Happiness had long held aloof. She was of the poorest of the tribe; childless, for many years; a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism; she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster, and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she lived in peculiar solitude, and the two spent the long months of the winter within the cabin together, while the mountain snows lay heavy on the eaves and the mountain winds beat and gibed at the door. Great icicles hung from the dark fissures of the crags; frosty scintillations tipped the fibres of the pines; wolves were a-prowl—sometimes their blood-curdling howls from afar penetrated to the hut where the ill-assorted companions sat together in the red glow of the fire, and roasted their sweet potatoes and apples on the hearth, and cracked nuts to pound into the rich paste affected by the Cherokees, and drank the bland "hominy-water," and gazed happily into each other's eyes, despite their distance apart at the two termini of life, the beginning and the end.

As she could speak no English, yet they must needs find a medium of exchange for their valuable views, she tried to teach him to speak Cherokee. He was a bird, her little bird, she told him by signs, and his name was Tsiskwa. This she repeated again and again in the velvet-soft fluting of her voice. But no! he revolted. His name was Archie Royston, he declaimed proudly. He soon became the monarch of this poor hearth, and he deported himself in royal fashion.

"Oo tan't talk," he said patronizingly to her one day, after listening in futile seriousness to her unintelligible jargon. Forthwith he essayed to teach her to speak English, and, humoring his every freak, she sought to profit. She would fix intent eyes upon him and turn her head askew to listen heedfully while she lisped after his lisping exposition of "Archie Royston." He grew heady with his sense of erudition. He would fairly roll on the puncheon floor in the vainglory of his delight when she identified chair and fire and bed and door by their accurate English names. Sometimes, in a surge of emotion, hardly gratitude or a sense of comfort, neither trust nor hope, but the sheer joy of love, the child would come at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face with kisses—the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled together they would repeat in concert—poor woman! perhaps she thought it a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or magic—"Ding-dong-bell!" and the comparative biographies of little Johnny Green and little Johnny Stout, and the vicissitudes of the poor pussycat submitted to their diverse ministrations. He was wont to sing for her also, albeit tunelessly, and as he sat blond and roseate and gay, warbling after his fashion on the hearth, her clouded old eyes were relumed with a radiance that came from within and was independent of the prosaic light of day. His favorite ditty was an old nursery rhyme in which the name "Pretty Polly Hopkins" occurs with flattering iteration, and he began to apply it to her, for he had come to think her very beautiful—such is the gracious power of love! And while the snow was flying, and the sleet and hail tinkled on the batten shutter, and the draughts bleated and whined in the crevices, he made the rafters ring:

"'Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins, How de do?—how de do?'

"'None the better, Tommy Tompkins, For seeing you, for seeing you!'

"'Polly, I've been to France And there spent all my cash.'

"'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins, Fool for you, fool for you!'"

It was a valuable course in linguistics for the inmates of the cabin, and Archie Royston was far more intelligible and skilled in expressing himself when that door, that had been closed on the keen blast, was opened to let in the suave spring sunshine and the soft freshness of the mountain air.



XII.

With the return of fine weather the work of railroad construction on the extension of the G. T. & C. line began to be pressed forward with eager alacrity. Indeed, it had languished only when the ground was deeply covered with snow or locked so fast in the immobile freeze that steel and iron could not penetrate it. The work had been persistently pushed at practicable intervals, whenever the labor could be constrained to it. Possibly this urgency had no ill results except in one or two individual cases. The sons of toil are indurated to hardship, and most of the gang were brawny Irish ditchers. Jubal Clenk, already outworn with age and ill nourished throughout a meagre life, unaccustomed, too, to exposure to the elements (for the industry of moonshining is a sheltered and well-warmed business), was the only notable collapse. He began by querulously demanding of anyone who would listen to him what he himself could mean by having an "out-dacious pain" under his shoulder-blade. "I feel like I hev been knifed, that's whut!" he would declare. This symptom was presently succeeded by a "misery in his breast-bone," and a racking cough seemed likely to shake to pieces his old skeleton, growing daily more perceptible under his dry, shrivelled skin. A fever shortly set in, but it proved of scanty interest to the local physician, when called by the boss of the construction gang to look in upon him, in one of the rickety shacks which housed the force of laborers, and which was his temporary home.

"There's no show for him," the doctor laconically remarked. "Lungs, heart, throat, all have got into the game. You had better get rid of him—he will never be of any use again."

