“Now go and open the doors,” he said, “so that when our friends arrive, they can come in at once.”
While he unlocked the boxes, Hester went to do as he had directed; but Beatrice, wondering and fascinated, could not leave his side. The first lid that he lifted showed bundles of bank-notes, and the second, shining piles of heavy gold pieces.
“Yes, this is the money that was missing,” he said.
CHAPTER XV
A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA
For a little time there was no sound in the big room as Beatrice stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment at the piles of gold and silver pieces heaped upon the table, while Hester stood at the outer door to listen. The night sounds of the mountain came in: the wind among the trees, the squeaking of a bat, the far-off yelp of a coyote. Presently, however, these faint noises were drowned in another, distant but growing nearer and louder, the angry voices of excited men and the tramp of feet upon the road.
Beatrice went to the door beside Hester and, for what seemed a very long time, stood waiting without a word spoken by any one of them, so intently were they all listening. Much as Beatrice desired that John Herrick should explain the presence of that money upon the table, she dreaded his speaking, for she wished to lose no sound of the tumult that was coming ever nearer up the hill.
The crowd of men was in sight now, climbing the last rise of the trail. They were singing some wild foreign song: it might have been Russian, Polish, Hungarian; she knew not which. The words conveyed no meaning to her, but the loud harsh cadences seemed to cry out a message of their own: a song of blind tyrannies and passionate rebellion, of cracking whips and pistol-shots, of villages burning amid curses and weeping and the cries of children. She shivered with terror as the shouting voices came close.
“If only they were Americans,” she whispered to Hester. How could any one control such a mob which scarcely understood a common tongue?
“There is no knowing what they may do,” Hester whispered in answer, “but if any one is able to quiet them, Roddy can.”
The men came tramping up to the foot of the veranda steps and stopped—a dense, huddled throng with a tossing lantern carried here and there that showed the dark faces and the shining, excited eyes. A few figures stood out against the foreign backgrounds: a handful of American and Irish laborers, Dan O’Leary, head and shoulders taller than the others, Dabney Mills hovering on the outskirts of the group, talking incessantly and entirely unheeded.