CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE WHITE HORSE SKIN

Curiosity held Jessica until the evangelist closed his melodeon preparatory to a descent upon the dance-hall. Then, thinking of the growing dark with some trepidation--for the recent "strike" had brought its influx of undesirable characters to the town--she started toward the mountain.

Ahead of her a m.u.f.fled puff-puff sounded, and the dark bulk of an automobile--the sheriff's, the only one the town of Smoky Mountain boasted--was moving slowly in the same direction, and she quickened her pace, glad of this quasi-company. It soon forged ahead, but she had pa.s.sed the outskirts of the town then and was not afraid.

A little way up the ascent a c.u.mbrous shadow startled her. She saw in a moment that it was the automobile, halted at the side of the road. Her footsteps made no sound and she was close upon it when she saw the three men it had carried standing near-by. She made to pa.s.s them, and had crossed half the intervening s.p.a.ce, when some instinct sent her to the shade of the trees. They had stopped opposite the hydraulic concession, where a side path left the main road--it was the same path by which she and Emmet Prendergast had taken their unconscious burden on a night long ago--leading along the hillside, overlooking the snake-like flume, and forming a steeper short-cut to the cabin above. They were conversing in low tones, and as they talked they pointed, she thought toward it.

Jessica had never in her life been an eavesdropper, but her excited senses made her anxious. Moreover, she was in a way committed, for she could not now emerge without being seen. As she waited, a man came from the path and joined the others. The sky had been overcast and gloomy, but the moon drew out just then and she saw that the new-comer, evidently a patrol, carried a rifle in the hollow of his arm. She also saw that one of the first three was the automobile's owner.

For some minutes they conversed in undertones, whose very secrecy inflamed her imagination. It seemed to her that they made some reference to the flume. Had there been another robbery of the sluice-boxes, and could they still suspect Hugh?

Dread and indignation made her bold. When they turned into the path she followed, treading noiselessly, till she was close behind them. They had stopped again, and were looking intently at a shadowy gray something that moved in the bottom below.

She heard the man who carried the rifle say, with a smothered laugh:

"It's only Barney McGinn's old white horse taking a drink out of the sluice-box. He often does that."

Then the sheriff's voice said: "McGinn's horse is in town to-night, with Barney on her back. Horse or no horse, I'm going to"--the rest was lost in the swift action with which he s.n.a.t.c.hed the firearm from the first speaker, sighted, and fired.

In the still night the concussion seemed to rock the ground, and roused a hundred echoes. It startled and shocked the listening girl, but not so much as the sound that followed it--a cry that had nothing animal-like, and that sent the men running down the slope toward an object that lay huddled by the sluice-box.

In horrified curiosity Jessica followed, slipping from shadow to shadow.

She saw the sheriff kneel down and draw a collapsed and empty horse's skin from a figure whose thieving cunning it would never cloak again.

"So it was you, after all, Prendergast!" the sheriff said contemptuously.

The white face stared up at them, venomous and writhing, turning about the circle as though searching for some one who was not there.

"How did--you guess?"

The sheriff, who had been making a swift examination, answered the panted question. "You have no time to think of that now," he said.

A sinister look darted into the filming yellow eyes, and hatred and certainty rekindled them. Prendergast struggled to a sitting posture, then fell back, convulsed. "Hugh Stires! He was the only--one who knew--how it was done. He's clever, but he can't get the best of Prendergast!" A spasm distorted his features. "Wait--wait!"

He fumbled in his breast and his fingers brought forth a crumpled piece of paper. He thrust it into the sheriff's hands.

"Look! Look!" he gasped. "The man they found murdered on the claim there"--he pointed wildly up the hillside--"Doctor Moreau. I found him--dying! Stires--"

Strength was fast failing him. He tried again to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came from his throat.

A blind terror had clutched the heart of the girl leaning from the shadow. "Doctor Moreau"--"murdered." Why, he had been one of Hugh's friends! Why did this man couple Hugh's name with that worst of crimes?

What dreadful thing was he trying to tell? She hardly repressed a desire to scream aloud.

"Be careful what you say, Prendergast," said the sheriff sternly.

The wretched man gathered force for a last effort. His voice came in a croaking whisper:

"It was Stires killed him. Moreau wrote it down--and I--kept the paper.

Tell Hugh--we break--even!"

That was all. His head fell back with a shiver, and Emmet Prendergast was gone on a longer journey than ever his revenge could warm him.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE RENEGADE

While the man whom the town knew as Hugh Stires listened to the tale of the street preacher, another, unlike yet curiously like him in feature, had slowly climbed the hilly slope from the north by the sanatorium road. He walked with a jaunty swagger bred of too frequent applications to a flask in his pocket.

