“An’ then whenst I war a-tryin’ ter git over that backset—findin’ out
thar warn’t no mo’ room fur me in heaven than thar war on yearth—up
ye hed ter pop, like a devil out’n a bush, a-goin’ ter sarch in the
mountings fur silver, sech ez that float ez I hed. An’ ye got me set ter
honin’ an’ hankerin’ arter silver an’ sech—whenst I mought hev knowed ez
Satan war in it, through Sam’ls takin’ off bein’ so durned cur’ous.” He
rubbed his hands silently for a few minutes as he looked at the fire.
“That war the reason I tuk ye ter Jepson’s old cabin ter bide a-fust—I
’lowed ye mought find sech float ’mongst them steep ledges an’ rocky
slopes.”
Rathburn looked up at him with an alert and kindling eye. His sense of
humiliation, his troubled conscience, were forgotten in an instant. “We
never went near the cave!” he exclaimed. “That was where the fellow was
going. That is where you tracked his steps, Jake.” He rose to his feet
and leaned over and clapped his comrade on the shoulder. “We’ll find it
yet. There’s the ore. We’ll explore the cave!”
The color had flared into his face; his lips curved hopefully under his
yellow mustache; his hand stroked it with his wonted alert, confident
gesture.
The mountaineer looked up at him with a face cadaverous in its extreme
pallor and the elongation of all its traits. His remonstrant eyes had a
presage of hopeless defeat in the midst of their anxious entreaty.
“_That_ won’t do, Eugene,” he said, in palpitating eagerness.
“Laws-a-massy, boy, we can’t go rummagin’ round a dead man’s bones fur
silver!”
He seemed to take note of the unmoved resolution in Rathburn’s
expression. In his despair and fear he sought to assume a casual air of
confidence which might impose upon his companion, however little root it
had in fact.
“But shucks! ye wouldn’t _dare_ to go a meddlin’ round dead folks. _Ye_
know _ye_ be afeard o’ ’em!”
“_I?_” exclaimed Rathburn, glancing down at him with a bantering smile,
“I?—afraid of dead men’s bones?”
Still looking up into his flushed, handsome, triumphant face, full of
life, and light, and spirit, Baintree quailed. For did he not remember,
so late though it was, his coadjutor’s profession? And had he not once
seen, in the backroom of Rathburn’s office, a bleached white skull that
the young physician considered a beautiful thing? The sight was renewed
to Baintree’s recollection with the vivid dread of a nightmare. He felt a
suffocating pressure upon his chest. A hoarse, wheezing, half-smothered
unconscious cry broke from his lips.
“Why, Jake!” Rathburn began, in a cheerful, rallying, reassuring tone;
but the mountaineer had started to his feet, and the impetuous torrent of
words would not be stopped.
“Ye air puttin’ a rope round my neck! Ye—knowin’ the Brumsaidge boys
like ye do! Ef they war ter find his bones—ye know, ye know what would
happen! O God A’mighty!” He struck his long, lean hands together as he
held them above his head. “An’ ye’d do it! Ye’d put a rope round my neck
fur the bare chance, the bare chance o’ findin’ the silver! O Lord! I
hev been gin over—plumb gin over! What ailed me,” he went on, in frantic
self-reproach,—“what ailed me ter tell the true place, many a lie ez I
hev tole? Even the Devil fursook me, never whispered me nare lie ter tell
this time,—this time, when a lie would hev saved my life! What ailed me
ter tell the place—the place”—
“Oh Jake, stop—_hush_!” exclaimed Rathburn, irritably.
“Oh, I never ’lowed ez ye’d sarch that spot—ez ye’d put me in danger—the
man ez gin ye all the chance ye ever hed”—
“Mighty good chance!” sneered Rathburn, losing patience. “A piece of
float that another fellow found, God knows where,—_stop_ that racket,
Jake!”
“Stop!” cried the mountaineer, still clasping and unclasping his hands
above his head as he moved convulsively about the floor. “Whyn’t ye ax
that thar worm in the fire,”—he pointed his quivering hand at a wretched,
writhing thing that the heat had summoned from its nest in the rotten
heart of the log forth into the midst of the flames, to turn hither and
thither in a futile frenzy until consumed,—“whyn’t ye ax that worm ter
stop?”
“Go on, then, and have a fit,” said Rathburn coolly, “or work yourself
into a fever.” He pointed to a small medicine-chest. “Shan’t cost you
anything,—got that advantage over the worm.”
His ridicule and his assumption of indifference were salutary. Baintree
paused, looking restlessly about for a moment, then he returned to the
hearth, shoving his chair with his knee back into the corner where he had
sat before. His fear was not allayed, however, nor his sense of injury
assuaged.
“Oh, ye air a mighty aggervatin’ cuss, Eugene Rathburn!” he declared,
lowering hopelessly at him across the hearth. “Ef I hed lived the life
other men do, an’ hed hed my sheer o’ the good luck other folks gits, I’d
hev too much sperit ter let ye kerry things like ye do. I’d kill ye afore
I’d let ye harm me!”
“I ain’t going to harm you,” said Rathburn casually. He did not even
remember his clutch on his comrade’s throat.
“Ef I hedn’t been through with jes’ what I hev been through with, ye
wouldn’t treat me so. Ye wouldn’t dare treat another man—Teck Jepson,
say—this-a-way.”
“Now I’m not afraid of Teck Jepson; you can bet high on that,” Rathburn
protested, with a sudden flush. “You are such a fool, Jake, though you
think yourself very smart indeed, that you make all sorts of mistakes,
and you want me to make them, too. You ought never to have said that the
man fell into a cave or chasm—for you don’t know it.” That continually
recurrent doubt again crossed his mind, and he cast a quick, suspicious
glance across the hearth at Baintree, whose trembling hands were spread
out to the fire, his pallid face bearing that recent impress of a strong
nervous shock, indescribable, but as unmistakable as the print of a blow.
“You ought never to have hid his coat and hat,—and, by the way, the
Broomsedge despot took no measures to punish you for that,—and I dare say
if the man’s bones were found even now in a cave on _his_ land, people
would like to know how _his_ cave came by them.”
Baintree looked up with a sudden flash of his former sly intelligence,
then bent his brooding eyes once more on the fire.
“Especially,” Rathburn continued, after a pause, “as they were always on
bad terms. You would be in a better position to stand such a discovery
than Jepson, for the jury has said that you had nothing to do with his
bones. What did Jepson quarrel with him about?”
Baintree never spoke of the victim of the catastrophe save with a bated
voice and a strained, anxious expression, almost a contortion in its
speculative keenness to detect the lack of confidence that was the usual
sequence of his words.
“’Bout’n the way he treated his wife.”
“His wife?—thought he was a young fellow, a mere boy.”
“He war married young,—’bout twenty. Gal war young, too. They didn’t
agree tergether. Some folks ’lowed he beat her, but Sam’l’s kin declared
they jes’ fought tergether—her bein’ ez survigrous ez him. But Jepson
went over thar one day whenst she hed her head tied up, ’lowin’ her
husband hed busted it, an’ he gin Sam’l a turr’ble trouncin’. _He_ hed
_his_ head tied up arter that.”
“I suppose she didn’t mourn her loss?” suggested Rathburn, with a jeering
smile.
“Took on turr’ble a-fust, an’ married agin ’fore the year war out.”
“Glad to get rid of him, eh?”
“_He’d_ hev been mighty glad ter git rid o’ _her_. Useter ’low sometimes
ez he’d run away from her ef he hed ennywhar ter run ter, an’ from
Jepson, too. He war turr’ble ’feard o’ Jepson. He useter ’low sometimes
ez he wisht he hed never kem from North Car’liny, whar he useter live an’
work in a silver mine. It gin out, though, an’ warn’t wuth nuthin’ ter
its owners.”
“I wonder,” said Rathburn speculatively, “if that isn’t where he is right
now.”
“Hedn’t been hearn on thar at the time o’ the trial,” said Baintree.
“Or else,” pursued Rathburn meditatively, “if in trouncing him,
according to his royal prerogative, Jepson might not have overdone the
chastisement, and stowed away the evidences of how justice had overborne
mercy in that cave of his.”
Both would have liked to credit this, but Baintree shook his head.
“_I_ don’t believe Keale fell into any cave,” Rathburn presently
resumed,—“a deft-footed mountaineer! He either went in there searching
for silver, or he was put in there for some purpose, or he has run away
from his matrimonial infelicity and the despot of Broomsedge Cove.”
He paused to kick the chunks of the logs together, between the stones
that served as fire-dogs, for they were burnt out now save for their
bulky and charred ends. The flames leaped up anew. The smoke had ceased
to puff into the room, but its aroma, with the pungent fragrance of the
wood, lingered in the air. The worm, in which Jake Baintree had descried
a parallel of cruelly perplexed anguish, was gone, and the world was as
if it had never been. The sinuous contortions of his fear and harassment
continued with hardly more hope of ultimate rescue. Nevertheless, like
the worm, he could but strive.
“Eugene,” he said, “let’s leave the cave alone. Su’thin’ dreadful will
kem o’ it ef we go meddlin’ thar. Ye know ye don’t want ter put me in no
danger wuss’n I be in now. Ye wouldn’t, now would ye?” in an unctuous,
coaxing voice, and with an appealing look.
“Why, not for worlds, Jake, not for worlds!” exclaimed Rathburn heartily.
A sigh of relief was on the lips of the suspected man, a gleam of
renewing life in his jaded eye. There had not yet been time to evolve
doubt, suspicion, qualification, before Rathburn spoke again.
“Nothing that I am going to do can injure anybody. I was placed in far
greater jeopardy by your concealments and mystery about the forge than
ever you will be by anything I counsel or do.”
“Ye mean ye won’t go ter the cave?” said Baintree, his lips dry and
moving with seeming difficulty.
“Now don’t be an ignoramus and a fool, Jake. Of course I shall look
for more of the float about the cave. I believe that’s where the man
found it. I should be a fit subject for the lunatic asylum if I didn’t
search there, and that’s just what you are. No harm in the world can
come of it. Why,” taking a bit of paper from his pocket and deftly
rolling a cigarette,—“why, Jake,”—he spoke in answer to Baintree’s silent
look,—“what would you have done if, some of those days when we were at
Jepson’s house, I had stumbled on the mouth of that cave?”
He cocked the cigarette between his teeth, its tiny red tip brightly
flaring, for the room was growing dull and dusky, and looked with an
expression of good-natured argument at Baintree across the hearth.
The mountaineer’s ruminative eyes were fixed upon him. “I tuk good pains
ye shouldn’t,” he admitted, in a tone, however, which implied that he had
yielded the previous points of controversy. “I never guided ye in that
d’rection.”
Rathburn took his cigarette from his mouth, emitted an airy wreath of
smoke, and shook his head seriously from side to side. Then as he smoked
on he said, “I have a very pretty quarrel with you, Jake. By your own
confession, you have systematically deceived me for a matter of six
months or more. You made me believe that _you_ had found the float, and
of course knew where you found it, when you were only trying to get the
benefit of such scientific knowledge as I had,—to discover mineral where
there was no reason to believe it to be. If you were not so ignorant you
wouldn’t have tried a foolish, hopeless dodge like that. You have made
me work very hard at this wild-goose chase, digging, and tramping, and
blacksmithing, and _you_ got me into a scrape that might have cost _me
my_ life. Indeed, but for that timely warning that put me on my guard and
made me behave like a man instead of a sheep-killing dog, I believe it
_would_ have cost me my life.”
His face grew grave and conscious at the thought of Marcella. He sat
silent for a moment or two, looking steadfastly at the fire and turning
the cigarette delicately between his fingers.
