She looked at him with a forced smile. "You have been dreaming," she answered.
He seemed to realize where he was. "I suppose so," he said with a sigh, "but it was very real. I thought he came in and spoke your name."
She stroked his hand. "It was fancy, dear." If he but knew who had really been there that night! If she could only tell him all the happy truth!
He lay silent a moment. Then he said: "If it could only have been Harry you married instead of Hugh! For he loved you, Jessica."
She flushed as she said: "Ah, that was fancy, too!"
It was the first time since the day of her marriage that he had spoken Hugh"s name.
CHAPTER XXVI
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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.ses, 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 compa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 hoa.r.s.e, husky monotone, every vein beating fiercely, his body hot with the heat of a forge. There it was, a hideous chapter of it, the d.a.m.nable 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.surance 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 l.u.s.ts and vices of the former man were rea.s.serting 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 coa.r.s.e, 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.
CHAPTER XXVII
INTO THE GOLDEN SUNSET
It was a fair, sweet evening, and the room where Jessica sat beside David Stires" bed, reading aloud to him, was flooded with the failing sunlight. The height was still in brightness, but the gulches below were wine-red and on their rims the spruces stood shadow-straight against the golden ivory of the southern sky. Since the old man"s seizure in the night he had been much worse and she had scarcely left his room. To-day, however, he had sat propped by pillows, able to read and chat, and the deep personal anxiety that had numbed her had yielded. She was reading now from a life of that poetess whose grave has made a lonely Colorado mountain a place of pilgrimage. She read in a low voice, holding the page to the dimming light:
"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot of n.o.ble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine was mellow and pleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon the great facts of G.o.d that He teaches best to those who love His Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when mortal dreams are over and work is done."
"That is beautiful," he said. "I should choose a spot like that." He pointed down the long slope, where a red beam of the sun touched the gray face of the k.n.o.b and turned it to a spot of crimson-lake. "That must be such a place."
Her cheeks flushed. She knew what he was thinking. He would not wish to lie in the far-away cemetery that looked down on the white house in the aspens, the theater of his son"s downfall! The k.n.o.b, she thought with a thrill, overlooked the place of Hugh"s regeneration.
A knock came at the door. It was a nurse with letters for him from the mail, and while he opened them Jessica laid aside the book and went slowly down the hall to the sun-parlor, where the doctor stood with the group gathered after the early supper, chatting of the newest "strike"
on the mountain.
"We"ll be famous if we keep on," he was saying, as she looked out of the wide windows across the haze where the sunlight drifted down in dust of gold. "I"ve a mind to stake out a claim myself."
"We pay you better," said one of the occupants grimly. "Anyway, the whole of Smoky Mountain was staked in the excitement a year ago. There"s no doubt about this find, I suppose?"
"It"s on exhibition at the bank," the doctor replied. "More than five thousand dollars, _cached_ in a crevice in the glacial age, as neat as a Christmas stocking!"
"Wish it was _my_ stocking," grunted the other. "It would help pay my bill here."
The man of medicine laughed and nodded to Jessica where she stood, her cheeks reddened by the crimsoning light. She had scarcely listened to the chatter, or, if she did, paid little heed. All her thoughts were with the man she loved. Watching the luminous purple shadows grow slowly over the landscape, she longed to run down to the k.n.o.b, to sit where she had first spoken to him, perhaps by very excess of yearning to call him to her side. She had a keen sense of the compunction he must feel, and longed, as love must, to rea.s.sure him.
The talk went on about her.
"Where is the lucky claim?" some one asked.
"Just below this ridge," the doctor replied. "It is called the "Little Paymaster.""