“I’m not much of anything,” he hurriedly interposed, “but I like to know what is going on, that’s all.”
He walked away without further excuse and went up to his room.
“I’ve got to watch him,” soliloquized Miss Crabb, “or he’ll get the scoop of all the news. Give him points, indeed! Maybe so, but not till after I’ve sent them to the Lightning Express! I’ll keep even with him, or know the reason why.”
It was a grand panorama that the climbing moon lighted up all around Mount Boab, a vast billowy sea of gloom and sheen. Here were shining cliffs, there dusky gulches; yonder the pines glittered like steel-armed sentinels on the hill-tops, whilst lower down they appeared to skulk like cloaked assassins. Shadows came and went, now broad-winged and wavering, again slender and swift as the arrows of death. The hotel was bright within and without. Some one was at the grand piano in the hall making rich music—a fragment from Beethoven,—and a great horned owl down the ravine was booming an effective counterpoint.
Crane stood leaning on the railing of the veranda and scowling savagely as Peck and Miss Moyne continued to promenade and converse. He was, without doubt, considering sinister things. Mrs. Bridges, finding him entirely unsympathetic, went to join Miss Crabb, who was alone where she had been left by Dufour. Meantime, up in his room, with his chair tilted far back and his feet thrust out over the sill of an open window, Dufour was smoking a fragrant Cuban cigar, (fifty cents at retail) and alternating smiles with frowns as he contemplated his surroundings.
“Authors,” he thought, “are the silliest, the vainest, and the most impractical lot of human geese that ever were plucked for their valuable feathers. And newspaper people! Humph!” He chuckled till his chin shook upon his immaculate collar. “Just the idea, now, of that young woman asking me to furnish her with points!”
There was something almost jocund blent with his air of solid self-possession, and he smoked the precious cigars one after another with prodigal indifference and yet with the perfect grace of him to the manner born.
“Hotel Helicon on Mt. Boab!” he repeated, and then betook himself to bed.
VII.
Some people are born to find things out—to overhear, to reach a place just at the moment in which an event comes to pass there—born indeed, with the news-gatherer’s instinct perfectly developed. Miss Crabb was one of these. How she chanced to over-hear some low-spoken but deadly sounding words that passed between Peck and Crane, it would be hard to say; still she overheard them, and her heart jumped almost into her mouth. It was a thrillingly dramatic passage, there under the heavy-topped oak by the west veranda in the gloom.