Kenny

CHAPTER XX

THE CHAIR BY THE FIRE

He went with her as far as he dared, and turned back with shining eyes and stumbling feet. He did not afterward remember his supper or what he had eaten, though Hannah at his command had set the table in the kitchen and Hughie had talked sensibly of pumpkins. He did not remember climbing the stairs to Adam's room. The one thing that jarred through his dreamy feeling of detachment was the old man's face.

"You're late!" he said.

"Yes," said Kenny happily, "I am." Even now with Adam's piercing eyes upon him, he had a feeling of invincibility; as if, aloof in the aerial sphere in which he seemed to float, he could shut the old man out.

Adam stared at him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once and be on his guard.

"'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids. And to-night the hills are open and the fairies are all out a-temptin' mortals. I myself have heard the fairy pipes showerin' sweetness everywhere. Wonderful music, Adam! Silver-soft and allurin' and the kind you can't forget! It throws you into a trance and fills you with beautiful longing. I forgot to come home. There! I must tell Hannah to put a light under the churn to-night. Then the fairies, hating fire, can't bewitch it."

Adam stared at him blankly. He was in mad mood, this Irishman. His eyes, ardently blue and tender and intense, danced with incautious gleams of laughter. His color was high. He was gay and utterly friendly.

An odd jealous hunger sprang up in the invalid's eyes.

"Are you mad?" he demanded.

"Quite!" said Kenny.

"More like," said the old man tartly, "you're drunk."

"Drunk," nodded Kenny, "with heather ale. Only the fairies know how to make it now. And who wouldn't be drunk in the head of him to-night with the Good People dancing on the hills and the dead dancing with them."

Adam frowned and shivered.

"You Irish," he said harshly, "are as morbid as you are poetic."

"'Tis all a part of the night," cried Kenny gayly and poured himself some brandy. "The druids," he remembered, "poured libations on the ground to propitiate the evil spirits and the spirits of the dead; but, Adam, I'm drinking to-night to Destiny! To Destiny," he added under his breath, "and the foreverness of her gift!"

"What gift," demanded Adam Craig, "are you trying to clinch with a gift to yourself of my brandy?"

"The gift," said Kenny cryptically, "of—Life!"

Well, he had spoken truth there. Life was love and love was life and perhaps until now he'd known neither.

Still the old man stared at him in dazed and sullen envy. His wild vitality seemed a barrier impossible to surmount.

"And it isn't just Samhain," said Kenny, setting down his glass. "Ugh, Adam, your brandy's abominable! It's the Eve of All Souls. To-night the dead revisit their homes. Once I remember when I was tramping through Ireland, an old woman left a chair by the fireside that the spirit of her son might come back to her. She even left some embers in the fire."

"That," said Adam Craig with a shudder, "will be enough of your damned ghosts and fairies."

Afterward to Kenny the evening was always a blur but he knew they had gotten on badly. And Adam, quiet and sullen, had drunk more than usual.

Kenny sparkled through the evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling curiously light and iridescent.

He meant not to sleep. He meant to roll the shades to the top and with the cold wind upon his face and the stars winking in silver beneficence overhead, to lie awake and think until the dawn came. He slept soundly, dreaming of thistledown and a little old woman in a green cloak who came out of a hill and played a tune upon a sort of lantern-flute. The notes had winged off in bars of music written in fire against the darkness. He had not finished the dream when he was awakened by someone knocking at his door.

It was Hughie, his face pale and disturbed.

"Mr. O'Neill," he said, "I'm wondering if you'd drive down to the village and telephone the doctor to come here first. Mr. Craig's had a bad fall. He's unconscious."

"Unconscious!" exclaimed Kenny, changing color. "How on earth, Hughie, did he fall?"

"I don't know," said Hughie sadly. "He must have climbed out of bed in the night."

"But, Hughie, he couldn't!"

"He could stagger a step or two," explained Hughie. "Not far. The trouble's in his spine. But he never dragged himself so far before."

"How far?"

"From his bed to his sitting room. I found him in a heap by the fire."

"Poor devil!" said Kenny, shocked.

He dressed quickly. Hannah helped him hitch the old mare to the buggy and found him nervous and unfamiliar with his task. Kenny drove off down the lane, oppressed by the bleak wind and the bare black tangle of branches ahead of him. The tragic effort of Adam's wasted legs had left him startled and uneasy. For the life of him he could not put out of his mind the tale of the old Irish woman and the chair she had left by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son. It had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder. It bothered Kenny now. He wished he hadn't remembered it last night or to-day. But the sound of Nellie's hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more recurrent than his own foreboding. It filled him with sadness and guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superstition. Seeking what? Someone he had wronged? The sinister spark inflamed his fancy. His brain whirled. Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the widow's bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before. Then too Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious.