“It is absurd, because you are afraid of this, and afraid of that, to
ask me to give up the whole thing or to go and search where there are no
indications, or very slight ones, as you had me do all summer, when you
knew where the only chances lay. But I forgive you, and I’m not going to
do anything that can possibly injure you.”
Baintree was sitting so still in the dusky gloom of the darkening cabin
that he hardly seemed alive. With the brown color of his coat dimly
suggested on the duller tones about him, he looked like an effigy of a
man rudely fashioned from a root.
“What be ye a-goin’ ter do?” he demanded.
The lack of candor could hardly be urged against Eugene Rathburn among
his many and conspicuous faults.
“I’m going to search that cave from end to end, if the good Lord spares
me,” he asseverated. “That’s what I’m going to do. There’s nothing there
that I shan’t find.”
His cigarette, so far spent it was, required some deft manipulation that
it should not burn his fingers or lips and yet yield the last treasures
of nicotian luxury that it contained. His attention was fixed upon it,
and he lost the look with which Jake Baintree received this unequivocal
statement. When he glanced up, the mountaineer had risen and was filling
his pipe from some tobacco on the mantel-piece.
“Going to smoke?” asked Rathburn. “Well, good-night to you, for I’m going
to turn in.”
He spread upon the floor a thick rug and a heavy blanket, placing one
end over the saddle to serve as pillow, and as he lay before the dying
fire he seemed to take scant heed of the vigil of the silent, watchful
Baintree, still erect in his chair, and still smoking his pipe. Only once
the young townsman stirred after he lay down. “How good the rain sounds
on the roof,” he said drowsily. A few moments afterward he was doubtless
asleep—a sound, dreamless slumber, the close counterfeit of death,
motionless, silent, deep. Nevertheless Jake Baintree hardly felt sure of
its genuineness until after he had arisen and arranged his own pallet
with some unnecessary stir, that might have seemed an experiment to judge
if the sleeper would rouse again on any slight provocation. Then he sat
down once more and meditatively eyed the red embers, dwindling, still
dwindling in the white and gray ashes.
The monotone of the rain still beat on the roof; he heard the wind from
far away; the vague stir of the crumbling fire was distinguishable,
although it might seem so fine and subtle a rustle would have been lost
in the sound of aught else. The muffled figure on the floor was still
discernible in the red glow; even the yellow hair showed in a dull gleam
amidst the umber tones of the shadows. Jake Baintree’s eyes were upon
it as with a careful hand he reached into a crevice of the jamb of the
chimney and drew forth something that had a sudden steely glitter even in
the semi-obscurity, and laid it cautiously on his knee.
He did not move for some time afterward, although in the increasing
dusk his shadowy figure could hardly have been distinguished from the
inanimate shadows about him. Presently his hands were moving softly to
and fro with swift, industrial intentness.
Even the embers seemed to cling to life and yield it with the reluctance
and vacillating struggle pathetically typical of the passing of human
breath. Their sparkle, and verve, and flamboyant energies were all spent,
but suddenly they sent forth an unexpected red glow, strong in the midst
of the ashes, that was like the transitory revival in the last flickering
moments of a doomed creature.
It irradiated Baintree’s wary bright eyes fixed abruptly upon it, as he
sat in the corner. So sudden was its flare that he had not an instant to
prepare for it, and a whisking feather in his hand still mechanically
moved to and fro as he oiled a pistol, now and then dipping the tip of
the quill into a tin vessel that stood on the jagged edge of the jamb
beside him. He gazed with alert anxiety at the sleeping man upon the
floor. The room was fully revealed in the melancholy red suffusion;
Rathburn’s face was distinct with its far-away, unconscious expression.
He did not stir; he saw naught of what he might have thought strange
enough in the dead hour of the midnight,—Jake Baintree slipping cartridge
after cartridge into the six chambers of Dr. Rathburn’s neglected
revolver, not loaded before since he had come to the mountains in August.