The ex-jockey, left standing alone on the drive in front of the old
mansion, had watched, with glowing eyes, the departure of the phaëton
from Duciehurst.
“Ai-yi, Ran Ducie,” he jeered, “ridin’ for a fall you are, if you did
but know it!”
The vehicle was out of sight in a moment. He thrust his cap on the back
of his head, sunk his hands deep in his pockets and strode up the flight
of steps to the broad stone-floored portico. He stood for a moment,
watching the great shining, rippling expanse of the silent river, vacant
save for a small steamer of the government fleet, whisking along in
haste on the opposite side, with a heavy coil of smoke and a fluttering
flag. Then he strolled into the house, looking about keenly and
furtively as he went. The place was obviously familiar to him, doubtless
from many secret explorations, and, without hesitation, he took his way
up two flights of stairs, threading the vacant apartments, coming, at
last, to the third story which gave access to the interior of the
capital of the pilaster where the treasure had been found.
He stood, his hands still in his pockets, gazing into the cavity, the
washboard left where it had been prized away from the wall. He stooped
down presently and sought to explore the interior of the pillar,
pulling out first the rotten fragments of the ancient knapsack. He gazed
at these remnants with great scorn of their obsolete fashioning, then
set to work to ransacking them, deftly manipulating the flaps lest
something hidden there should escape his scrutiny. The search resulted
in naught, save a handful of crumbs of desiccated leather. He even
paused to examine the quality of the fabric and the stitching of the
construction.
“Sewed by hand, by jinks!” he muttered. But the article had evidently
been used merely as protection, or concealment, perhaps, for the box it
had contained. He made a long-armed lunge into the depths of the cavity
in hopes of further booty, realizing that he was the first intruder into
the place after the departure of the refugees from the _Cherokee Rose_,
and might make prize of whatever they had possibly overlooked. His heart
quickened its beats as his fingers touched straw, but when he dragged
forth a bundle holding persistently together he discovered that it was
but one of the well-woven, enormous nests of the tiny sparrow, creeping
in through a crevice without, and, like some human builders, having a
disproportionate idea of suitable housing for its station. He spat a
flood of tobacco juice upon the cunning work of the vanished architects,
and, with a curse as grotesque as profane, made a circuit of the
interior of the cavity in the pillar with his bare palms. Nothing--quite
empty. The treasure had lain here for forty years, the fact bruited
throughout the traditions of the country. Hundreds, of whom he was one,
had made vain search--“and Randal Ducie had found it first go! Some
people have _all_ the luck!” He had ventured to the window of the great
dining-room last night, after his confederates had fled, and had gazed
with gloating eyes on the pile of gold and jewels on the table before
Adrian Ducie, whom he mistook for the man familiar to the neighborhood.
The sight had maddened him. He had urgently sought to stimulate his
confederates to an attack on the place while the money lay undefended,
openly on the table. He thought that in the tumult of surprise a rich
capture might be effected.
“To snatch jes’ a handful would have done me a heap o’ good,” he
meditated.
But no! Binnhart had declared they were too far outnumbered, that the
enterprise was impracticable. And Binnhart had seemed slow and dazed,
and himself the victim of surprise. Colty’s loose lips curled with
bitter scorn as he recalled how owlishly wise Binnhart had looked when
he had declared that he would try first the inside and then the outside
of this pilaster from the ground floor, instead of at once essaying the
capital,--but he did not know what a “capital” was,--nor, indeed, did
the jovial “Colty” until he heard the word from Randal Ducie a few
minutes ago. In fact, Binnhart did not know the difference between a
“pillar” and a “pilaster,” except as the builder in Caxton had expounded
the terms. Indeed, Binnhart, assuming to be a leader of men, should be
better informed. Leader! He would lead them all to the penitentiary if
they followed him much farther. It was an ill-omened association of
ideas. Colty Connover began to wonder if any of the refugees from the
_Cherokee Rose_ had acquired any knowledge of the search for the
treasure prosecuted from without. He remembered how suddenly the sound
of a woman’s screams had frightened the marauders from their occupation
in what they had deemed the deepest solitude. If some woman had been
sitting at this window she could easily have heard their unsuspecting
talk. He looked down speculatively. Through the broken roof of the
portico he could discern some of their abandoned tools still beside the
base of the column. “Pilaster,” he sneered. The word had for him the
tang of an opprobrious epithet. She could have heard everything. Had
she, indeed, heard aught? Could she remember the names? She could
doubtless recall “Colty.” That was within the scope of the meanest
intelligence. He began to quail with the realization of disastrous
possibilities. What woman was it, he wondered. The one in the phaëton?
