Then he fell to thoughtfully eying the fire, the simple elements of his interest in the disconnected monologue merged into anxiety and perplexity and baffled speculation. The veiled flame still tended sluggishly upward; he heard the sobbing of the sap oozing out at the ends of the logs. "This wood is mighty green," he observed, disparagingly, "an' post oak, too, I b'lieve. 'Tain't fitten ter make a fire out'n."
A vague stir was on the roof—pattering drops; slow, discontinued presently, and discursively falling again. The little cabin was on the very verge of a rain cloud. In the valley the rhythmic beat of the downfall upon the tree-tops came muffled to his ears, and he noted the intermittent sound of the wind dying away and rising fitfully and farther off. All at once his attention was deflected from the outer world.
"The Leetle People revealed the secret, Buck. Lay it at thar door," cried the weird voice of delirium.
Carew drew his sprawling members into a tense attitude, a hand on either knee, his head thrust forward, his eyes distended, staring into the gloom, his lower jaw falling.
"Thar warn't room enough fur the bones an' the jug an' the plunder too. An' that thar one o' the Leetle People's harnts hev sot out ter walk, ez sure ez ye air born—no room sca'cely bein' lef' in his grave. So durned onlucky ter meddle with the Leetle People's graves! So durned onlucky, to be sure!"
The officer sat as if turned to stone, breathless, motionless, staring fixedly into the dusky room, and seeing nothing that was before him—only the goal which he had sought—while the fevered head still rolled back and forth on the pillow, the delirious voice repeating, with every inflection of dull despair: "So durned onlucky! So onlucky, to be sure!"
How long the sheriff sat there, unconsciously striving to realize the situation, the significance of this strange discovery, he did not know. It was with a distinct effort of the mind at last that he sought to pull himself together and turn to the consequent step. He felt as if he were dreaming even after he was on his feet, and he paused irresolutely in the middle of the floor, and looked expectantly toward the bed, where the wounded man's head still restlessly rolled as he muttered: "So durned onlucky! So onlucky, to be sure!" But if Bob Millroy should talk all night he could add naught of importance to what the sheriff already knew.
"No use a-listening ter him jabber now," he said.
A sudden look of thought smote his face; his eyes narrowed, his teeth closed firmly, as he revolved the idea in his mind, and he turned abruptly to the window. The blasts had closed the batten shutter fast, and he shook it smartly before it would open in his hand. The slow wheeling of its edges against the sky revealed a change since last he had looked out. The stars still scintillated above in the clear spaces of the zenith, but a rain-cloud hung in the south, bulging low over the ranges, its blackness differing vastly in tone from the limpid darkness where the night was clear and serene. One summit below it was distinctly defined; there it had betaken a dusky brown color, and about its lower verge a fringe of fine straight lines of rain was suggested; a moon—a belated, waning moon—was rising in the melancholy dead hour of the night, its distorted, mist-barred disk showing between the bare eastern peaks, which were all silvered and clearly outlined above the massive wooded slopes darkling below. It shone full in the officer's eyes as for a moment he steadfastly gazed upon it. Then he laid his hand upon the window-sill and lightly sprang upon the ground below. The next moment he was standing in the door of the barn, and his stentorian halloo had roused all the slumbering mountaineers amongst the hay, and hailed the echoes in many a rocky gorge far away.