Jasper Larrabee stood transfixed, gazing at that tremulous, luminous
astral presence with a strange superstitious thrill at his heart.
It hardly seemed merely a star, so alien to his mind was its aspect
in the erst untenanted spaces whence it blazed, so freighted with
occult significance. Had the moment been charged with some wonderful
apotheosis, some amplification of its pure white lustre into the
benignant splendors of a vision of angels, the transformation could
scarcely have exceeded the capacities of that breathless, insistent
expectation which the ignorant mountaineer lifted toward it. For his
was a simple faith, and his untaught mind had learned no doubts. And
had never these nights of ours communion with celestial pursuivants?
Did never the flutter of an angel's wing illumine far perspectives that
darkle heavily over the earth? Was this rare fluid, which we call the
air, so dense; were its sensitive searching vibrations, known as waves
of light and sound, so dull, that it should feel naught, reveal naught,
when the angel of the Lord flashed through the stars and the wind,
through blossoming woods or bleak snows of deserts, and into the haunts
and the homes of men?
So many had come! He did not know that they were alien to the
nineteenth century, and that the most spiritual-minded of to-day would
account for their sudden vision as from prosaic natural causes,--as
mental aberration, or the distortions of a diseased fancy, or the
meaningless phantasmagoria of somnolent cerebration. To him it seemed
that they had been with man from the very beginning; and why should
their presence here be stranger than his own? Their very numbers
served to coerce credibility. So many had come! To kings, to wanderers
in the wilderness, to prophets, to shepherds, in dreams and in the
broad daylight, they came: to stand with a gleaming sword before the
gates of Paradise, and to sing in the starry advent of a new day,--On
earth peace, good will toward men; to bring the immortal lilies of the
Annunciation, and to tread the ways of the fiery furnace; to touch the
bursting bonds of saints in prison, and to roll away the stone from
the sepulchre of all the world; to minister to the Christ alike in the
shadows of Gethsemane and amongst the splendors of the Mount of the
Transfiguration!
Larrabee was trembling in every limb, as the scenes trooped out before
him in the vivid actuality of his recollections of the pages of the
much-thumbed volume which he had left behind him when he had fled from
the still in the Lost Time mine. He sank down upon the rocky verge of
the precipice, amongst the clinging verdure of its jagged crevices.
Some sweet-scented herb sent out its delicate incense under the
pressure of his hands. A drowsy twitter of half-awakened nestlings came
from the feathery boughs of a cedar-tree that a niche in the cliff hard
by half nourished, half starved. The melancholy antiphony of the voices
of the wilderness rose and fell in alternating strains, and at long
intervals in a vague undiscriminated susurrus the night seemed to sigh.
He heard naught; he heeded naught. His unwinking gaze was fixed upon
the wondrous star in the heavens, with that thronging association
of angelic ministrants so definitely in his mind that he might have
thought to see an amaranthine crown expanding from the rayonnant
sidereal points, or the outline of a nearing pinion stretched strongly
to cleave the ether. For so many had come!
But no! His imagination could compass no such apotheosis. The star
remained a star. The exaltation of that moment of wild, vague, and
breathless expectation exhaled slowly. A poignant sense of loss
succeeded it. The prosaic details of the actual outer life pressed once
more on his realization. He looked about him on the sombre wilderness,
the black surly mountains, the itinerant mists, heedless whither, the
steely glimmer here and there of the ponds where the water made shift
to catch the reflection of the sky amidst the dun shadows, and sighed
drearily with the sighing night.
He was penniless, shelterless, his life at the mercy of any chance
that might favor his crafty enemy, his confidence betrayed by the
fugitive whom he had succored, his liberty endangered, already a
criminal in the eyes of the law,--an outcast, in truth, within a
league of his home. From the nullity of the begloomed landscape the
glance naturally rebounded, and the very obscuration of the earth lent
glister and definiteness to the wonderful precision of the march of
the constellations, as, phalanx after phalanx, they deployed, each in
its allotted space and sequence, toward the west. And again his eyes
dwelt upon that new splendor in the midst of them. How strange that it
should suddenly blossom whitely forth among these old, old stars that
had lighted the bosky ways of the garden of Eden! How strange that the
sight of it should be vouchsafed to him--and why!
His pulses were tumultuously astir. All at once the thought that had
been slowly framing itself in his mind took definite form. He wondered
if it could be a sign for him, and of what!
