when Ben Frady had cleared the open space before the post-office of all
loafers, and she unwittingly had ridden on to the scene, and, grasping
the situation, had demanded his revolver from him and had received it.
Not until afterwards had she had any such sensations as this, when a
message had come to the house that the negroes on the farm were cutting
each other, and she had walked in upon them and had ordered them to
separate.
Bob had told her that he didn't know what it was all about, and the
uncertainty made the situation only more disquieting. Like most
Southern women, it did not occur to her to interfere before the event
in any affair that was men's own; but she began to formulate a plan
that depended for its success upon Bob's keeping her informed as to the
course pursued by his father. Could she depend on him? Her anxiety was
cruel.
VIII
Sydney Rides against Time
Three days later Bud brought to von Rittenheim the following note:
"DEAR BARON,--I say again that I haven't any idea what you are
driving at, but I never yet went back on a fight, so if you still
want one I'll meet you at twelve o'clock to-morrow on top of Buck
Mountain. I think you went to a picnic there when the chestnuts
were ripe last fall, so you know the place. I'll take the weapons
along with me, and you can examine them when you get there. I don't
want any second.
"Yours truly,
"HENRY MORGAN."
Von Rittenheim puzzled over the English of this document, and nodded
his head in satisfaction.
"At last he performs his duty. Buck Mountain I know. It is a distant
spot, ten miles from here. He is strange not to say what are the
weapons; but what can you expect?"
With a shrug derogating the social experience of his adopted land, he
proceeded to negotiate with Bud for the use of his mule on the next
day.
It was nearly eleven o'clock on the following morning when Bob Morgan
drew rein before the Carrolls' door, and asked to see Sydney.
"Beg her to come to the door just a moment, Uncle Jimmy. No, I'll not
send the horse around. And she'll want Johnny saddled at once. Send
word to the stable, please."
When she appeared he ran up the steps as far as his bridle would allow,
and spoke in a low voice, with a glance at the windows.
"It's this morning, Sydney, at twelve. Will you come? Father didn't
tell me about it until just as he was leaving the house, and he said he
didn't want me, but I'd promised you, and we'll be in time if we hurry,
I've ordered Johnny."
The girl clutched her throat with a feeling that every bit of strength
was leaving her body. Bob, buckling his curb rein, saw nothing. His
only thought was to give her some sport. A fight, more or less, counted
but little with him personally; and he did not think that this one
actually would take place, else he would not have considered taking a
girl to it.
Sydney spared a thought of wonder at Bob's nonchalance, but as swiftly
reflected that perhaps men always were cool in such emergencies. To her
it meant murder,--the crime of life destroyed. And whose life? Perhaps
that of her dear old friend. Perhaps----!
The blood surged back to her brain and she mastered herself.
"We have so little time," she panted. "I'll be ready in a minute."
Before the horse was at the mounting-block she was awaiting him,
buttoning her gloves, while she extended her foot for Bob to buckle her
spur. She had put on her riding-skirt, but otherwise was as she had
come to the door.
"Don't you-all want a coat, Sydney?" asked Bob, solicitously. "Or a
hat?"
"No, I'm quite warm. Where is that boy? Hurry, Clint," she called to
the little negro, who was bringing the horse around with a slowness
born of his enjoyment of the brief ride.
"Off with you, quick, now, boy!" It was Bob, who was catching the
girl's impatience. "Here, take Gray Eagle."
He flung his bridle to the lad, and threw Sydney into the saddle as
quickly as she could wish. She adjusted herself carefully, for she knew
how the discomfort of a twisted skirt may make a difference of a minute
in the mile, or may mean real danger at a jump.
"There's no time to lose, it's five minutes past eleven now," she said,
glancing at a strap watch on her wrist, and touching Johnny with her
spur.
Bob's horse was off in pursuit before his master was well on his back.
"I declare, she might have given me a fairer start!" he growled, as the
sorrel settled down ahead of him into a run that bade fair to keep even
the advantage. They had had many a race, Bob and Sydney, and usually it
was the girl who was the more cautious rider of the two. To-day,
however, she took risks that amazed even her old-time playmate, who
thought he knew her every mood.
By the long driveway and the road it was two miles to the Doctor's
house, and five from there to the foot of Buck Mountain. By a cut
across the sheep-pasture the first part of the way could be reduced
nearly a mile.
"She certainly is keen for the fun," thought Bob, as he saw Sydney turn
from the avenue and drive Johnny at a gate which he knew that she did
not care often to take.