He hoped Binnhart might shoot her in the hold-up planned on the road. A
pistol ball would tie her tongue if--if she had not already told all she
knew! Yet what would his name signify? Only that he was one of the
seekers who from time immemorial had ransacked the house for its
treasure. Robbery, perhaps, in a way, yet what was so definitely
abandoned to the will of the marauder could scarcely be esteemed in the
pale of ownership. If only the gang had not left their insane victim
bound and gagged, as evidence of their brutality. “Colonel Kenwynton
will never rest till he ferrets out who done that job.” He winced and
lifted one foot high, and let it down with a stamp. “I’d hate for the
old Colonel to git on my track, sure,” he muttered.
He reflected that this was what had queered the whole run, through
Binnhart’s self-sufficiency, though that fellow, Treherne, did tell, in
his sleep, where the money was hid. If they had known--if they had only
known--what constituted the capital of a pillar. It had been
mismanaged--mismanaged from the beginning, and once more he declared
that it was Captain Hugh Treherne who had queered the whole run.
He walked slowly down the stairs into the broad hall, and then,
threading the vacant apartments with the definite intention of
familiarity, he came into the room where poor Hugh Treherne had lain for
hours bound and gagged, not knowing whether his sufferings were actual
or the distraught illusions of his mental malady.
Connover stood looking at the many footprints in the dust on the floor,
clustered about the clear space where the man had lain. In the corners
of the apartment the dust was thick and gray and evidently had not been
disturbed in years. Here it was that the refugees of the _Cherokee Rose_
had found Captain Treherne. But _he_ could not have informed his
rescuers where the swag was hidden. He himself did not know,--he could
not say when he was awake. By reason of his distorted mental processes
only in dreams did his memory rouse itself; only his somnolent words
could reveal the story of the hiding of the treasure in the capital of
the pilaster. As, in his ignorant fashion, Connover sought to realize
the situation he groped for the clew of its discovery. How had they
chanced to find it? Could the woman have overheard the talk of the gang
from the window of the attic, and, knowing the signification of the
terms “pilaster” and “capital,” could she have fallen like a hawk upon
her prey? Oh, Binnhart was distanced by the whole field,--a fool and a
fake. And if he should botch this hold-up that he had planned for Randal
Ducie---- Suddenly a nervous thrill agitated Connover. He was conscious
that an eye was upon him, a fixed, furtive scrutiny. He gazed wildly
about the desolate, empty room. Almost he could see a vague figure at
the door withdrawing abruptly as he glanced toward it, but when he ran
into the hall there was naught for sixty feet along which any spy upon
him must have passed. Still, as he returned, reassured, he felt again
that covert gaze. Nothing was visible at the window on one side of the
apartment. On the other side the room was lighted by a glass door
opening on a veranda, in which the panes had recently been shattered,
and broken glass lay about. When he pulled it ajar loose bits fell from
the frame and crashed upon the floor, setting astir keen shrill echoes
through the empty desolation that put every quivering nerve to the
torture. Outside he heard a vague, silly laugh even before he perceived
Mrs. Berridge standing close against the wall in her effort to escape
observation, her head, with its towsled copper hair, all bare, but an
apron pinned shawl-wise around her shoulders in lieu of a wrap.
“I’m cotched,” she exclaimed deprecatingly. “I thought I’d peek in and
find out what’s going on, though I reckon I ain’t wanted.”
“Not much you ain’t,” he declared, recovering his composure with
difficulty. “How’d you come?”
“In the dug-out,” she explained. “I tied Possum in his bunk, and locked
him up, and took out. He’s safe enough.”
“Oh, that’s all right. He’ll spend most of his days locked up, ennyhow,”
Colty roughly joked.
“He won’t nuther.” She struck at him with an affectation of retaliation.
But her face was not jocose, and a tallowy pallor accented the freckles.
“Colty,” she lowered her voice mysteriously, “I have heard shootin’.”
