Every appliance of resuscitation known to science was brought into use,
but in vain. No scrap of paper, no clue of identification, was found upon
the body. The three, bound together in such close ties of sympathy, were
stricken as with a new and appalling affliction. The burden was all the
heavier for that momentary lightening of a treacherous hope. For a time
Bayne could not reconcile himself to this new disaster. So overwhelming
indeed, so obvious, was its effect that Lillian, ever with her covetous
appropriation of every faculty, her grasping claim on every identity in
this sacred cause, feared that despair had at last overtaken him, and
that he would succumb and give over definitely the search. The idea
roused her to a sort of galvanic energy in promoting the project, and she
would continually formulate fantastic plans and suggest to him tenuous
theories with feverish volubility, only to have him thrust them aside
with a lacklustre indifference that their futility merited.
"He is discouraged, Gladys; he is at the end of his resources," she said
aside to her friend. "He can try no more."
"How can _you_ believe that?" cried Gladys.
Even in this crisis Lillian noted anew with a wounded amazement the
significant smile on the fair face of her friend, the proud pose of her
head. Could she arrogate such triumphant confidence in the temper and
nature of a man who did not love her?--whose heart and mind were not
trusted to her keeping? That doubt assailed Lillian anew in Bayne's
absence, and in the scope for dreary meditation that the eventless days
afforded it developed a fang that added its cruelties to a grief which
she had imagined could be supplemented by no other sorrow.
It was merely sympathy that animated him in her behalf, she felt sure; it
was pity for her helplessness when none other would abet the hopeless
effort to recover the child. His conviction that Archie still lived
constrained him by the dictates of humanity to seek his rescue. He was
doubtless moved, too, by the great generosity of his heart, his
magnanimity; but not by love--never by love! How could it be, indeed, in
the face of all that had come and gone, and of the constant contrast,
mind, body, and soul, with the perfect, the peerless Gladys!
In this, the dreariest of his absences, seldom a word came to the two
women waiting alternately in agonized expectation or dull despair. For
Bayne was much of the time beyond the reach of postal and telegraphic
facilities. In the endeavor to discover some clue to identify that
strange visitant of the smiling spring sunset, and thus reach other
participants in the crime of the murder and the abduction, Bayne had the
body conveyed to the Great Smoky Range, within the vicinity of the
Briscoe bungalow, discerning from the speech of the man, as well as from
his familiarity with the deed, that he was a native mountaineer. Lillian
had desired to bestow upon him, in return for his intention of aid at the
last, a decent burial, but the interpretation of the metropolitan
undertaker of this commission was so far in excess of the habit of the
rustic region that men who had known old Clenk all their lives did not
recognize him as he lay in his coffin, clean, bathed, shaven, clad in a
suit of respectable black and with all the dignity of immaculate linen,
and they swore that they had never before seen him. The alertness of
Copenny's guilty conscience sharpened his faculties. His keen eyes
penetrated the disguise of this reputable aspect at once, though he
sedulously kept his own counsel. He heard the details of the death in the
rounds of the mountain gossip, and divined what Clenk's errand had been.
He deemed that the effort to turn State's evidence had met its condign
punishment, and he felt more assured and secure now that it had been
attempted and had failed.
Bayne, however, had scant time to push his investigations here, where
indeed the ground had been previously so thoroughly searched, for he was
summoned away by another lure of a clue far to the northeast. His recent
bitter disappointment, on the verge of a discovery of importance, perhaps
enabled him better to bear in this instance the result of a fruitless
quest, for he had definitely ceased to hope. He had begun to believe the
child was dead. Clenk's words implied no present knowledge of his
seclusion. The allusion to a severe illness suggested possibilities of
relapse, of a weakening of the constitution as much from lack of proper
attention and nourishment as from disease.
On the lonely railway journey from the scene of this latest
disappointment, Bayne was dismayed to note from time to time how blank
were the hours before him, how his invention had flagged! What to do
next, what tortuous path to try, he did not know. Now and again he sought
to spur up his jaded faculties to perceive in the intricate circumstances
of all his futile plans some fibre of a thread, untried hitherto, that
might serve to unravel all this web of mystery. But no! He seemed at the
end. His mind was dull, stagnant; his thoughts were heavy; he was
oblivious of the surroundings. The incidents of the passing moment
scarcely impinged upon his consciousness. He did not share the vexation
of his fellow-passengers when a wreck of freight cars on the track bade
fair to delay the train some hours, awaiting the clearance of the
obstructions. It hardly mattered where he spent the time. He had lost all
interests, all hold on other phases of life, and this that he had made
paramount, essential, baffled and deluded and denied him, and in its
elusiveness it seemed now to have worn him quite out.
Then once more he sought to goad his drooping spirits, to rouse himself
to a keener efficiency. He would not give up the emprise, he declared
again, he would not be conquered save by time itself. It was rather an
instinct, in pursuance of this revival of his resolution, to seek to rid
himself of his own thoughts, the constant canvass of his despair; this
had necessarily a resilient effect, benumbing to the possibilities of new
inspiration. He sought to freshen his faculties, to find some diversion
in the passing moment that might react favorably on the plan nearest his
heart. He forced himself to listen, at first in dull preoccupation, to
the talk of a group in the smoker; it glanced from one subject to
another--the surroundings, the soil, the timber, the mining
interests--and presently concentrated on a quaint corner of the region,
near the scene of the stoppage, the Qualla Boundary. This was the
reservation of a portion of the tribe of Cherokee Indians, the Eastern
Band, who nearly a century earlier had evaded, in the dense fastnesses of
these ranges, removal with their brethren to the west, and had finally
succeeded in buying this mountainous tract of fifty thousand acres.
As Bayne looked out of the window, urging his mind to appraise the human
interest of the entourage, to apprehend its significance, he bethought
himself of a certain old Cherokee phrase that used to baffle him in his
philological studies. He remembered in a sort of dreary wonder that he
had once felt enough curiosity concerning this ancient locution to
maintain a correspondence with the Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian
Institution as to its precise signification--and now he could scarcely
make shift to recollect it.
He had then been hard on the track of the vanishing past; his wish was to
verify, solely for the sake of scholastic accuracy, these words of the
ancient Cherokee tongue, the Ayrate dialect, which was formerly the
language of their lowland settlements in this region, but which, since
the exodus of the majority of these Indians to the west and the fusion of
the lingering remnant of their upper and lower towns into this tribal
reservation east of the Great Smoky Mountains, has become lost, merged
with the Ottare (Atali) dialect, once distinctively the speech of their
highland villages only, but now practically modern Cherokee.
As Bayne recalled the circumstances, he noted one of the Qualla Indians
loitering about the scene of the wreck. He put a question to him from out
the window of the coach, and discovered that he spoke English with some
facility. The old habit reasserted itself with inherent energy, and
presently Bayne was moved to leave the car and sit on a pile of wood near
the track, where, with his new acquaintance, he floundered over verbal
perversions of modern changes and lost significations of the language and
the contortions of Anglicized idioms, till at length he remarked that if
his interlocutor would act as interpreter he should like to converse on
the subject of these words with some old Cherokee who had never learned
English and had seldom heard it spoken.
The Qualla Boundary is sufficiently permeated with the spirit of the past
to feel that Time is the intimate possession of man. In that languid
environment there is no frenzy to utilize it lest it fly away. No man is
hurried into his grave within the reservation. It seemed not more strange
to the Indian than to the linguist to spend an hour or so in meditating
on a queer word that has lost its meaning amidst the surges of change.
The tribesman, lending himself readily to the investigation, suddenly
bethought himself of the ancient sibyl in her remote cabin on the steep
slant of the mountain, among the oldest and the least progressive
denizens of the Qualla Boundary.
Despite her arrogations of uncanny foreknowledge of human events, despite
her mystic lore of spells and charms, she had no faint presentiment of
the fact when Fate came boldly here and laid a hand on her door. None of
her familiars of the air, of the earth, gave her warning. Often she
thought of this afterward with bitterness, with upbraiding. The Mountain
Climber, _Atali Kuli_ (the ginseng), must, she was sure, have known of
this inimical ascent of the steeps, but he only burrowed the deeper, and
treacherously made no sign. As to _Agaluga Hegwa_, the great Whirlwind--she
would have bidden him arise quickly--"_Ha-usi-nuli datule-hu gu!_"--but
to what avail! Doubtless he was asleep somewhere on the sunny slopes. The
Ancient White Fire was covered with ash; not a glimmer did _Higayuli
Tsunega_ afford her, not a flicker. What a mockery was it that _Kananiski
Gigage_ should pretend to weave his web so fast, so fine, about the
child, and yet suffer its strong meshes to be burst apart by a mere word.