"Too high for Johnny. I must tell her not to do that again," he
commented, as he noticed during his own flight that the top rail was
split from contact with the first horse's heels.
[Illustration: A fence at the top of a sharp ascent]
Down the hill and across the field tore the sorrel, leaping the branch,
and slackening to allow the gray's approach only when he came to a
fence whose position at the top of a sharp ascent forbade his taking
it.
Sydney looked back impatiently as Bob covered the dozen lengths between
them and swung off to open the gate.
"You might wait for a fellow," he grumbled, but already the girl was
through, and her white blouse and ruddy hair shone half-way across the
unenclosed meadow upon which she had entered. For the first time her
pale face impressed Bob.
"Looks like she saw something," he thought, with a remnant of old
superstition. "I do believe she thinks there's going to be bloodshed."
And with a view to reassuring her, he caught up with her in the path
through the belt of woods that led from the field to the road. Their
horses were nose on tail, and of necessity going slowly.
"Sydney!" he cried, "O-oh, Sydney! You don't think it's serious, do
you? Because----"
Here the path debouched into the open road, and Johnny was off again
before Bob could finish, and his question, meant to inspirit Sydney,
had sounded to her only like a desire for his own reassurance, and had
alarmed her more than ever.
A mad feeling within pricked her to tear on without slackening. She
felt that she could have galloped to the very top of the mountain
without fatigue. Her horsewoman's intelligence, however, warned her to
think of her animal, and she took him along quietly through the open
place before the post-office, giving Bob a chance to catch up.
He was thoroughly out of temper now. Never before had Sydney been so
careless of him. He couldn't understand it; but he was beginning to
realize that she was taking the adventure seriously, and, with boyish
malice, he resolved to make no further effort to undeceive her.
Indeed, as they rode on slowly and silently, side by side, for a few
hundred yards, he became not so sure himself that the duel was the joke
that he had considered it.
He knew his father to be a man ready in his own defence, and of a high,
though controlled temper; and he had not overlooked the fact that the
stocks of two guns were protruding from the holster that projected from
under the skirt of the Doctor's McClellan. Furthermore, he knew that
the German was in deadly earnest.
As these suspicions assailed him, he turned to Sydney and touched the
spur to his gray. The girl responded to his look, and they set into the
steady gallop that covers much country with but little effort either to
horse or rider.
Sydney held out her watch for Bob to see. It was quarter past eleven.
Nearly five miles lay before them to the foot of the mountain, and to
the summit there was a long, steep mile and a half which was the
time-consumer to be reckoned with.
A mile beyond the post-office they turned from the State Road into a
less-travelled, and hence rougher, side road. Through a stretch of
sandy mud they breathed the horses again, and then on, on, on to the
big hill whose vast bulk was beginning to tower mightily before them.
Past the old school-house they dashed, without a glance for its forlorn
state of decay; past one of the farm gates of the Cotswold estate; past
the Baptist Bethel, indistinguishable from a school-house except for
the white stones in the graveyard, upon which the sun glinted
cheerfully.
Quarter after quarter they left behind them, slowing up only for steep
descents or for patches of lengthwise road-mending whose upthrust
branch ends are liable to snag a horse's legs. Johnny and Gray Eagle
took in their stride the brooks that babbled gayly across the way; they
shied at a glare of mica on the red clay of the bank; they dodged ruts,
and leaped mud-holes, and pushed for the middle of the road.
At the end of the third mile Sydney asked, not lifting her eyes from
the ground before her, "Is the bridle-path open?" It was the first time
she had spoken since they left Oakwood.
"I don't know. It may be washed. We'd better keep to the sled-track."
"It's half a mile longer."
"But the other might delay us more."
Sydney did not urge the point, but looked at her watch as they reached
the opening where the ascent began.
It was twenty minutes of twelve.
Without a word she held out her hand to Bob. She felt sick and faint,
and her companion's whistle was not reassuring.
"They'll probably be late," he suggested, but he remembered as he said
it that his father had left home for the meeting-place before he had
started to take the news to Sydney.
The trail began in a steep acclivity that soon brought the horses to a
walk. When it was surmounted the beasts needs must blow, though they
pressed on willingly enough at a half-minute's end. A fairly level bit
followed along the ridge of the foot-hill they just had climbed. It was
not wide enough for them to travel abreast, and Johnny led with a sharp
trot that made clever avoidance of the stones and roots and stumps that
sprang into sight before him as at the summons of a malignant spirit.
