THE OLD MINE’S SECRET
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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[Illustration: “There was Dick, waving his hand tauntingly”--_page 18_]
THE
OLD MINE’S SECRET
BY
EDNA TURPIN
AUTHOR OF “HONEY SWEET,” “PEGGY OF
ROUNDABOUT LANE,” “TREASURE
MOUNTAIN,” ETC.
FRONTISPIECE BY
GEORGE WRIGHT
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921.
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
TO
REBECCA BROCKENBROUGH
AND
TERRY LEE ROBERTS
THE OLD MINE’S SECRET
CHAPTER I
“O-O-Oh! oh me-e!” Dick made the sigh very sad and pitiful.
His father did not seem to hear it. He tilted his chair farther back,
perched his feet on the porch railing, and unfolded his newspaper.
It was a mild April morning, and the Osborne family had drifted out
on the porch,--Mr. Osborne with his papers and Mrs. Osborne with her
sewing; Sweet William was playing jackstraws with himself, Patsy sat on
the steps with her back to the others, especially Dick, who, however,
was pitying himself too much to notice her.
“I always get blamed for everything I do,” he said mournfully, “but
David----”
“‘House for War: Vote 373 to 50.’” Mr. Osborne read the headline.
“That is the answer to the President’s message four days ago. Now the
Senate----”
“Father! If you’ll just let me off to-day, I’ll work from school-out
till dark every day next week. I certainly will. Father, please----”
“Richard Randolph Osborne! You are to work your assigned part of the
garden to-day, _to-day_, without further pleas for postponement.” Mr.
Osborne’s mild voice and red flabby face stiffened with determination.
This was not the first week that Dick had neglected his garden task.
“Yes, sir,” Dick answered meekly, wriggling a little. That was all he
could do--wriggle a little--because he was made into a sort of merman
by having an old Persian shawl wrapped about him, from the waist down.
“I think you might let me off,” he persisted in an undertone; “just
this one more time. If mother had patched my trousers last night--if
she’d let me put on my Sundays now--I could get that hateful old garden
worked this morning. I’ve got something else to do to-day, something
awfully important.”
“I’m sorry I forgot, son,” said his mother. “I certainly meant to mend
them last night. I was reading, and forgot. I wish you had reminded
me.” She took quicker stitches and her thread snarled so that she had
to break it and begin again. “I am so sorry,” she repeated in the
delicious voice that made her words seem as fresh and sweet as the red
roses that fell from the mouth of the fairy-tale maiden.
Mrs. Osborne was a dear, sunny-hearted little woman with dark hair,
irregular features, and a vivid, eager face. She loved to read;
indeed, she could no more resist a book than a toper could refuse a
drink, but she was always so sorry and so ashamed when she neglected
home duties that every one except the person who suffered from it
forgave her freely.
Patsy, Dick’s twin sister, came now to her mother’s defense. “It’s your
fault, Dick,” she said. “It’s all your own fault. If you had locked the
bookcase door, it would have reminded her there was something to do.
And then she would have thought of the trousers.”
“I forgot,” Dick confessed. That put him clearly in the wrong, and made
him the crosser. He turned on his sister, growling: “What business is
it of yours, miss? You please let my affairs alone and attend to your
own. What are you doing, Patsy?”
He tried to wriggle near enough to see, but Patsy made a face at him
and ran into the yard. Dick was such a tease! She was not going to tell
him that she had decided to be a poet and was composing a wonderful
ballad. How surprised he would be when it came out in the _Atlantic_ or
_St. Nicholas_, with her name in big black letters--Pocahontas Virginia
Osborne, as it was in the family Bible. Or would she have a pen-name,
like ‘Marion Harland’? If she could think of a lovely original
name---- But perhaps she had better finish the poem first.
She perched herself in the swing and chewed her pencil and read over
the four lines she had written:
“Johnny was a sailor,
He was brave and bold;
He thought he would make an adventure
To find the North Pole.”
She could not think of anything else to say, so she read that over
again; and then again. While inspiration tarried, an interruption
came. It took the shape of her small brother William with two of
his followers--Hop-o-hop, a lame duck that he had adopted when its
hen mother pecked it and cast it off, and Scalawag, a sand-colored,
bob-tailed stray dog that had adopted him.
“Hey, Patsy! I think I’ll give you a kiss,” announced Sweet William,
raising his fair, serious face to hers. “I think I might give you two
kisses. You are so sweet. Patsy,” he went on coaxingly, “wouldn’t you
want to lend me a pencil? Just one little minute, to make you a picture
of a horse.”
“Oh, Sweet William, you’re such a nuisance!” said Patsy. “I’m awfully
busy. How can I ever finish this, if you bother me?”
But she gave him pencil and paper, and sat swinging back and forth,
looking idly about the spacious yard where the budding oaks made
lacelike shadows, on that April morning.
In the center of the yard was a great heap of bricks. That was the
remains of Osborne’s Rest, the family mansion that had been burned
in a raid during The War, as those southern Virginians called the
War of Secession from which they dated everything. Since then, two
generations of Osbornes had dwelt in The Roost, a cottage in one corner
of the yard. It was now the home of Patsy, her father and mother, her
two brothers, Dick and Sweet William, and a motherless cousin, David
Spotswood.
The big front gate opened on The Street, the one thoroughfare of The
Village. There were a church, a tavern, two shops, a dozen frame and
brick dwellings set far back in spacious grounds, and the county
Court-house in a square by itself. Behind the Court-house rambled The
Back Way which had once expected to become a street, but remained
always The Back Way with only a blacksmith’s shop, a basket-maker’s
shed, and a few cabins on it.
A century and a half before, three royal-grant estates, Broad Acres and
Larkland and Mattoax, cornered at a stone now on Court-house Green.
These plantations had long ago been divided into small farms; but in
The Village still lived Wilsons and Mayos and Osbornes who counted as
outsiders all whose grandfathers were not born in the neighborhood and
the kinship.
While we have been looking about, Sweet William lay flat on the ground,
holding his tongue between his teeth, to assist his artistic efforts.
“Look at my horse, Patsy!” he crowed, holding up the paper.
“Hm-m! I don’t call that much like a horse,” observed Patsy.
Sweet William’s face clouded, and then brightened. “Tell you what!”
he said. “It’ll be a cow. I’ll kick out one hind leg and put a bucket
here. Now! She’s spilt all the milk.”
Patsy laughed; and then one knew that she was pretty, seeing the merry
crinkles around her twinkling hazel eyes, and the upward curve of her
lips that brought out dimples on her freckled pink cheeks.
“I love you when you laugh, Patsy!” exclaimed Sweet William, hugging
her knees. “You may have my picture. And I’ll sit in the swing with
you.”
“You and Scalawag and Hop-o-hop may have the swing,” said Patsy. “I’m
going in. I’ll finish my poem to-morrow. I want to find out--I think
Dick has a secret.”
She jumped out of the swing, gave Sweet William’s ear a “love pinch,”
and strolled back to the porch.
“Dick,” she asked in an offhand way, “what are you going to do with
that candle you got this morning?”
Dick’s gloom relaxed and he winked tantalizingly.
“You wish you knew,” he said. “But--you’ll--never--find--out. Ah,
ha-a-a!”
“Don’t you tell, Mister Dick!” said Patsy. “I don’t want you to tell.
I’d rather find out for myself. And I certainly will find out, sir. You
just see if I don’t.”
Mr. Osborne still had his nose in his day-old paper; news younger than
that seldom, came to The Village. “‘Army plans call for a million men
the first year.’ That is a gigantic undertaking, Miranda, and--”
“It certainly is,” she agreed placidly. “Mayo, Black Mayo has bought
some more pigeons; and Polly says he’ll not tell what he paid for them,
so she knows it’s some absurd sum that he can’t afford.”
“Yes.” Her husband agreed absently. “And a million men means not
only men, but arms, equipment, food. Bless my life! Is that clock
striking--it can’t be!--is it ten? And I here instead of at the
Court-house.” He got up and stuffed the newspaper and a _Congressional
Record_ in his pocket.
“What are you going to do, dear?” asked his wife.
“We want to find out if the Board of Supervisors can appropriate money
to send our Confederate veterans to the Reunion in June. There have
been so many unusual expenses, bridges washed away and that smallpox
quarantine, that funds are low. I hope they can raise the requisite
amount.”
“Of course they will. They must,” Mrs. Osborne said quickly and
positively. “Why, the yearly reunion--seeing old comrades, being
heroized, recalling the glorious past--is the one bright spot in their
gray old lives.”
“Mr. Tavis and Cap’n Anderson were talking about the Reunion at the
post office yesterday,” said Dick. “They are just crazy about having it
in Washington. Cap’n has never been there. But he was telling how near
he and old Jube Early came to it, in ’64.”
“What an experience it will be, taking peaceful possession in old age
of the Capital they campaigned against when they were soldier boys,
over fifty years ago!” said Mrs. Osborne. “Certainly they must go. How
many are there, Mayo?”
“Nine in our district,” answered her husband. “Last year there were
sixteen. Three have died, and four are bedridden.”
“Ah! so few are left; so many have passed on.” Mrs. Osborne glanced
through the open door at a portrait, her father in a colonel’s gray
uniform. “Of course they must go, our nine old soldiers.”
“Sure!” said Dick. “If there isn’t money enough, we boys can help
raise it. Mr. Tavis says he’ll pay me to plant corn, afternoons and
Saturdays. I wasn’t thinking about doing it. But our old Confeds
mustn’t miss their Reunion.”
“Good boy! that’s the right spirit,” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.
She adored the memory of her gallant father and of the Confederate
cause to which he had devoted himself. The quiet, uneventful years
had brought no new deep, inspiring interests to the little Southern
community. Its love and loyalty clung to the past. To the children
the Lost Cause was a tradition as heroic and romantic as the legends
of Roland and Arthur; but it was a tradition linked to reality by the
old gray-clad men who had fought with Lee and Jackson. As Jones and
Tavis and Walthall, they were ordinary old men, rather tiresome and
absurd; but call them “Confederate veterans” and they were transformed
to heroes whom it was an honor to serve. Dick, shirking the work that
meant food for his family, would toil gladly to send them to their
Reunion.
“They must have this, perhaps their last--”
Mrs. Osborne paused, and her husband said: “We’ll manage it; we’ll
manage it somehow. If there is a deficit, we may be able to make it up
by private subscription. Perhaps I’ll get a case next term of court,
and can make a liberal contribution.” He laughed.
Mr. Osborne--called Red Mayo to distinguish him from a dark-haired
cousin of the same name, called Black Mayo--was a lawyer more by
profession than by practice; there were not enough law crumbs in The
Village, he said, to support a sparrow.
He strolled toward the Court-house while Mrs. Osborne took her last
hurried stitches. Then she handed the patched trousers to her son, who
rolled indoors and put them on. He went into the garden and gloomily
eyed the neglected square where peas and potatoes and onions were
merely green lines among crowding weeds.
“I certainly can’t finish it this morning,” he growled. “There’s too
much to do.”
“If you work hard, you can finish by sundown,” said his cousin, David
Spotswood, who was planting a row of beets on the other side of the
garden.
“I can’t work after dinner,” said Dick. “I’ve got something else to do.
I just can’t finish it to-day.”
“You’d better,” said Patsy, who had followed him into the garden. “When
father says ‘Richard’ and shuts his mouth--so! he means business. Say,
Dick! What were you getting that candle for? What are you going to do?
Let us go with you, Anne Lewis and me, and I’ll help you here.”
“You help!” Dick spoke in his most superior masculine manner. “Girls
haven’t any business in gardens. They ought to stay in the house and
make bed-quilts. They’re too afraid of dirty hands and freckled faces.”
Patsy flared up and answered so quickly that her words stepped on one
another’s heels. “That’s mean and unfair! You know I hate gloves and
bonnets, and I just wear them because mother makes me. But anyway, sir,
I think they’re nicer than great-grandmother’s shawl for trousers.”
She went back up the boxwood-bordered walk.
“I’ll keep my eyes on you, Mr. Richard Randolph Osborne,” she said to
herself. “Where you go to-day, I’ll follow.”
Halfway up the long walk, she came upon Sweet William, sitting on the
ground, holding a maple bough over his head.
“Won’t you come to our picnic, Patsy?” he said. “Me and Scalawag are
having a loverly picnic in the woods down by Tinkling Water.”
“No, thank you,” said Patsy. “I want to see Anne Lewis about going
somewhere after dinner.”
“Where?” asked Sweet William.
“I don’t know--till I find out,” laughed Patsy. “But Anne and I will do
that; we certainly will.”
“I wish Anne was staying here,” Sweet William said wistfully.
“So do I,” agreed Patsy. “Easter holiday is too short to divide with
Ruth. Oh! I’ll be so glad when it’s summer and Anne comes to stay a
long time.”
“It isn’t ever a long time where Anne is,” said Sweet William. “I’m
going with you to see her, Patsy, and I’ll have my picnic another day.”
They went off and left Dick raking and weeding and hoeing very
diligently; but, working his best, he had not half finished his task
when the dinner bell rang. He surveyed the garden with a scowl.
“It’ll take hours and hours to get it done,” he said. “And then it
would be too late to go where I’m going. Maybe I can work the potato
patch after supper.”
“You can’t,” said David, who had a straightforward way of facing facts.
“Oh! maybe I can,” said Dick, who had a picturesque way of evading
them. “You might help me. You might work on it awhile after dinner.”
“Thank you! I’ve something else to do. I’m going to harrow my corn
acre. I want to plant it next week,” said David, who was a blue-ribbon
member of the Boys’ Corn Club.
At the dinner table the boys were joined by Sweet William, Patsy,
and Anne Lewis, a cousin who was spending her Easter holiday in The
Village. The two girls watched Dick like hawks, and jumped up from
the table as soon as he went out of the dining room. He hurried to
the little upstairs room he shared with David that was called the
“tumble-up room” because the steps were so steep. Presently he came
down and showed off the things he was putting in his pockets--a candle,
a box of matches, and a ball of stout twine. He sharpened his hatchet
and fastened it to his belt.
“Yah! You wish you knew what that’s for,” he said, with a derisive face
at Patsy and then at Anne.
He strutted across the yard toward the front gate, but he was not to
march off in undisturbed triumph.
“Dick! uh Dick!” called his mother. “Remember you’ve your garden work
to finish.”
“Yes’m.” He scowled, then he said doggedly: “There’s something else
I’ve promised myself to do first.”
Anne and Patsy waited only to see that he turned up, not down, The
Street; then they ran around The Back Way and came out just behind him
at the church; there The Street turned to a road which led past the
mill and on to Redville. Dick walked quickly, and the girls hurried
after him; then he walked slowly, and they loitered so as to keep just
behind him.
“Where are you going?” he turned and challenged them.
“Oh! we might go to the mill to see Cousin Giles, or to Larkland to
look at Cousin Mayo’s new pigeons, or to Happy Acres,” answered Patsy.
Dick strode on, and the girls trotted behind him, making amicable
efforts at conversation.
“Steve Tavis has gone fishing with John and Baldie Eppes,” Anne
remarked. “He said we girls might go, too. But Patsy and I thought
there might be something--something more fun to do.”
No answer.
Patsy made an effort. “Dick,” she said, “I hope you’ll finish your
garden work to-day. Father’s tired of excuses and he’s made up his mind
for punishing. But even if we do get home late, I can help you.”
Silence.
“It’s a mighty nice day,” Patsy went on pleadingly, “to--to do outdoor
things. You say yourself I’m as good as a boy to have around. I
wouldn’t be in the way at all; and I could hold the candle for you.”
By this time they were at the mill where the Larkland road and the
Happy Acres path turned from the highway. Dick kept to the main road
and the girls followed. He stopped and faced them.
“You said you were going to the mill, or Larkland, or Happy Acres. Trot
along!”
“I said we might go there,” Patsy amended. “Or we might go--’most
anywhere. Do let us go with you; please, Dick.”
“Where?”
“Oh! wherever you are going. We’ll not tell.”
“You certainly will not,” he declared; “for a mighty good reason: you
are not going to know anything to tell.”
Patsy’s eyes flashed. “We’ll show you,” she said. “We are going to
follow you, like your shadow. You know good and well I can run as fast
as you. Now take your choice, sir; let us go with you, or give up and
toddle home and finish your task so as not to get punished.”
“Hm!” he jeered. “If I’ve got something on hand good enough to take
punishment for, it’s too good to spoil with girls tagging along.”
He walked briskly up the road. Anne and Patsy followed him for a silent
mile--up and down hills scarred with red gulleys, through woods,
by brown plowed fields and green grain land. They passed several
log cabins; the Spencer place, an old mansion amid tumbled-down
out-buildings; Gordan Jones’s trim new house gay with gables and fresh
paint. Then they came to an old farmhouse surrounded by neglected
fields.
“Why, that door’s open!” Anne remarked with surprise. “Is somebody
living at the old Tolliver place?”
“A new man; Mr. Smith. He came here last winter,” explained Patsy.
“Somebody new in the neighborhood!” laughed Anne. “Doesn’t that seem
queer? What sort of folks are they?”
“Um-mm; unfolksy,” said Patsy. “There’s just Mr. Smith, and his nephew
Albert that goes to our school. We’ve never got acquainted with Albert.
He’s sort of stand-offish; not as if he wanted to be, but as if he were
afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” asked Anne.
“Oh! I don’t know. Nothing. I reckon he’s just shy.”
“What sort of man is Mr. Smith?” inquired Anne.
“Ugly; and grins. He’s away from home most of the time. He’s a salesman
or agent of some kind. Dick,” Patsy returned to a more interesting
subject, “do please tell us what you are going to do.”
“We-ell,” Dick began as if he were about to yield reluctantly; then he
interrupted himself eagerly: “Oh! look at that squirrel!”
Their eyes followed his pointing finger, and crying, “Easy marks!” he
darted into a dense thicket of pines on the other side of the road. The
girls followed quickly, but he made good use of his moment’s start and
they caught only glimpses of him here and there behind the trees.
“Run, Anne!” Patsy called presently. “To the left. Here! Let’s head him
off!”
They ran around a thick clump of pines to meet him--and he was not
there. He did not seem to be anywhere. He had vanished as completely as
if the earth had opened and swallowed him.
“We may as well give up,” Anne sighed at last.
“Yes,” Patsy agreed reluctantly. “I reckon he’s miles away by this
time.”
Crestfallen and disappointed, they went back to the road and started
slowly down the hill.
Then a red-brown head rose out of a heap of pine brush, so cautiously
that it did not disturb the woodpecker drumming on a nearby stump. A
pair of merry brown eyes watched the girls till they were at a safe
distance; then Dick, to the terror and hasty flight of the woodpecker,
scrambled out of the brush heap.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo-_oo-oo_!” he called deridingly.
Anne and Patsy started and looked back.
“There he is!” groaned Patsy.
Yes, there he was, standing in the middle of the road, waving his hand
tauntingly.
“Shall we chase him again?” asked Anne.
“Yes,” said Patsy; and then: “No, it’s no use. He’s too far away;
before we could get halfway up the hill, he’d be out of sight again.”
“Oh, well!” laughed Anne. “We don’t care, Patsy-pet. Let’s go to Happy
Acres and see what flowers are in bloom.”
They went back to Larkland mill that had been a mill ever since The
Village had been a village; crossed a foot bridge over Tinkling Water;
and followed the path to the woodland nook they called Happy Acres.
Long ago a house had been there, and persistent garden bulbs and shrubs
gave beauty and fragrance to the place. One spring, Anne had adopted
it and christened it Happy Acres, and she and her friends had made it
a little woodland park that was a joy to all the neighborhood. It was
fragrant now with a blossoming plum-tree and gay with the pink and
scarlet of flowering almond and japonica.
Anne and Patsy plucked a few sprays to carry home the beauty of it,
and started down the path for a little visit to their cousin, Giles
Spotswood, the miller.
Patsy, who was in front, stopped suddenly. “What’s that?” she whispered.
“It sounds like men quarreling,” Anne whispered back. “Who on earth--”
“Look there!”
Anne crept to Patsy’s side and peeped through the bushes. There were
two men on the roadside. One was their cousin, Black Mayo Osborne.
“Who’s that man?” asked Anne.
“Mr. Smith; the new man at the Tolliver place.”
“Ugh! he’s horrid! snarling like a spiteful cur dog!” exclaimed Anne.
The stranger was indeed odd and unpleasant-looking. He had long
loose-jointed limbs and such a short body that it seemed as if its
only function was to hold his head and limbs together. The two sides
of his blond face were quite unlike. The left side was handsome with
its straight brow and wide blue eye; but the right eye, half hidden by
its drooping lid, slanted outward and down, the tip of the nose turned
toward the bulging right nostril, and the mouth drooped at the right
corner and ended in a heavy downward line.
“Easy! go easy, my German friend!” Black Mayo’s voice rang out clear
and mocking.
“I am not a German; that am I not!” screamed Smith. “I am an American
citizen. I can my papers show. I am more American than you. What are
your peoples here? _Ach!_ what do they? This morning they did the last
cent out of their treasury take, the expenses of old traitors and
rebels to pay--”
The sentence was not finished. A quick blow from the shoulder stretched
him on the ground.
“Hey! lie there a minute!” cried Black Mayo, with an impish light
twinkling in his dark eyes. “Listen! Here’s a tune you’ve got to
respect in this part of the world.” He whistled “Dixie” with vim and
vigor, over and over again. Then he stepped aside and held out his
hand, saying: “Ah, well! You didn’t know any better. Forget it!”
The man glared up at him, without a word.
“Oh! if that’s the way you feel about it--” Mr. Osborne laughed,
shrugged his shoulders, and, still whistling “Dixie,” took the road
that led to his home at Larkland.
Mr. Smith scrambled to his feet and looked after Black Mayo, from under
down-drawn brows, with his thin wide lips writhing like serpents; then
he went limping up the road.
The girls turned white amazed faces to each other.
“Ugh!” said Patsy. “Let’s go home. Do--do you reckon he’ll hurt Cousin
Mayo?”
“Of course not. He can’t. How can he?” said Anne. After a pause she
added: “He certainly will if he can.”