It was not the obsolete word which the visitor sought, for as he sat
outside her door in a chair, brought from within the cabin, while she
crouched on the threshold, and the interpreter perched on the stump of a
tree, an interruption occurred that flung those enigmatic syllables back
on the mysterious past forever. "Polly Hopkins" in her poor and ragged
calico gown--for the picturesque Indian garb of yore is now but a
tradition in the Qualla Boundary--had barely lifted her head in her
flapping old sunbonnet that scarcely disguised its pose of surprised
expectation, when a sound came from the interior of the house as
turbulent as the approach of a troop of wild horses, and instantly there
rushed out into the sunshine a sturdy blond child with wide, daring blue
eyes, golden hair, muscular bare legs, arrayed in a queer little frock of
blue gingham, and no further garb than the graces of his own symmetry.
For a moment Bayne was like a man in a dream. To be confronted suddenly
with the realization of all his hopes, the consummation of all his
struggles, took his breath away. He had not been sufficiently acquainted
with the boy to recognize him at once in this different attire, and with
the growth and vigor of nearly a year's time, but the incongruity of his
fair complexion, his blond hair, in this entourage, his exotic aspect,
made Bayne's heart leap and every nerve tremble.
Meeting the gaze of the big, unafraid blue eyes, he asked at a venture in
English, "And what is your name, young man?"
"Archie Royston," promptly replied the assured and lordly youngster.
"Alchie Loyston," mechanically repeated the old sibyl. Even the glance of
her dimmed eyes was a caress as she fondly turned them toward the child.
Bayne looked as if he might faint. A sharp exclamation was scarcely
arrested on his lips. He flushed deeply, then turned pale with
excitement. For months past, flaring in all the public prints, that name
had been advertised with every entreaty that humanity must regard, with
every lure that might excite cupidity, with every threat that
intimidation could compass. And here, in this sequestered spot, out of
the world, as it were, among the remnant of an Indian tribe, of a
peculiarly secluded life, of a strange archaic speech and an isolated
interest, was craftily hidden the long-lost child. Any ill-considered
remark might even yet jeopardize his restoration, might result in his
withdrawal, sequestered anew and inaccessible. Julian Bayne became
poignantly mindful of precaution. He affected to write down the Cherokee
words as the interpreter and the old sibyl discussed them, but his pencil
trembled so that he could hardly fashion a letter. It was an interval to
him of urgent inward debate. He scarcely dared to lose sight of the boy
for one moment, yet he more than feared the slightest demonstration
unsupported.
He was in terror lest he find the situation changed when next he
approached the fortune-teller's cabin, a few hours later, but the little
blond boy, half nude, was playing in the lush grass before the open door.
The visitor was bolder now, being accompanied by officers of the law; so
bold indeed that he was able to pity the grief of the poor,
unintelligible squaw, volleying forth a world of words of which every
tenth phrase was "Alchie Loyston." By what argument she sought to detain
him, what claims she preferred, what threats she voiced, can never be
known. The sheriff of the county was obdurate, deaf to all intents and
purposes. He shook his head glumly when it was suggested that she might
remain with the child until his mother should arrive in response to the
telegram already sent. "Might poison him--Indians are queer cattle!
Mocking-birds will do that if the young ones are caged, through the bars,
by jing!"
All night long, like some faithful dog, she lay on the floor outside the
door of the room where they kept the child, her face to the threshold;
and on the inner side, in emulation and imitation, little Archie lay on
the floor and echoed her every groan and responded to her lightest
whisper. But sleep was good to him, and when he was quite unconscious the
officers took him up and placed him on a bed, while they awaited in great
excitement and with what patience they could muster the response to the
telegram sent by Bayne, couched in guarded phrase and held well within
the facts:
Child here in the Qualla Boundary, answering to description in
advertisements. Says his name is Archie Royston. Will not talk
further. Well-treated. Held for identification. Awaiting advices.