The Great Quest Part 9

"The ungrateful reprobate!" Uncle Seth cried with an angry gesture.

"He's drawn me into this thing hand and foot--hand and foot. I'm committed. It's too late to withdraw, and he knows it. And now, now for the first time, mind you, he's starting on one of his old sprees."

"He's not a hard drinker," I said. "In all the time he's been in Topham he's not been the worse for liquor, and this evening, so far as I could see, he was just taking a gla.s.s--"

"You don't know him as he used to be," my uncle cried.

"A gla.s.s," put in Abe Guptil; "but with Jed Matthews!"

"You've hit the nail on the head," Uncle Seth burst out--"with Jed Matthews. G.o.d save we're ruined by this night's work. If he should go out to Higgleby's barn with that gang of thieves, my good name will go too. I swear I'll sell the brig."

Uncle Seth wildly paced the room and scowled until every testy wrinkle on his face was drawn into one huge knot that centred in his forehead.

The only sounds, as Abe and I sat watching him in silence, were the thumping of his feet as he walked and the hoa.r.s.e whisper of his breathing. Plainly, he was keyed up to a pitch higher than ever I had seen him.

At that moment, from far beyond the village, shrilly but faintly, came a wild burst of drunken laughter. It was a single voice and one strange to me. There was something devilish in its piercing, unrestrained yell.

"Merciful heavens!" Uncle Seth cried,--actually his hand was shaking like the palsy; a note of fear in his strained voice struck to my heart like a finger of ice,--"I'd know that sound if I heard it in the shrieking of h.e.l.l; and I have not heard Neil Gleazen laugh like that in thirty years. Come, boys, maybe we can stop him before it's too late."

Thrusting his fingers through his hair so that it stood out on all sides in disorder, he wildly dashed from the room.

Springing up, Abe and I followed him outdoors and down the road. We ran with a will, but old though he was, a frenzy of fear and anxiety and shame led him on at a pace we could scarcely equal. Down the long road into town we ran, all three, breathing harder and harder as we went, past the store, the parsonage, and the church, and past the smithy, where someone called to us and hurried out to stop us.

It was the smith, who loomed up big and black and ominous in the darkness.

"They've gone," he said, "they've gone to Higgleby's barn."

"Who?" my uncle demanded. "Who? Say who! For heaven's sake don't keep me here on tenterhooks!"

"Neil Gleazen," said the smith, "and Jed Matthews and all the rest.

Ah, you wouldn't listen to _me_."

"And all the rest!" Uncle Seth echoed weakly.

For a moment he reeled as if bewildered, even dazed. Whatever it was that had come over him, it seemed to have pierced to some unsuspected weakness in the fibre of the man, some spot so terribly sensitive that he was fairly crazed by the thrust. To Abe and me, both of us shocked and appalled, he turned with the madness of despair in his eyes.

"Boys," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "we've got to be ready to leave. Call Sim and Arnold! Hitch up the horses! Pack my bag and--and, Joe,"--he laid his hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, a mere trembling breath of a whisper,--"here's the key to the house safe.

Pack all that's in it in the bed of the wagon while the others are busy elsewhere. O Joe! what a wretched man I am! Why in heaven's name could he not walk straight for just one day more?"

Why, indeed? I thought. But I remembered Higgleby's barn, and in my own heart I knew the reason. Secretly, all this time, Neil Gleazen had been hand in glove with his old disreputable cronies; now that he had got Uncle Seth so far committed to this new venture that he could not desert it, Gleazen was entirely willing to throw away his hard-won reputation for integrity, for the sake of one farewell fling with the "old guard."

"Go, lads," Uncle Seth cried; "go quickly." He rested a shaking hand on my arm as Abe turned away. "My poor, poor boy!" he murmured.

"I've meant to do so well by you, Joey! Heaven keep us all!"

"But you?" I asked.

"I'm going, if I can, to bring Neil Gleazen back before it is too late," Uncle Seth replied. And with that he set off into the darkness.

As we turned back to the store to rouse up Arnold and Sim, I caught a glimpse of the stark white platform on the green, which was visible even in the darkness, and ironically I thought of the farewell ceremonies that were to take place next day.

I shall never forget how the store looked that night, as Abe and I came hurrying up to it. The shadows on the porch were as black as ink, and the shuttered windows seemed to stare like the sightless eyes of a blind man who hears a familiar voice and turns as if to see whence it comes. From the windows of the room above, which Arnold and Sim occupied, there shone a few thin shafts of light along the edges of the shades, and the window frames divided the shades themselves into small yellow squares, on which a shadow came and went as one of the men moved about the room.