Nellie stumbled and jolted Kenny into sanity. He put his thoughts aside in horror. But dreadful strings of mystery converged persistently to one point: Adam Craig, the pitiful old miser who for some reason huddled every book in the farmhouse on his shelves. Fate cruelly had brought melancholy into this, the first morning of his love. Kenny shivered with resentment.

He telephoned the doctor's farm and found him ready to start his weary ambulant day; hamlet to hamlet, farm to farm, until dusk and often after. The bare thought of it filled Kenny with sympathetic gloom. Then his brain began again to burn in speculation. Frowning, he turned back homewards up the hill and through the wood, where the road lay, rough and lonely.

With his mind upon it he evolved Nellie from her harness and led her into the stall. When he had done with her halter he found that Joan had slipped into the barn and stood a little way off, her soft eyes intent upon him.

"Joan!" he exclaimed radiantly. The sight of her was like a lilac wind in fog. The fog fled and you found the world clear and fragrant.

She came to him instantly, her face like a colorless flower, a faint shadow in her eyes.

"Colleen!" said Kenny. He kissed her gently. Again he was conscious with a flurried feeling of impatience that the force of his tenderness would not rise to his lips. He whose words of love had been so fluent and poetic!

"Hannah sent me," said Joan. "She was afraid you wouldn't know how to get Nellie out of the shafts. Oh, Kenny!" There was quick compassion in her eyes.

"Let's not think of sorrowful things, dear!" said Kenny swiftly. "I dreamed of a lantern."

"And I," said Joan, the rich rose tints he loved flaming in her face, "I dreamed of you."

Kenny choked back the tender untruth he would have liked to utter. For an instant he hated the little old fairy in the green cloak who had come forth from the hill in his dream. How easy for the dream-god to have made her—Joan!

"Joan," he said wistfully, "you're sure you love me!"

"Yes," said Joan. "There is no one in my life I love so well."

"And it will last?"

Disturbed she glanced at him, her eyes dark with rebuke.

"Until the judgment day!" persisted Kenny.

"Kenny," she said, "why do you speak so strangely. Love is love, isn't it? And if you who have known all things love me, how much more must I who have lived so much alone, love and cling to you?"

He kissed her hair and pressed his cheek against it where the shadows were soft and golden.

"I want you, heart of mine," he said steadily, "to love me in this wonderful way that I love you. There are ways and ways of loving."

That, in her girlhood dream of love, she could not see. And Kenny was passionately glad that his words were a riddle.

Then the horn came, clear and mellow, through the cold November air and Joan drew the hood of her cloak about her head.

Kenny sighed. He clung to her hand as she started away.

"Girleen," he said soberly, "the wind's cold. Must you ferry the river in winter, too?"

"Save when there's ice," said Joan. "The bridge is three long miles away."

From the barn doorway he watched the flutter of her cloak as she hurried down the path to the river.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

Kenny went back to the kitchen, hungry and depressed. To his fancy, as eager at times in its morbidity as in its lighter sparkle, the shadow of death seemed brooding over the farmhouse. This an hour later the weary little doctor confirmed. He had tired shadows around his eyes, that doctor; he seemed always bored to death at the proneness of mankind to ills and aches and babies; and his kind tired voice never lost its drawl no matter what the crisis.

"It isn't just the spine trouble, Mr. O'Neill," he said. "With that alone he'd likely linger on for years. And it isn't the trouble here in his chest. That's chronic and unimportant. It's the brandy. He drinks a quart a night and he won't give it up."

"I know."

The doctor shook his head and pursed his lips.

"I think he'll just slip away without regaining consciousness. Pulse is barely a flutter. Joan can tend him. She's done it before. Every now and then for a good many years he's had a bedfast spell. Poor child!" The doctor cleared his throat. "Well, Mr. O'Neill, such is life! I'll stop back to-night on my way home."

