"Why, what are we thinking of?" she exclaimed. "Julian Bayne will be half frozen when he gets here. His room must be prepared—something hot to drink, and something to eat. No, Lillian, youmustn'tring the bell! The servants have been at work all day, and have earned their rest. We will just take this matter in charge ourselves. You go to the kitchen and see if the fire has kept in the range. If not, make it up. You will find wood at hand, laid ready for getting breakfast. Mrs. Marable, look in the refrigerator, please, and see what there is for him to eat. I will get out the bed linen and blankets, for he will be exhausted, no doubt."
But when she stood alone in the upper hall, at the door of the vacant guest-room, the candle in her hand, Gladys had a sudden keen intimation that she was herself but human, endowed with muscles susceptible of overstrain, with nerves of sensitive fibre, with instincts importunate with the cry of self-interest, with impulses toward collapse, tears, terrors, anxieties—all in revolt against the sedulous constraint of will. The light of the candle in her hand, thrown upward on her face, showed the fictitious animation that she had sustained vanish out of its lineaments, as life itself might flicker to extinction, and leave a mask like death. It was a tragic mask. Her lids fell over her hopeless eyes; her lips drooped; the flush of her splendid florid beauty had faded as if it had never bloomed. She discovered that she was gasping in the dull, chill air. She leaned against the balustrade of the stairs, limp, inert, as if every impetus of vigor had deserted her. But it would never do for her to faint, she reflected. She must act for others, with just judgment, with foresight, with effective housewifely care, and with good heart and courage.
"I must think for the rest—as Ned would, if he were here," she said, still half fainting. She got the window open hard by, and a vagrant gust of the cold air stung her face as with a lash. But she was out of the direct course of the blast as it came shrilly fluttering from over the roof, and she could maintain her position, although she could scarcely breathe in the keen frigidity. Snow had fallen, deeper than she had ever seen. With it had come that strange quality of visibility that seems to appertain to a sheeted world like an inherent luminosity; or was it perchance some vague diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly housed; but the somnolent stillness of the muffled earth continued unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed and howled and wailed.
One sombre hour succeeded another as if the succession were endless. Long, long before there was the sense of a boreal dawn in the chill darkness, the house stood in readiness, though none came. The servants were presently astir; the fires were freshly flaring, the furniture rearranged. In view of the freeze, the gardener had seen fit to cut all the blooms in the pit to save them from blight, and a great silver bowl on the table in the hall, and the vases in the library, were filled with exotics. The fragrance oppressed Lillian in some subtle sort; the spirit of the scene was so alien to the idea of festival or function; the dim gaunt morning was of so funereal an aspect; the gathering of household companions, gloomy, silent, expectant, into one room duly set in order, was so suggestive, that the array of flowers and the heavy perfumed air gave the final significant impression of douleur and doom.
At the first glimpse of dawn, Gladys had despatched a groom, well mounted and with a fresh led horse, out on the road to descry perchance some approach of Mr. Bayne, to afford assistance if this were needed. Hours went by, and still there was no news, no return of the messenger. Now and again Mrs. Briscoe sought to exchange a word with Mrs. Marable to relieve the tension of the situation; but the elder lady was flabby with fatigue; her altruistic capabilities had been tried to the utmost in this long vigil and painful excitement, which were indeed unmeet for her age and failing strength. She did not enter into the troubled prevision of Gladys, who had been furtively watching a strange absorption that was growing in Lillian's manner, a fevered light in her eyes. Suddenly, as if in response to a summons, Lillian rose, and, standing tall and erect in her long black dress, she spoke in a voice that seemed not her own, so assured, so strong, monotonous yet distinct.
"You cruel woman," she said, as if impersonally. But Gladys perceived in a moment that she had in mind her own arraignment, as if another were taxing her with a misdeed. "In this bitter black night, in this furious ice-storm, and you did not forbid it! You did not explain your need. You summoned him to risk his life,his life, that he might something the earlier offer his fallible opinion, perhaps worth no more than that bit of stone! You would not wait till daylight—you would not wait one hour. You cruel woman! Already you had the best of him, his heart, to throw away at a word as if it were naught—merely a plaything, a tawdry gaud—the best and tenderest and noblest heart that ever beat!—and for a silly quarrel, and for your peevish vanity, you consented to humiliate his honest pride and to hold him up to ridicule, jilted on his wedding-day. And but that he is so brave and genuine and fine of fibre, he would never have had the courage to hold up his head again. But even the basest of the yokels and groundlings could not make merry over the cozening of so noble a gentleman! And now, because of your faith in his magnanimity, you summon him forth in an ice-storm at your 'utmost need,' all careless of his suffering, at the risk of his life. And he, fool that he is, without even a question, regardless of all that has come and gone—or, more foolish still, forgiving and forgetting—obeys your behest! You have taken all he had left, you cruel woman!—his life, this time, his life,his life!"
Gladys literally cowered under this storm of words, as if the pitiless hail had beaten on her own head. But as Lillian, her arms outstretched, her voice broken into shrill cries, rushed to the door, Mrs. Briscoe sprang forward, caught her arm, and sought to detain her. "What are you going to do, Lillian?"
"To raise the country-side, the county—to search for all that the storm and the floods and that baneful woman have left of him!"
She broke away hastily from the restraining clutch of Gladys, who, following her closely, saw her reel backward as if in shrinking affright from a shadowy figure standing in the dim hall.
X.
Julian Bayne, his long coat covered with snow and jingling with icicles, his chill face scarlet with cold, his lips emitting a cloud of visible breath, his eyes intent beneath the brim of his frost-rimmed hat, stood gazing as if petrified by the strange scene he had witnessed just enacted within, the strange words he had overheard.
"What is all this?" he cried at length. "Did you think I couldn't make it?" Then to Lillian specially, as he took her hand, "Am I late?" he asked solicitously. "I made all the speed I could. I hope I haven't killed the horse."
He glanced over his shoulder through the open door, where he could see a bit of the snowy drive, on which the groom was slowly leading the animal, heavily blanketed, up and down before taking him to the stable. Although sobbing now and again from the stress of his exertions, the horse had evidently sustained no permanent injury.
"I came instantly," Julian repeated. "What is it?"
"Nothing!" cried Lillian hysterically, clinging to his arm. "They all think it isnothing—nothing at all."
He stared at her somewhat grimly, though evidently mystified.
"Come," he said, "let us get at the rights of this. And I'd really like a glimpse of the fire—I'm half frozen."
He threw off his overcoat, stiffened with the ice, and strode into the library toward the blazing hearth. Mrs. Marable was suddenly roused to remember the decoction that she herself had prepared, and put the glass into his hand. But he took only a single swallow, gazing in absorption at Gladys, who had undertaken to detail the discovery of the stone in the pocket of the little red coat, and the theory that Mrs. Royston had desperately based upon it. Lillian herself was hanging her head in shame for her folly, that she should for this fantastic illusion have inflicted on this man of all men, on whom indeed she had least claim, the agony he had endured, and the peril of his life.
She could never have described the overwhelming tumult of her heart when he lifted his head at the end of the story, with a look of grave and intent pondering.
"This stone is the efflorescence of a limestone cavern, given to him, no doubt, but when and where? And how is it that you did not know it, knowing his every thought?" he said in a tense, excited voice.
