King Spruce Part 40

Something in the horror of her wide-open eyes told him plainly now that this could not be merely the question of the loss of one of the Skeets.

And with that conviction growing out of bewildered doubt, he went with her when she led him away towards the office camp. A suspicion wild as a nightmare flashed into his mind. In the w.a.n.gan she faced him, as woe-stricken, as piteously afraid, as though she were confessing a crime against him.

"It was John Barrett's daughter Elva on that team with me," she choked.

"She wanted to come--but I'll be honest with you, Mr. Wade. She wouldn't have come if I hadn't encouraged her--yes, put the idea into her head and the means into her hands. I've been a fool, Mr. Wade, but I'll not be a coward and lie about my responsibility."

He gazed at her, his face ghastly white in the lantern-light.

"She wanted to--she was coming here--she is lost?" he mumbled, as though trying to fathom a mystery.

Infinite pity replaced the distraction in the girl's face.

"Forgive me, Mr. Wade!" she cried. "Not for my folly--you can't overlook that. Forgive me for wasting time. But I didn't know how to say it to you." She put her woman's weakness from her, though the struggle was a mighty one, and her face showed it. "I won't waste any more words, Mr.

Wade. John Barrett has been at my father's house for weeks. He has been near death--he is near death now, but the big doctors from the city say that he will get well. He must have been through some terrible trouble up here."

She looked at him with questioning gaze, as though to ask how much he knew of the strain that had prostrated John Barrett, the stumpage king.

"He was in great danger--and his exposure--" stammered Wade.

But she went on, hurriedly:

"It was fever, and it went to his head, and he talked and raved. His daughter came from the city and nursed him, and she has heard him talking, talking, talking, all the time--talking about you, and how you saved him from the fire; talking about a woman who is dead and a man who is alive, and a girl--"

"Does Elva Barrett--know?" he demanded, hoa.r.s.ely.

"It was too plain not to know--after she saw that girl, Mr. Wade. The girl was there at our house--she is there now. It isn't all clear to us yet. We have only the ravings of a sick man--and the face of that girl.

Father doesn't understand all of it, either. But he knows that you do, although you haven't told him." She clutched her trembling hands to hold them steady. "And he has talked and talked of other things, Mr.

Wade--the sick man has. He has said that you have his reputation, and his prospects, and the happiness of his family all in your hands, and that you are waiting to ruin him because he has abused you; and he has tossed in his bed and begged some one to come to you and promise you--buy you--coax you--"

"It's a cursed lie--infernal, though a sick man babble it!" Wade cried, heart-brokenly. "It holds me up as a blackmailer, Miss Nina. It makes me seem a wretch in Elva's eyes. And yet--was she--was she coming here thinking I was that kind--coming here to beg for her father?" he demanded.

"We--I--oh, I don't like to tell you we believed that of you," the girl sobbed. "No, I didn't believe it. But if you had only heard him lying there talking, talking! And you were the one that he seemed to fear. And we thought if you knew of it you wouldn't want him to worry that way.

And if we could carry back some word of comfort from you to him--She wanted to come to you, Mr. Wade, and I encouraged her and helped her to come--because--because--" The girl caught her breath in a long sob, and cried: "She loves you, Mr. Wade! And I've pitied you and her ever since that day in the train when I found out about it."

It was not a moment to a.n.a.lyze emotions. Nina Ide, in her ingenuous declaration of Elva Barrett's motives in seeking him, had made his heart for an instant blaze with joy. For that instant he forgot the shame of the baseless babblings of the sick man, the awful mystery of Elva Barrett's disappearance. The blow of it--that Elva Barrett was gone--that she was somewhere in those woods alone, or worse than alone, had stunned him at first. Groping out of that misery, striving to realize what it meant, he had faced first the hideous thought that she might believe him mean enough to seek revenge. Then came the dazzling hope that Elva Barrett so loved him that she adventured--imprudently and recklessly, but none the less bravely--in order to make her love known.

Then over all swept the black bitterness of the calamity.

"But you must have some suspicion--some hint how she was taken or how she went!" he cried. "In Heaven's name, Miss Nina, think! think! You heard some outcry! There was some hidden rock or stump to jar the sled!

The man did not search along the road far enough! She must be lost--lost!" and his voice rose almost to a shriek.

"There was no cry, Mr. Wade. And I went back with the man. We searched; we called--we even went as far as the place where we covered ourselves with the blankets. We could find no track, and the snow was driving and sifting. The man does not know it was Elva Barrett," she added.

He suddenly remembered the driver's statement.

