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The Tempering

by Charles Neville Buck · English · Gutenberg #33736 · 743,991 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Tempering

Author: Charles Neville Buck

Illustrator: Ralph P. Coleman


        
Release date: September 16, 2010 [eBook #33736]

Language: English

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THE TEMPERING

by

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

Author of "The Call of the Cumberland," "The Battle Cry," etc., etc.

Frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman







Garden City       New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages
including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1919, by The Ridgeway Company



[Illustration: "'_I've never seen the evening star rise up over the
Kaintuck Ridges that I haven't ... thought of it as your own star._'"]




THE TEMPERING




CHAPTER I


"Nothin' don't nuver come ter pass hyarabouts!"

The boy perched disconsolately on the rotting fence threw forth his
lament aloud to the laurelled silences of the mountain sides and the
emptiness of space.

"Every doggone day's jest identical with all ther balance--save only
thet hit's wuss!"

He sat with his back turned on the only signs of human life within the
circle of his vision; unless one called the twisting creek-bed at his
front, which served that pocket of the Kentucky Cumberlands as a
highway, a human manifestation.

There behind him a log-cabin breathed smokily through its mud-daubed
chimney; a pioneer habitation in every crude line and characteristic. On
the door hung, drying, the odorous pelt of a "varmint." Against the wall
leaned a rickety spinning wheel.

To all that, which he hated, he kept his stiff back turned, but his
ears had no defence against the cracked falsetto of an aged voice
crooning a ballad that the pioneers had brought across the ridges from
tide-water ... a ballad whose phrasing was quaintly redolent of antiquity.

The boy kicked his broganned heels and snorted. His clothes were
homespun and home sewed and his touselled shock of red-brown hair
cropped out from under a coon skin cap. His given name was Boone and his
life was as hobbled by pioneer restrictions as was that of the greater
Boone--but with a difference.

The overland argonauts who had set their feet and faces westward across
these same mountains bore on their memories the stimulating image of all
that they had left behind and carried before their eyes the alluring
hope of what they were to find.

This Boone, whose eyes, set in a freckled face, were as blue as overhead
skies and deep with a fathomless discontent, had neither past nor future
to contemplate--only a consuming hunger for a life less desolate. That
of his people was unaltered--save for a lapse into piteous human
lethargy--from the days when the other Boone had come on moccasined feet
to win the West--for they were the offspring of the stranded; the heirs
of the lost.

Over all the high, hunched steepness of the ranges, Autumn had wandered
with a palette of high colour and a brush of frost, splashing out the
summer's sun-burned green with champagne yellow, burgundy-red and
claret-crimson. To the nostrils, too, there floated with the
thistledown, hints of bursting ripe fox-grapes and apples ready for the
cider press.

Countless other times Boone had sat here on this top-rail in his
hodden-gray clothes and his slate-gray despair, making the same plaint,
and knowing that only a miracle would ever bring around the road's
turning anything less commonplace than a yoke of oxen or a native as
drab as the mule he straddled.

Yet as the boy capped his lamentation with a sigh that seemed to
struggle up from the depths of his being, a breeze whispered along the
mountain sides; the crisp leaves stirred to a tinkle like low laughter
and there materialized a horseman who was in no wise to be confused with
ordinary travellers in these parts. Boone Wellver caught his breath in a
gasp of surprise and interest, and a low whistle sounded between his
white teeth.

"Lord o' Mercy," breathed the urchin, "hit's a furriner! Now I wonder
who is he?"

The stranger was mounted on a mule whose long ears flapped dejectedly
and whose shamble had in it the flinch of galled withers, but the man
in the saddle sat as if he had a charger under him--and it was this
indefinable declaration of bearing that the boy saw and which, at first
glance, fired his imagination.

The traveller's face was bronzed and the moustache and imperial, trimmed
in the fashion of the Third Napoleon's court, were only beginning to
lose their sandy colour under a dominance of gray.

The eyes--though now they were weary with travel and something more
fundamental, too, than physical fatigue--were luminous of quality and a
singularly clear gray of colour. They were such eyes as could be dogged
and stern as flint or deep and bafflingly gentle like mossy waters.

Covering the bony flanks of the mule and bulging grotesquely to port and
starboard, hung capacious canvas saddle pockets--and as the stranger
drew rein the boy's eyes dwelt with candid inquisitiveness upon them.
Out of the cavernous maw of one of these receptacles protruded the
corner of a tin dispatch box and fastened to a cantle ring behind the
saddle was a long, slender object in a water-proof covering laced at the
top.