Lillian was on her feet again in an instant, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, her voice trembling. "Oh, Julian, you think it is possible that Archie is alive! Oh, I believe it! I believe it! And the thought is like the elixir of life, like the ecstasy of heaven!"
He made no direct reply, but turned hastily to go to the telephone. "You cannot afford to lose any chance, even the most remote. The county officers must be notified, advertisements sent out, and offers of reward. There is not a moment to be wasted."
"But Gladys thinks it is a folly," cried Lillian, following him into the hall, eager to test the negative view, fearful of her trembling hope; "and my aunt is troubled for my sanity."
As he waited for the line, which was "busy," he turned and sternly surveyed her. "Why should you defer to their views, Lillian? Haven't you yet had enough of ordering your life by the standards of others? Be yourself—if you have any identity left at this late day. Rely on your own judgment, consult your own intuitions, rest on your own sense of right and justice and conscience, and you cannot err!"
"Oh, Julian!" she exclaimed in tearful amaze. "How can you say that of me—ofme?"
He looked startled for one moment, as if he had spoken inadvertently, for her guidance, his inmost thought, without regard to its personal significance. Then, with a rising flush and a conscious eye, he sought to laugh off the episode. "Oh, well, I didn'tmeanit, you know! Only the compliments of the newly arrived." And as the bell jingled he took down the receiver with obvious relief.
In the presence of poor Gladys, for whose calamity there could be no prospect of alleviation, the subject of Briscoe's death and the child's abduction as connected therewith could not be discussed in all its bearings. Only Mrs. Marable joined Lillian in the library that afternoon when the sheriff arrived, and the mother's eager hopes were strengthened to note the serious importance he attached to the discovery of the bit of stone in the pocket of the little red coat. He was obviously nettled that it should have remained there unnoted while the garment was in his keeping, but Lillian tactfully exhibited the unusual inner pocket in the facing, the "shy pocket," which, thus located, offered some excuse for the failure to find earlier its contents. With Julian Bayne's suggestions, the sheriff presently hammered out a theory very closely related to the truth. The visit of the revenue officer was detailed by Bayne, and considered significant, the more since it began to be evident that Briscoe was murdered, and in his case a motive for so perilous a deed was wholly lacking. The stone lily in the child's pocket made it evident that he himself had been in the moonshiners' cavern, the only one known to the vicinity, or that the stone had been given to him by some frequenter of that den—hardly to be supposed previous to the catastrophe. In fact, the sheriff declared that he had reason to believe that the child was wearing the coat at the time of the tragedy, and thus it could not have been cast loosely from the vehicle at the moment when the mare had fallen from the bluff to the depths below. It had been restored to the locality in a clumsy effort to prove the child's death.
The officer was a big, burly man, handsome in his way, his ponderosity suggesting a formidable development of muscle rather than fat. His manner was as weighty as his appearance. He seemed as if he might have been manufactured in a tobacco factory, so was the whole man permeated by nicotian odors of various sorts, but he politely declined to smoke during the long and wearing consultation, even with the permission of the ladies present, and stowed away in his breast pocket the cigars that Bayne pressed upon him, as he remarked, for reference at a moment of greater leisure. Bolt upright, a heavy hand on either big-boned knee, his shaven jowl drooping in fleshy folds over his high stiff collar, he sat gazing into the fire with round, small, gray, bullet-like eyes, while the top of his bald head grew pink and shining with warmth. He had a loud, countrified voice in his normal speech, that gave an intimation of a habit of hallooing to hounds in a fox-chase, or calling the cattle on a thousand hills, but it had sunk to a mysterious undertone when he next spoke, expressive of the importance of the disclosure he was about to make.
A few days previous, he said, he had chanced to arrest an Irish mechanic who, during the season, had been employed at the neighboring hotel in replacing some plaster that had fallen by reason of leakage. Since then, a hard drinking man, he had been idly loafing, occasionally jobbing, about the country, but the offence charged was that of being concerned in a wholesale dynamiting of fish in the Tennessee River some months ago. The man protested violently against his arrest, being unable to procure bail, and declared he could prove an alibi but for fear that a worse thing befall him. This singular statement so stimulated the officer's curiosity that his craft was enlisted to elicit the whole story. Little by little he secured its details. It seemed that on the day when the fish were dynamited contrary to law, the Irishman was some thirty miles distant from the spot—the day of the Briscoe tragedy. He believed that he was the last man who had seen Briscoe alive—unless indeed he were done to death. He was afoot, walking in the county road, not more than two miles from the vacant hotel, when he saw a dog-cart coming like the wind toward him. The gentleman, driving a splendid mare, checked his speed on catching sight of him, and called out to him. Upon approaching, he recognized Mr. Briscoe, whom he had often seen when at work at the neighboring hotel. On this occasion Mr. Briscoe asked him to hold the mare while he slipped a coat on the little boy whom he had in the dog-cart with him—a red coat it was—for it took all he knew to drive the mare with both hands. And the Irishman declared it took allheknew to hold the mare for the single minute required to slip the child into the coat. Twice the plunging animal lifted him off his feet as he swung to the bit. But the gentleman did not forget to pay him royally. Mr. Briscoe tossed him a dollar, and then, with "the little bye in his red coat" sitting on the floor of the vehicle, he was off like a cyclone and out of sight in a moment. Almost immediately afterward the Irishman heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and a tumultuous crash, as of some heavy fall into the depths of the valley. To his mind, the sound of the weapon intimated some catastrophe, and he said nothing at the time as to his meeting with Mr. Briscoe. That circumstance seemed to him of no importance. He was afraid of being numbered among the suspects if any evil deed had been done. He heard the searching parties out all night, and it was a terrible sound! "It was too aisy fur a poor man to be laid by the heels fur a job he niver done, bedad, as was the case at present." He permitted himself, however, to be persuaded to let a charge of vagrancy be entered against him and go to jail, really to be held as a witness in the event of more developments in the Briscoe case; for the authorities desired that no arrests in that connection should be made public until the significance of the fact that at the time of the tragedy the child was wearing the coat—afterward found hanging loose, without a rent or a blemish, on the tree in the valley—should be fully exploited. If it were indeed a direful instance of murder and abduction, as the sheriff now believed, he wished the miscreants to rest unwitting of the activity of the officers and the menace of discovery.
"But it seems a pity for the poor innocent Irishman to have to stay in jail. How good of him to consent!" exclaimed Mrs. Marable pathetically.
The sheriff was all unacclimated to the suave altruism of fashionable circles. His literal eyebrows went up to an angle of forty-five degrees; he turned his belittling eyes on Mrs. Marable, as if she were a very inconsiderable species of wren, suddenly developing a capacity for disproportionate mischief. "Not at all, madam," he made haste to say. "He can be legally held for a witness, lest he get away and out of reach of a subpœna. It is the right of the State, and of Mrs. Briscoe as well, who will doubtless join the public prosecution. We are asking nothing of nobody, and taking nothing off nobody, neither."
"But I should like," said Lillian, "to arrange that he shall suffer no hardship. I shall be happy to defray any expense to make him thoroughly comfortable."
