CHAPTER XXIII A RACE WITH DEATH
On the day following the expulsion of Prendergast, Harry woke restless and unrefreshed. Fleeting sensations mocked him—a disturbing conviction that the struggling memory in some measure had succeeded in reasserting itself in the shadowy kingdom of sleep. Waking, the apparitions were fled again into their obscurity, leaving only the wraiths of recollection to startle and disquiet.
A girl's face hovered always before him—ruling his consciousness as it had ruled his sleeping thought. "Is it only fancy?" he asked himself. "Or is it more? It was there—my memory—in shreds and patches, on my sleep; now when I wake, it is only the fraying mist of dreams.... Dreams!" He drew a deep breath. "Yet the overmastering sense of reality remains. Last night I walked in intimate, forgotten ways—and she was in them—she!" He flushed, an odd, sensitive flush. "Dreams!" he said. "All dreams and fancies!"
At length he took down from its shelf the bottle he had rescued from Prendergast's intention and emptied it of its glistening grains—enough to replenish his depleted stock of provisions. He paused a moment as he put on his hat, smiling whimsically, a little sadly. He dreaded entering the town. But there could be no remedy in concealment. If he was to live and work there, appear he must on the streets sooner or later. Smoky Mountain must continue to think of him as it might; what he was from that time on, was all that could count to him.
If he had but known it, there was good reason for hesitation to-day. Early that morning an angry rumor had disturbed the town; the sluice of the hydraulic company had been robbed again. Some two months previously there had occurred a series of depredations by which the company had suffered. The boxes were not swept of their golden harvest each day, and in spite of all precautions, coarse gold had disappeared mysteriously from the riffles—this, although armed men had watched all night. There had been much guess-work. The cabin on the hillside was the nearest habitation—the company's flume disgorged its flood in the gulch beneath it—and suspicion had eventually pointed its way. The sudden ceasing of the robberies with the disappearance of Hugh Stires had given focus to this suspicion. Now, almost coincident with his return, the thievery had recommenced. It had been a red-letter day for Devlin and his ilk who cavilled at the more charitable. Of all this, however, the object of their "I-told-you-so" was serenely ignorant.
As Harry walked briskly down the mountain, a feeling of unreality stole upon him. The bell was ringing in the steeple of the little Catholic church below, and the high metallic sound came to him with a mysterious and potential familiarity. With the first note, his hand in his pocket closed upon an object he always carried—the little gold cross he had found there when he awakened in the freight-car, the only token he possessed of his vanished past. More than once it had been laid for a mascot on the faro-table or the roulette-board with his last coin. Always it had brought the stake back, till he had gained a whimsical belief in its luck.
He drew it out now and looked at it. "Strange that the sound of a bell always reminds me of that," he muttered. "Association of ideas, I fancy, since there is a cross on the church steeple. And what is there in that bell? It is a faint sound even from here, yet night after night, up there in the cabin, that far-off peal has waked me suddenly from sleep. Why is it, I wonder?"
Entering the town, there were few stirring on the sunny streets, but he could not but be aware that those he met stopped to gaze after him. Some, indeed, followed. His first objective point was a jeweler's, where he could turn his gold-dust into readier coin for needful purchases. He saw a sign next the Mountain Valley House, and entered.
The jeweler weighed the dust with a distrustful frown, but Harry's head was turned away. He was reading a freshly printed placard tacked on the wall—an offer of reward for the detection of the sluice thief. He read it through mechanically, for as he read there came from the street outside a sound that touched a muffled chord in his brain. It was the exhaust of a motor-car.
He thrust the money the goldsmith grudgingly handed him into his pocket and turned to the door. A long red automobile had stopped at the curb. Two men whom it carried were just entering the hotel.