickly to face the open door. Out beyond the drill derrick a thin line of fire, driven by the freshening west wind and showing orange-colored under the mist-wraiths, was sweeping down upon the clearing. “Show me where you left the stuff!” he snapped at the mechanician, but even as he spoke, a fuse squibbed and the thunder of a terrific explosion shattered the forest silences, the concussion smashing the glass in the small square window, rocking the lightly built tool-house like the heaving of an earthquake, and bombarding it an instant later with a rain of fallingdébris. The judge, sitting upon the coil of rope, was not thrown down, but the five men who were standing were flung in a heap on the floor.
Tregarvon was the first to regain his feet and to reach the open. The cloud mantlings had beenthrust aside for the moment, but the stir was full of gray dust and acrid with the fumes of the explosive. Where the derrick and the new power-plant had stood there was a mass of tangled wreckage, and the burying-ground glade looked as if it had been swept by a tornado. In the wan moonlight Tregarvon caught a glimpse of something moving under the trees beyond the wreck; then the moving object erected itself into the stature of a man.
One glance at the tall, frock-coated figure was enough. With a mad yell of rage, Tregarvon snatched the gun from the judge’s hands and gave chase, calling to the frock-coated man to stand or he would shoot. There was an instant of hesitation, seemingly of indecision; then the man turned and fled. And, as if to favor him, another scudding cloud settled upon the mountain top, burying forest and glade, the tangled wreck and the two runners in its fleecy depths.
Tregarvon raced on for a breath-cutting space; guided solely by the crashing of the fugitive through the brier tangles and dry-leaf beds. Then he began to get his second wind, and again he shouted the command to halt. Since this seemed only to have the effect of hastening the thudding footsteps on ahead, he fired the gun, holding themuzzle high, as he thought and intended, but apparently not high enough, as the dreadful sequence immediately indicated. For, almost exactly coincident with the report of the gun, there was a shriek, the crash of a falling body, and silence.
At this the pursuer came down from the transporting heights of berserk rage with a shock that was sickening. “Oh, good Lord!” he gasped; “I’ve killed him!” Whereupon he flung the offending weapon afar and ran to confirm the horrifying conclusion.
He was still running in the direction from which the cry had come when the curious happening befell. As if the solid earth had been whisked away from beneath his feet he found himself whirling through empty space; falling through unfathomable depths of it, it seemed, before he collided with another world—a world of shocks and coruscating pains, of beatings and bruisings, and presently of grateful forgetfulness.