Distraught and rebellious, Kenny fought the girl's refusal to let Hannah take her place. She hid the mended gown he hated under an apron of Hannah's, slipped into his arms and out again with tears upon her cheeks, and fled from his protestations with her hands upon her ears. Kenny followed her to the door of Adam's sitting room, frantic with distress. Verily, he thought, as the door closed gently in his face, the quality of Joan's mercy was not strained. It came like Portia's gentle rain from Heaven. It forgot and forgave and condoned. But the thought of her, flowerlike in the shadow of death, was unendurable.

Anxious to help, Kenny sculled the old punt back and forth, whenever the horn blew, until dusk. He had humbly pledged himself to curb a tendency to speed and excitement and therefore ferried the river well until a wind rose at twilight, clouds thickened overhead and a spatter of rain blew into his face. Then his patience waned and he tacked an enormous sign upon the willow under one of Hughie's lanterns. Owing to illness, it said, the ferry had been discontinued. Afterward he went to tell Joan what he had done, and met the doctor on the stairway.

"By morning," he nodded slowly, answering Kenny's look. "Yes, I'm afraid he'll be gone. I'd like to stay, Mr. O'Neill, for Joan's sake. But there's a baby coming over at the Jensen farm. There always is. And my duty as I see it is more with life than with death."

"I'll stay with him," said Kenny. "Joan must rest."

But she would not.

"Donald should be here too," she said. "We are all he has."

"Then," said Kenny, his lips white, "I shall stay here with you."

The night closed in with gusty showers of rain. There was no sound from the high old-fashioned bed where Adam Craig lay, gray and still. The silence, the gloom of dark wood, the grotesque shadows from a lamp burning dimly on the bureau and the loud licking of the clock drove Kenny with a shudder to the window. Death to him who so passionately loved life's gayety and its music was more a thing of horror than of grief. He found no solace in the wind and rain of the autumn night. They plunged him instead into a mood of morbid imagery. The weird music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting the music of death. The rain was tears.

Ochone! Ochone! The wind of sorrow rose and fell, rose and fell, with unearthly cadence. Kenny thought of the horrible Dullahaun who roves about the country with his head under his arm and a death-warning basin of blood in his hand ready to dash in the face of the unlucky wight who answers his knock.

He shuddered and choked. Then Joan slipped into the shelter of his arm, terrified at the thought of death, cried and watched the rain with him.

Adam Craig died at dawn with the rain he hated beating at the window. And peace came wanly to his wrinkled face.

CHAPTER XXII

IN THE CABIN

They were hard days for Kenny, who hated gloom save when it was picturesque and transient. And they were harder for the pity and misgiving in his heart. He himself perhaps had hastened the old man's death with a careless story. Why had it bothered him? Why had it goaded his wasted legs to horrible effort?

Ordinarily Kenny knew he would have resented the intrusion of alien sorrow into his life. He hated sorrow. Now for Joan's sake he made himself a part of it. If Joan must endure it, so could he. But he sickened at the need.

He was doomed to a tragic, unforgettable hour in the churchyard when the voice of the old minister, conventional in its sadness, droned wearily into his very soul:

"Ashes to ashes … dust to dust." … The clock turned back and he stood in a church by an Irish hill. White and terrified, Kenny remembered what in its vivid agony of detail he would fain have forgotten. Why, now, when Joan was slipping into his life, a lonely waif of a girl in a black gown he hated, why must he think years back to that soft-eyed Irish girl and Brian? Had he broken his pledge to her, driving her son away with a passion of self no less definite for its careless gayety? Eileen's son! Eileen's son! Sadness tore at Kenny's heart and twitched at his dry, white lips. Ah! why must he live again that agonizing day when Eileen had gone out of his life forever?

The voice went on, funereal, gentle. Kenny's eyes blurred. Sweat came coldly forth upon his forehead. At the first thud of earth he choked and turned away, the pain unbearable. Adam Craig had driven his nephew away … with a passion of self … and he had died with mercy at his bedside, not love. A passionate hunger for Brian stirred in Kenny's heart and made him lonely. Ah! how farcical his penance! Some nameless thing of self linked him to Adam Craig. The thought was horrible. Some nameless thing linked each mournful detail of to-day to the tragedy of long ago. … And then mercifully the thing became a blur of November wind, a monotonous voice of sorrow, the thud of earth and the end.

The coach toiled up the hill and Kenny, with Joan in his arms, forgot.

"Mavourneen," he said wistfully, "let's slip away, you and I, to the cabin in the pines. I want you to myself. And there in the house—" he looked away. The thought of the old house, bleak and desolate at its best and haunted now by the sense of a presence gone, oppressed him.

Joan nodded.