The next upward stretch was over a ledge of rock from which the
winter's rains had washed the soil. A trickling spring kept its surface
constantly wet, and its slippery face brought Johnny to his knees.
Sydney uttered a cry which ordinarily would have been one of pity for
her favorite's pain. Now it was a note of fear lest the fall might mean
delay. But the brave sorrel heaved himself up, and turned across the
path to pant after the exertion.
"Are you all right, Sydney?" came Bob's anxious cry from below, whence
he had seen the accident.
"It was nothing," she called. "Come, Johnny, poor old man!"
She patted his lowered neck, and he bent his hoofs to catch his
toe-calks in the cracks of the rock.
Another fleeting pause at the top rewarded his endeavor, and then a
couple of hundred yards of hardly perceptible upward incline produced
again the swift and ready trot.
Five minutes more of easy climbing brought into view the tobacco barn
which was one of the mountain's landmarks. Beyond it the grade became
much more abrupt, and although it was worn fairly smooth by the sleds
of the men who planted aerial cornfields far up on the highest
clearings, yet its steepness rendered this last half-mile the truly
formidable part of the ascent.
Johnny glanced up it with regretful eye, stopped an instant, took a
long breath, shook himself, and went bravely to his task.
Sydney's every thought was a passionate longing to press on,--to hurry,
to rush, to fly. Her lips grew white when she saw that the hands of her
watch pointed to four minutes of twelve.
"It is not possible to be in time," she agonized. "O God, delay them! O
God, stop them!"
She bent forward over the horse's withers, and stretched upward, as if
to pull him higher by her buoyancy. She was heedless of the stream that
gurgled beside the trail among the evergreen sword-fern--a noisy
betrayer of the mountain's angle. She did not observe that she was
alone, that Bob was not following her. She was deaf to his cries as he
struggled below with the gray, which was plunging against an attack of
yellow jackets, and refused to take the trail.
Johnny stopped, his sides heaving pitiably.
"Oh, can I bear it? Oh, go on; do go on! O God, give me strength to
wait."
Though she tore off her gloves in nervous impatience, still she left
the rein upon the horse's neck, for she knew that the willing beast was
doing his best.
He stopped again, and still once more, before they came to the foot of
the bald, whose slippery, dead grass added another peril to the climb.
The trail ended here, for it was not needed where a sled could go
anywhere over the clearing.
"Come, dear boy. Come, dear old horse," she urged. "Five minutes more
will take us there."
The watch's cruel face told the hour to be twelve minutes past twelve,
but Sydney did not feel so keen a pang as when she looked last,
although it was later than the fatal hour. The continued silence gave
her confidence. Only the bay of a hound in some cove below, and the
yelp of a puppy, reached her.
She was dully dogged. The horse stumbled and scrambled on.
"We can't do better than our best, Johnny. May God keep them! Oh,
Johnny! My dear, faithful Johnny, don't fall! Get up--_get up_!" she
cried.
As he settled on to his side to roll up on to his feet again,--a
process that his labored breathing and the weight of his rider made
difficult on the sharp incline,--she slipped from his back and
struggled on on foot.
She was near the crest of the mountain,--the bunch of chestnut-trees on
the summit showed their swelling buds against the sky just over her
head,--yet how slow was her advance! The sedge-grass caught her feet;
the blackberry-vines tore at her skirt; a rolling pebble threw her down
upon her hands.
In an instant she was up and on again,--she was at the summit at last!
And there, just below the crest on the other side, facing each other on
their animals, like knights of old, were the two men she sought.
IX
"It Needed Only This!"
Trembling she stood, looking down upon the foes below her. Her hands
were knotted against her breast, that heaved with nature's cry at her
cruelty. The thumping of her heart shook her body mercilessly. The
anguish of her soul dried her throat, and filled her eyes with dread,
and made her an embodiment of horror. Yet a stir of gratitude fought
with fear for a place in her.
"Thank God, I am not too late!" was her voiceless cry.
Through the clear air came the sound of a voice, sharply articulate.
"It is not enough that you eat my bread and go forth from my door to do
your treacherous act. You come again to my house to scorn at me after
my humiliation, and you have not the courage to own your falseness. And
now, when I demand from you the satisfaction that most surely do you
owe me, how do you make a mock at me? Is that a weapon with which
gentlemen do fight? Is it a shot-gun that men do carry to a duel?"
The hitherto still figure on the Doctor's horse stirred uneasily.
"And see, I break it." The mule turned back his ears, as upon them fell
the click of the opening gun, followed by the drop of a shell into an
open palm. "_Ach_, yes, I thought so! It needed only this! This so
small shot is for the birds!"
A thud vibrated on the air--the sound of the flung-down weapon.
"Now, if you-all were only an American, Ah could make you understand
right quick that----"
The Doctor's slow drawl was broken by an exclamation from von
Rittenheim. Morgan followed the German's eyes, and saw above them
against the fleckless blue of the heavens the brilliant figure of the
girl, her hands straining against her breast, her face a field where
anxiety and grief flitted like clouds across the background of the sky.
She came down towards them when she saw herself observed, and the two
men silently dismounted as she approached, and pulled off their caps,
less in salutation than from instinctive respect for deep emotion.
It was a poor little appeal she made, as words went. Her voice was
hardly whisper-high, so labored was her breathing. She held out her
hands to them one after the other, in supplication.
"You won't do it! Oh, please don't! I came---- You mustn't----" Her
breath came in gasps.
Von Rittenheim mutely took the pleading hands in his, and reverently
kissed them. He faced the Doctor brokenly.
"I thought you had heaped upon me every humiliation. Until now this was
lacking. You might have spared me this!"
Mounting his mule he broke into the thicket and disappeared.
The two left behind--the tawny, stooping Carolinian and the girl, gone
white-lipped in spite of the beating of her heart--stared in silence at
the copse as long as they could hear the crash of the breaking twigs
and resisting branches.
Sydney still was intent on the lessening sounds when the old man's keen
blue eyes withdrew themselves from the wood and scrutinized her face,
pitiably drawn and colorless.
"H'm," he grunted, and added, mentally, "Hard lines for Bob."
The sound of his ejaculation reached the girl's dulled ears. She turned
to him with a touch of distrust, and yet a look of question that seemed
to implore her old friend for an explanation that might save him to her
as an honest man. The Doctor was touched by it. He nodded in the
direction in which the Baron had disappeared.
"Crazy, plumb crazy," he averred.
Sydney's dry lips formed a soundless "Why?"
"He's got some notion in his head that Ah've done him an injury--you
heard him?"
She nodded.
"Ah swear to you, Sydney, Ah haven't any idea what he means, but he
harps on it, and he sent me a challenge, as Ah suppose you know, or you
wouldn't be here."
"Yes. Bob brought me."
"Ah bluffed him off fo' three days. Ah hoped Ah might think of
something that would get him out of that vein without hurting his
foreign feelings, but Ah couldn't think of anything, so Ah 'lowed to
pretend to play up to his game, and in some way turn it into a joke."
"The bird-shot was the joke?"
The Doctor colored dimly under his tan.
"Well, Ah must confess that it seemed to me mo' humorous when Ah was
loading up the guns at home than when the Baron was discoursing about
it."
"I should think so. I should think----"
Sydney bit her sentence in two. She felt too uncontrolled to allow
herself to comment upon the Doctor's conduct.
"Ah certainly believe he's crazy or going to have a fever, and Ah'll
find some way of watching him. Ah suppose he won't let me on his place
now; Ah'll have to see Bud. Where's yo' horse?" he asked, suddenly.
Sydney pressed her hand to her head confusedly.
"I don't know. Back there somewhere."
"Come, we must hunt him. You seem tired to death, child. Did you ride
hard?"
"It was about an hour and ten minutes to the foot of the bald."
She was dragging herself wearily up to the chestnut-trees.
"An hour and ten minutes to the foot of the bald? From where?"
"From home."
"From Oakwood? Holy Smoke! What did Bob let you do such a fool thing
fo'?" he ejaculated, angrily. "Where is Bob, anyway?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him since--I think it was--I don't know
where it was," she ended, weakly, and with distress.
The Doctor looked at her keenly.
"Here, never mind him; he can take care of himself well enough; better
than he can of you, by the looks of it. Sit down, now; yes, right here
on the grass, and drink this."
He gave her a draught from his flask, standing over her threateningly
when she hesitated at the entire contents of the cup cover.
"Take it all," he insisted, "every drop. It's the only thing on earth
that's health to its enemies and death to its friends."
Sydney leaned back wearily against a jutting rock and closed her eyes.