"Throw him over the bluff, eh?" the jolly, portly boss asked with a twinkling eye. "We ain't much on transportation yet."

"Well, it's no great matter. He'll provide his own transportation before long;" and the physician stepped into his buggy with an air of finality.

The old man had, however, unsuspected reserves of vitality. He crept out into the sunshine again, basking in the vernal warmth with a sense of luxury, and entering into the gossip of the ditchers with an unwonted mental activity and garrulity.

One day—one signal day—as he sat clumped up on a pile of timber destined for railroad ties, his arms hugging his knees, his eyes feverishly bright and hollow, a personal interest in his condition was developed in the minds of his old pals and fellow-laborers, Drann and Holvey, albeit of no humane tendency. It was the nooning hour, and the men at their limited leisure lay in the sun on the piles of lumber, like lizards.

"Gee!" exclaimed one burly fellow, rising on his elbow. "How I'd like ter git my paw on that reward—five thousand dollars for any information!"

"I'm in fur money ez sure ez ye air born! All signs favor," exclaimed old Clenk eagerly. "I dream about money mighty nigh every night. Paid in ter me—chink—chink—I allus takes it in gold. Goin' ter bed is the same ter me that goin' ter the bank is ter most folks."

His interpolations into the conversation usually failed to secure even a contemptuous rebuff; they passed as if unheard. But such is the coercive power of gold, albeit in the abstract, that this tenuous vision of wealth had its fascination. The brawny workman held the newspaper aside to look curiously over at the piteous wreck, as the old ragamuffin grinned and giggled in joyous retrospect, then began to read again the advertisement: "Twenty-five thousand dollars in cash if the information leads to the recovery of the child."

"Do they head them advertisements 'Suckers, Attention'?" asked one of the men who labored under the disadvantage of illiteracy. The scraps read aloud from the papers were his only source of information as to their contents. "They oughter say 'Suckers, Attention,' for they don't even tell whut the kid looks like. I wouldn't know him from Adam ef I wuz ter pass him in the road."

"But they do tell what he looks like!" exclaimed the reader. "Here it all is: blue eyes, golden hair, fair skin, rosy cheeks——"

"Cutest leetle trick!" exclaimed old Clenk, with a reminiscent smile at the image thus conjured up.

The words passed unnoticed save by Drann and Holvey. They exchanged one glance of consternation, and the fancied security in which they had dwelt, as fragile as a crystal sphere, was shattered in an instant. The old man was broken by his illness, his recent hardships. He was verging on his dotage. His senile folly might well cost them their lives or liberty.

Indeed, as the description progressed, detailing the child's attire even to his red shoes, the old fellow's fingers were toying fatuously with one of them in his deep coat pocket among the loose tobacco that fed his pipe. "That don't half ekal him," he broke out suddenly. "Never war sech another delightsome leetle creeter."

A moment of stunned amazement supervened among the group.

"Why, say, old Noah, did you ever see that kid?" at length demanded the reader, with a keen look of suspicion.

It was the inimical expression, rather than a definite consciousness of self-betrayal, that sent the old man's drifting mind back to its moorings. "Jes' listenin' ter that beautiful readin'," he grinned, his long yellow tobacco-stained teeth all bare in a facial contortion that essayed a smile, his distended lips almost failing of articulation. "Them was fine clothes sure on that lovely child."

The flamboyant advertisements had often before been read aloud in the construction camp, and the matter might have passed as the half-fevered babblings of a sick old man, but for that look of stultified comment, of anguished foreboding, that was interchanged between the two accomplices. Only one man, however, had the keen observation to catch that fleeting signal, and the enterprise to seek to interpret it.

The next day, when Clenk did not reappear, this man quietly slipped to the shack where the three lived together. There was a padlock knocking in the wind on the flimsy door. This said as plain as speech that there was no one within. Ordinarily this would have precluded all question, all entrance. But the intruder was seeking a pot of gold, and informed by a strong suspicion. With one effort of his brawny hands, he pulled loose from the top first the strap of one of the broad upright boards that formed the walls, then the board itself. He turned sideways and slipped his bulk through the aperture, the board swinging elastically back into place.

There was a stove in the squalid little apartment, instead of the open fires common to the region. It was masked in a dusky twilight, but as his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity and the disorder, his suspicion exhaled, and a heavy sense of disappointment clogged his activities like a ball and chain.

There in his bunk lay Clenk, his eyes shining with the light of fever, his illness affording an obvious explanation of the precaution of his comrades in locking the door while they were away at work, at the limits of the construction line, to protect him from molestation by man or beast.