"She came in Kate Arden's clothes," confided the girl. "Those who saw her ride out of Castonia, Mr. Wade, thought it was Kate Arden. And Kate Arden, in Elva Barrett's dress, is sitting now beside John Barrett, holding his hand, and his daughter's face has soothed him. He thinks it is his daughter beside him. They are so like, Kate and Elva. We waited until we had made sure. It was my plan. And Kate obeyed me. I don't know what she is thinking of. She is sullen and silent, but she took the place by his bed when I told her to. Then it could not be said that John Barrett's daughter had come seeking Dwight Wade."

Even in this stress he could still feel grat.i.tude for the subterfuge that checked the tongues of gossip.

"I wish father had more authority over me," sobbed the girl. "He wouldn't have let us come on such a crazy errand if I hadn't bossed him into it." The lament was so guilelessly feminine that Wade put aside his own woe for the moment to think of the girl's distress.

"This will be your home until I can send you back, Miss Nina," he said, gently. "I will have old Christopher bring in your supper and mend your fire."

"And about her, Mr. Wade?" she cried.

"I'm going," he said, simply, but with such earnestness that her eyes flooded again with tears.

CHAPTER XXI

THE MAN WHO CAME FROM NOWHERE

"He hadn't a word for no one, not even for me or Mike, And whenever we spoke or tried to joke, he growled like a Chessy tyke."

Dwight Wade found a lively conference in progress in the main camp.

Tommy Eye was doing most of the talking, and it was plain that his opinions carried weight, for no one presumed to gainsay him.

"And I'll say to you what I'm tellin' to them here, Mr. Wade," continued the teamster. "You saw for yourself what happened here last night. A ha'nt done it. And the ha'nt done this last. They're pickin' Skeets right and left."

"Ha'nt must be in the pay of Pulaski D. Britt," remarked one rude joker.

"He's been the one most interested in gettin' the tribe out of this section."

Dwight Wade, love and awful fear raging in his heart, was in no mood to play dilettante with the supernatural, nor to relish jokes.

"We'll have done with this foolishness, men!" he cried, harshly. "A girl has been lost in these woods." He was protecting Elva Barrett's incognito by a mighty effort of self-repression. The agony of his soul prompted him to leap, shouting, down the tote road, calling her name and crying his love and his despair. "I want this crew to beat the woods and find her."

"She can't ever be found," growled a prompt rebel. "I heard the driver tell. She was picked right up and lugged off. There ain't any of us got wings."

"Oh, you've got to admit that there are ha'nts!" persisted Tommy, with fine relish for his favorite topic. "And they pick up people. I see one, in the shape of a tree, pick up an ox once and break his neck."

"D--n you for drooling idiots!" raved Wade, beside himself. It was the first outlet for the storm of his feelings.

He ordered them to get lanterns and start on the search--he strode among them with brandished fists and whirling arms, and they dodged from in front of him, staring in amazement.

"My Gawd," mourned Tommy, "this camp has had the spell put on it for sure! The ha'nt has driv' the boss out of his head, and will have him next. And if it can drive a college man out of his head, what chance has the rest of us got?"

Panic was writ large in the faces of the simple woodsmen, and fear glittered in their eyes. A single queer circ.u.mstance would merely have set them to wondering; but these unexplainable events, following each other so rapidly and taking ominous shade from the gla.s.s that lugubrious Tommy Eye held over them, shook them out of self-poise. It needed but one voice to cry, "The place is accursed!" to precipitate a rout, and old Christopher Straight had the woodsman's keen scent for trouble of this sort.

"A moment! A moment, Mr. Wade!" he called. He patted the young man's elbow and urged him towards the door. "I want to speak to you. Keep quiet, my men, and go in to your supper."

As he pa.s.sed the cook-house door he sharply ordered the cook to sound the delayed call--the cook being then engaged in discussing, with chopping-boss and cookee, a certain "side-hill lounger," a ha'nt that wrought vast mischief of old along Ripogenus gorge.

"Mr. Wade," advised the old man, when they were apart from the camp, "I'm sorry to see you get so stirred up over the Skeet girl, for I don't believe she appreciates your kindness. I have this matter pretty well settled in my own mind. I don't know just why Miss Nina is up here, nor why she has brought that girl back--or tried to. It is plain, though, that the girl has deceived her."

"I don't understand," quavered Wade, struggling between his own knowledge and old Christopher's apparent certainty.

"The Skeet girl, having her own reasons for wanting to come this way from Castonia, got as far as Pogey Notch, slipped off the team, and made her way to Britt's camp on Jerusalem to join Colin MacLeod. It's all a put-up job, Mr. Wade, and they've simply done what they set out to do in the first place, when Britt and his crew followed John Barrett and me to Durfy's. So I wouldn't worry any more about the girl, Mr. Wade. Let her stay where she plainly wants to stay."