The sheriff looked down on feminine intelligence. The law was exclusively man's affair. He made it and administered it. The officer had seldom known women to intrude into it, save to get the worst of it. Its minister had an air of burly ridicule that trenched on contempt as he broke into a laugh of great relish.
"The county can accommodate its boarders without your help, Mrs. Royston. Much obliged, all the same. He ain't no nice customer. He is mighty lucky to be sure of his grub and fire and shelter this tough winter. He ain't got to do any work. He has the freedom of the yard and the halls and the office at all hours. No, madam, he is as snug as a bug in a rug. You'll have a chance to spend all the money that you care to put up in this affair, if I'm not mightily mistaken. No use in wastin' any of it on Micky."
The fact that the child had not been wearing the coat when starting on the drive, but had been seen in it immediately previous to the catastrophe; that it should be subsequently found and not on his body, of which no trace had ever been discovered, went far to convince the authorities that the garment had been restored to the locality afterward in pursuance of an effort to prove his death. They had begun to believe that the child had in some manner escaped at the time of the tragedy, and was now held in retreat lest he disclose incriminating evidence. But it was a barren triumph of logic. They realized that any demand of the reward offered must needs bring a counter inquiry concerning the facts of Briscoe's murder, and therefore from the beginning they had little hope that any good result would ensue from the wide publicity and the extended search that his mother and her adviser had inaugurated. The child remained as if caught up in the clouds. Though extravagant offers of reward for any information concerning him, as well as for his ultimate recovery, were scattered broadcast throughout the country; though every clue, however fantastic or tenuous or obviously fraudulent, was as cautiously examined as if it really held the nucleus of discovery; though fakers and cheats of preposterous sorts harassed the proceedings and wrought many malevolent bits of mischief in disappointed revenge, being treated with a leniency which would suffer aught, all, rather than clog any vague chance of a revelation of the seclusion of the lost child—there seemed no prospect, no hope.
It had been Lillian's instinct to continue in the place where the child had been last seen—she felt a fictitious sense of proximity in the familiar localities that had known him. But with the exigencies of the systematic effort for his recovery she returned to her own home in the city of Glaston, whither Gladys accompanied her, as being more accessible when her presence in the search was required.
Julian Bayne gave himself wholly to the effort. He travelled here and there, pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith to deceive him, if it might be, generally a pitiable, puny thing, swarming with vermin, half famished and forlorn. But Julian was dubious how ill treatment and lack of nourishment might have transformed the heir of the proud Archibald Royston, and in each instance he summoned Lillian through long journeys, tortured with alternations of hope and suspense, to inspect the waif. All without avail. True, she invariably bettered the condition of the little creature, thus fortunate in attracting her notice, purveying clothes and food, and paying a good round price for the consent of its keepers to place it in some orphanage or other juvenile refuge. So exhaustive, so judicious, so tireless, was the search, so rich the reward, that as time went by and no result ensued, the authorities became more than ever convinced that since the child's abduction was complicated with the more desperate crime of Briscoe's murder, this effectually precluded any attempt at his restoration by the kidnappers; for indeed, to those who knew the facts, the large reward was obviously the price of a halter. As this theory gained strength, their ardor in the search declined, and Lillian and Julian realized that more than ever the child's restoration would depend on their individual exertions.
The effort came to seem an obsession on the part of Bayne. He was worn and weary; his business interest languished, and his friends, remonstrating in vain, regarded it as the culminating injury to his life and prospects already wrought by the influence of this woman.
Indeed, one of the chief difficulties of the continuance of the enterprise was the resistance they must needs maintain to the remonstrance of friends. This finally came to be so urgent that it even involved an effort to circumscribe the futile activities. In view of the provisions of Mr. Royston's will no portion of the minor's estate could be used to defray the extremely lavish expenses that the thoroughness and extent of the search involved. All the large disbursements of money came from Mrs. Royston's own share of her husband's fortune. This brought her uncle, Mr. Marable, into the discussion. Her resources would not sustain these heavy draughts, he urged. In case the child remained perdu, to be sure, and the legal presumption of his death obtain by reason of the lapse of time, his estate would by the terms of the will vest in her, and thus financially all might be well. But on the contrary, should he be found in the course of time, this wild extravagance would result in bankrupting her. She thought it necessary to keep detectives in constant pay to hold their efforts and interest to the search, even though the ultimate rich reward were dangled continually before their eyes. The flamboyant advertisements, the widespread publicity over half the world, had involved commensurate cost. Large sums had been disbursed for information merely that was rooted in error and bore only disappointment. Then, too, were the inevitable mistakes, the fakes and cheats, and the expenses of a score of agents effecting nothing. Mr. Marable rubbed the wisps of gray hair on either side of his corrugated temples, and wrung his solvent hands in financial anguish.
He sought in this cause to take advantage of Bayne's influence with Lillian, and made an effort to induce him to remonstrate with her. They were in the library of her house in Glaston, looking over some papers together, a real estate mortgage, in fact, by which Lillian intended to raise a large sum for more unrestricted use in the extension of the search.
Bayne sat at the table, scanning the money-lender's memoranda, his experience as a broker having developed a keen scent for any untoward or mischievous detail.
"But in seeking the wisest methods of economy, the essential opportunity may escape her. While she is financiering, the child may die in the hands of his abductors, or he may succumb to hardship otherwise—be disfigured by disease or disabled by exposure, or slaughtered, so to speak, mentally or morally, or spirited away and be heard of never again. No, no," Bayne declared definitely; "I could not advise her to consider money in this connection."
Mr. Marable could ill brook contradiction or dissent. He quivered with more than the infirmities of age as he stood by the table, supporting himself on his cane.
"You don't reflect, Mr. Bayne, that though she gets the child's estate if he dies or continues lost—if he lives and this expenditure goes on, she will be penniless—you don't realize that. She will be a poor woman—she will have nothing left of her provision as a widow."
"Well, that suits me to the ground," Bayne retorted unexpectedly. "I shall be glad to profit as little as possible by Mr. Royston's property."
The notary public, come to take Mrs. Royston's acknowledgment, was announced at the moment, and the two gentlemen, still wrangling, went into the reception room to meet him. Mrs. Marable, her eternal Battenberg in her hands, looked up through the meshes of a perplexity, as visible as if it were a veritable network, at Gladys, who was standing in the recess of the bay-window, a book in her hand.
"I didn't understand that remark of Mr. Bayne's as to the poverty of Mr. Royston's widow," the old lady submitted.
Gladys, the match-maker, laughed delightedly. "I did!" she cried triumphantly.
As she went out of the room, she encountered Lillian in the hall, summoned to sign and acknowledge the papers. The flush on the cheek of Gladys, the triumph in her eyes, the laugh in the curves of her beautiful lips, arrested Mrs. Royston's attention. "What are you laughing about?" she asked, in a sort of plaintive wonderment.
"About something that Julian said just now."
"What was it?" Lillian queried, still bewildered in a sort.
The flush deepened on Mrs. Briscoe's cheek, her eyes were full of light, her voice chimed with a sort of secret joy.
"I will not tell you!" she cried, and, still smiling, she floated down the hall, her book in her hand.