"And not that dress!" begged Kenny with a shudder.

She laid her cheek against his shoulder.

"It was just for to-day, Kenny. Hannah thought it best." Her soft eyes, curiously child-like with the shadow of sadness in them, appealed to him for understanding. He kissed her, marveling afresh at the tender miracle of peace and tenderness her presence brought him.

"Had I loved Uncle a great deal more—it isn't wrong for me to say that now, Kenny?"

"It would be wrong, dear, if you made pretense of something you couldn't feel."

"I—I meant that even then I could have mourned him better with my heart than this—this dreadful dress. It would carry gloom wherever I went. And that would be selfish."

He blessed her shy intelligence and kissed her again. Then the carriage stopped at the farmhouse door and Kenny hurried up to his room to find clothes less formal and depressing. Afterward he went ahead to the cabin and built a fire.

The crackle of the wood was lively to his ears and cheerful. The room grew, warm and homelike. When Joan came a little later, he was whistling softly and making tea. He liked her dress. It was dark and soft. He liked the lace fichu at her throat. And he liked the huge old-fashioned cameo that fastened it.

"Hughie is hunting the key to the table-drawer," she said. "I told him about the cabin. It doesn't matter now. Poor Uncle!" She blinked and wiped her eyes. "He didn't mean to be cruel, Kenny. It was the brandy and the pain. If Hughie finds the key, he wondered if you'd go over Uncle's papers to-night. The will is there."

"The will!" said Kenny. He put wood on the fire in some excitement. A miser's will!

Joan's eyes were tender.

"Kenny, how good you've been!"

"Nonsense!" he said brusquely.

"Hughie said so, too. And Hannah and Hetty. Someone had to think and plan and you did it all so well. And, Kenny, I told Hannah, that I'm going to marry you and she cried and kissed me and—and poured a wash-bowl full of tea for Hughie to wash his hands in!"

"The heart of her!" said Kenny. "Come, girleen. The tea's ready. I want to see you pour it."

He watched with his heart in his eyes while she poured his tea. There was a sense of home in the cabin here and the crackle of the fire was the music of comfort. Kenny drank a little of his tea and roved off to the window to light a cigarette.

Beyond the November monotone of trees blazed the red of a sunset. A winter sunset! The fall was over.

"Joan!" he called softly. "Come, jewel machree, the Gray Man is stealing through the pines."

She came at once and slipped into the circle of his arm. Kenny held her tight and found his courage. He was restless, it seemed, and after months of irresponsibility, the thought of work was bothering him badly. Kenny must leave the farm. He must go soon; in a week. And his wife must go with him.

Joan's breathless amazement made him laugh.

"But, Kenny, I—I can't!" she said.

"And I," said Kenny stubbornly, "can't and won't go away and leave you here. The thought of winter and the hills and that barn of a house when the wind is blowing would haunt me. No, no, girleen!"

Joan looked up and smiled and her soft eyes were wistful.

"Kenny, I must study for another year!"

"Another year!" said Kenny blankly. "Colleen, you've the wisdom of the ages in your head right now."

Joan shook her head.

"I must learn to be your wife," she said. "Now it—it dazzles and frightens me—"

"Joan!"

"Have you forgotten, Kenny, that I have lived my life up here in hills and trees. And you—"

"Joan, please!" he begged in distress.

"But I can't forget," said the girl steadily. "Whenever I read the article Garry sent about 'Kennicott O'Neill, brilliant painter'—think of it, Kenny! 'Brilliant painter!'—I go back and read again just to be sure I'm not dreaming. I've been so much alone that the thought of going out into your world with you—terrifies me. I could not bear to have you—sorry!"

"Mavourneen!" he said, shocked.

There were tears upon her cheeks.

"I would only ask that you be your own dear self," said Kenny gently. "And every man of my world and every woman will stare and envy!"

"I must know music and French," said Joan, checking the need upon her fingers. "I must know how to dance. Now when I talk I must have something to say. Otherwise I feel shy and quiet. I must learn how to talk a great deal without saying anything as you do sometimes."

He laughed in delight at the final need.

"All of it," declared Kenny happily, "I can teach you."

"No," said Joan with a definite shake of her head. "You would kiss me. And I would always be right even when you knew I was wrong."

His eyes laughed at her mischievously. But he caught her hands and pressed them to his lips.