At sight of that, Boone's eyes livened yet more, for he recognized the
shrouded shape though it was a thing almost as foreign to his world as
starlight is to the floor of the sea. Once he had been to Marlin Town on
a troubled Court day when a detachment of militia had stood guard in the
square to overawe warring factions and avert bloodshed. Their failure to
do so is another story, but their commanding officer had worn a sabre,
and now with a stirring excitement the boy divined that, this "qu'ar
contraption" dangling at the newcomer's back was nothing less portentous
than a sword!

Straightway the drab curtain of life's unrelief was rent for Boone
Wellver, and shot through with gleaming filaments of wonderment and
imaginative speculation. Here, of a sudden, came Romance on horseback,
and what matter that the horse was a mule?

"Son," he said in a kindly manner, "I'm bound for Cyrus Spradling's
house, and I begin to suspect that I must have lost my way. How about
it?"

Boone did not immediately reply. He merely poured out of his wide and
innocent blue eyes a scrutiny as inquisitorial as though he had been
stationed here on picket duty and were vested with full authority to
halt whomsoever approached.

While the newcomer sat, waiting in his saddle, Boone Wellver vaulted
lightly down from fence rail to gravel roadway and, standing there as
slim yet as sturdy as a hickory sapling, raised one hand towards the
mule's flank, but arrested it midway as he inquired, "Thet critter o'
yourn--hit don't foller kickin', does hit?"

"Stand clear of its heels," cautioned the man hastily. "I've known this
beast only since morning--but as acquaintance ripens, admiration wanes.
What's your name?"

"Boone Wellver. What's yourn?"

"Mine is Victor McCalloway. Does your father live near here?"

"Hain't got no daddy."

"Your mother, then?"

"Hain't got no mammy nuther."

The stranger gazed down from his saddle with interested eyes, and under
the steadiness of his scrutiny Boone was smitten with an abrupt
self-consciousness.

"Don't you belong to any one at all?" The question was put slowly, but
the reply came with prompt and prideful certitude.

"I'm my own man. I dwells with a passel of old granny folks an'
gray-heads, though." Having so enlightened his questioner, he added with
a ring of pride, as though having confessed the unflattering truth about
his immediate household, he was entitled to boast a little of more
distant connections:

"Asa Gregory's my fust cousin by blood. I reckon ye've done heered tell
of him, hain't ye?"

Across the face of Victor McCalloway flitted the ghost of a satirical
smile, which he speedily repressed.

"Yes," he said briefly with non-committal gravity, "I've heard of him."

To the outer world from which McCalloway came few mountain names had
percolated, attended by notability. A hermit people they are and
unheralded beyond their own environment--yet now and then the reputation
of one of them will not be denied. So the newspaper columns had given
Asa Gregory space, headlines even, linking to his name such appositives
as "mountain desperado" and "feud-killer."

When he had shot old John Carr to death in the highway, such unstinted
publicity had been accorded to his acts--such shudder-provoking fulness
of detail--that Asa had found in it a very embarrassment of fame.

But the boy spoke the name of his kinsman in accents of unquestioning
admiration, and Victor McCalloway only nodded as he repeated,

"Yes, I've heard of him."

Then as the traveller gathered up his reins to start onward, a tall
young man came, with the swing of an elastic stride, around the next
turn and, nodding to the boy, halted at the mule's head. He was an
upstanding fellow, of commanding height, and the tapering staunchness of
a timber wedge. He carried a rifle upon his shoulder and his
clear-chiselled face bore the pleasant recommendation of straight-gazing
candour. His clothing was rough, yet escaped the seeming of roughness,
because it sat upon his splendid body and limbs as if a part of
them--like a hawk's plumage. But it was the eyes under a broad forehead
that were most notable. They were unusually fine and frank; dark and
full of an almost gentle meditativeness. Here was a native, thought the
man on the mule, whose gaze, unlike that of many of his fellows, was
neither sinister nor furtive. Here was one who seemed to have escaped
the baleful heritage of grudge-bearing.

Then McCalloway's thought was interrupted by the voice of the boy
declaring eagerly: "This hyar furriner 'lows ter ride over ter Cyrus
Spradlin's dwellin' house. We've jest been talkin' erbout ye--an' he's
already done heered of ye, Asa!"