Since the evening of the momentous scene in the chapel with Harry Sanderson, Hugh had had more and more recourse to that black comforter.

It had grown to be his constant companion. When, late on the night of the game, some miles away, he had gloatingly counted the money in his pockets, he had found nearly a thousand dollars in double-eagles, and a single red counter--the last he had had to stake against Harry's gold.

He put the crimson disk into his pocket, "to remember the bishop by," he thought with a chuckle, but the fact that for each of the counters Harry had won he had sworn to render a day of clean and decent living, he straightway forgot. For the other's position he had wasted no pity.

Harry would find it difficult to explain the matter to the bishop! Well, if it "broke" him, served him right! What business had he to set himself so far above every one else?

For some time thereafter Hugh had seriously contemplated going abroad, for a wholesome fear had dogged him in his flight from Smoky Mountain.

For weeks he had travelled by night, scanning the daily newspapers with a desperate anxiety, his ears keen for hue and cry. But with money in his pocket, courage returned, and in the end fear lulled. There had been no witness to that deed on the hillside. There might be suspicion, but no more! At length the old-time attraction of the race-course had absorbed him. He had followed the horses in "the circuit," winning and losing, consorting with the tipsters, growing heavier with generous living, and welcoming excitement and change. But the ghost of Doctor Moreau haunted him, and would not be exorcized.

Money, however, could not last always, and a persistent run of ill luck depleted his store. When poverty again was at his elbow a vagrant rumor had told him, with the usual exaggerations, of the rich "find" on the Little Paymaster Claim on Smoky Mountain. Too late he cursed the reasonless panic that had sent him into flight. Had the ground been "jumped" by some one who now profited? Nevertheless, it was still his own to claim; miners' law gave him a year, and he had left enough possessions in the cabin, he thought cunningly, to disprove abandonment.

He dreaded a return, but want and cupidity at length overcame his fears.

He had arrived at Smoky Mountain on this night to claim his own.

As he walked unsteadily along, Hugh drank more than once from the flask to deaden the superst.i.tious dread of the place which was stealing over him. On the crest of the ridge he skirted the sanatorium grounds and at length gained the road that twisted down toward the lights of the town.

In the dubious moonlight he mistook the narrow trail to the k.n.o.b for the lower path to the cabin. As he turned into it, the report of a rifle came faintly from the gulch below. It seemed to his excited senses like the ghostly echo of a shot he had himself fired there on a night like this long before--a hollow echo from another world.

He quickened his steps and stumbled all at once into the little clearing that held the new-made grave and Jessica's statue. The sight terrified his intoxicated imagination. His hair rose. The name on the headstone was STIRES, and there was himself--no, a ghost of himself!--sitting near! He turned and broke into a run down the steep slope. In his fear--for he imagined the white figure was pursuing him--he tripped and fell, regained his feet, rushed across the level s.p.a.ce, threw his weight against the cabin door, and burst into the room.

A dog sprang up with a growl, and in the light of the fire that burned on the hearth, a man sitting at the rough-hewn table lifted a haggard face from his arms and each recognized the other.

The ghost was gone now before firelight and human presence, and Hugh, with a loud laugh of tipsy incredulity, stood staring at the man before him.

"Harry Sanderson!" he cried. "By the great horn spoon!" His shifty eyes surveyed the other's figure--the corduroys, the high laced boots, the soft blue flannel shirt. "Not exactly in purple and fine linen," he said--the impudent swagger of intoxication had slipped over him again, and his boisterous laugh broke with a hiccough. "I thought the gospel game was about played out that night in the chapel. And now you are willing to take a hint from the prodigal. How did you find my nest? And perhaps you can tell me who has been making himself so infernally at home here lately?"

"_I_ have," said Harry evenly.

Hugh's glance, that had been wavering about the neat interior, returned to Harry, and knowledge and anger leaped into it. "So it was you, was it? You are the one who has been trying his hand as a claim-jumper!" He lurched toward the table and leaned upon it. "I've always heard that the devil took care of his own. The runaway rector stumbles on my manor, and with his usual luck--'Satan's luck' we called it at college--steps in just in time to strike it rich!"

He stretched his hand suddenly and caught a tiny object that glittered against Harry's coat--the little gold cross, which the other had tied to his watch-guard. The thong snapped and Hugh sent the pendant rattling across the doorway.

"You were something of a howling swell as a parson," he said insolently, "but you don't need the jewelry now!"