"Listen, dear," he pleaded. "My world isn't a world of social climbers or snobs or dollar-worshippers. It's a world of gifted men and women who haven't time to look up your ancestors or your bank balance before they decide to be friendly and kind. I know a poet whose mother was a gypsy, a painter who's a baron and he says he can't help it, a French girl who paints millionaire babies and her father was a tight-rope walker in a circus. My world, Joan, is the happy-go-lucky Bohemia of success and the democracy of real talent. We're actors and painters and sculptors and writers and artists in general and all in all I think we work a little more and play a little more, enjoy a little more and suffer a little more than the rest of the world. Once in a while to be sure a head grows a bit too big and then we all take a bop at it! But the big thing is we're human; just folks, as a man in the grillroom said one night. We're human and we're kind. It's not a smart set, dear. And it's not an ultra-fashionable four-hundredy thing. God forbid! It's the kind of Bohemia I love. And I'm sure you'll love it too."

Her eyes were shining. In the dusk her color came to him like the glimmer of a flower.

"Kenny!" she exclaimed. "How wonderful it all is, you and all of it! And yet if—if I feel as I do, you must let me go for a year. Otherwise if I lack confidence in myself—Oh, can't you see, Kenny, I shall be shy and frightened and always ill at ease!"

"Go!" he echoed blankly.

"Somewhere," said Joan, "to study music and French and how to talk your kind of nonsense. Hannah says there must be money enough in Uncle's estate for that."

"Where," said Kenny, his heart cold, "would you go?"

"I thought," said Joan demurely, "that perhaps I could study in New York where I wouldn't be so—lonesome."

He caught her in his arms.

"Heart of mine!" he whispered. "You thought of that."

"Then," said Joan, "I can learn something of your world before I become a part of it. Don't you see, Kenny? I can look on and learn to understand it. I should like that. Come, painter-man! The tea's cold. And it's growing dark. We'd better light the lamp."

With the tea-pot singing again on the fire and the lamp lighted, Kenny, but momentarily tractable, had another interval of rebellion. Joan, in New York, might better be his wife. Joan, studying, might better have him near to talk his sort of nonsense, listen to her music and make love volubly in French to which she needed the practice of reply. His plea was reckless and tender but Joan shook her head; and Kenny realized with a sigh that her preposterous notion of unfitness was strong in her mind and would not be denied.

"A year, Kenny!" pleaded Joan. "After all, what is a year? And at the end I shall be so much happier and sure." She came shyly to his chair and slipped her arms around his neck. "I want so much to do whatever you want me to do. And yet—and yet, Kenny, feeling as I do, I shall be—Oh, so much happier if you will wait until I can come and say that I am ready to be your wife."

"It will make you happier!" he said abruptly.

"Yes."

"Then, mavourneen," said Kenny, "it shall be as you say. I care more for your happiness than for my own."

They went back through the darkness hand in hand.

CHAPTER XXIII

A MISER'S WILL

Kenny lingered moodily over his supper. His evening was casting its shadow ahead. He dreaded the thought of climbing the stairs to Adam's empty room. If he could have kept his hostile memories in the face of death, he told himself impatiently, it would have been easier. But Garry was right. He was wild and sentimental. Only pitiful memories lingered to haunt him: rain and loneliness and the old man's hunger for excitement.

He went at last with a sigh, oppressed by the creak of the banister where Adam had sat, sinister and silent in his wheel-chair, listening to the music. Memories were crowding thick upon him. Again and again he wished that he had never opened the door of the sitting room that other night and caught the old man off his guard. It had left a specter in his mind, horrible in its pathos and intense. Strung fiercely to the thought of emptiness, it came upon him nevertheless, as he opened the door, with a curious chill sense of palpability; as if silence and emptiness could strike one in the face and make him falter.

The room was fireless and silent and unspeakably dreary. Hughie had left a lamp burning upon the table. The key he had found in the pocket of the old man's bathrobe lay beside it.

For an interval Kenny stood stock still, his color gone. He faced strange ghosts. Here in this faded room, with its mystery of books, he had known agonizing pity and torment, gusts of temper, selfish and unselfish, real and feigned, moments of triumphal composure that now in the emptiness it was his fate to remember with a sickening shudder of remorse. Here he had battled in vain for Joan, practicing brutally the telling of much truth; and here with his probing finger, Adam Craig had roused his slumbering conscience into new doubt and new despair. And here he must not forget he had told the tale of the fairy mill … and suspicion had come darkly to his mind. Suspicion of what? That, as ever, he refused to face.

