They all retired early that night, for Aunt Anna, who had just come home, was tired as well as happy, and Nancy had been so busy that she could not hold her eyes open even until a decent hour for bedtime. In spite of her uneasy thoughts, Beatrice fell asleep quickly, and, even after an hour of sound slumber, awoke with difficulty.
“It is raining,” she thought sleepily at first, hearing a light tap, tap against the casement. “I must get up and close the window.”
Yet she would have dropped asleep again had not the sound continued insistently. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. To her surprise, the stars were shining through the window, and no raindrops but a handful of gravel pattered on the sill. She jumped up, drew her big coat about her, for the night air was cold, and leaned out. A shadowy figure, unrecognizable in the starlight, stood below her.
“Miss Deems,” came a voice, a rich Irish voice that after a moment of doubt she realized was Dan O’Leary’s, the man who used to care for Buck; “Miss Deems, there’s the deuce and all to pay down in the town to-night, and this Dabney Mills here vows that it was your doing.”
She discerned then a second figure skulking among the shadows, a very crestfallen Dabney Mills, brought hither evidently by no desire of his own.
“He came to the meeting,” went on Dan, “and gave us a long tale of how John Herrick’s past had come out at last, how he had got into disgrace back East and came here to lose himself and take another name. And from that he argues that it was John Herrick took the money we have all been looking for this long time. I thought it only best to come straight to you for the truth, since the fellow here was quoting you.”
Poor Beatrice’s teeth chattered with cold and misery as she leaned against the window-frame and, below her breath, tried to explain just how matters stood. Had Aunt Anna been wakeful, she would have been reading in the room below and would have overheard, but fortunately she was sleeping soundly on the sleeping-porch at the other side of the house.
“Some of what he said is half true,” Beatrice began, “and some of it is all false.” Dan O’Leary listened to the end of her story without comment.
“I was hoping you could give him the lie direct,” he said finally. “The men below are wild with anger and are coming up the hill to tax John Herrick with wrecking the company. They were walking and we had horses, but they’ll not be so long behind us. Well, I’ll go back and stop them if I can.”