“Naw!” he cried remonstrantly, as if the reluctance to entertain the
fact could annul it.
“Whenst on the ruver I heard shootin’,” she declared again.
“Oh, shucks, gal,” he exclaimed. “You couldn’t hear it so fur off.”
“On the water!” she cried, lifting her eyebrows. “The water fetches the
sound.”
“He _said_ he wouldn’t shoot,” cried Colty Connover, his lip pendulously
drooping. “He said on no account.”
“You b’lieve his gab? Well, you _are_ a softy!” she flung at him. Then,
with one end of the apron string in her mouth, she ejaculated
murmurously: “I heard shootin’,” looking doubtfully and vaguely over her
shoulder.
“Then he’ll swing for it ef he’s killed Ran Ducie. There ain’t a more
pop’lar man in the county, nor a better judge of horseflesh.”
“I ain’t carin’ fur Binnhart arter the way he made me trick that crazy
loon out’n his secrets an’ then declared he’d gimme nuthin’ thout he
found the truck.”
“Pulled the horse an’ lost yer pay, too,” grinned Colty.
“But all the rest will be tarred with the same stick----”
“Not me nor you,” interrupted Colty Connover,--“’cause he said he
wouldn’t shoot. He swore he wouldn’t.”
Suddenly she pushed back her tousled red hair as she stood near the
glass door, and looked up with a startled apprehension on her face.
“Listen, Colty, listen----! What is that sound--what is that sound?”
Then a strange thing happened. The sun, low in its circuit, was already
westering on the October day. Even now its radiance fell through the
great windows and open doors all aslant, and lay in deep orange tints
athwart the bare, dusty floors. Many a skein-like effulgence was
suspended from the panes, and on these fine and fiery lines illuminated
motes were scattered like the notation of music on an immaterial cleff.
There was no wind, no rustle of the magnolia trees glimpsed without. The
river was silent as always. The stillness was intense, indescribable,
and, suddenly, with a long drawn sigh, a creaking dissonance, the old
house gave forth one loud moan, voicing its sorrows, its humiliation,
its inanimate woe.
The two looked at each other with aghast, white faces. Then, with a
common impulse, they fled from--they knew not what. The woman sprang out
of the shattered glass door and sped through the shrubbery, across the
ruined levee to her dug-out, swinging at the old landing. The groom
dashed down the hall, the echoes of his steps hard on his heels like
swift pursuers, out into the road, and thence, scarcely relaxing his
pace, ran along the rugged ground till he was in the turn-row, where his
speed was aided by the smooth hard-beaten earth. The cotton was breast
high, and glittering in the afternoon sun--a famous crop. He could
scarcely see the pickers, although he noted here and there their big
cylindrical baskets, filled as the bags, suspended from their necks,
overflowed from time to time. A great wagon was drawing up at one side
where the road struck the turn-row, and this notified him that the
weigher, with his steelyards, had arrived to pay off the laborers
according to the weight of the contents of their baskets, and to convey
the product to Ran Ducie’s gin. He welcomed the sight of another white
man, for he desired more credible testimony, in case it should be
needed, than the haphazard observation of the darkey cotton pickers that
he was miles distant from the scene of Binnhart’s hold-up at the time of
the shooting. Hence he attached himself to the society of the weigher,
and made himself unpleasantly conspicuous, and was officious and
obstructive during the weighing process, as much from latent intention
as maladroit folly. When, at last, the wagons were heaped and he and the
weigher took their seats behind two of the big mules, the pickers,
trailing on foot contentedly in the rear, his companion observed: “I’m
goin’ to tell Mr. Ducie that the nex’ time he treats you to a ride he
may pervide a coach and four, for durned if I’ll have you monkeying in
the cotton fields along of me another time.” Colty Connover had made the
desired impression and on this score he was content. Nevertheless, again
and again during the afternoon, throughout the process of the weighing,
and on the road to the town, and in the midst of his duties at the
livery stable there recurred to him a stupefied, stunned realization of
some uncomprehended crisis, and again and again he asked himself
helplessly: “What was that strange sound in the old house? What was it?”
And on the river bank, in the little amphibious cabin upon its grotesque
high-water stilts, through all the afternoon and deep into the night,
the woman with a vague thrill of terror futilely wondered, “What was
that strange, strange sound in the old house? What was it?”