Nevertheless, the intruder made an effort to hold his theory together. He approached the bunk, and with an insidious craft sought to draw the old man out. But Clenk was now on his guard. His comrades had bitterly upbraided him with his self-betrayal, that indeed threatened the safety of all. In fact, their courage was so reduced by the untoward episode that he more than suspected they intended to flee the region, and he was disposed to give the fact that he was left cooped up here under lock and key no such humane interpretation as the intruder had placed upon it. They had left him to starve, if not discovered, while they sought to compass a safe distance. At all events, he was so broken in mind and body that his story was more than likely to be discredited, unless their own clumsy denials and guilty faces were in evidence to confirm its truth.

Now his garrulity had vanished; he licked his thin lips ever and anon, and looked up over the folds of the red blanket drawn to the chin with a bright, inscrutable eye and said nothing. His weakness was so great that the policy of lying silent and supine, rather than exert his failing powers, was commended by his inclination as well as his prudence.

Though it was in vain that the spy plied him with question and suggestion, one phrase was like a galvanic current to this inert atrophy of muscle and mind. "Look here, old man," the intruder said at length, baffled and in despair, "you mark my words!" The brawny form had come close in the shadow and towered over the recumbent and helpless creature, speaking impressively through his set teeth. "You mark my words: your pals are going to do you."

A quiver of patent apprehension ran over the dimly descried face, and under the blanket the limbs writhed feebly; but Clenk's resolution held firm, and with a curse, balked and lowering, the man stepped out at the place where he had effected his entrance at the moment when his scheme might have borne fruit.

For old Clenk had struggled up in bed. This threat was true. He had vaguely suspected the fact, but in the words of another his fear had an added urgency. He had betrayed his accomplices, he had betrayed himself. Doubtless it was a race between them as to who could soonest seize the opportunity to turn State's evidence.

And why should he fear the law more than another? As matters stood, he would be left to bear the brunt of its vengeance, while the active perpetrator of the deed escaped, and the accessories sought shelter beneath the aegis of the law itself.

He was not long in reasoning it out. The strength of his resolution imparted a fictitious vigor to his muscles. While unaided he could never have stirred the heavy board, his efforts made it give, loosened as it had already been, so that his thin, wiry body could slip between its edge and the rest of the wall. He had one moment of intense terror lest it slip elastically back and hold him pinioned there, but a convulsive struggle sufficed, and he stepped out, exhausted and trembling, into the gathering dusk, a lowering assemblage of darkling mountains, and at a little distance the shacks of the construction gang. The doors were aflare with flickering lights from within, and the unctuous smell of frying pork was on the air. It was well for his enterprise that at the critical moment the camp was discussing its well-earned supper and had scant attention to bestow on other interests.

An hour later the men on a hand-car, whizzing down the portion of the track that was sufficiently complete for this mode of progression, gave little heed that a workman from the camp was stealing a ride, sitting in a huddled clump, his feet dangling. Whether discharged or in the execution of some commission for the construction boss, they did not even canvass. Far too early it was for the question of rates or passes to vex the matter of transportation. They did not even mark when he dropped off, for the hand-car ran into the yards at the terminus, carrying only its own crew.

Clenk was equally fortunate in creeping into an empty freight here unobserved, and when it was uncoupled and the engine swept into the round-house in the city of Glaston, it was verging again toward sunset, and he was hundreds of miles from his starting-point.

Some monitions of craft were vaguely astir in his dull old brain. He had resolved to throw himself on the mercy of the mother, ere he trusted himself to the clutches of the law. He winced from the mere thought of those sharp claws of justice, but he promised himself that he would be swift. He could not say how Holvey and Drann might secure precedence of him. They had gotten the start, and they might hold it. But if he should tell the mother where they had left the child, he would surely have a friend at court. When he was in the street he walked without hesitation up to the first responsible-looking man he met, and, showing him the advertisement in the newspaper, boldly asked to be directed to the house of that lady.

So dull he was, so unaccustomed to blocks and turnings and city squares, that after an interval of futile explanation the stranger turned out of his way and walked a short distance with him. All the world had heard of the tragedy and the mysterious disappearance of the child, and, although suspecting a fake, even a casual stranger would not disregard a chance of aid.