A chair stood by the fireplace. Kenny with a shudder moved it to a distant corner. He could not bear the memory of that last night when he had barred the old man out from his joyous mood of sparkle, telling Samhain tales of the fairies and the dead.

After all, had he meant always to be cruel, that keen-eyed old man with his keener wits? What conflict of spirit and body had lain behind his fretful fits of temper?

Kenny turned, blinking, from the wheelchair, and his glance, blurred a little, found the old man's glasses on the mantel. The shabby case, left behind while Adam faced the great adventure, was oddly pitiful. Kenny cleared his throat. He had his moment of rebellion then at the inevitability of death and doom. It behooved all of us, he remembered with set lips, to be kind and mend quarrels while the sap of life ran in our veins, strong and full.

The sight of the key upon the table sent his thoughts flying off at a tangent. A miser's will! … Mother of Men! It was a thing of morbid mystery and romance!

Kenny sat down in wild excitement and opened the drawer.

He saw at once an orderly packet of papers. The will, which barely a month ago, Hughie said, he and Hannah had signed without reading, lay uppermost. Adam had written his will himself, disdaining lawyers.

Kenny opened the will and began to read. He read as he always read in moments of excitement, blurring through with a glance. But though the old man's writing was distinct and almost insolent in its boldness, the portent of the written words did not filter through at once to his understanding. He frowned and read again. Once more he read, pacing the floor with unquiet eyes. A number of things were becoming clearer. There was in the first place no mention of the fugitive nephew. Joan was the sole heir. There was one executor. That executor was Joan's guardian and Joan's guardian was one—Kennicott O'Neill! Kenny read the name aloud as if it belonged to someone else. Joan's guardian! Again he read the clause aloud with an exclamation of doubt and unbelief. It lay there definite and clear. He was the sole executor of Adam's will and he was Joan's guardian. Startled he read the rest.

"To Kennicott O'Neill, my friend, my signet ring … to my niece, Joan West, from whom, no matter what the circumstances, I have never had an unkind word, I bequeath the Craig farm and all the land and all the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth wheresoever situate, provided the executor can find it."

Kenny went back with a feeling of numbness in his brain and read it all again.

"The rest of my wealth wheresoever situate … provided the executor can find it!"

Those words he scanned blankly with a feeling of much fire in his head and a tantalizing cloud before his eyes. They meant what? Strange hints and subtle smiles recurred to him. … And Adam had been a miser who read of buccaneers and hidden treasure. … Buccaneers and hidden treasure! … He would have hidden pirates' gold, he had said, under the biggest apple-tree in the orchard, under the lilac bush or … Where else had he said? … And … what … had … he … meant?

Kenny struck his head fiercely with his hand, raked his hair in the old familiar gesture and roamed turbulently around the room with the will in his hand. He was conscious of that dangerous alertness in his brain that with him always presaged some unusual clarity of vision, a startling speed with the adding of two and two. Four came now with bewildering conviction. Fragments of the puzzle of mystery that had bothered him for days dropped dizzily into place, even the fairy mill and the Eve of All Souls. What wonder that in a drunken fit of superstition Adam had staggered out to seek his dead!

With his hair in disarray from the frantic combing of his fingers, Kenny went down to find Joan. He read the will aloud to her, controlling his voice with an effort.

"Don shall have the farm," said Joan. "I shouldn't know what to do with it."

Kenny read the baffling clause at the end of the will again.

"'All the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth, wheresoever situate, provided the executor can find it.'"

It seemed to him in his excitement that he could not tell her what he thought—that he could not say it all with care and calm when his head was whirling.

"Joan," he said gently, "you must tell me everything you remember about your mother and your father and your uncle. And whether there was ever money. Much money," he insisted, his vivid face imploring.

Joan shook her head sadly.

"There is so little I remember, Kenny," she said. "So very little. There was never money. I do not remember my mother or my father. Neither does Donald. We lived until I was eight with an old cousin, Nellie Craig. She said that uncle was a miser who loved nothing but his brandy. Then she died and we came here. We had to come. There was no other place for us. I remember that Don's clothes and mine were always ragged until I grew old enough to mend them. Then I found mother's trunks in the garret. Later Don and I thought of the ferry and had for the first time some money of our own."

Kenny looked crestfallen.

"And there is nothing more?" he said. "Think, Joan, think!"

"Nothing," said Joan. "Donald and I were afraid of Uncle. We never dared to ask him questions. And he never spoke of my mother save to sneer and curse the stage. What is it, Kenny? What are you thinking?"

