Satan Sanderson Part 16

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 rea.s.serting 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, coa.r.s.e 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. "a.s.sociation 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 m.u.f.fled 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.

Harry had seen many such machines in his wanderings, and they had aroused no baffling instinct of habitude. But the old self was stirring now, every sense alert. Hour by hour he had found himself growing more delicately susceptible to subtle mental impressions, haunted by shadowy reminders of things and places. Something in the sight of the long, low "racer" reminded him--of what? His eye traced its polished lines, noting its cunning mechanism, its build for silent speed, with the eager lighting of a connoisseur. He took a step toward it, oblivious to all about him.

He did not note that men were gathering, that the nearest saloon was emptying of its occupants. Nor did he see a girl on horseback, with a tiny child before her on the saddle, who reined up sharply opposite.

The rider was Jessica; the child, an ecstatic five-year-old she had picked up on the fringe of the town, to canter in with her hands gripping the pommel of the saddle. She saw Harry's position instantly and guessed it perilous. What did the men mean to do? She leaned forward, a swift apprehension in her face.

Harry came back suddenly to a realization of his surroundings. He looked about him, startled, his cheek darkening its red, every muscle instinctively tightening. He saw danger in the lowering faces, and the old l.u.s.t of daring leaped up instantly to grapple with the rejuvenated character.

Devlin's voice came over the heads of the crowd as, burly and shirt-sleeved, he strode across the street:

"Hand over the dust you've stolen before you are tarred and feathered, Hugh Stires!"

Harry looked at him surprised, his mind instantly recurring to the placard he had seen. Here was a tangible accusation.

"I have stolen nothing," he responded quietly.

"Where did he get what he just sold me?" The jeweler's sour query rose behind him from the doorway.

"We'll find that out!" was the rough rejoinder.

In face of his threatening peril, Jessica forgot all else--the restive horse, the child. She sprang to the ground, her face pained and indignant, and started to run across the street. But with a cry of dismay she turned back. The horse had caught sight of the red automobile, and, snorting and wild-eyed, had swung into the roadway.

"It's Devlin's kid!" some one cried out, and Devlin, turning, went suddenly ashen. The baby was the one soft spot in his ruffianly heart.

He sprang toward the animal, but the movement and the hands clutching at the bridle sent it to a leaping terror. In another instant it had broken through the ring of bystanders, and, frenzied at its freedom, dashed down the long, level street with the child clinging to the saddle-pommel.

It was all the work of a moment, one of panic and confusion, through which rang Jessica's scream of remorse and fright. Torpor held the crowd--all save one, whose action followed the scream as leap follows the spur. In a single step Harry gained the automobile. With an instantaneous movement he pushed the lever down and jerked the throttle wide. The machine bounded into its pace, the people rolling back before it, and, gathering headway, darted after the runaway.

The spectators stood staring. "He'll never catch him," said Michael Halloran, who had joined the crowd. "Funeral Hollow's only a mile away."

With others he hurried to the hotel balcony, where he could watch the exciting race. Jessica stood stock-still, as blanched as Devlin, wringing her hands.

Harry Sanderson had acted with headlong intention, without calculation, almost without consciousness of mental process. Standing on the pavement, with the subtle lure of the motor creeping in his veins, his whole body responding--as his fingers had tingled at sight of the violin--to the m.u.f.fled vibrations of that halted bundle of steel, in the sharp exigency he had answered an overmastering impulse. In the same breath he had realized Jessica's presence and the child's peril, both linked in that anguished cry. With the first bound of the car under him, as the crowd was s.n.a.t.c.hed behind, a weird, exultant thrill shot through every nerve. Each bolt and bar he knew as one would tell his fingers.

Somewhere, at some time, he had known such flight--through mellow sunlight, with the air singing past. Where? When?

Not for the fraction of a second, however, did his gaze waver. He knew that the flat on which the town was built fell away in a hollow ravine to the southward--he could see it from the cabin doorway--a stretch of breakneck road only a mile ahead. Could the child hold on? Could he distance those frenzied hoofs in time? The arrow of the indicator stole forward on the dial.

Far behind, as the crowd watched, a cry rose from the hotel balcony. It was Barney McGinn, the freighter, with a gla.s.s at his eye. "He's gaining!" he shouted. "He has almost overtaken the horse!"

The horse's first fury of speed was tiring. The steel steed was creeping closer. A thunder of hoofs in pursuit would have maddened the flying animal, but the gliding thing that was now so close to him came on with noiseless swiftness. Harry had reserved, with the nicety of a practised hand, a last increment of speed. With the front wheels at the horse's flank, he drew suddenly on this. As the car responded, he swerved it sharply in, and, holding with one hand, leaned far out from the step, and lifted the child from the saddle.

The automobile halted again before the hotel amid a hush. The men who a little while before had been ripe for violence, now stood in shamefaced silence. It was Jessica who ran forward and took the child, still sobbing a little, from Harry's hands. One long look pa.s.sed between them--a look on her part br.i.m.m.i.n.g with a great grat.i.tude for his lifting of her weight of dread and compunction, and with something besides that mantled her cheeks with rich color. She kissed the child and placed her in her father's arms.

Devlin's countenance broke up. He struggled to speak, but could not, and, burying his face in the child's dress and crying like a baby, he crossed the street hastily to his own door.

Harry stepped to the pavement with a dull kind of embarra.s.sment at the manifold scrutiny. He had misconstrued Jessica's flushing silence, and the inference stung. The fierce zest was gone, and the rankling barb of accusation smarted. He should apologize to the owner, he reflected satirically, for helping himself to the automobile--he who stole gold-dust, he at whose door the town laid its unferreted thieveries! He who was the scapegoat for the town's offenses!

That owner, in very fact, stood just then in the hotel doorway regarding him with interest. He was the sheriff of the county. He was about to step forward, when an interruption occurred. A scuffle and a weak bark sounded, and a lean brown streak shot across the pavement.

"Rummy!" cried Harry. "Rummy!"

Through some c.h.i.n.k of the dead wall in his brain the name slipped out, a tiny atom of flotsam retrieved from the wreck of memory. That was all, but to the animal which had just found its lost master, the word meant a sublimation of delight, the clearing of the puzzle of namelessness that had perplexed its canine brain. The dog's heaven was reached!

Down on his knees on the pavement went Harry, with his arms about the starved, palpitating little creature, and his cheek against its s.h.a.ggy coat. In another moment he had picked it up in his arms and was walking up the street.

Late that night Tom Felder, sitting in his office, heard the story of the runaway from the sheriff's lips. He himself had been in court at the time.

"And the horse?" he asked.

"In the Hollow, with his back broken," said the sheriff.

The lawyer sprang from his chair. "Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed. "How can a man like that ever have been a scoundrel?"

The sheriff relit his dead cigar reflectively. "It's a curious thing,"

he said. "They are saying on the street that he's sent Prendergast packing. He'll have to watch out--the old tarantula will sting him if he can!"

Harry Sanderson went back to his cabin with a strange feeling of exaltation and disappointment--exaltation at the recurrence of something of his old adventures, disappointment at the flushed silence with which Jessica had received the child.