It was well that the distance was not great, for even his excitement was hardly adequate to sustain Clenk's failing physique. When the old mountaineer paused on the concrete sidewalk to which the spacious grounds of the suburban residence sloped, he looked about with disfavor. "Can't see the house fur the trees," he muttered, for the great oaks, accounted so magnificent an appurtenance in Glaston, were to him the commonest incident of entourage, and a bare door-yard, peeled of grass, a far more significant token of sophistication. As he approached, however, the stately mansion presently appeared, situated on a considerable eminence, and with long flights of stone steps from a portico, enriched with Corinthian columns, and from two successive terraces at some little distance in front. Here were tall stone vases on either hand, and beside one of these at the lower terrace two ladies had paused, waiting, descrying his approach. One was gowned in deep black, sad of aspect, though serene, and very beautiful. The other wore a dress all of sheer white embroideries, with knots of brocaded lilac ribbon, festival of intimation, but her face was thin, wan, worn, tortured out of all semblance of calm or cheer. He came falteringly toward them, and stood for a moment uncertain. Then—for the scope of his cultivation did not include the civility of lifting his hat—he said, "Which of ye two wimin hev los' a child?" His voice was quavering, even sympathetic, and very gentle as he looked at them.

"I have lost my little son!" cried Lillian in a keen, strained tone, agonized anew by the mere mention of the catastrophe. "Have you any information about him? I am ready to pay for it." She had been warned a hundred times that eagerness in proffering money, in making the reward so obviously sure, was not conducive to accelerating the disclosure, bringing into play the innate perversity of human nature, and a desire to trade on the situation and increase the gains; yet try as she might, she could not refrain from invoking always the cogent aid of gold.

"I ain't so particular 'bout the money, lady. I got su'thin' on my mind. I be bent on makin' it square with the law. An' then, too, that leetle Archie air a mighty gamesome leetle trick." He laughed slightly as with a pleasant fleeting reminiscence. "Come mighty nigh dyin', though—skeered me, fur a fack. Powerful tight squeak he had!"

All at once his eyes, glancing over his shoulder, lighted on Bayne, who had just come to call on the ladies and now stood at the bottom of the flight of the terrace steps. Clenk drew back with an obvious shock. "Why, look-a-hyar, you ain't Mr. Briscoe!" he exclaimed insistently, as with a desire to reassure himself. His eyes large, light, distended, were starting out of his head. His jaw quivered violently. The grimy, claw-like hand he extended shook as with a palsy.

When together, Briscoe and Bayne had scant facial resemblance; but apart, that stamp of consanguinity might easily recall for each the face of the other. Bayne, with his wonted subtlety of divination, replied at once, "No, but Mr. Briscoe was my cousin."

"Oh, ho—oh, ho—I see," the old man said, tractable and easily convinced. "I know—Lawd! I got reason ter know that Briscoe's dead. I war afeared o' seein' su'thin' oncommon—his harnt, or some sech. The idee shuk me powerful. I hev had a fever lately. Lemme sit down—I—I—can't stand up. I been hevin' a misery lately in my breast-bone—oh!"—he waved his hand in the air with a pathetic, grasping gesture—"me breath is gone—me breath, me breath——"

He sank down on an iron bench at one side on the velvety turf and feebly gasped.

"I'll get some brandy," Gladys said in a low tone to Lillian, and sped swiftly up the steps toward the house.

Suddenly Clenk partially lifted himself and dived into one of the pockets of his loose coat. He brought up a little red shoe, all tarnished and tobacco-stained, and held it out to Lillian with a faint and flickering smile of bestowal, certain of gratitude as well as recognition. "Does you-uns know that leetle foot?"

Lillian swayed for a moment as if she might fall. Then, with a piercing shriek, she darted forward and seized it from his shaking grasp. She held it up to the light, and as Gladys returned, herself bearing the tray with the glass and decanter, Lillian convulsively clutched her arm and, speechless and trembling, pointed to the name in tarnished gilt on the inside of the sole—her own shoemaker, who had constructed the delicate little hand-sewed slipper!

"Where is he now—where is this child?" Bayne demanded precipitately, his own breath short, his pulses beating in his temples till the veins seemed near bursting.

"I can't rightly say now," the old man drawled; "but—but I kin tell you where we-uns lef' him. 'T war a awful bis'ness, that crackin' off Briscoe—that warn't in the plan at all. We-uns war after the revenuer. What right had he ter bust our still an' break up our wu'm and pour our mash an' singlings out on the ground? Ain't it our'n? Ain't the corn an' apples an' peaches our'n? Didn't we grow 'em?—an' what right hev the gover'ment ter say we kin eat 'em, but can't bile 'em—eh? They b'long ter we-uns—an' gosh! the gover'ment can't hender! But we never meant no harm ter Briscoe. Lawd! Lawd! that warn't in the plan at all. But the child viewed it, an', by gosh! I b'lieve that leetle creetur could hev told the whole tale ez straight as a string—same ez ef he war twenty-five year old. That deedie of a baby-child talked sense—horse-sense—he did, fur a fack!"