In reply to our cries and knocks, Arnold raised the curtain and we saw first his head, then Sim's, black against the lighted room.

"Who is there?" he called, "and what's wanted?"

Almost before we had finished pouring out our story, Arnold was downstairs and fumbling at the bolts of the door; and as we entered the dark store, Sim, his shoes in his hand, followed him, even more than usually grotesque in the light from above.

"My friends," said Arnold, calmly, "let us now, all four, prove to ourselves and to Seth Upham, the mettle that is in us."

We lost no time in idle speculation. Dividing among us all that was to be done, we fell to with a will. Working like men possessed, we packed our own possessions and Uncle Seth's, both at the store and at the barn; and while the others were still busy in the carriage-shed, I hurried back to the house and opened the safe, and brought out bags of money and papers and heaven knows what, and as secretly as possible packed them in the bottom of the wagon. For three hours we toiled at one place and the other; then, hot, tired, excited, apprehensive of we knew not what, we rested by the wagon and waited.

"I never heard of anything so rattle-headed in all my life," Sim Muzzy cried, when he had caught his breath. "Seth Upham gets crazier every day. Here all's ready for the grand farewell to-morrow and all of us to be there, and not one of us to leave town until next week, and yet he gets us up at all hours of the night as if we was to start come sunrise. I'm not going to run away at such an hour, I can tell you. Why it may be they'll call on me to make a speech! Who knows?"

"We'll be lucky, I fear," said Arnold Lamont, "if we do not start before sunrise."

"Before sunrise! Well, I'll have you know--"

I simply could not endure Sim's interminable talk. "Watch the goods and the wagon, you three," I said. "I'm going to look for Uncle Seth and see what he wants us to do next."

Before they could object, I had left them sitting by the wagon and the harnessed horses, ready for no one knew what, and had made off into the night. Having done all that I could to carry out my uncle's orders, I had no intention of returning until I had solved the mystery of Higgleby's barn.

I hurried along and used every short cut that I knew; and though I now stumbled in the darkness, now fell headlong on the dewy gra.s.s, now barked my s.h.i.+ns as I scrambled over a barway, I made reasonably good progress, all things considered, and came in less than half an hour to the pasture where Higgleby's lonely barn stood. The door of the barn, as I saw it from a distance, was open and made a rectangle of yellow light against the black woods beyond it. When I listened, I heard confused voices. As I was about to advance toward the barn, a certain note in the voices warned me that a quarrel was in progress. I hesitated and stopped where I was, wondering whether to go forward or not, and there I heard a strange sound and saw a strange sight.

First there came a much louder outcry than any that had gone before; then the light in the barn suddenly went out; then I heard the sound of running back and forth; then the light appeared again, but flickering and unsteady; then a single harsh yell came all the way across the dark pasture; then the light grew and grew and grew.

It threw its rays out over the pasture land and revealed men running about like ants around a newly destroyed hill. A tongue of flame crept out of one window and crawled up the side of the old building. A great wave of fire came billowing out of the door.

Sparks began to fly and the roar and crackling grew louder and louder.

As I breathlessly ran toward the barn, from which now I could see little streams of fire flowing in every direction through the dry gra.s.s, I suddenly became aware that there was someone ahead of me, and by stopping short I narrowly escaped colliding with two men whom, with a sudden shock, I recognized as my uncle and Neil Gleazen.

"Uncle Seth!" I gasped out.

Nothing then, I think, could have surprised Seth Upham. There was only relief in his voice when he cried, "Quick, Joe, quick, take his other arm."

Obediently, if reluctantly, I turned my back on the conflagration behind us, and locking my right arm through Neil Gleazen's left, helped partly to drag him, partly to carry him toward the village and the tavern.

"I showed the villains!" Gleazen proclaimed thickly. "The scoundrels! The despicable curs! I showed them how a gentlemen replies to such as them. I showed them, eh, Seth?"

"Yes, yes, Neil! Hus.h.!.+ Be still! There are people coming. Merciful heavens! That fire will bring the whole town out upon us."

"I showed them, the villains! the scoundrels! the despicable curs!

They are not used to the ways of gentlemen, eh, Seth?"

"Yes, yes, but do be still! _Do, do_ be still!"

"I showed them how a gentleman acts--"

The man was as drunk as a lord, but in his thick ravings there was a fixed idea that sent a thrill of apprehension running through me.