Lillian stood motionless in amaze. Something that Julian Bayne had said to work this metamorphosis! Something that she must not hear, must not know! The look in her friend's eyes, the tone of her voice, stayed with Lillian in every moment of surcease of torment for the child's rescue, and worked their own mission of distress. Had she thought indeed that she could hold Julian Bayne's heart through all vicissitudes of weal and woe, of time and change? She had of her own free choice thrown it away once as a thing of no worth. She had never justified her course, or thought it could be deemed admirable as an exponent of her character. And here she was constantly contrasted with a woman who had no fault, no foible, who was generous, whole-souled, splendid, and beautiful, already with a strong hold on his affections, close to him, the widow of his cousin who was always the friend of his heart. And so sweet she was, so unconscious of any thought of rivalry! That night she came late to Lillian's room to say good-night once more, to counsel hope, and urge an effort to sleep. Even when she seemed gone at last, she opened the door again to blow a kiss and smile anew. When the door had closed finally Lillian, standing near the mirror, could but note the difference. She was ghastly in her gay and modish attire, for she had instantly laid aside her mourning for the death of the boy, as an affront to her faith that he still lived. The sharp tooth of suspense had eaten into her capacities of endurance; her hopes preyed upon her in their keen, fictitious exaltations; the alternations of despair brought her to the brink of the grave. She was reduced almost to a shadow; she would go about the affair—she would entertain no other—with a sort of jerking, spasmodic activity as unlike muscular energy as if she were an automaton. She had no rest in her sleep, and would scream and cry out in weird accents at intervals, and dream such dreams! She would blanch when questioned, and close her lips fast, and never a word escaped them of what these visions of terror might be.
XI.
How the mother-heart would have rejoiced could Lillian have divined that her child was well and happy, though affectionate in new ties while she languished in his absence! Archie had begun to adore the old Indian fortune-teller who cuddled and coddled him in loving delight. She lived for a time in grievous fear of his departure, but when no news came of the men who had placed him there, and the date fixed for their return passed without event, she began to gloat on the possibility of desertion. She tried all her ancient savage spells and methods of forecast—many strange jugglings with terrapin shells and white beads and pointed sticks and the aspect of the decoction of magic herbs. With fervor, she gave herself also to her pagan invocations to those spirits of Zootheism and personified elements of Nature, so real even to the modern Cherokee, esteemed so potent in the ordering of human affairs. Suddenly her hope glowed into triumph! She had a fantastic conviction that the child was bound fast. The signs intimated that the great mystic Red Spider,Kananiski gigage, had woven his unseen web about the boy, and he could not escape from those constraining meshes. As to the men—she concluded that they were blown away somewhere. The wind had attended to that little matter. "Agaluga Hegwa! Atigale yata tsutu negliga," she exclaimed in grateful rapture. ("Oh, great Whirlwind! By you they must have been scattered.")
Happiness had long held aloof. She was of the poorest of the tribe; childless, for many years; a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism; she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster, and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she lived in peculiar solitude, and the two spent the long months of the winter within the cabin together, while the mountain snows lay heavy on the eaves and the mountain winds beat and gibed at the door. Great icicles hung from the dark fissures of the crags; frosty scintillations tipped the fibres of the pines; wolves were a-prowl—sometimes their blood-curdling howls from afar penetrated to the hut where the ill-assorted companions sat together in the red glow of the fire, and roasted their sweet potatoes and apples on the hearth, and cracked nuts to pound into the rich paste affected by the Cherokees, and drank the bland "hominy-water," and gazed happily into each other's eyes, despite their distance apart at the two termini of life, the beginning and the end.
As she could speak no English, yet they must needs find a medium of exchange for their valuable views, she tried to teach him to speak Cherokee. He was a bird, her little bird, she told him by signs, and his name wasTsiskwa. This she repeated again and again in the velvet-soft fluting of her voice. But no! he revolted. His name was Archie Royston, he declaimed proudly. He soon became the monarch of this poor hearth, and he deported himself in royal fashion.
"Oo tan't talk," he said patronizingly to her one day, after listening in futile seriousness to her unintelligible jargon. Forthwith he essayed to teach her to speak English, and, humoring his every freak, she sought to profit. She would fix intent eyes upon him and turn her head askew to listen heedfully while she lisped after his lisping exposition of "Archie Royston." He grew heady with his sense of erudition. He would fairly roll on the puncheon floor in the vainglory of his delight when she identified chair and fire and bed and door by their accurate English names. Sometimes, in a surge of emotion, hardly gratitude or a sense of comfort, neither trust nor hope, but the sheer joy of love, the child would come at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face with kisses—the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled together they would repeat in concert—poor woman! perhaps she thought it a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or magic—"Ding-dong-bell!" and the comparative biographies of little Johnny Green and little Johnny Stout, and the vicissitudes of the poor pussycat submitted to their diverse ministrations. He was wont to sing for her also, albeit tunelessly, and as he sat blond and roseate and gay, warbling after his fashion on the hearth, her clouded old eyes were relumed with a radiance that came from within and was independent of the prosaic light of day. His favorite ditty was an old nursery rhyme in which the name "Pretty Polly Hopkins" occurs with flattering iteration, and he began to apply it to her, for he had come to think her very beautiful—such is the gracious power of love! And while the snow was flying, and the sleet and hail tinkled on the batten shutter, and the draughts bleated and whined in the crevices, he made the rafters ring:
"'Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins,How de do?—how de do?'"'None the better, Tommy Tompkins,For seeing you, for seeing you!'"'Polly, I've been to FranceAnd there spent all my cash.'"'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins,Fool for you, fool for you!'"
"'Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins,How de do?—how de do?'
"'Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins,
How de do?—how de do?'
"'None the better, Tommy Tompkins,For seeing you, for seeing you!'
"'None the better, Tommy Tompkins,
For seeing you, for seeing you!'
"'Polly, I've been to FranceAnd there spent all my cash.'
"'Polly, I've been to France
And there spent all my cash.'
"'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins,Fool for you, fool for you!'"
"'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins,
Fool for you, fool for you!'"
It was a valuable course in linguistics for the inmates of the cabin, and Archie Royston was far more intelligible and skilled in expressing himself when that door, that had been closed on the keen blast, was opened to let in the suave spring sunshine and the soft freshness of the mountain air.
XII.
With the return of fine weather the work of railroad construction on the extension of the G. T. & C. line began to be pressed forward with eager alacrity. Indeed, it had languished only when the ground was deeply covered with snow or locked so fast in the immobile freeze that steel and iron could not penetrate it. The work had been persistently pushed at practicable intervals, whenever the labor could be constrained to it. Possibly this urgency had no ill results except in one or two individual cases. The sons of toil are indurated to hardship, and most of the gang were brawny Irish ditchers. Jubal Clenk, already outworn with age and ill nourished throughout a meagre life, unaccustomed, too, to exposure to the elements (for the industry of moonshining is a sheltered and well-warmed business), was the only notable collapse. He began by querulously demanding of anyone who would listen to him what he himself could mean by having an "out-dacious pain" under his shoulder-blade. "I feel like I hev been knifed, that's whut!" he would declare. This symptom was presently succeeded by a "misery in his breast-bone," and a racking cough seemed likely to shake to pieces his old skeleton, growing daily more perceptible under his dry, shrivelled skin. A fever shortly set in, but it proved of scanty interest to the local physician, when called by the boss of the construction gang to look in upon him, in one of the rickety shacks which housed the force of laborers, and which was his temporary home.