"I think," said Kenny, making a colossal effort to speak with the calm he could not feel, "that somewhere buried on the farm is a great deal of money. I think it belonged to your mother and that it was left in trust to your uncle for Donald and you—"

"Kenny!"

"I think," went on Kenny steadily, "that this singular clause in your uncle's will was a miser's struggle between justice and his instinct for hoarding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money. God knows how or where, and shunted the responsibility of its finding upon me. If it was never found, as perhaps he hoped, he had still fulfilled his trust and the dictates of his conscience in willing the money back to you."

"But, Kenny, how could he bury it?"

"How often," reminded Kenny, "has Hughie in summer wheeled him out to the orchard and left him there? How often has he wheeled himself around the walk by the lilac bush? And he was clever and cunning. Could he not, from time to time, hide the money in his bathrobe and find some means of digging?"

Joan looked unconvinced.

"And where," she said, "would my mother, who earned her living on the stage, get money? A great deal, I mean?"

"I—I don't know," said Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I wish I did. Sometime or other, Joan, there has been Craig money and a lot of it. This old house is the house of an aristocrat with money enough to gratify expensive whims. Either the money was willed to her or with the beauty she must have had, she married it. They are the things you and I must find out somehow. Of one thing I am absolutely convinced. There is money. It did not belong to your uncle. It is hidden somewhere on the farm."

He told her of the fairy mill, of the old man's gloating pride in the word miser, of All Souls' Eve and Adam Craig's hints about the apple tree and the lilac bush.

"And many another place," added Kenny bitterly, "that slipped by me for I didn't listen!"

"It is unlikely," Joan said, "that he would find the opportunity for hiding money in so many places. Why then did he name them all?"

"His conscience forced him to give some inkling of the spot where he had hidden money not his own. But he purposely multiplied our chances of failure. Joan, I've got to get a spade and dig up the apple-tree!"

His excitement was contagious. Neither of them heard Hughie in the doorway until he spoke.

"Mr. O'Neill," he said eagerly, "have you read the will?"

Kenny struck himself upon the forehead and stared at Hughie in genuine resentment. Hughie was another problem. But Hughie's quiet eyes pleaded; and Hughie's ruddy face was honest. Kenny told him all.

"I'm not surprised," said Hughie. "From the minute I set foot here three years back, I said, and Hannah said, that Mr. Craig was a miser. And it's common talk in the village."

But Kenny was off through the doorway with the will in his hand. Joan and Hughie followed him to the kitchen.

Here when the will had been read again commotion seized them all. Hughie went out to the barn to hunt a spade, Hannah trotted about talking of wraps, Hetty found a lantern for Kenny and Kenny burned his fingers lighting it, and stepped on the cat. Joan soothed the outraged feline with a nervous laugh. There was madness in the air. In an interval of blank disgust in which he criticized the length of the cat's tail and the clarion quality of his yell, Kenny fumed off barnwards in search of Hughie. His excitement was compelling. Hannah headed a cloaked exodus from the kitchen, chirping an astonishment which she claimed was unprecedented in her quiet life.

They straggled up the orchard hill in a flutter.

It was snowing a little. The coldness of the air was soft and heavy. Hannah and Hughie held the lanterns high and with a startling attack that made the dirt fly, Kenny began to dig.

The lantern light rayed off grotesquely through the leafless orchard but the silent group, intent upon the energetic digger, watched only the spot where the fan-like rays converged upon the spade. The wind, sharp, intermittent and bringing with it now and then a flurry of snow, flapped their clothes about them. Kenny, pausing to wipe his forehead, thought the night warm. Joan's eyes, dark, solemn, frightened, spurred him on to greater effort. He dug furiously, flinging earth in all directions. Hughie marvelled at his madcap speed and the strength of his sinewy arms. His jaw was set. His face, dark and vivid in the lantern light, shone with a boy's excitement. But when the wind came he looked defiant. They could not know that to him, then, the spirit of Adam Craig seemed to come with a sigh and a rustle and hover near them.

Hughie took his turn at the spade but to Kenny his methodical competence proved an irritant. He was glad when Hughie's back gave out and forced him to surrender.

"Mr. O'Neill," said Hannah flatly after what seemed an interminable interval of digging, "you've dug a hole big enough to bury yourself. Mr. Craig's money couldn't be no further down than that. Myself I think you'd better let it go until morning. It's snowin' harder every minute and we'll all get our death of cold."

Kenny shuddered at the homely phrase. But he wiped the dirt and perspiration from his forehead and went off toward the kitchen in gloomy silence, his energy and optimism gone.

CHAPTER XXIV

DIGGING DOTS

So madness settled down upon the Craig farm.

Futile, flurried days of digging followed for which Kenny, delving desperately in his memory, supplied forgotten clues. Fearful lest the villagers might take it into their heads to climb the hill to Craig Farm and help them dig, he pledged every one to secrecy and went on digging, with Hughie at his heels. The suspense became fearful and depressing.

On the third day Hannah rebelled. The gloom and mystery were getting on her nerves.

"Hetty," she said irritably, "if you're standin' at the window there, figurin' out where Mr. Craig's money is likely to be buried, you can stop it this minute and clean the lamps. Your father's out pulling up the floor-boards in the barn and Mr. O'Neill's digging up the lilac bush for the third time. And that's enough. It beats me how Mr. O'Neill can go on rememberin' so much now he's got his memory started. He just seems to unravel things out of it overnight. It keeps me all worked up. I feel as if I ought to whisper when I speak and every night the minute I get to sleep I find myself diggin' in first one outlandish place and then another. And if I'm not diggin' in my sleep, your father is, with jerks and starts and grunts enough to wake the dead. I'm all unstrung. So far as I can see the only thing we're findin' is nerves. One thing I will say: It was dull and lonesome before Mr. O'Neill came and I missed him when he went but dear knows, it was peaceful. It's been one thing right after the other. Who upset Mr. Abbott in the river, I'd like to know, and almost hit him in the head with an oar? Who kept Mr. Craig so upset that he threw his brandy bottle at your father most every morning? Who sang the roan cow into kickin' at the milk? Who—"

"Sh!" said Hetty.

It seemed that Mr. O'Neill at that minute was not digging up the lilac bush. There was a sound of hurried footsteps in the room beyond and he came in with a piece of letter paper in his hand.

"Look, Hannah," he cried. "Look! I found it among Mr. Craig's papers. It's a rude chart of the farm, picked out here and there in dots."

Hannah wiped her arms and put on her glasses. The paper filled her with excitement.

"Sakes alive, Mr. O'Neill," she exclaimed, "what will you do now?"

"Do?" said Kenny wildly. "Do? There's only one thing to do, of course. Hughie and I will dig up the dots. I wish to Heaven I could find a Leprechaun somewhere under a thorn-bush."

"What's a Leper John?" demanded Hannah.

"A fairy shoemaker," explained Kenny absently, "in a red coat and he wears buckled shoes and knee-breeches and a hat with a peak and always he's mendin' a shoe that he doesn't finish, find him and never once let him trick you into lookin' away and he'll tell you where treasure is hidden, always."

Hannah blinked.

"What ye need most to my mind, Mr. O'Neill," she said earnestly, "is a regiment of grave-diggers and stone-cutters to help you and Hughie get the thing done."

Night came upon them with Hughie digging up a dot beside the well and Kenny again in the orchard. Everything led back somehow to the orchard, his memory, the chart, even his own conviction.

That night in a dream Kenny distinctly saw the weary little doctor with a bag of mystery in his hand and a spade over his shoulder walking down the orchard hill.

He awoke at dawn with a shiver of excitement. The doctor! What could be more reasonable? Adam had known him for a lifetime. Whom else would he trust? The thought nerved him to heroics.

Kenny climbed out of bed and dressed, shiveringly conscious that the morning was cold enough to turn his breath to steam. It was that period of indistinctness moreover when farmers and roosters, he knew, were getting up all over the dawn, but Kenny, with little time and no inclination at all for melancholy rebellion, tip-toed down the stairway with his shoes in his hand. He put them on by the kitchen fire. There was water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold enough to hurt his face. Still his excitement kept him keyed to a pitch of singular and optimistic hilarity. Through the kitchen window came the pale glimmer of snow. He hoped Hughie wouldn't hear him harnessing Nellie, and shoot at the barn. The possibility sent him to the kitchen stairway. It wound upward in an old-fashioned twist to the room above.

"Hughie!" he called in a low voice. "Hughie!"

There was a noise of many creaks overhead.

"I'm going to hitch up Nellie and drive over to Dr. Cole's farm. I—I feel sure he buried the money!"

"God Almighty!" exclaimed Hughie.

But Kenny was already on his way to the kitchen door.