“But why has the somebody—who isn’t Hartridge—called the fight off so suddenly? By Jove, Vance—I have an idea! It has dawned upon the enemy, whoever he is, that it wasn’t worth while to efface us at a time when we were perseveringly going the right way about it to efface ourselves! I’d like to make a bet with you: when we begin drilling in the right place—if there is any right place—the trouble will blossom out again. What do you think?”
“I haven’t a thought left that isn’t too leg-weary to keep up with you,” Tregarvon confessed; whereat he fell to talking of Miss Richardia Birrell, dribbling on until Carfax, groaning in spirit, got up to light the bed-room candles.
IX
A Bad Night for Rucker
AFTER the drilling plant had been moved to the chance-chosen, fourth trial site a short half-mile south of the original line of prospect holes, the work of reinstallation was begun. At its completion, it was at Rucker’s suggestion that the small tool-house was fitted with a single-sashed window and a folding cot-bed, and that the duties of night-watchman were added to his daytime oversight of the drilling machinery.
Just why the plant, which had been left unguarded since the first week of the campaign, and had been unmolested, should now need a night-watchman, the mechanician did not attempt to explain. His reasons for wishing to transfer his lodgings from the valley to the mountain top were entirely personal. He had been taken as a boarder at the Tryons’, and to wear out the dull evenings after working hours, he had been drawn first into the lounging circle at Tait’s store, and later into the smaller circle of the Layne household on the lower valley road.
The loadstone at Layne’s was a granddaughter of the patriarch’s, a black-eyed, red-lipped girl of primal passions and impulses; and in the beginning Rucker had been given a fair field and no questions asked as to his eligible state and standing. Evening strolls on the country roads with Nancy Layne for a companion were not to be compared with a night off on Broadway under the bright lights; but such diversions were made to suffice until a day when Daddy Layne, abruptly pointing to the long-barrelled squirrel-rifle resting on its pegs over the kitchen fireplace, assumed the aggressive. “Git yo’ license an’ yo’ preachuh, ’r let Nan alone an’ quit projec’in’ round this yer valley o’ nights,” was the old man’s ultimatum; and Rucker, having a wholesome fear of consequences, and the best of reasons for not applying for a marriage license, asked permission to sleep at the drilling plant.
The first night on the mountain was frankly harrowing to the city-bred mechanic, whose burglarish aspect did not insure him against the still alarms of the forest intensified by moon-flung shadows of solemn trees, by scurryings of fallen leaves rattling like dry bones under the autumn night-wind, and, more than all, by a sense of complete and lonely isolation.
Each unfamiliar sound brought Rucker out of his cot-bed blankets with a bound and sent him groping to the square window. First it was a little screech-owl, perching on the walking-beam of the drill, and chattering out its blood-curdling cry. Next it was a slow and measured crashing in the undergrowth, sound mysterious and unnerving to a degree until the night-prowling cow responsible for it lowed gently and crossed the clearing to snuff suspiciously at the boiler and machinery.
The tension once more relieved, Rucker tumbled into the blankets again, calling himself shop names and swearing by all the gods of the metalworkers that nothing short of a forest-fire or an earthquake should make him lose any more sleep. Yet, while he was still only eye-deep in his first doze a new alarm brought him leaping to his feet and sent him, blinking and breathing hard, to the square of moonlight framed by the small window.
What he heard this time sounded like the measured hoof-beats of a horse. Rucker had a pocket flash-light, and he turned it upon the face of his watch. He had gone early to bed, and it was still early, barely ten o’clock. A by-road, the one by which the drilling plant had been brought in, ran through the wood a little distance to the left of the glade. Staring wide-eyed, Rucker made out the shadowy bulk of a wheeled vehicle standing in this road, with a white horse, seemingly of incredible size, looming gigantic between the thills.