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Page 78
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!
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