LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Dawn had come with an unleashed wind and the crash of thunder. The
electric storm, which had muttered and menaced like a Sabbath of witches
till daylight, had broken at length and turned the world to a raving
turmoil, pitilessly scarring the mountain and deluging the gulches with
cloud-burst.
In the cabin on the hillside Harry had watched the rage of the elements
with a dull sense of accord; it typified the wild range of feeling in
which his soul had been harried. Battle had been the keynote of a series
of days and doings of which the tense awakening in Jessica's chamber,
with its supreme moment of passion and longing, had been a weird
culmination.
As he made his way down the mountain in the blank and heavy dark,
correcting his path by the lightning, he had faced squarely the question
that in that dim room had become an imminent demand.
"_What if I love her!_ What right have I to love her, with a wretched
name like mine? She has refinement, a measure of wealth, no doubt, and
I am poor as poverty, dependent on the day's grubbing in the ditch for
to-morrow's bacon and flour. Yet that would not stand in the way! I am
no venal rogue, angling for the loaves and fishes. Whatever else she
cursed me with, Nature gave me a brain, and culture and experience have
educated it. With hand or brain I can hew my own niche to stand in! Must
I put away the longing that drove me to her in sleep, with her dawning
love that shielded me? And if, knowing all, she love me, must the past,
that is so unreal to me, block my way to happiness? I am putting it deep
underground, and its ghost shall not rise! Time passes, reputations
change. Mine will change. And when I have squared my living here, the
world is wide. What does it matter who she is, if she is the one woman
for me? What does it matter what I have been, if I shall be that no
longer?"
So he had argued, but his argument ended always with the same stern and
unanswerable conclusion: "To drag her down in order to lift myself!
Because she pities me--pity is akin to love!--shall I take advantage of
her interest and innocence? Shall I play upon divine compassion and
sinister propinquity, like any mean adventurer who inveigles a romantic
girl into marrying a rascal to reform him?"
In the cabin, through the long hours till the dawn began to infiltrate
the dark hollows of the wood he had lain wide-eyed, thinking. When day
came he had cooked his breakfast and thereafter sat watching the havoc
of the storm through the window. Hours passed thus before the fury of
the wind had spent itself, and with the diminution of the rain, a
crouching mist had crept over the range from the west, from which Smoky
Mountain jutted like a drenched emerald island. At length he rose, threw
open the door and stood looking out upon the wind-whipped foliage and
the drab desolation of the fog. Then he threw on his Mackinaw coat,
picked up his gold-pan and climbed down the slope. Beneath all other
problems must lie the sordid problem of his daily food. He had uncovered
a crevice in the bed-rock at the end of his trench the day before, and
now he scraped a pailful of the soggy gravel it contained and carried it
back to the cabin. A fresh onslaught of rain came just then, and setting
the heaped-up pan on the doorstep, he reentered the room.
With a sigh he took off his damp coat and threw a log on the fire. He
abstractedly watched it kindle, then filled and lit his pipe and turned
to the book-shelf. He ran his hand absently along the row. Where had
been that wide, dim expanse of library walls that hovered like a mirage
beyond his visual sight? He chose a volume he had been reading, and
turned the pages.
All at once his hand clenched. He gave a choked cry. He was staring at a
canceled bank-draft bearing his own name--a draft across whose face was
written, in the cramped hand resembling the signature, a word that
seemed etched in livid characters of shame--_Forgery!_
"Pay to Hugh Stires"--"the sum of five thousand dollars"--he read the
phrases in a hoarse, husky monotone, every vein beating fiercely, his
body hot with the heat of a forge. There it was, a hideous chapter of
it, the damnable truth from which he had shrunk! "I may be a thief!"--he
had said that to himself long ago. His mind had revolted at the idea,
yet the thought had clung. It had made him a coward. When the allegation
had passed before the jeweler's shop, it had stung the deeper for his
dread. He had been the beneficiary of that forgery. He alone could have
perpetrated it. The popular suspicion was well grounded: he was a common
criminal!
Did the town know? He snatched at the draft and read the date. More than
a year ago, and it had been presented for payment in a distant city, the
city near which he had been picked up beside the railroad track. The
forged name was the same as his own. Who was David Stires? His father?
Had that city been his home once, and that infamous act the forerunner
of his flight or exile? He looked at the paper again with painful
intentness. It was canceled--therefore had been paid without question.
Yet the man it had robbed had stamped it with that venomous hall-mark.
Clearly the law had not stepped in--for here he was at liberty, owning
his name. He had been let go, then, disowned, to carry his badge of
crime here into the wilderness! And how had he lived since then? Harry
shuddered.
What now? It was no longer a question only of his life and repute here
at Smoky Mountain. The trail led infinitely further; it led to the
greater world, into which he had fondly dreamed of going. The words
Jessica had spoken on the hillside sounded in his ears: "_Whatever has
been_ I have faith in you now." His face lightened. That assurance had
swept the past utterly aside, had leaned only on the present. His
present, at least, was clean!
He drew a sudden breath and the color faded from his cheek; a baleful
suggestion had insinuated itself with a harrowing pain. _Was_ it clean?
He had forced an entrance in the dead of night to tread dark halls like
a thief--and he had laid that flattering unction to his soul! Suppose he
had not gone there innocent of purpose? What if, not alone the memory,
but the lusts and vices of the former man were reasserting themselves in
sleep? What if the new Hugh Stires, unknown to the waking consciousness,
was carrying on the deeds of the old? What if the town was right? What
if there was, indeed, good reason for suspecting him?
He stumbled to a chair and sat down, his frame rigid. He thought of the
robbed sluice in the gulch below, of his own unhappy adventure of the
night. How could he tell what he had done--what he might do? Minutes
went by as he sat motionless, his mind catching strange kaleidoscopic
pictures that fled past him into the void. At length he rose and went to
the window. Far down the hillside, a faint line through the mist spanned
the gulch bottom. A groan burst from his lips:
"That is the hydraulic flume," he said aloud. "Gold has been stolen
there in the past, again and again. Some was stolen two nights ago. _How
do I know but that I am the thief?_" Was that what Prendergast had meant
by the "easier way"? A shiver ran over him. "How do I know!" he thought.
"I can see myself--the evil side of me--when the dark had fallen, waking
and active ... I see myself creeping down there, stealing from shadow to
shadow, to scoop the gold from the riffles when the moon is under a
cloud. I see men sitting from dark to daylight, with loaded rifles
across their knees, watching. I see a flash of fire ... I hear a report.
I see myself there by the sluice-boxes, dead, shot down in the act of a
thief, making good the name men know me by!"
The figure of Jessica came before him, standing in her soft white gown,
her hand against her cheek and the jasmin odors about her. The dream he
had dreamed could not be--never, never, never! All that was left was
surrender, ignominious flight to scenes barren of suggestion.
To a place where he could work and save and repay! He looked at the slip
of bank-paper in his hand.
At that instant a shining point caught his eye. It came from the pan of
gravel on the doorstep on which the rain had been beating. He thrust the
draft into his pocket and seized a double handful of the gravel. He
plunged it into a pail of water and held it to the light. It sparkled
with coarse, yellow flakes of gold. He dropped the handful with a sharp
exclamation, threw on his coat and rushed from the cabin.
All day, alone on the fog-soaked hillside, Harry toiled in the trench
without food or rest.