"There's no show for him," the doctor laconically remarked. "Lungs, heart, throat, all have got into the game. You had better get rid of him—he will never be of any use again."
"Throw him over the bluff, eh?" the jolly, portly boss asked with a twinkling eye. "We ain't much on transportation yet."
"Well, it's no great matter. He'll provide his own transportation before long;" and the physician stepped into his buggy with an air of finality.
The old man had, however, unsuspected reserves of vitality. He crept out into the sunshine again, basking in the vernal warmth with a sense of luxury, and entering into the gossip of the ditchers with an unwonted mental activity and garrulity.
One day—one signal day—as he sat clumped up on a pile of timber destined for railroad ties, his arms hugging his knees, his eyes feverishly bright and hollow, a personal interest in his condition was developed in the minds of his old pals and fellow-laborers, Drann and Holvey, albeit of no humane tendency. It was the nooning hour, and the men at their limited leisure lay in the sun on the piles of lumber, like lizards.
"Gee!" exclaimed one burly fellow, rising on his elbow. "How I'd like ter git my paw on that reward—five thousand dollars for any information!"
"I'm in fur money ez sure ez ye air born! All signs favor," exclaimed old Clenk eagerly. "I dream about money mighty nigh every night. Paid in ter me—chink—chink—I allus takes it in gold. Goin' ter bed is the same ter me that goin' ter the bank is ter most folks."
His interpolations into the conversation usually failed to secure even a contemptuous rebuff; they passed as if unheard. But such is the coercive power of gold, albeit in the abstract, that this tenuous vision of wealth had its fascination. The brawny workman held the newspaper aside to look curiously over at the piteous wreck, as the old ragamuffin grinned and giggled in joyous retrospect, then began to read again the advertisement: "Twenty-five thousand dollars in cash if the information leads to the recovery of the child."
"Do they head them advertisements 'Suckers, Attention'?" asked one of the men who labored under the disadvantage of illiteracy. The scraps read aloud from the papers were his only source of information as to their contents. "Theyoughtersay 'Suckers, Attention,' for they don't even tell whut the kid looks like. I wouldn't know him from Adam ef I wuz ter pass him in the road."
"But theydotell what he looks like!" exclaimed the reader. "Here it all is: blue eyes, golden hair, fair skin, rosy cheeks——"
"Cutest leetle trick!" exclaimed old Clenk, with a reminiscent smile at the image thus conjured up.
The words passed unnoticed save by Drann and Holvey. They exchanged one glance of consternation, and the fancied security in which they had dwelt, as fragile as a crystal sphere, was shattered in an instant. The old man was broken by his illness, his recent hardships. He was verging on his dotage. His senile folly might well cost them their lives or liberty.
Indeed, as the description progressed, detailing the child's attire even to his red shoes, the old fellow's fingers were toying fatuously with one of them in his deep coat pocket among the loose tobacco that fed his pipe. "That don't half ekalhim," he broke out suddenly. "Never war sech another delightsome leetle creeter."
A moment of stunned amazement supervened among the group.
"Why, say, old Noah, did you ever see that kid?" at length demanded the reader, with a keen look of suspicion.
It was the inimical expression, rather than a definite consciousness of self-betrayal, that sent the old man's drifting mind back to its moorings. "Jes' listenin' ter that beautiful readin'," he grinned, his long yellow tobacco-stained teeth all bare in a facial contortion that essayed a smile, his distended lips almost failing of articulation. "Them was fine clothes sure on that lovely child."
The flamboyant advertisements had often before been read aloud in the construction camp, and the matter might have passed as the half-fevered babblings of a sick old man, but for that look of stultified comment, of anguished foreboding, that was interchanged between the two accomplices. Only one man, however, had the keen observation to catch that fleeting signal, and the enterprise to seek to interpret it.
The next day, when Clenk did not reappear, this man quietly slipped to the shack where the three lived together. There was a padlock knocking in the wind on the flimsy door. This said as plain as speech that there was no one within. Ordinarily this would have precluded all question, all entrance. But the intruder was seeking a pot of gold, and informed by a strong suspicion. With one effort of his brawny hands, he pulled loose from the top first the strap of one of the broad upright boards that formed the walls, then the board itself. He turned sideways and slipped his bulk through the aperture, the board swinging elastically back into place.
There was a stove in the squalid little apartment, instead of the open fires common to the region. It was masked in a dusky twilight, but as his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity and the disorder, his suspicion exhaled, and a heavy sense of disappointment clogged his activities like a ball and chain.
There in his bunk lay Clenk, his eyes shining with the light of fever, his illness affording an obvious explanation of the precaution of his comrades in locking the door while they were away at work, at the limits of the construction line, to protect him from molestation by man or beast.
Nevertheless, the intruder made an effort to hold his theory together. He approached the bunk, and with an insidious craft sought to draw the old man out. But Clenk was now on his guard. His comrades had bitterly upbraided him with his self-betrayal, that indeed threatened the safety of all. In fact, their courage was so reduced by the untoward episode that he more than suspected they intended to flee the region, and he was disposed to give the fact that he was left cooped up here under lock and key no such humane interpretation as the intruder had placed upon it. They had left him to starve, if not discovered, while they sought to compass a safe distance. At all events, he was so broken in mind and body that his story was more than likely to be discredited, unless their own clumsy denials and guilty faces were in evidence to confirm its truth.
Now his garrulity had vanished; he licked his thin lips ever and anon, and looked up over the folds of the red blanket drawn to the chin with a bright, inscrutable eye and said nothing. His weakness was so great that the policy of lying silent and supine, rather than exert his failing powers, was commended by his inclination as well as his prudence.
Though it was in vain that the spy plied him with question and suggestion, one phrase was like a galvanic current to this inert atrophy of muscle and mind. "Look here, old man," the intruder said at length, baffled and in despair, "you mark my words!" The brawny form had come close in the shadow and towered over the recumbent and helpless creature, speaking impressively through his set teeth. "You mark my words: your pals are going to do you."
A quiver of patent apprehension ran over the dimly descried face, and under the blanket the limbs writhed feebly; but Clenk's resolution held firm, and with a curse, balked and lowering, the man stepped out at the place where he had effected his entrance at the moment when his scheme might have borne fruit.
For old Clenk had struggled up in bed. This threat was true. He had vaguely suspected the fact, but in the words of another his fear had an added urgency. He had betrayed his accomplices, he had betrayed himself. Doubtless it was a race between them as to who could soonest seize the opportunity to turn State's evidence.
And why should he fear the law more than another? As matters stood, he would be left to bear the brunt of its vengeance, while the active perpetrator of the deed escaped, and the accessories sought shelter beneath the ægis of the law itself.
He was not long in reasoning it out. The strength of his resolution imparted a fictitious vigor to his muscles. While unaided he could never have stirred the heavy board, his efforts made it give, loosened as it had already been, so that his thin, wiry body could slip between its edge and the rest of the wall. He had one moment of intense terror lest it slip elastically back and hold him pinioned there, but a convulsive struggle sufficed, and he stepped out, exhausted and trembling, into the gathering dusk, a lowering assemblage of darkling mountains, and at a little distance the shacks of the construction gang. The doors were aflare with flickering lights from within, and the unctuous smell of frying pork was on the air. It was well for his enterprise that at the critical moment the camp was discussing its well-earned supper and had scant attention to bestow on other interests.
