A RACE WITH DEATH
On the day following the expulsion of Prendergast, Harry woke restless
and unrefreshed. Fleeting sensations mocked him--a disturbing conviction
that the struggling memory in some measure had succeeded in reasserting
itself in the shadowy kingdom of sleep. Waking, the apparitions were
fled again into their obscurity, leaving only the wraiths of
recollection to startle and disquiet.
A girl's face hovered always before him--ruling his consciousness as it
had ruled his sleeping thought. "Is it only fancy?" he asked himself.
"Or is it more? It was there--my memory--in shreds and patches, on my
sleep; now when I wake, it is only the fraying mist of dreams....
Dreams!" He drew a deep breath. "Yet the overmastering sense of reality
remains. Last night I walked in intimate, forgotten ways--and she was in
them--_she!_" He flushed, an odd, sensitive flush. "Dreams!" he said.
"All dreams and fancies!"
At length he took down from its shelf the bottle he had rescued from
Prendergast's intention and emptied it of its glistening grains--enough
to replenish his depleted stock of provisions. He paused a moment as he
put on his hat, smiling whimsically, a little sadly. He dreaded entering
the town. But there could be no remedy in concealment. If he was to live
and work there, appear he must on the streets sooner or later. Smoky
Mountain must continue to think of him as it might; what he was from
that time on, was all that could count to him.
If he had but known it, there was good reason for hesitation to-day.
Early that morning an angry rumor had disturbed the town; the sluice of
the hydraulic company had been robbed again. Some two months previously
there had occurred a series of depredations by which the company had
suffered. The boxes were not swept of their golden harvest each day, and
in spite of all precautions, coarse gold had disappeared mysteriously
from the riffles--this, although armed men had watched all night. There
had been much guess-work. The cabin on the hillside was the nearest
habitation--the company's flume disgorged its flood in the gulch beneath
it--and suspicion had eventually pointed its way. The sudden ceasing of
the robberies with the disappearance of Hugh Stires had given focus to
this suspicion. Now, almost coincident with his return, the thievery
had recommenced. It had been a red-letter day for Devlin and his ilk who
cavilled at the more charitable. Of all this, however, the object of
their "I-told-you-so" was serenely ignorant.
As Harry walked briskly down the mountain, a feeling of unreality stole
upon him. The bell was ringing in the steeple of the little Catholic
church below, and the high metallic sound came to him with a mysterious
and potential familiarity. With the first note, his hand in his pocket
closed upon an object he always carried--the little gold cross he had
found there when he awakened in the freight-car, the only token he
possessed of his vanished past. More than once it had been laid for a
mascot on the faro-table or the roulette-board with his last coin.
Always it had brought the stake back, till he had gained a whimsical
belief in its luck.
He drew it out now and looked at it. "Strange that the sound of a bell
always reminds me of that," he muttered. "Association of ideas, I fancy,
since there is a cross on the church steeple. And what is there in that
bell? It is a faint sound even from here, yet night after night, up
there in the cabin, that far-off peal has waked me suddenly from sleep.
Why is it, I wonder?"
Entering the town, there were few stirring on the sunny streets, but he
could not but be aware that those he met stopped to gaze after him.
Some, indeed, followed. His first objective point was a jeweler's, where
he could turn his gold-dust into readier coin for needful purchases. He
saw a sign next the Mountain Valley House, and entered.
The jeweler weighed the dust with a distrustful frown, but Harry's head
was turned away. He was reading a freshly printed placard tacked on the
wall--an offer of reward for the detection of the sluice thief. He read
it through mechanically, for as he read there came from the street
outside a sound that touched a muffled chord in his brain. It was the
exhaust of a motor-car.
He thrust the money the goldsmith grudgingly handed him into his pocket
and turned to the door. A long red automobile had stopped at the curb.
Two men whom it carried were just entering the hotel.
Harry had seen many such machines in his wanderings, and they had
aroused no baffling instinct of habitude. But the old self was stirring
now, every sense alert. Hour by hour he had found himself growing more
delicately susceptible to subtle mental impressions, haunted by shadowy
reminders of things and places. Something in the sight of the long, low
"racer" reminded him--of what? His eye traced its polished lines,
noting its cunning mechanism, its build for silent speed, with the eager
lighting of a connoisseur. He took a step toward it, oblivious to all
about him.
He did not note that men were gathering, that the nearest saloon was
emptying of its occupants. Nor did he see a girl on horseback, with a
tiny child before her on the saddle, who reined up sharply opposite.
The rider was Jessica; the child, an ecstatic five-year-old she had
picked up on the fringe of the town, to canter in with her hands
gripping the pommel of the saddle. She saw Harry's position instantly
and guessed it perilous. What did the men mean to do? She leaned
forward, a swift apprehension in her face.
Harry came back suddenly to a realization of his surroundings. He looked
about him, startled, his cheek darkening its red, every muscle
instinctively tightening. He saw danger in the lowering faces, and the
old lust of daring leaped up instantly to grapple with the rejuvenated
character.
Devlin's voice came over the heads of the crowd as, burly and
shirt-sleeved, he strode across the street:
"Hand over the dust you've stolen before you are tarred and feathered,
Hugh Stires!"
Harry looked at him surprised, his mind instantly recurring to the
placard he had seen. Here was a tangible accusation.
"I have stolen nothing," he responded quietly.
"Where did he get what he just sold me?" The jeweler's sour query rose
behind him from the doorway.
"We'll find that out!" was the rough rejoinder.