"Where—where——" Lillian was using every power of her being to restrain the screams of wild excitement, to sustain the suspense.

"Where did you last see him?" asked Bayne. He had grown deadly white, and the old man, lifting his face, gazed vaguely from one to the other. Their intense but controlled excitement seemed subtly imparted to his nerves. The details of the tragedy had become hackneyed in his own consciousness, but their significance, their surfeit of horror, revived on witnessing their effect on others.

"Look-a-hyar, you two an' this woman will stan' up fur me when I gin myself up fur State's evidence, ef I put ye on the track fur findin' Bubby? He's thar all right yit, I'll be bound—well an' thrivin, I reckon. He hev got backbone, tough ez a pine knot."

"Yes, yes, indeed; we pledge ourselves to sustain you," cried Lillian. Bayne was putting the glass of brandy into the grimy, shaking paw, mindful of the old man's shattered composure.

"It be a mighty risk I be a-runnin'"—the old, seamed face was of a deadly pallor and was beginning to glister with a cold sweat. "I reckon I oughtn't ter tell nuthin' exceptin' ter the officers, but—but—I 'lowed leetle Archie's mother would help me some again them bloodhounds o' the law."

"I'll move heaven and earth to aid you!" cried Lillian.

"See here, I can promise that you shall be held harmless, for I am the prosecutor," Gladys struck suddenly into the conversation, pale but calm, every fibre held to a rigorous self-control. "I am Mr. Briscoe's wife, his widow. Now tell me, where did you last see that child?"

"Wh—wh—wh—whut? You the widder?" Clenk's eyes were starting from their sockets as he gazed up at her from his crouching posture on the bench, his head sunk between his shoulders, his hand with the untasted glass in it trembling violently.

"An' ye say that ye too will stand by me? Then lemme tell it—lemme tell it now. 'T was—what d'ye call that place?—I ain't familiar with them parts. Wait"—as Bayne exclaimed inarticulately—"lemme think a minit." He dropped his head on one of his hands, his arm, supported by the back of the bench, upholding it. His slouched hat had fallen off on the stone pavement, and his shock of gray hair moved in the soft breeze.

The moment's interval in the anguish of suspense seemed interminable to the group. "Drink a little brandy," Bayne counselled, hoping to stimulate his powers.

He evidently heard, and sought to obey. The hand holding the untasted liquor quivered, the glass swayed, fell from his nerveless grasp, and shivered to fragments on the stone pavement.

Bayne sprang to his side and lifted his head. Ah, a drear and ghastly face it was, turned up to the gorgeous sunset, the gentle ambient air, the happy, fleeting shadows of the homing birds.

"Has he fainted?" asked Lillian.

"The man is dead!" Bayne cried with a poignant intonation. "He is dead! He is dead!"

For while they had waited for the word that had eluded him he had gone out into the great wordless unknown. His failing strength had thwarted his will. His spirit had given him the slip.



XIII.

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.



XIV.

Lillian, at her home in Glaston, replied by wire in that tumult of emotion which each new lure was potent to excite, despite the quicksands of baseless hope that had whelmed its many precursors. Still, she expected only another instance of deliberate and brazen fraud, or crafty and sleek imposture, or, worse still, honest mistake. The little suit-case, packed with all that the child might need, which had journeyed through so many vicissitudes, so many thousand miles, was once more in her hand as she took the train. She never forgot that long night of travel, more poignant than all her anguished journeyings that had preceded it. Hurtling through the air, it seemed, with a sense of fierce speed, the varied clangors of the train, the ringing of the rails, the frequent hoarse blasts of the whistle, the jangling of the metallic fixtures, the jarring of the window-panes, all were keenly differentiated by her exacerbated and sensitive perceptions, and each had its own peculiar irritation. She scarcely hoped that she might sleep, and it was only with a dutiful sense of conserving her strength and exerting the utmost power of her will in the endeavor, that she lay down when her berth was prepared. But the seclusion, the darkness within the curtains, oppressed her, for unwittingly the sights and sounds of the outer world had an influence to make her quit of herself, in a measure, and to focus her mind on some trivial object of the immediate present. She drew the blind at the window that she might see the scurrying landscape—the fields, the woods, the river—and now and again the sparkling lights of a city, looking in the distance as if some constellation, richly instarred with golden glamours, had fallen and lay amidst the purple glooms of the hills. For these elevations, and the frequent tunnels as the dawn drew near, gave token that the mountains were not distant; the great central basin of Tennessee lay far to the west; the engine was often climbing a steep grade, as she noted from the sound. She was going to the mountains, to the mountains—to meet what? Sometimes she clasped her hands and prayed aloud in her fear and heart-ache and woe. Then she blessed the many clamors of the train that had lacerated her tenderest fibres, for they deadened the sound of her piteous plaints, and she was a proud woman who would fain that none heard these heart-throbs of anguish but the pitying God Himself.

She must have slept from time to time, she thought, for she was refreshed and calmer when she looked forth from the window and beheld the resplendent glories of the sunrise amidst the Great Smoky Mountains. Vast, far-stretching, lofty, as impressive as the idea of eternity, as awesome as the menace of doom, as silent as the unimagined purposes of creation, they lifted their august summits. They showed a deep, restful verdure in the foreground, and in more distant reaches assumed the blandest enrichments of blue, fading and fading to mere illusions of ranges, and finally dreaming away to the misty mirages of the horizon.

Lillian was ready, erect, tense, waiting, for miles and miles before her destination could be reached, when suddenly the conductor appeared, his face alive with the realization of sensation. The sheriff of the county had flagged the train. He had a vehicle in waiting for Mrs. Royston, in order that she might curtail the distance, as the house where the child was held was on the verge of the Qualla Boundary, and the nearest station was still some miles further. There were few words spoken on that hasty morning drive under the vast growths of the dense and gigantic valley woods. The freshness of the forest air, the redundant bloom of the rhododendron, the glimpse now and again of a scene of unparalleled splendor of mountain range and the graces of the Oconalufty River, swirling and dandering through the sunshine as if its chant in praise of June must have a meaning translated to the dullest ear—all was for Lillian as if it had not been. The officers had cast but one glance at her tense, pale face, then turned their eyes away. The suspense, the pain, the torture of fear could end only with that signal moment of identification. Though the group respected her sorrow in silence, they themselves experienced the rigors of uncertainty and agitation when the log cabin came into view amidst the laurel, and every man of them trooped in, following her, when the door opened and she was ushered into the little, low-ceiled room, so mean, so rough, so dingy of hue. But for her it held the wealth of the universe, the joy of all the ages. There upon the bed lay her sleeping child, larger, more vigorous, than she remembered him, garbed in a quaint little garment of blue gingham; his blond hair clipped close, save for two fine curls on top, worn indeed like a scalp-lock; his long lashes on his cheeks, rosy ripe; his red lips slightly parted; his fine, firm-fleshed, white arms tossed above his head; his long, bare legs and plump, dimpled feet stretched out at their full length. His lips moved with an unformulated murmur as her hysterical, quavering scream of joyful recognition rang through the room. Then he opened his big blue eyes to find his mother bending over him. He did not recognize her at once, and after a peevish sleepy stare he pushed her aside, calling plaintively for his precious "Polly Hopkins."

"Oh, bring Polly Hopkins, whoever she is!" cried the poor rebuffed mother. "And Heaven bless her if she has been good to him."

But when the dismal old squaw blundered into the room, more blinded by grief and tears than infirmity, the identity of his visitor came back suddenly to him with the recollections of the past, and in all the transcendent joy of an invaluable possession he called out, "Look, mamma! Ain't her pretty? So-o pretty! Me s-sweet Polly Hopkins!" And sitting up in bed, he threw his arms around both as they knelt beside it, and all three wept locked in the same tender embrace.

For Lillian would not hear of the implication of "Polly Hopkins" in the suspicion of the abduction, and the rigors of the law were annulled so far as she was concerned. On the contrary, Mrs. Royston's first effort was to ameliorate the old woman's condition, to take her at once to their home to be cherished there forever. When the ancient sibyl, affrighted at the idea of removal and change, positively refused, the mother tenderly begged that she would tell then what could be done for her.

"Polly Hopkins" asked but one boon: the boy. That was the limit of her demand.

Lillian was fain to solace her earnest desire to bestow rich reward by settling a comfortable annuity on her and contracting for a snug, stanch house to be built here, with every appliance that could add to her comfort, and for this "Polly Hopkins" cared not at all; for her poor home had been full of joy with "Alchie Loyston."

"I am glad I can afford it," said Lillian, with a gush of tears—how long it had been since she could say she was glad of aught! "Though she will not come with me, I shall have the best specialist in the United States to leave everything and come here and take the cataracts from her eyes. At least, she shall have her sight restored."

But alack, it was not "Alchie Loyston" whom she should see!

As for Lillian, she would scarcely consent to be separated from the child for one moment. The authorities conceived it necessary to take his statement in private—but allowed her to stand just outside the door—before his mind could be influenced by the comments of others or the involuntary assimilation of their views with his knowledge of the facts, for there was still a large reward for any information leading to the apprehension of the murderers of Edward Briscoe. Little Archie had obviously been a witness of that catastrophe and kidnapped to prevent his revealing the identity of its perpetrators. Indeed, this was a well-founded fear, for he was very glib with the details of that momentous occasion, and he had no sooner mentioned the name of Phineas Copenny, or "Phinny 'Penny," in his infantile perversion, than the North Carolina official turned aside and indited a telegram to the sheriff of the county in Tennessee where the crime had been committed.

None of his capacity to make himself understood had the boy lost by the craft of the moonshiners in placing him where he would never hear an English word and was likely to forget the language. A very coherent story he told still later when he was brought into the criminal court at Shaftesville, being the capital of the county in Tennessee where the deed was perpetrated, and confronted by Copenny. One of the moonshiners, arrested on suspicion of complicity with the murder, had turned State's evidence and had given testimony as to the details of the plot to ambush the revenue officer, and the delegation of Phineas Copenny and two others to execute it. Another testified that he had afterward heard of the murderous plan and of the mistake in the identity of the victim; but as neither of these parties was present at the catastrophe, the story of the child was relied on as an eye-witness to corroborate this proof. The admission of his testimony was hotly contested because of his tender years, despite the wide inclusiveness of the statute, and its inadequacy would possibly have resulted in a reversal of the case had an appeal been taken. But Phineas Copenny made no motion for a new trial and desired no appeal. He had feared, throughout, the possible capture and conclusive testimony of Drann and Holvey, and, lest a worse thing befall him, he accepted a sentence of a long term in the penitentiary. In view of the turpitude of "lying in wait," though a matter of inference and not proof, he doubted the saving grace of that anomaly of the Tennessee law that in order to constitute murder in the first degree the victim of a premeditated slaughter must be the person intended to be slain.

There was scant doubt as to his guilt in the minds of the jury. The boy singled out Copenny from a crowd in which he had been placed to test his recognition by the little witness. He remembered the man's name, and called him by it. He gave an excited account of the shooting, although this was the least intelligible part of his testimony, for he often interrupted himself to exclaim, "Pop-gun—bang!" disconnectedly, as the scene renewed itself in his memory. He explained the disappearance of Mr. Briscoe and the mare by the statement that "Phinny runned out—pop-gun—bang!—an' bofe felled over the bluff." He called the moonshiners' cave a cellar, however, and declared that he went hunting for his mamma in a boat, and the counsel for the defence made the most of such puerilities and contradictions. But the child was very explicit concerning the riving from him of his coat by Phineas Copenny, and the plan to throw it over the bluff, and it made a distinct impression on the jury when he added that Copenny took his hat also—for no mention had been made of the discovery of the hat in the quagmire in the valley—and that Copenny had broken the elastic that held it under his chin and this snapped his cheek. He could, nevertheless, give no account how he reached the Qualla Boundary, and he broke off suddenly, dimpling, bright-eyed, and roseate, to ask the judge if he knew "Polly Hopkins."

"Her is so-o pretty!" he cried out in tender regret.

Mrs. Royston was nettled by the laughter elicited by this query, with its obvious fervor of enthusiasm, for she divined that the merriment of the crowd was charged with ridicule of the incongruous object of his callow adoration, the forlorn old fortune-teller, who had been so gentle and so generous, albeit so alien to the civilization of the present day. Lillian could but realize that the ministering angel is of no time or nationality, and the transcendent beauty of its apparition may well be a matter of spiritual and not merely visual perception. The heart of a woman is no undecipherable palimpsest for the successive register of fleeting impressions. Here was written in indelible script the tenderest thought of affection, the kindest charity, and all the soft graces of fostering sentiment, with no compensatory values of reciprocal loyalty, or the imposing characters of authority. For the old squaw could not even understand the justice of the dispensation; it seemed to her that with impunity she was deserted, denied; her plea was a jest to right reason; her love, in which the child had once rejoiced, was superfluous, worthless, now that he had come to his own; her poor hearth, which his bright infantile smiles had richly illumined, was dark, desolate; the inexorable logic of law and worldly advantages was beyond her ken, and she felt that she had only rescued and cherished the little waif that she herself might be lacerated by grief and bereaved for his sake, and fain to beat her breast and to heap ashes on her head. Poor, poor, "pretty Polly Hopkins!"

Cheering news of her, however, now and again came from the mountains. The noted oculist, after his final visit to her, stopped over in Glaston to report to Mrs. Royston the complete success of the treatment, knowing the gratification the details would afford. He brought, too, the intelligence that she was free of her old torture from rheumatism, which had been of the muscular sort, resulting from exposure and deprivation, and had yielded to the comforts of the trig, close house that Mrs. Royston had built for her, and the abundance of warm furnishings and nutritious food, a degree of luxury indeed which was hardly known elsewhere in the Boundary. Her prosperity had evolved the equivocal advantage of restoring her prestige as a sibyl, and she had entered upon a new lease of the practice of the dark arts of fortune-telling and working charms and spells. He gave a humorous account of her expressions of gratitude to him for the restoration of her sight, which facetiousness Bayne, who chanced to be present, perceived did not add to Mrs. Royston's pleasure; for she regarded "Polly Hopkins" very seriously indeed. Before the physician quitted the "Boundary," the old squaw bestowed upon him, through the interpreter, certain secret magic formulae for working enchantments on his city patients, and thereby effecting rapid cures and filling his coffers. Knowing of Bayne's hobby for linguistics, the oculist jocularly turned these archaic curios over to him. In that connection Bayne recounted that after the child had departed with his mother from the mountains, he himself being detained by final arrangements with the authorities, his interest in researches into the arcana of old Cherokee customs had been revived by seeing the sibyl seated on the ground, swaying and wailing and moaning, and casting ashes on her head as if making her mourning for the dead. At the time he had marked the parity of the observance with the Hebraic usage, and he intended to make an examination into the origin of the curious tradition of the identity of the American Indians with the lost tribes of Israel.

Train-time forced the oculist to a hasty leave-taking, and it was only after he was gone that Bayne noticed the evidence of restrained emotion in Lillian's face. Bayne had been about to conclude his own call, which concerned a matter of business, the claim of a reward which he considered fraudulent, but he turned at the door, his hat in his hand and came back, leaning against the mantel-piece opposite her. He noted that the tears stood deep in her eyes.

"I can't bear to think of her unhappiness," she said, "when I consider all I owe to her."

"You had better consider what you owe to me," Bayne gayly retorted, seeking to effect a diversion.

"Oh, you, you! But for you! When I think of what you have done for Archie, and for me, I could fall down at your feet and worship you!" she exclaimed with tearful fervor.

"Oh, oh, this is so sudden!" he cried, with a touch of his old whimsicality.

"Don't—don't make fun of me!" she expostulated.

"Bless you, I am serious indeed! I expected something like this, but not so soon; and, in fact, I expected to say it myself—but I could not have done it better!"

"Did you really intend to say it, to come back to me?" She gazed appealingly at him.

"As soon as we had time for such trifles." He would not enter into her saddened mood.

"But one thing I want to know: did you really intend it, or was it only my cruel affliction that brought you back to me—motives of sheer humanity—because no one else would help me, because they thought I was the prey of frenzied fancies to believe that Archie still lived?"

Julian was silent for a moment, obviously hesitating. Then he reluctantly admitted, "No, I should never have come back."

She threw herself back in the chair with a little pathetic sigh. He looked at her with a smile at once tender and whimsical. She too smiled faintly, then took up the theme anew.

"But, Julian," she persisted, "it is very painful to reflect that you had deliberately shut me out of your heart forever; that when you saw me again you had no impulse to renew the past. Had you none, really?"

The temptation was strong to give her the reassurance she craved. She had suffered so bitterly that a pang of merely sentimental woe seemed a gratuitous cruelty. Yet he was resolved that there should never come the shadow of falsehood between them. He was glad—joyous! The future should make brave amends for the past. He sought to cast off the bitter retrospection with which she had invested the situation. His gay laughter rang out. "Madam, I will not deceive you! I intended that you should never get another shot at me; but circumstances have been too much for me—and I have ceased to struggle against them."

THE END