An hour later the men on a hand-car, whizzing down the portion of the track that was sufficiently complete for this mode of progression, gave little heed that a workman from the camp was stealing a ride, sitting in a huddled clump, his feet dangling. Whether discharged or in the execution of some commission for the construction boss, they did not even canvass. Far too early it was for the question of rates or passes to vex the matter of transportation. They did not even mark when he dropped off, for the hand-car ran into the yards at the terminus, carrying only its own crew.
Clenk was equally fortunate in creeping into an empty freight here unobserved, and when it was uncoupled and the engine swept into the round-house in the city of Glaston, it was verging again toward sunset, and he was hundreds of miles from his starting-point.
Some monitions of craft were vaguely astir in his dull old brain. He had resolved to throw himself on the mercy of the mother, ere he trusted himself to the clutches of the law. He winced from the mere thought of those sharp claws of justice, but he promised himself that he would be swift. He could not say how Holvey and Drann might secure precedence of him. They had gotten the start, and they might hold it. But if he should tell the mother where they had left the child, he would surely have a friend at court. When he was in the street he walked without hesitation up to the first responsible-looking man he met, and, showing him the advertisement in the newspaper, boldly asked to be directed to the house of that lady.
So dull he was, so unaccustomed to blocks and turnings and city squares, that after an interval of futile explanation the stranger turned out of his way and walked a short distance with him. All the world had heard of the tragedy and the mysterious disappearance of the child, and, although suspecting a fake, even a casual stranger would not disregard a chance of aid.
It was well that the distance was not great, for even his excitement was hardly adequate to sustain Clenk's failing physique. When the old mountaineer paused on the concrete sidewalk to which the spacious grounds of the suburban residence sloped, he looked about with disfavor. "Can't see the house fur the trees," he muttered, for the great oaks, accounted so magnificent an appurtenance in Glaston, were to him the commonest incident of entourage, and a bare door-yard, peeled of grass, a far more significant token of sophistication. As he approached, however, the stately mansion presently appeared, situated on a considerable eminence, and with long flights of stone steps from a portico, enriched with Corinthian columns, and from two successive terraces at some little distance in front. Here were tall stone vases on either hand, and beside one of these at the lower terrace two ladies had paused, waiting, descrying his approach. One was gowned in deep black, sad of aspect, though serene, and very beautiful. The other wore a dress all of sheer white embroideries, with knots of brocaded lilac ribbon, festival of intimation, but her face was thin, wan, worn, tortured out of all semblance of calm or cheer. He came falteringly toward them, and stood for a moment uncertain. Then—for the scope of his cultivation did not include the civility of lifting his hat—he said, "Which of ye two wimin hev los' a child?" His voice was quavering, even sympathetic, and very gentle as he looked at them.
"I have lost my little son!" cried Lillian in a keen, strained tone, agonized anew by the mere mention of the catastrophe. "Have you any information about him? I am ready to pay for it." She had been warned a hundred times that eagerness in proffering money, in making the reward so obviously sure, was not conducive to accelerating the disclosure, bringing into play the innate perversity of human nature, and a desire to trade on the situation and increase the gains; yet try as she might, she could not refrain from invoking always the cogent aid of gold.
"I ain't so particular 'bout the money, lady. I got su'thin' on my mind. I be bent on makin' it square with the law. An' then, too, that leetle Archie air a mighty gamesome leetle trick." He laughed slightly as with a pleasant fleeting reminiscence. "Come mighty nigh dyin', though—skeered me, fur a fack. Powerful tight squeak he had!"
All at once his eyes, glancing over his shoulder, lighted on Bayne, who had just come to call on the ladies and now stood at the bottom of the flight of the terrace steps. Clenk drew back with an obvious shock. "Why, look-a-hyar,youain't Mr. Briscoe!" he exclaimed insistently, as with a desire to reassure himself. His eyes large, light, distended, were starting out of his head. His jaw quivered violently. The grimy, claw-like hand he extended shook as with a palsy.
When together, Briscoe and Bayne had scant facial resemblance; but apart, that stamp of consanguinity might easily recall for each the face of the other. Bayne, with his wonted subtlety of divination, replied at once, "No, but Mr. Briscoe was my cousin."
"Oh, ho—oh, ho—I see," the old man said, tractable and easily convinced. "I know—Lawd! I got reason ter know that Briscoe's dead. I war afeared o' seein' su'thin' oncommon—his harnt, or some sech. The idee shuk me powerful. I hev had a fever lately. Lemme sit down—I—I—can't stand up. I been hevin' a misery lately in my breast-bone—oh!"—he waved his hand in the air with a pathetic, grasping gesture—"me breath is gone—me breath, me breath——"
He sank down on an iron bench at one side on the velvety turf and feebly gasped.
"I'll get some brandy," Gladys said in a low tone to Lillian, and sped swiftly up the steps toward the house.
Suddenly Clenk partially lifted himself and dived into one of the pockets of his loose coat. He brought up a little red shoe, all tarnished and tobacco-stained, and held it out to Lillian with a faint and flickering smile of bestowal, certain of gratitude as well as recognition. "Does you-uns know that leetle foot?"
Lillian swayed for a moment as if she might fall. Then, with a piercing shriek, she darted forward and seized it from his shaking grasp. She held it up to the light, and as Gladys returned, herself bearing the tray with the glass and decanter, Lillian convulsively clutched her arm and, speechless and trembling, pointed to the name in tarnished gilt on the inside of the sole—her own shoemaker, who had constructed the delicate little hand-sewed slipper!
"Where is he now—where is this child?" Bayne demanded precipitately, his own breath short, his pulses beating in his temples till the veins seemed near bursting.
"I can't rightly saynow," the old man drawled; "but—but I kin tell you where we-uns lef' him. 'T war a awful bis'ness, that crackin' off Briscoe—that warn't in the plan at all. We-uns war after the revenuer. What right had he ter bust our still an' break up our wu'm and pour our mash an' singlings out on the ground? Ain't it our'n? Ain't the corn an' apples an' peaches our'n? Didn't we grow 'em?—an' what right hev the gover'ment ter say we kin eat 'em, but can't bile 'em—eh? They b'long ter we-uns—an' gosh! the gover'ment can't hender! But we never meant no harm ter Briscoe. Lawd! Lawd! that warn't in the plan at all. But the child viewed it, an', by gosh! I b'lieve that leetle creetur could hev told the whole tale ez straight as a string—same ez ef he war twenty-five year old. That deedie of a baby-child talked sense—horse-sense—hedid, fur a fack!"
"Where—where——" Lillian was using every power of her being to restrain the screams of wild excitement, to sustain the suspense.
"Where did you last see him?" asked Bayne. He had grown deadly white, and the old man, lifting his face, gazed vaguely from one to the other. Their intense but controlled excitement seemed subtly imparted to his nerves. The details of the tragedy had become hackneyed in his own consciousness, but their significance, their surfeit of horror, revived on witnessing their effect on others.
