A Chilhowee Lily | Page 7

the weales on her arm. "It don't hurt me wuth talkin' 'bout. Ye jes' pound away, an' welcome!"
Perhaps it was her slender, elastic strength and erect grace, with her shining hair and ethereal calm pallor in the midst of the storm that evoked the comparison, for Ozias Crann was suddenly reminded of the happy similitude suggested by the letter that he had heard read and had repeated yesterday to his cronies as he stood in the road. The place was before him for one illumined moment--the niche in the cliff, with its ferns and vines, the delicate stately dignity of the lilies outlined against the intense blue of the sky.
The reminiscence struck him like a discovery. Where else could the flower have been so naturally noticed by this man, a stranger, and remembered as a mark in the expectation of finding it once more when the bulb should flower again--as beside the county road? He would have been hopelessly lost a furlong from the path.
Crann stood for a moment irresolute, then silently grasped his pickaxe and slunk out among the mists on the porch.
He berated his slow mind as he hurried invisible through the vast clouds in which the world seemed lost. Why should the laggard inspiration come so late if it had come at all? Why should he, with the clue lying half developed in his own mental impressions, have lost all the vacant hours of the long, bright night, have given the rumor time to pervade the mountains, and set all the idlers astir before he should strike the decisive blow!
There, at last, was the cliff, beetling far over the mist-filled valley below. A slant of sunshine fell on the surging vapor, and it gleamed opalescent. There was the niche, with the lilies all a-bloom. He came panting up the slope under the dripping trees, with a dash of wind in his face and the odor of damp leafage and mold on the freshening air.
He struck the decisive blow with a will. The lilies shivered and fell apart The echoes multiplied the stroke with a ringing metallic iteration.
The loiterers were indeed abroad. The sound lured them from their own devious points of search, and a half dozen of the treasure-seekers burst from the invisibilities of the mists as Ozias Crann's pickaxe cleaving the mold struck upon the edge of a small japanned box hidden securely between the rocks, a scant foot below the surface. A dangerous spot for a struggle, the verge of a precipice, but the greed for gain is a passion that blunts the sense of peril. The wrestling figures, heedless of the abyss, swayed hither and thither, the precious box among them; now it was captured by a stronger grasp, now secured anew by sheer sleight-of-hand. More than once it dropped to the ground, and at last in falling the lock gave way, and scattered to the wind were numberless orderly vouchers for money already paid, inventories of fixtures, bills for repairs, reports of departments--various details of value in settling the accounts of the mine, and therefore to be transmitted to the main office of the mining company at Glaston. "Ef I hed tole ye ez the money warn't thar, ye wouldn't hev believed me," Lora-linda Byars said drearily, when certain disappointed wights, who had sought elsewhere and far a-field, repaired to the cabin laughing at their own plight and upbraiding her with the paucity of the cache. "I knowed all the time what war in that box. The man lef' it thar in the niche arter he war shot, it bem' heavy ter tote an' not wuth much. But he brung the money with him, an' tuk it off, bein', he said, without orders from the owners, the miners hevin' burnt down the offices, an' bruk open the safe an' destroyed all the papers, ceptin' that leetle box. I sewed up the man's money myself in them feather beds what he lay on whenst he war wagined down 'ter Colb'ry ter take the kyars. He 'lowed the compn'y mought want them papers whenst they went into liquidation, ez he called it, an' tole me how he hed hid 'em."
Rufe Kinnicutt wondered that she should have been so unyielding. She did not speculate on the significance of her promise. She did not appraise its relative value with other interests, and seek to qualify it. Once given she simply kept it. She held herself no free agent. It was not hers.
The discovery that the lure was gold revealed the incentive of her lover's jealous demand to share the custody of the secret. His intention was substituted for the deed in her rigid interpretation of integrity. It cost her many tears. But she seemed thereafter to him still more unyielding, as erect, fragile, ethereally pure and pale