“But look-a-here,” Dabney Mills burst out, “if she’s his sister and he’s your uncle, why did you never let on to any one? You were strangers to him, you two girls, when you came here: I could swear it. And one day when you were out, I asked your aunt if she had ever seen John Herrick, and she said no.”
Still Beatrice was silent, with growing misgivings, as he went on excitedly, as much to himself as to her.
“There must have been a family quarrel,” he speculated shrewdly. “Herrick did something disgraceful, most likely, back there at home, and came West to lose himself, and the rest of you followed, by and by, to see him; but you never owned he belonged to you. Say, that’s something to tell them down yonder at the meeting to-night. When they hear that about his past, they may know for sure where to look for their money.”
He swung on his heel and was off in haste down the hill.
“Stop! Stop!” cried Beatrice, but he paid no heed. She ran a few steps after him but he had already disappeared.
As she went into the house, she was thinking of that boulder that had rolled from under her horse’s feet on the climb up Dead Man’s Mile. She remembered how it bounded down the slope, disappearing in the wood to do what damage she could not tell. In much the same way her thoughtless speech had escaped from her and now, quite beyond her reach, was doing harm at which she could only guess.
They all retired early that night, for Aunt Anna, who had just come home, was tired as well as happy, and Nancy had been so busy that she could not hold her eyes open even until a decent hour for bedtime. In spite of her uneasy thoughts, Beatrice fell asleep quickly, and, even after an hour of sound slumber, awoke with difficulty.
“It is raining,” she thought sleepily at first, hearing a light tap, tap against the casement. “I must get up and close the window.”
Yet she would have dropped asleep again had not the sound continued insistently. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. To her surprise, the stars were shining through the window, and no raindrops but a handful of gravel pattered on the sill. She jumped up, drew her big coat about her, for the night air was cold, and leaned out. A shadowy figure, unrecognizable in the starlight, stood below her.
“Miss Deems,” came a voice, a rich Irish voice that after a moment of doubt she realized was Dan O’Leary’s, the man who used to care for Buck; “Miss Deems, there’s the deuce and all to pay down in the town to-night, and this Dabney Mills here vows that it was your doing.”