"Look-a-hyar, you two an' this woman will stan' up fur me when I gin myself up fur State's evidence, ef I put ye on the track fur findin' Bubby? He's thar all right yit, I'll be bound—well an' thrivin, I reckon. He hev got backbone, tough ez a pine knot."
"Yes, yes, indeed; we pledge ourselves to sustain you," cried Lillian. Bayne was putting the glass of brandy into the grimy, shaking paw, mindful of the old man's shattered composure.
"It be a mighty risk I be a-runnin'"—the old, seamed face was of a deadly pallor and was beginning to glister with a cold sweat. "I reckon I oughtn't ter tell nuthin' exceptin' ter the officers, but—but—I 'lowed leetle Archie's mother would help me some again them bloodhounds o' the law."
"I'll move heaven and earth to aid you!" cried Lillian.
"See here, I canpromisethat you shall be held harmless, for I am the prosecutor," Gladys struck suddenly into the conversation, pale but calm, every fibre held to a rigorous self-control. "I am Mr. Briscoe's wife, his widow. Now tell me,wheredid you last see that child?"
"Wh—wh—wh—whut? You the widder?" Clenk's eyes were starting from their sockets as he gazed up at her from his crouching posture on the bench, his head sunk between his shoulders, his hand with the untasted glass in it trembling violently.
"An' ye say that ye too will stand by me? Then lemme tell it—lemme tell it now. 'T was—what d'ye call that place?—I ain't familiar with them parts.Wait"—as Bayne exclaimed inarticulately—"lemme think a minit." He dropped his head on one of his hands, his arm, supported by the back of the bench, upholding it. His slouched hat had fallen off on the stone pavement, and his shock of gray hair moved in the soft breeze.
The moment's interval in the anguish of suspense seemed interminable to the group. "Drink a little brandy," Bayne counselled, hoping to stimulate his powers.
He evidently heard, and sought to obey. The hand holding the untasted liquor quivered, the glass swayed, fell from his nerveless grasp, and shivered to fragments on the stone pavement.
Bayne sprang to his side and lifted his head. Ah, a drear and ghastly face it was, turned up to the gorgeous sunset, the gentle ambient air, the happy, fleeting shadows of the homing birds.
"Has he fainted?" asked Lillian.
"The man is dead!" Bayne cried with a poignant intonation. "He is dead! He is dead!"
For while they had waited for the word that had eluded him he had gone out into the great wordless unknown. His failing strength had thwarted his will. His spirit had given him the slip.
XIII.
Every appliance of resuscitation known to science was brought into use, but in vain. No scrap of paper, no clue of identification, was found upon the body. The three, bound together in such close ties of sympathy, were stricken as with a new and appalling affliction. The burden was all the heavier for that momentary lightening of a treacherous hope. For a time Bayne could not reconcile himself to this new disaster. So overwhelming indeed, so obvious, was its effect that Lillian, ever with her covetous appropriation of every faculty, her grasping claim on every identity in this sacred cause, feared that despair had at last overtaken him, and that he would succumb and give over definitely the search. The idea roused her to a sort of galvanic energy in promoting the project, and she would continually formulate fantastic plans and suggest to him tenuous theories with feverish volubility, only to have him thrust them aside with a lacklustre indifference that their futility merited.
"He is discouraged, Gladys; he is at the end of his resources," she said aside to her friend. "He can try no more."
"How canyoubelieve that?" cried Gladys.
Even in this crisis Lillian noted anew with a wounded amazement the significant smile on the fair face of her friend, the proud pose of her head. Could she arrogate such triumphant confidence in the temper and nature of a man who did not love her?—whose heart and mind were not trusted to her keeping? That doubt assailed Lillian anew in Bayne's absence, and in the scope for dreary meditation that the eventless days afforded it developed a fang that added its cruelties to a grief which she had imagined could be supplemented by no other sorrow.
It was merely sympathy that animated him in her behalf, she felt sure; it was pity for her helplessness when none other would abet the hopeless effort to recover the child. His conviction that Archie still lived constrained him by the dictates of humanity to seek his rescue. He was doubtless moved, too, by the great generosity of his heart, his magnanimity; but not by love—never by love! How could it be, indeed, in the face of all that had come and gone, and of the constant contrast, mind, body, and soul, with the perfect, the peerless Gladys!
In this, the dreariest of his absences, seldom a word came to the two women waiting alternately in agonized expectation or dull despair. For Bayne was much of the time beyond the reach of postal and telegraphic facilities. In the endeavor to discover some clue to identify that strange visitant of the smiling spring sunset, and thus reach other participants in the crime of the murder and the abduction, Bayne had the body conveyed to the Great Smoky Range, within the vicinity of the Briscoe bungalow, discerning from the speech of the man, as well as from his familiarity with the deed, that he was a native mountaineer. Lillian had desired to bestow upon him, in return for his intention of aid at the last, a decent burial, but the interpretation of the metropolitan undertaker of this commission was so far in excess of the habit of the rustic region that men who had known old Clenk all their lives did not recognize him as he lay in his coffin, clean, bathed, shaven, clad in a suit of respectable black and with all the dignity of immaculate linen, and they swore that they had never before seen him. The alertness of Copenny's guilty conscience sharpened his faculties. His keen eyes penetrated the disguise of this reputable aspect at once, though he sedulously kept his own counsel. He heard the details of the death in the rounds of the mountain gossip, and divined what Clenk's errand had been. He deemed that the effort to turn State's evidence had met its condign punishment, and he felt more assured and secure now that it had been attempted and had failed.
Bayne, however, had scant time to push his investigations here, where indeed the ground had been previously so thoroughly searched, for he was summoned away by another lure of a clue far to the northeast. His recent bitter disappointment, on the verge of a discovery of importance, perhaps enabled him better to bear in this instance the result of a fruitless quest, for he had definitely ceased to hope. He had begun to believe the child was dead. Clenk's words implied no present knowledge of his seclusion. The allusion to a severe illness suggested possibilities of relapse, of a weakening of the constitution as much from lack of proper attention and nourishment as from disease.
On the lonely railway journey from the scene of this latest disappointment, Bayne was dismayed to note from time to time how blank were the hours before him, how his invention had flagged! What to do next, what tortuous path to try, he did not know. Now and again he sought to spur up his jaded faculties to perceive in the intricate circumstances of all his futile plans some fibre of a thread, untried hitherto, that might serve to unravel all this web of mystery. But no! He seemed at the end. His mind was dull, stagnant; his thoughts were heavy; he was oblivious of the surroundings. The incidents of the passing moment scarcely impinged upon his consciousness. He did not share the vexation of his fellow-passengers when a wreck of freight cars on the track bade fair to delay the train some hours, awaiting the clearance of the obstructions. It hardly mattered where he spent the time. He had lost all interests, all hold on other phases of life, and this that he had made paramount, essential, baffled and deluded and denied him, and in its elusiveness it seemed now to have worn him quite out.
