"There are two horses—and two men talking—and wheels," said Durgan, slowly reckoning up the sounds he heard.
"Go in, and take the dogs," said Alden to Bertha. "We will go down to the mine and meet them, so that Hermione need not be disturbed."
"You need not be so careful to protect her now," she said hardly. "She is in too great pain to care what happens."
Then Durgan was striding down the trail, and Alden hopping nimbly over the rocks beside him.
"The last visitors who rode here through the night brought handcuffs," said Durgan grimly.
He could not divest himself of the idea that some armed fate was close upon them all.
He lit his lantern, and kindled a fire of sticks in the stove of his hut. Alden, who was shivering with cold, warmed himself. The travelers were now resting their horses a half-mile below. The keen air, the new excitement, were a spur to the mind of the weary lawyer. He began to talk with renewed melancholy, and a persistence that wearied Durgan's ears.
"So far, we are not only without proof, but without reasonable hypothesis. The cleverest detective in New York tells me that Beardsley left New York and cannot be traced. When we find him, we shall only have, as means to incriminate him, the word of a dead negro, whose mind was obviously failing when he gave his evidence, and one letter which——"
Durgan's impatience was intolerable. He went out on the dark road. He thought of that other night, gorgeous in its whiteness, when the full moon had looked down on the beautiful bronze form of the murdered woman and on a strolling, dandified valet, of whose portrait Durgan remembered every detail. He had seen him in the glamor of the silvered avenue; and his silken hair and long whiskers, the expanse of shirt-front, the flash of false jewels, and his mad utterance, which was now gradually taking the form of truth, lived again in his memory. He remembered, too, the crimson dawn in which he had witnessed Adam's passionate grief, and his own rage of indignation when the next night had brought with it, on this same road, the worst of insults to taint that grief.
The cause of all that coil of evil and pain had been the quiet lady, whom they had just left with the intense loneliness of her secret, shut off in her anguish from sister and lover. For her sake, it seemed, Eve had been killed, and Adam had wept, and the vain serving-man had used his last vital powers to save her from a world's reproach. As yet there was no outcome of it all, except dissension and misery.