In the arrogations of poor humanity of the higher things, in the
infinite breadth of the claim of an immortal soul, vast incongruities
meet. The extreme might seem reached in the ignorant mountaineer,
the moonshiner obnoxious to the law, the poverty-stricken laborer,
seeing with the wild preëmptions of fancy this star, all newly and
miraculously alight in the sky, as charged with some mysterious
relation to his infinitesimally petty and restricted life. But once
admit the idea of an immortal spirit, heir of all knowledge, made a
little lower than the angels, to be crowned with glory and honor, the
climax of development, and even the splendors of the star are as naught.
Larrabee had no cultivated sense of comparison. His tenacious nature
laid hold upon the idea of an intimate personal intention, a sign in
the heavens, with a blunt and stalwart appropriation.
He rose swiftly to his feet. So different a spirit animated him that it
seemed a different path from that which he had trod as he had plodded
slowly up the mountain, with hesitating steps and frequent uncertain
pauses. Now he went deftly down the rugged and far darker way, brushing
amongst bushes and vines, and be-showered with the perfumed drops that
his hasty transit shook from their boughs; swiftly slipping through the
shifting mists that now hid the sky, and again revealed the glister
of that great star amidst a myriad others at the vanishing point of a
perspective of seemingly precipitous white ascents, as the uncertain
light cleft the glimmering vapors. He looked up to it, as it were,
through a defile between these impalpable white cliffs, from the
dark abysses of the night; and then the gauzy medium interposed, and
without the faint light of the stars the night was black again. His
pace did not slacken. He went forward as confidently in the darkness
as if he were led by the definite capacity of sight, trusting to that
instinct of woodcraft almost as keen as sense itself. Sometimes,
indeed, his foot struck against a branch, torn by the wind from the
trees and left to wither in the rugged path; or the splash of a pool
beneath his inadvertent step broke the silence of his journey, as these
unaccustomed incidents of the way asserted their presence as obstacles.
He never hesitated, nor doubted, nor deviated. He seemed led through
the darkness by his will. He was aware in some mysterious sort of the
looming propinquity of great trees or the locality of jagged rocks;
he avoided the verge of cliffs and abysses with that keen, accurate
discernment of an unascertained faculty, as a somnambulist might have
done. As far as his recognized intelligence was concerned, he was down
in the Cove before he knew it, for the way was still sloping, the
footing rocky and uneven. A long slanting burnished gleam of orange
light appearing suddenly before him, revealing the white mists, and
making the darkness a definite visible blackness rather than merely
charged with a sense of sightlessness, he deemed only one of those
transient lines of lightning reflected in the temporary ponds that
he had marked earlier in the evening. It did not flicker, however,
and die away. As he stared forward, he perceived, beyond a darkly
lustrous interval, a parallel line of yellow brilliance,--another, and
still another; and he became aware that he was amongst the workmen's
shanties, the lights of which were mirrored in the water. Presently
illusory shimmering squares were visible in the mists which marked the
open doors. A croaking frog by the waterside ceased suddenly, as,
with more decided step, Larrabee skirted the pool and approached. He
felt rather than saw the shadowy creature's leap from before his foot,
again an elastic spring along the margin, and a splash as the frog
jumped into the water, and the long lines of gilded light were broken
into a thousand concentric shoaling curves. Voices sounded close at
hand, and then the whole little settlement became vaguely visible,--the
cabins further apart than they had seemed at the distance; a banjo
was strumming at the most remote, and as Larrabee walked up to the
nearest, boldly, in the avenue of light that the open door blazed out
in the darkness, he saw within the man whom he sought, bending his
frowning brow over a paper in his hand. In the other hand Kenniston
held a cigar, which at long intervals he put between his lips; then he
pulled energetically at it as if merely to keep it alight, and with
no definite experience or expectation of nicotian solace. The county
surveyor, on the contrary, on the other side of the table, puffed
his pipe systematically, his eyes half closed, his grizzled bearded
face showing in repose amongst the wreaths of smoke, his conscience
discharged of every detail of the great science of mensuration which he
sought to apply to the various parcels of land owned or claimed by his
fellow-man. He had answered so much at random the occasional remarks
of his host on the subject of the processioning that it became very
apparent to Kenniston that he did not propose to work at his vocation
out of office hours, as it were. From the consideration of futility
as well as decorum, Kenniston had relapsed into silently comparing the
calls of the deed with the notes he had made of the day's work, and
only unconsciously did an interjection of irritation and disgust escape
him.
"I ain't responsible for any disputed p'int, Mr. Kenniston," said the
surveyor, sibilantly sucking his pipestem, his eyes quite closed, his
feet upon the fender of the little stove. "Ye kin hev a jury o' good
and lawful men ter examinate an' decide upon it; my business is ter run
the line 'cordin' ter the calls an' the compass. That's all!"
Kenniston looked up, a sarcastic comment in his eyes; the mere
possibility of submitting the question of the boundary of his land to
the wild will of a jury of mountaineers, qualified by the surveyor,
according to the law of processioning land, and met in those tangled
precipitous woods to discriminate in matters mathematical and to settle
questions of topographical fact, seemed to him so happy a travesty of
the theory of law and justice that he could not forbear a scornful
smile at his own probable plight when he should come forth from such
unique adjudication of his interests.
"There's no disputed '_p'int_,'" he said, laughing satirically.
"It's the whole confounded line from the Big Hollow Boulder to Wild
Duck Falls!"
"'Cordin' ter the calls an' the compass," muttered the surveyor, fast
succumbing to the unholy fascinations of a dream in which he found
that in seeking to ascertain the area of a triangular body of land he
achieved the petrifying result of transforming it to a square. Reason
revolted; he woke with a snort, filliped off the ash from his pipe,
adjusted himself anew in his chair, looked very wide awake, to be
overtaken again by the same irreconcilable process and result.
In the diversion of Kenniston's attention he had lost the run of his
ideas; he paused, puffed his cigar into a glow, pushed his chair
slightly back from the table, glanced with lowering disaffection
at the slumbering surveyor, and then mechanically about him at his
surroundings.
The house was the roughest of shells, and hardly compact enough to
withstand the floods of rain that had descended upon it to-day. In one
corner the floor was still damp, the eaves outside dripped. Beyond a
cot, a table, and a few chairs there was no furniture save Kenniston's
valise, his gun in its case, which was never opened, and a monkey
stove, an object of aversion to its æsthetic owner; for, despite its
utility, its outline and atmosphere were a continual affront to him,
and it suffered grossly from the comparison with the great open fires
of the mountaineers' hearths, the incense of hickory and ash and pine,
the flash and flame and sparkle of those humble illumined interiors.
The shadowy figure of a man standing in the doorway Kenniston did not
immediately notice. Beyond a slight start, a mere matter of nerve (for
he could hardly be surprised by aught that the mountaineers could say
or do), he did not betray the unexpectedness of the apparition. He
smoked silently, eying the intruder without salutation, as if he sought
to shift the discourtesy of the lack of formality upon one who merely
paused at the door of his domicile and surveyed its occupant; it was
his rule not to encourage the mountaineers to come about, and he felt
at liberty, with so untutored a folk, to depart from the decrees of
decorum in such small matters, which were, however, exigent even with
them. In this instance no offense seemed to be taken, no intentional
lack perceived. Larrabee stood, his smiling dark eyes scanning
Kenniston with a steadiness which apparently had other actuation than
mere curiosity, his pale clear-cut face, his auburn hair, his alert
strong pose, distinct in the crude white light of the unshaded kerosene
lamp. Whether it were the natural commendation of a face and figure
regularly handsome by the line and rule by which Kenniston was wont to
apportion beauty; whether the exaltation of the discovery of the star,
the spiritual audacity of the arrogation of a personal intimation in
its manifestation, had touched Larrabee's expression with something
strange, something aloof from the day, the time, and the people,
Kenniston's jaded interest was stirred.
"Did you want to see me?" he demanded, at length. "Then come in."
Larrabee remained at the threshold, but he leaned against the wall, his
big brown hat on the back of his head, as it rested against the rich
veined amber and creamy tints of the yellow pine wood.
"Air you-uns the stranger-man ez hev been hyarabouts, buildin' the
hotel an' sech?" he asked slowly.
Kenniston's eye became intent, hardening as he nodded. His thoughts
flew instantly to that fair edifice and the collapse of all his plans,
with the quick inference that here was information to come touching the
incendiary. He felt his blood leap; by his pulsing veins he knew how
it was burning into his face. He had that desire toward justice which
should animate every civilized man, but although he sought to hold
himself impartial, calm, circumspect to receive what might be a false
accusation, it would have fared ill with Larrabee's enemy had he an old
score to settle thus.
As he remained silent Kenniston spoke, with a view of urging forward
the disclosure. "Have I ever seen you here before?"
Larrabee shook his head. "I hev never viewed you-uns ez I knows on."
Then, after a pause, "Air you-uns a book-l'arned man?"
"Reasonably so," Kenniston said, with a slight laugh. He leaned his
elbows on the table, holding his chin in his hand, which was half
obscured by his full beard, and while he looked impatiently at his
visitor his white teeth gnawed his underlip.
Larrabee hesitated. "Hev ye met up with the stars in yer readin'?" he
finally blurted out.
A sudden look of blank disappointment crossed Kenniston's face.
"Stars!" he echoed in dismay. "Why, I thought you had come to give me
some information about the cur that set fire to my house."
(It was a different kind of brute, but the fact of Bruin's agency was
relegated to the state of things not revealed, which we denominate
mystery.)
It was Larrabee's turn for impatience, and an affronted sense of
interruption.
"I dunno nuthin' 'bout who burnt yer hotel"--He paused suddenly, the
conviction all at once fully fledged in his mind that it was the deed
of the moonshiners, to rid the Cove of its prospect of troublesome
invaders. The recollection of Espey's threat rang in his ears as if the
very vibrations of the words were audible upon the air: "Burn him out!
Burn his shanty every time he gits it started!"
Larrabee suffered the sense of a nervous shock, so great was
the revulsion from the subject that had engrossed him; for this
reminiscence of all things he had least expected to meet here. He could
hardly cope with it in the free outer air. It belonged so essentially
to that other life of his, that underground world where he bore so
different an identity, that it seemed to have thoughts and intentions
and a conscience peculiar to itself. He had realized the dangers of
the isolation in which he stood amongst those of his association, but
he had thought himself safe here. Kenniston knew him neither by name
nor face, and he was a stranger to all the workmen; since their advent
into the Cove he had been held a prisoner in the Lost Time mine. Even a
chance encounter with Rodolphus Ross he did not dread, for the officer
had not been apprised of his identity on the night he had summoned him
to search for the escaped Espey masquerading under the name of Larrabee.
The abrupt pause, the introverted look, the sudden recollection
advertised in unmistakable characters upon his unguarded face, did
not escape Kenniston's observation, now keen and all on the alert.
For his heart was in this reprisal. If he had had naught to gain and
much to risk, indeed much of certain loss, he would have pursued this
injury to its ultimate and bitterest requital. All that was manly in
him--his courage, his pugnacity, his tenaciousness, his self-respect,
his vehement, insistent, vigorous personality, that could neither
make nor keep covenant with concession, compromise, or defeat--rose
to the occasion. He had cursed in his heart the lukewarmness of the
authorities, who had opined that the mountaineers were mighty rough
folks, mighty hard to catch, lived in a mighty difficult country, and
who had offered him the half-veiled advice that they were mighty bad to
run against, in lieu of the formulated and disciplined suspicions which
he had expected, the canvassing of possible "fire-bugs," involving
as sequence warrants for arrest, indictments, and other fierce and
formidable engines of the law, set to work with full intent and
expectation.
Here was a clue,--the first; and fortunately it had fallen into his
own hands. However, it behooved him to be cautious, or the suggestion
might be of as little ultimate value as if it were already given to
the turbulent, ill-advised, precipitate deputy, or to his unsanguine,
dubious, dilatory principal, with his wise saws about the lack of
prudence involved in running against mountain folks, who were mighty
hard to catch in the wilds of their difficult country.
Now and again the family of Cap'n Lucy had had an intimation of how
pleasant Mr. Kenniston could be when he chose. It was reserved for
Jasper Larrabee to experience the fascination of the full and ripened
flavor, the bouquet, so to speak, of his geniality and good will. A
second rapid covert survey from that altered point of view which one is
apt to adopt when a personal interest looms in the background convinced
Kenniston that his visitor was no fool. Although he intended to drop
the subject for the present, he did not quit it abruptly.
"I was in hopes you could name some suspicious characters, or had heard
some threatening talk, or"--
Once more he saw from his visitor's face that, inadvertently, he had
again struck the nail on the head. His secret self-applause aided his
self-denial in relinquishing so promising a line of investigation. The
man must be made to talk freely, to disclose; his confidence must be
secured.
"I have had heavy losses in this matter, and the officers seem of
mighty little account. Every now and then I hope I'll hear of something
some other way. I'm afraid to build again unless I know the fire-bug
is somewhere else, or discover what I've done to set people against
_me_."
Larrabee's face was at once softened and troubled. "Burn his shanty
every time he gits it started," quoth Espey. And he that would work
ill to one man would work ill to another: witness his own plight. His
conscience began to stir. If, he thought, the whiskey tax were not in
itself so tyrannical, so impracticable and obnoxious a thing, he might
have admitted for the nonce that moonshining was in itself wrong.
Kenniston's eyes were studying his unconscious countenance. "Well," he
said suddenly, "since it's nothing about my affairs, what can I do for
you? Won't you have a chair?"
Larrabee shook his head silently. He stood for a few moments undecided.
It might seem that his enthusiasm, so ruthlessly dragged down to earth,
might hardly make shift to rise again; but it was strong of wing, as
behooves that ethereal essence, and in his ignorant assumptions he
thought that he had seen a sign in the heavens, a sign for him. The
fervor of all that he had half doubting believed, and half believing
doubted, fired his pulses once more. He cared naught for Espey and
his troublous usurpations, the officer of the law, the moonshiner
and his deadly feud, the incendiary, the necessity of heed to his
words. He cared for naught under the moon. Once more his face had that
illumined, exalted expression. As he leaned suddenly forward, with a
keen anxiety, and said, "Air ye 'quainted with the stars by name, bein'
a book-l'arned man?" Kenniston had a swift doubt of his sanity.
"Yes," he replied. And after a pause he asked the counter-question,
"Are you interested in the stars?"
But Larrabee, still under the influence of the strong excitement that
possessed him, did not answer directly.
"I kin read, but I hain't got but one book. The teacher what l'arned me
ter read 'lowed ez the stars air named; they air numbered in a book.
Hev ye l'arned sech?"
"Oh yes; I have studied astronomy," replied Kenniston capably. "I know
their names."
"I know _them_; I dunno thar names," said Larrabee, making a
definite distinction. "That's the reason I kem ter you-uns, hearin' ez
ye air a book-l'arned man."
He turned his head and looked out into the night as he stood on the
threshold. The mists had gone their ways. The clouds were far in
the west. Above all, the clear, sombre field of the sky was thickly
bespangled with stars, chill, keenly glittering, for below the night
was very dark.
"Thar's a new one," he declared excitedly, "a new one never viewed
afore! I seen it kindle up a matter of three week ago, three week an'
better, an' it's thar now!"
Kenniston sat in silent amazement, looking steadily at him.
"Kem out!" Larrabee insisted, in tones strangely urgent. "Kem out an'
see!"
Some subtle monition apprised Kenniston that there was something in
the man's disclosure withheld; that it was not merely to bring his
book-learning to bear upon the array of the stars that he was asked to
step out of his door at this hour of the night. How often he had heard,
as the climax of a feud, of a man in these mountains being summoned
on some pretext out of his door to meet a murderous bullet fired
by an enemy hidden in the dark! He was momentarily ashamed of this
recollection as he glanced at the surveyor asleep close at hand; as he
heard the rhythmic beat of feet on the shaking, ill-laid floor, and the
patting of hands as some jovial young blade danced a "break-down" in
one of the workmen's shanties to the strumming of the banjo, finding
this far more congenial an occupation than shoving the jack plane.
Nevertheless, he had enemies, virulent, unscrupulous, powerful, as
his short stay here might seem to attest, and what strange, fantastic
vagary was this touching a new star! He would not refuse; that would
impugn his courage even to himself, and he held it dear; and as
he looked at Larrabee's face with its ever-smiling eyes, despite
the intimation of something withheld, of trafficking with a mere
subterfuge, he doubted as causeless his prudence. Moreover, this was
a man of whom he must keep track, of whom he must know more. He was
looking about the room as he rose. "Wait a minute," he said. "I have a
strong glass here that may be of use."
The door of the maligned monkey stove standing ajar emitted a ruddy
glow of embers upon the yellow pine walls of the room, and toned down
the white glare of the kerosene lamp. A deep, restful red hue might
have attracted the eye from the farther side amongst the shadows, as
Kenniston tossed a rug aside upon a chair to obscure a quick search
through his valise. A pernicious habit, that of carrying his pistols at
the bottom of his luggage, amongst his clean shirts, and he promised
himself this should be the end of it. At the moment that he thrust the
revolver into his pistol-pocket he picked up the field-glass from the
cot. "Here it is," he said, and he followed his guest out of the door
and into the dusky night.
It was still all vibrant with the twanging drone of the cicada and
the windy note of the booming frogs. The air, damp and of clarified
freshness, was pervaded with indeterminate fragrance, the blent perfume
of some flower and the pungent aroma of weed and shrub and the balsamic
fir. A cluster of great trees rose just outside of the little shell,
and though many a star shone down in the interstices of the black
fibrous foliage, Larrabee led the way out beyond them and into an
open space. It was nearer the other cottages instead of farther away,
as Kenniston had half expected. The suspicion, the half-dormant fear,
the doubt in his mind, were giving place anew to his determination to
keep his hand on this man, to win his confidence or to surprise his
secret. All those genial arts of ingratiation at his command were once
more brought into play. It was he who introduced the subject of their
mission, as they paused on a slight eminence, with a clear view of the
great fields of heaven before them.
"Now which is the star that you want to know more about?" he demanded,
lifting the glass with a free gesture, and adjusting it to his eye.
"Don't ye see nuthin' oncommon?" the mountaineer asked, in a tense
voice.
The strained tone struck Kenniston's attention, and he lowered the
glass and looked through the baffling darkness at his companion,
whose form could only be discriminated by some fine sense from the
surrounding darkness by an effect of solidity, given one could hardly
say how.
Kenniston, the glass swaying useless in his hand, gazed upward once
more.
"No, I can't say I do," he replied wonderingly.
Larrabee suddenly came up close to him, taking him by the arm.
"Now, hyar, todes the east, an' yit a leetle todes the north, sorter
slanchwise todes Big Injun Mounting, setting a mite ter the west from
that, an' plumb west from Chilhowee, a bright, bright star,--with," he
added, in a surprised tone, as if he had not before discerned this, "a
sorter silver shine onto it."
Kenniston laughed slyly in his sleeve. One can hardly better appreciate
the immense distance that mechanical appliance has brought man from
his normal state of natural, unassisted faculties than in the effort
to point out, with such accuracy as to enable another to distinguish,
an object in those fair and foreign fields of heaven, by the unaided
means of the index finger. A suffusion of self-gratulatory pride is
apt to overspread the consciousness, the unit assuming the credit of
all that the genius of invention has achieved in the generic name of
mankind. Kenniston had not even a slight expectation of being able to
distinguish the particular star, but the affectation of effort, in his
own interests, in some sort constrained his will. He looked about the
skies with that vague sense of recollection which animates one who
turns the leaves of a volume written in a half-forgotten language. He
had not been the familiar of the stars. His choicest ambitions had
lifted him no further than a reasonably safe height for an attic, or
those fantastic simulations of turrets, with which the new architecture
apes _haud passibus æquis_ the old. He had naught in common with
the full-pulsed aspiring audacity of those architects of eld who
builded in the plain of Shinar; his was but a low-studded Babel. He
had not cared for a higher outlook, and his building had no definite
designs touching heaven. It had been so long since he had regarded
the upper atmosphere other than barometrically that he hardly made
shift to see the Swan arch her snowy neck from those great lakes of
ether, whose indented shores seemed marked and foliage-fringed by the
wooded summits of the Great Smoky Mountains. The assertive brilliance
of Lyra he noted near the meridian, with the harp-strings all vibrant,
doubtless, with that music of the spheres which we are told by the
scientist is no longer a mere figment of poesy. The Cor Caroli gleamed
pure and splendid amongst the mists of a struggling recollection. And
where was Scorpio?--how low in the sky, how far to the southwest, how
near to its setting! Through a water-gap of Chilhowee, cloven to the
very heart of the range, he marked the gleaming coils. Of strangely
melancholy intimations were the stars, seen so far through the steep
wooded defile, dark and rugged on either hand; but he only remembered
the relation of its early setting and the season, for it was near the
end of September. How little building weather the year might spare
him yet! How heavy the rains of to-day, and the west still harbored
portents! Unless he relinquished all and left the field, baffled and
beaten, he must have the incendiary behind the bars. To jail a suspect,
at all events, would intimidate the lawless population, and point the
moral of "Hands off!"
"I don't see it," he said, reverting to the prosecution of his
intention to win the mountaineer's secret information as to the origin
of the fire. "I'm sorry I can't see it, Mr.--Excuse me, what did you
say your name is?"
His visitor had not said, but all thrown off his guard the young man
replied promptly, "Lar'bee,--Jasper Lar'bee. Ef ye look jes' a leetle
ter the right of that thar batch o' stars ez 'pears some similar ter a
kyart-wheel"--He raised once more the futile inefficiency of his index
finger.
But Kenniston was not looking. This name,--he placed it at once. In
the short interview which he had had with the deputy sheriff touching
the incendiary, without whose apprehension he feared to recommence the
building, it had recurred repeatedly to Rodolphus Ross's lips coupled
with many an imprecation. Kenniston had paid scant heed at the time
to the story of the search for Espey, of the pretended arrest, of
the escape of the supposed Larrabee and the inference of some crime
which his flight fostered. It had all happened during his absence from
the Cove, and shortly before the beginning of the building of the
hotel. He could not conceive of any reasons for connecting one with
the other; but this man indubitably knew something of the crime; his
long and mysterious disappearance had baffled all the devices of the
officers, and surely it was a strange subterfuge which had brought him
hither. Strange to the minds of others as well, for sundry figures
were detached now and again from the illumined thresholds near at
hand; presently the foreman had joined the two, and several of the
workmen approached, all pausing at intervals and craning their necks
up toward the sky, having noticed the intent scrutiny of it, and
expectant of some _lusus naturæ_,--comet, or aurora borealis, or
other phenomenon,--the observation of which might serve to break the
monotony. The resonant tone of the banjo now and again sounded loud
in the damp air, as the musician who carried it under his arm jostled
against one of the other men. Their attitudes and faces expressed an
alert curiosity, for they were not altogether indistinguishable, the
two star-gazers having insensibly changed their positions, and come
within the line of light falling from one of the open doors.
"Some ter the right o' that batch o' stars ez be some similar ter a
kyart-wheel," repeated Larrabee urgently.
"I don't know which you mean," replied Kenniston, drawing himself back
to the subject with difficulty.
"Don't ye view one ez ye never viewed afore?" demanded Jasper
breathlessly. "Ef ye know 'em, ye air 'bleeged ter see that thar one
air strange!"
"Mr. Jackson,"--Kenniston turned to the foreman,--"do you see anything
unusual in that sky?"
The foreman answered with a prompt and businesslike negative, and then
appealed in turn to one of the workmen. None of them could perceive
aught amiss, although they all turned about and critically surveyed
the majesty of the heavens.
"It's a new star," protested Larrabee, unconsciously adopting the
scientific term of description. "I seen it kindle up myself 'bout three
weeks ago."
There was an astounded silence; then a resonance broke out abruptly as
the young musician smote his bullet head with the banjo, apparently
inadvertently, but with the view of intimating to his fellows that all
was not accurately adjusted in the cranium of their queer visitor.
Kenniston hesitated for a moment. There lay in his mind the residuum,
so to speak, of an impression that new stars or temporary stars are not
of infrequent occurrence in the economy of worlds, rating time by the
long astral lengths. He could not say at once,--such scant commerce
he had had with the stars of late years, to be sure! His mind had
reverted instantly to the question upon what pretext he should seek
to detain the man. He only saw rather than noted the workmen slowly
turning aside, the long lane of yellow light streaming through the
door, the lustrous mirror-like suggestions in the darkness hard by
where the pools lurked and the frogs were still croaking, the outlines
of the clustering roofs of the other little buildings, shadowy in the
deeper shadow, the dense woods surrounding all, and above the great
amphitheatre of the mountains on every side. The voice of the foreman
recalled him:--
"That's a queer customer. First crank I've seen here."
"Where is he?" cried Kenniston, with a start, the freedom of the
criticism notifying him of the absence of its subject. "Stop him! Call
him! Hold on to him!"
But the effort was vain. Larrabee had departed as suddenly, as
tracklessly, as if the night had swallowed him up.