“Gee! Will they do that?” Billy thought a minute. “Say! If you should need me, blow this whistle twice; but don’t do anything that will let the two at the house know I’m there. See?” Billy handed over his whistle.
“I’m on. If you hear shots don’t be scared. I’m heeled.” He showed a new revolver.
They separated, and Billy hurried back to his place. So far there was nothing unusual in the quiet evening scene. Through the foliage he could see May Nell and her mother in their summer white, sitting on the veranda; could hear the soft murmur of their intermittent conversation, though no words. The evening was warm, and the fragrance of honeysuckle and mignonette heavy on the air. For years afterwards Billy never smelled them that he did not live over again the events of that awful night.
Many times he made the rounds, stealthily, keeping most of the time near the garage lest he should be called. When he went in once for something, the clock said eleven; and the next time he looked toward the veranda, they were gone. The lower house was dark, but upstairs lights twinkled from two of the rooms; shortly they, too, were dark.
Two men entered the radiance of the gateway lamps. Billy hastened down the drive to see if they went toward the viaduct; but they kept on up the road that led through the woods to some small ranches.
For more than an hour all was quiet. Billy hoped the two in the house were sleeping calmly; hoped no hint of this night’s anxieties would ever come to them. Suddenly, unbidden, came the thought of fire! He knew how the stairways ran, how he could reach those rooms unless both stairways were cut off. In that case—was there a ladder? He measured with his eye the more than twenty feet between those windows and the sloping ground.
He remembered seeing a ladder at the back of the garage, and went to look for it, but it was gone; and he wondered if it could have been placed in the basement for safe keeping while the servants were away.
As he returned to his beat again, a ringing of metal struck through the darkness. It was the hammers! They had begun to lay the rails! Regularly, beat on beat, came the blows. Dozens of lanterns were bunched each side of the track, shedding a dim light. Billy wondered why Mr. Smith had not strung electric lamps on a sliding wire. Perhaps he did not want the Green Hills Power Company to know,—since he must buy power of them until his own plant was completed.
Billy crept quickly back to his post near the garage, thinking Mr. Smith might call him. Again he saw the two men in the lamplight going by on the road, this time headed for Tum-wah. An uneasy suspicion came to him: What business had taken those men to the isolated ranches and back so late at night?
A dozen answers,—business, illness, a telegram,—many legitimate errands might be theirs for this midnight trip. Yet Billy could not rid himself of his suspicion.