Her head swam, and she resigned herself to the Doctor's commands with
the blessed feeling of relief that a woman has when responsibility
falls from her own upon some man's shoulders.
A whoop from the chestnuts made her open her eyes.
"Is it Bob?"
"Yes, leading Johnny." Doctor Morgan raised his voice. "Come down here.
You're a pretty feller to carry a girl to ride," he continued, as Bob
tied the horse to one of the chestnuts and sprang down the slope. "No
girl in my time ever shook me like that. Where did she lose you?"
Bob answered nothing to his father's gibes, but bent anxiously over
Sydney.
"You are not hurt, de--Sydney? Just awfully done up? I ought not to
have let you come. It's been too hard a ride. It's all my fault," he
went on, accusingly, while the Doctor nodded his head in agreement, and
Sydney tried in vain to interrupt.
"No, indeed, Bob, you were not to blame at all. I made you promise, and
I couldn't have forgiven you or myself if I hadn't been here when----"
She fell back against the rock, and the Doctor broke in, by way of
diversion,--
"Where's Gray Eagle?"
"Down at the tobacco barn. He got wild and balked the steep part of the
trail, so I tied him to a tree and left him to kick it out."
"You walked up, then?"
"Yes, and found Johnny gluttonously eating blackberry-vines on the
other side of the bald. That scared me to death, for I thought he'd
made way with Sydney in some mysterious fashion,--perhaps eaten
her,--and was indulging in dessert! Where's your enemy?"
The Doctor glanced quickly at Sydney, and frowned at Bob.
"Gone home," was all he would say.
They lifted the girl on to her horse, and Bob guided him down to the
very foot of the mountain. At the tobacco barn the Doctor untied Gray
Eagle, subdued by his enforced loneliness, and led him behind them.
"Bob will stay to luncheon at Oakwood, it's so late," said Sydney to
him as they parted at his gate. "You'll not forget to find out in some
way if the Baron is ill, will you?"
"No, my dear, I'll watch him like the Pinkertons' eye that never
sleeps," returned the old man, genially.
"Mrs. Carroll has gone into the dining-room," the servant told them at
the door, and Sydney assumed much cheerfulness as she made her
apologies.
"I've brought Bob, grandmother. He's been all over everywhere with me
this morning. You'll forgive me, Katrina, for leaving you, won't you?
Where's Mr. Wendell?"
"Not back from Asheville yet."
"He went in yesterday," explained Mrs. Carroll to Bob. "I suppose the
train is late. It does seem as if they grow more and more uncertain,
and when there are only two a day each way, it certainly is annoying,
very. You wouldn't know what to make of so meagre an arrangement, would
you, Katrina dear?"
"There's the carriage now," said Bob. "The train couldn't have been
much over an hour behind time; surely you wouldn't complain of that."
"I feel as if I had been journeying for days," said John, sitting down,
"and had seen the sights of far-distant worlds."
"It's the obelisk in Court Square that makes you think that," suggested
Sydney.
"Or the battlements on the library building," added Bob.
"Are there street-cars?" asked Katrina.
"Street-cars? Why, child, there are street-cars to burn--electric ones,
too. I felt grievously defrauded. I wanted a mule tram."
"The mule is an unfashionable animal," said Mrs. Carroll. "Time was
when a handsome pair of mules was considered not unsuitable to draw a
gentleman's carriage."
"The farmers aren't using them so much, either," said Bob. "They're too
unreliable. Horses are cheaper, too."
"I saw some very decent saddle-horses in town--of their kind."
"What's their kind?"
"Long-tailed single-footers, Katrina."
"The easiest gait in the world," put in Bob, combatively, disregarding
the tails.
"It looks so. And not a Derby hat in the whole place except mine."
"And not a silk one, except on colored coachmen," added Sydney,
maliciously.
"Did you drive about?"
"I saw all the sights, dear Mrs. Carroll. I have done to a brown the
Vanderbilt place, the Sunset Drive, and the junction of the Swannanoa
and the French Broad. I flogged a rebellious horse to Gold View, and I
scaled Beaumont and looked down into Chunn's Cove. I gazed at the--you
will excuse me, I hope--faded exterior of a tobacco warehouse----"
"The farmers don't grow much now," interpolated Bob.
"So I was told. And I beheld with rapture the architecture of the
Federal Building. That's the fullest beehive for its size, isn't it?
Post-office, revenue office,--goodness knows what's in it!"
"Is the United States Court on yet?" asked Bob.
"Not being a victim, I don't know."