Then once more he sought to goad his drooping spirits, to rouse himself to a keener efficiency. He would not give up the emprise, he declared again, he would not be conquered save by time itself. It was rather an instinct, in pursuance of this revival of his resolution, to seek to rid himself of his own thoughts, the constant canvass of his despair; this had necessarily a resilient effect, benumbing to the possibilities of new inspiration. He sought to freshen his faculties, to find some diversion in the passing moment that might react favorably on the plan nearest his heart. He forced himself to listen, at first in dull preoccupation, to the talk of a group in the smoker; it glanced from one subject to another—the surroundings, the soil, the timber, the mining interests—and presently concentrated on a quaint corner of the region, near the scene of the stoppage, the Qualla Boundary. This was the reservation of a portion of the tribe of Cherokee Indians, the Eastern Band, who nearly a century earlier had evaded, in the dense fastnesses of these ranges, removal with their brethren to the west, and had finally succeeded in buying this mountainous tract of fifty thousand acres.
As Bayne looked out of the window, urging his mind to appraise the human interest of the entourage, to apprehend its significance, he bethought himself of a certain old Cherokee phrase that used to baffle him in his philological studies. He remembered in a sort of dreary wonder that he had once felt enough curiosity concerning this ancient locution to maintain a correspondence with the Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian Institution as to its precise signification—and now he could scarcely make shift to recollect it.
He had then been hard on the track of the vanishing past; his wish was to verify, solely for the sake of scholastic accuracy, these words of the ancient Cherokee tongue, the Ayrate dialect, which was formerly the language of their lowland settlements in this region, but which, since the exodus of the majority of these Indians to the west and the fusion of the lingering remnant of their upper and lower towns into this tribal reservation east of the Great Smoky Mountains, has become lost, merged with the Ottare (Atali) dialect, once distinctively the speech of their highland villages only, but now practically modern Cherokee.
As Bayne recalled the circumstances, he noted one of the Qualla Indians loitering about the scene of the wreck. He put a question to him from out the window of the coach, and discovered that he spoke English with some facility. The old habit reasserted itself with inherent energy, and presently Bayne was moved to leave the car and sit on a pile of wood near the track, where, with his new acquaintance, he floundered over verbal perversions of modern changes and lost significations of the language and the contortions of Anglicized idioms, till at length he remarked that if his interlocutor would act as interpreter he should like to converse on the subject of these words with some old Cherokee who had never learned English and had seldom heard it spoken.
The Qualla Boundary is sufficiently permeated with the spirit of the past to feel that Time is the intimate possession of man. In that languid environment there is no frenzy to utilize it lest it fly away. No man is hurried into his grave within the reservation. It seemed not more strange to the Indian than to the linguist to spend an hour or so in meditating on a queer word that has lost its meaning amidst the surges of change. The tribesman, lending himself readily to the investigation, suddenly bethought himself of the ancient sibyl in her remote cabin on the steep slant of the mountain, among the oldest and the least progressive denizens of the Qualla Boundary.
Despite her arrogations of uncanny foreknowledge of human events, despite her mystic lore of spells and charms, she had no faint presentiment of the fact when Fate came boldly here and laid a hand on her door. None of her familiars of the air, of the earth, gave her warning. Often she thought of this afterward with bitterness, with upbraiding. The Mountain Climber,Atali Kuli(the ginseng), must, she was sure, have known of this inimical ascent of the steeps, but he only burrowed the deeper, and treacherously made no sign. As toAgaluga Hegwa, the great Whirlwind—she would have bidden him arise quickly—"Ha-usi-nuli datule-hu gu!"—but to what avail! Doubtless he was asleep somewhere on the sunny slopes. The Ancient White Fire was covered with ash; not a glimmer didHigayuli Tsunegaafford her, not a flicker. What a mockery was it thatKananiski Gigageshould pretend to weave his web so fast, so fine, about the child, and yet suffer its strong meshes to be burst apart by a mere word.
It was not the obsolete word which the visitor sought, for as he sat outside her door in a chair, brought from within the cabin, while she crouched on the threshold, and the interpreter perched on the stump of a tree, an interruption occurred that flung those enigmatic syllables back on the mysterious past forever. "Polly Hopkins" in her poor and ragged calico gown—for the picturesque Indian garb of yore is now but a tradition in the Qualla Boundary—had barely lifted her head in her flapping old sunbonnet that scarcely disguised its pose of surprised expectation, when a sound came from the interior of the house as turbulent as the approach of a troop of wild horses, and instantly there rushed out into the sunshine a sturdy blond child with wide, daring blue eyes, golden hair, muscular bare legs, arrayed in a queer little frock of blue gingham, and no further garb than the graces of his own symmetry.
For a moment Bayne was like a man in a dream. To be confronted suddenly with the realization of all his hopes, the consummation of all his struggles, took his breath away. He had not been sufficiently acquainted with the boy to recognize him at once in this different attire, and with the growth and vigor of nearly a year's time, but the incongruity of his fair complexion, his blond hair, in this entourage, his exotic aspect, made Bayne's heart leap and every nerve tremble.
Meeting the gaze of the big, unafraid blue eyes, he asked at a venture in English, "And what is your name, young man?"
"Archie Royston," promptly replied the assured and lordly youngster.
"Alchie Loyston," mechanically repeated the old sibyl. Even the glance of her dimmed eyes was a caress as she fondly turned them toward the child.
Bayne looked as if he might faint. A sharp exclamation was scarcely arrested on his lips. He flushed deeply, then turned pale with excitement. For months past, flaring in all the public prints, that name had been advertised with every entreaty that humanity must regard, with every lure that might excite cupidity, with every threat that intimidation could compass. And here, in this sequestered spot, out of the world, as it were, among the remnant of an Indian tribe, of a peculiarly secluded life, of a strange archaic speech and an isolated interest, was craftily hidden the long-lost child. Any ill-considered remark might even yet jeopardize his restoration, might result in his withdrawal, sequestered anew and inaccessible. Julian Bayne became poignantly mindful of precaution. He affected to write down the Cherokee words as the interpreter and the old sibyl discussed them, but his pencil trembled so that he could hardly fashion a letter. It was an interval to him of urgent inward debate. He scarcely dared to lose sight of the boy for one moment, yet he more than feared the slightest demonstration unsupported.
He was in terror lest he find the situation changed when next he approached the fortune-teller's cabin, a few hours later, but the little blond boy, half nude, was playing in the lush grass before the open door. The visitor was bolder now, being accompanied by officers of the law; so bold indeed that he was able to pity the grief of the poor, unintelligible squaw, volleying forth a world of words of which every tenth phrase was "Alchie Loyston." By what argument she sought to detain him, what claims she preferred, what threats she voiced, can never be known. The sheriff of the county was obdurate, deaf to all intents and purposes. He shook his head glumly when it was suggested that she might remain with the child until his mother should arrive in response to the telegram already sent. "Might poison him—Indians are queer cattle! Mocking-birds will do that if the young ones are caged, through the bars, by jing!"
All night long, like some faithful dog, she lay on the floor outside the door of the room where they kept the child, her face to the threshold; and on the inner side, in emulation and imitation, little Archie lay on the floor and echoed her every groan and responded to her lightest whisper. But sleep was good to him, and when he was quite unconscious the officers took him up and placed him on a bed, while they awaited in great excitement and with what patience they could muster the response to the telegram sent by Bayne, couched in guarded phrase and held well within the facts: