The season seemed full of menace to the troglodytes of the Lost Time
mine. The work went on about the still as hitherto, but with added
precaution--various and vain, for the limits of their ingenuity had
already been reached--and with a heavy sense of presage. The old moods
that had prevailed here were gone, whether of brag and bluster, or wild
hilarity, or jocose horse-play, or the leisurely and languid spinning
of yarns to help the hour to pass. Even the industry of old Zeb Copley,
the veteran of the force, was mitigated by sudden long pauses and a
disposition to hearken fearfully for unaccustomed noises, and by eager
and earnest urgency that the work should be pretermitted for a time.
The youngest moonshiner of all felt it a dreary world to look at with
sober eyes, and, despite his morose abstinence and surly staidness, a
less discerning judgment than Taft's might have foreseen the brevity
of this enforced drought and the danger of a relapse, with all his
reminiscences at his thick tongue's end, were he free to fare about the
world without. Espey's vacant place was ever significant of the reason
for it, and Larrabee would sit for hours brooding over the untoward
chances of his own fortunes; his gloomy eyes on the ever-glinting line
of light playing through the furnace door, his motionless pipe full
only of dead ashes in his heedless hand.
"Ye air a toler'ble dangersome neighbor," Taft remarked one day; for
the complication of the mistaken identity had come to his ears during
a sortie from his stronghold, and the threats of the deputy sheriff
against the supposed Jasper Larrabee coupled with his suspicions as to
moonshining.
Larrabee looked up fiercely. "Move, then, ef ye don't like yer
neighbor."
He was like a fox run to earth; he had no further resource. His
one idea of dealing with the law was by evasion and subterfuge and
concealment. He had no remote expectation of justification. By a series
of deceits he had persuaded his mother to go on an immediate visit to
a bedridden great-aunt who lived in an adjoining county. The horse
she rode belonged to a neighbor of the aged relative, who chanced to
be in this locality, and who was taking home with him a led horse, a
recent purchase. Jasper himself was to go after her in the indefinite
period when the corn should be laid by and her own horse at leisure.
The infant conqueror of the rickets went with her, mounted behind her,
his chubby arms stretched at their utmost length clasping her gaunt
waist, and with as unchastened a vainglory and pride in the earnest of
this great journey and the envious wonderment of the other children as
if his bourne were the north pole. Thus Mrs. Larrabee set out, with
the grim-visaged neighbor of the aunt in advance, and with a frisky,
dapper colt--already _en rapport_ with the pilgrim youth by reason
of mutual juvenility, irresponsibility, and frivolity--kicking up his
admired heels in the rear. And Henrietta Timson reigned in her stead
under the queer little sylvan roof that seemed no more made with hands
than the cups of a triple acorn.
Thus it was that Jasper Larrabee was roofless for the nonce, save for
the strata of the Lost Time mine.
That Lorenzo Taft would fain be rid of him he saw grimly enough, and
this he grimly refused to heed. He had incurred the suspicion of
moonshining by reason of Espey's choosing to wear his name for an hour
or so. He had incurred it through no fault of his own. The infringement
of the law was common to them all, and involved a danger which they
should share.
At all events, there would be nobody to answer for harboring the
fugitive, should Espey's true identity become known to the law, and
Rodolphus Ross find his way again to the little house on its airy
perch. Taft had thought it wise that Larrabee, already tainted with
suspicion in the mind of the officer of the law, and thus a source of
great danger, should follow Espey to parts unknown. But the world, to
the unlodged of earth, is doubtless of aspect like the face of the
waters to the dove when first loosed from the ark, without foothold or
friendly sign.