In face of his threatening peril, Jessica forgot all else--the restive
horse, the child. She sprang to the ground, her face pained and
indignant, and started to run across the street. But with a cry of
dismay she turned back. The horse had caught sight of the red
automobile, and, snorting and wild-eyed, had swung into the roadway.
"It's Devlin's kid!" some one cried out, and Devlin, turning, went
suddenly ashen. The baby was the one soft spot in his ruffianly heart.
He sprang toward the animal, but the movement and the hands clutching at
the bridle sent it to a leaping terror. In another instant it had broken
through the ring of bystanders, and, frenzied at its freedom, dashed
down the long, level street with the child clinging to the
saddle-pommel.
It was all the work of a moment, one of panic and confusion, through
which rang Jessica's scream of remorse and fright. Torpor held the
crowd--all save one, whose action followed the scream as leap follows
the spur. In a single step Harry gained the automobile. With an
instantaneous movement he pushed the lever down and jerked the throttle
wide. The machine bounded into its pace, the people rolling back before
it, and, gathering headway, darted after the runaway.
The spectators stood staring. "He'll never catch him," said Michael
Halloran, who had joined the crowd. "Funeral Hollow's only a mile away."
With others he hurried to the hotel balcony, where he could watch the
exciting race. Jessica stood stock-still, as blanched as Devlin,
wringing her hands.
Harry Sanderson had acted with headlong intention, without calculation,
almost without consciousness of mental process. Standing on the
pavement, with the subtle lure of the motor creeping in his veins, his
whole body responding--as his fingers had tingled at sight of the
violin--to the muffled vibrations of that halted bundle of steel, in the
sharp exigency he had answered an overmastering impulse. In the same
breath he had realized Jessica's presence and the child's peril, both
linked in that anguished cry. With the first bound of the car under him,
as the crowd was snatched behind, a weird, exultant thrill shot through
every nerve. Each bolt and bar he knew as one would tell his fingers.
Somewhere, at some time, he had known such flight--through mellow
sunlight, with the air singing past. Where? When?
Not for the fraction of a second, however, did his gaze waver. He knew
that the flat on which the town was built fell away in a hollow ravine
to the southward--he could see it from the cabin doorway--a stretch of
breakneck road only a mile ahead. Could the child hold on? Could he
distance those frenzied hoofs in time? The arrow of the indicator stole
forward on the dial.
Far behind, as the crowd watched, a cry rose from the hotel balcony. It
was Barney McGinn, the freighter, with a glass at his eye. "He's
gaining!" he shouted. "He has almost overtaken the horse!"
The horse's first fury of speed was tiring. The steel steed was creeping
closer. A thunder of hoofs in pursuit would have maddened the flying
animal, but the gliding thing that was now so close to him came on with
noiseless swiftness. Harry had reserved, with the nicety of a practised
hand, a last increment of speed. With the front wheels at the horse's
flank, he drew suddenly on this. As the car responded, he swerved it
sharply in, and, holding with one hand, leaned far out from the step,
and lifted the child from the saddle.
The automobile halted again before the hotel amid a hush. The men who a
little while before had been ripe for violence, now stood in shamefaced
silence. It was Jessica who ran forward and took the child, still
sobbing a little, from Harry's hands. One long look passed between
them--a look on her part brimming with a great gratitude for his lifting
of her weight of dread and compunction, and with something besides that
mantled her cheeks with rich color. She kissed the child and placed her
in her father's arms.
Devlin's countenance broke up. He struggled to speak, but could not,
and, burying his face in the child's dress and crying like a baby, he
crossed the street hastily to his own door.
Harry stepped to the pavement with a dull kind of embarrassment at the
manifold scrutiny. He had misconstrued Jessica's flushing silence, and
the inference stung. The fierce zest was gone, and the rankling barb of
accusation smarted. He should apologize to the owner, he reflected
satirically, for helping himself to the automobile--he who stole
gold-dust, he at whose door the town laid its unferreted thieveries! He
who was the scapegoat for the town's offenses!
That owner, in very fact, stood just then in the hotel doorway regarding
him with interest. He was the sheriff of the county. He was about to
step forward, when an interruption occurred. A scuffle and a weak bark
sounded, and a lean brown streak shot across the pavement.
"Rummy!" cried Harry. "Rummy!"
Through some chink of the dead wall in his brain the name slipped out, a
tiny atom of flotsam retrieved from the wreck of memory. That was all,
but to the animal which had just found its lost master, the word meant a
sublimation of delight, the clearing of the puzzle of namelessness that
had perplexed its canine brain. The dog's heaven was reached!
Down on his knees on the pavement went Harry, with his arms about the
starved, palpitating little creature, and his cheek against its shaggy
coat. In another moment he had picked it up in his arms and was walking
up the street.
Late that night Tom Felder, sitting in his office, heard the story of
the runaway from the sheriff's lips. He himself had been in court at the
time.
"And the horse?" he asked.
"In the Hollow, with his back broken," said the sheriff.
The lawyer sprang from his chair. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "How can a
man like that ever have been a scoundrel?"
The sheriff relit his dead cigar reflectively. "It's a curious thing,"
he said. "They are saying on the street that he's sent Prendergast
packing. He'll have to watch out--the old tarantula will sting him if he
can!"
Harry Sanderson went back to his cabin with a strange feeling of
exaltation and disappointment--exaltation at the recurrence of something
of his old adventures, disappointment at the flushed silence with which
Jessica had received the child.