The tall man on foot stiffened, at the announcement, into something like
hostile rigidity, and the velvet softness of eye which, a moment ago, a
woman might have envied, flashed into the hard agate of suspicion.

He stood measuring the stranger for an uncompromising matter of moments
before he spoke, and when words came they were couched in a steely
evenness of tone. "So ye've heerd of me--hev ye?"

He paused a moment after that, his face remaining mask-like, then he
went on:

"I reckon whatever ye heered tell of me war either right favourable or
right scandalous--dependin' on whether ye hed speech with my friends--or
my enemies. I've got a lavish of both sorts."

McCalloway also stiffened at the note of challenge.

"I never talked to any one about you," he rejoined crisply. "I read your
name in newspapers--as did many others, I dare say."

"Yes. I reckon ye read in them papers thet I kilt Old Man Carr. Wa'al,
thet war es true es text. I kilt him whilst he was aimin' ter lay-way
me. He'd done a'ready kilt my daddy an' I was ridin' inter Marlin Town
ter buy buryin' clothes--when we met up in ther highway. Thet's ther
whole hist'ry of hit."

"Mr. Gregory," the older man said slowly with an even courtesy that
carried a note of aloofness, "I've neither the right nor the disposition
to question you on personal matters. I reserve the privilege of
discussing my own affairs only so far as I choose, and I recognize the
same right in others. My final opinions, however, are not formed on
hearsay."

The brown eyes softened again and the features relaxed. "I reckon,"
commented Asa with a touch of shame-faced apology in his tone, "thar
warn't no proper call fer me ter start in straightway talkin' erbout
myself nohow--but when a man's enemies air a'seekin' ter git him hung,
hit's liable ter make him touchy an' mincy-like. Hit don't take no hard
bite ter hurt a sore tooth, no-ways."

Victor McCalloway inclined his head. "I stopped here," he explained, "to
ask directions of this lad. These infernal roads confuse me."

"I reckon they do be sort o' mystifyin' ter a furriner," assented the
mountaineer, who stood charged with murder, then he added with grave
courtesy: "I'll go back ter ther fork of ther highroad with ye an' sot
ye on yore way ef so be hit would convenience ye any."

As mounted traveller and unmounted guide went on toward the rounded cone
of Cinder Knob it seemed to loom as far away as ever, masking behind its
timbered distances the unseen trickle of Hominy Mill Creek, where Cyrus
Spradling dwelt.

But to right and left, ever the same, yet ever changing; sombre in
shadowed gorge and bright of sunlit crest, lay the broken, forested
hills. Their horizons gathered in tangled depths of timber--shadowed
hiding places of chasms--silences and a brooding spirit of mystery.

At length a sudden elbow in the twisting way brought them face to face
with two rifle-bearing men. They were gaunt fellows, tall but slouching
and loose of joint. Their thin faces, too, were saturnine and ugly with
the cast of vindictiveness.

"Howdy, Asa," accosted one and, with a casual nod, the guide responded,
"Howdy, Jett," but in the brief silence that followed, broken by the
wheezy panting of the mule, McCalloway fancied he could discern an
undernote of tension.

"This here man," went on Asa Gregory, jerking his head backward, as if
in answer to an unuttered query, "gives ther name of McCalloway. I
hain't never seed him afore this day, but he's farin' over ter
Spradling's an' I proffered ter kinderly sot him on his way. I couldn't
skeercely do no less fer him."

The two nodded and when some further exchange of civilities had
followed, passed on and out of sight. But for a while after their
departure Asa stood unmoving with his head intently bent in an attitude
of listening--and though his rifle still nestled unshifted in its
cradling elbow, the fingers of the trigger hand twitched a little and
the brown eyes were again agate-hard. Finally the guide's mouth line
relaxed from the straight tautness of whatever emotion had caused that
stiffening of posture, and the lips moved in low speech--almost
drawlingly soft of cadence.

"I reckon they've done gone on," he said, as if speaking to himself;
then lifting his eyes to his companion, he explained briefly. "Not
meanin' no offence, I 'lowed hit war kinderly charitable ter ye ter let
them fellers know ye jest fell in with me accidental like. They wouldn't
favour ye no great degree ef they figgered me an' you was close
friends."

"And yet," hazarded McCalloway, groping in the bewilderment of this
strange environment, "you greeted each other amicably enough."

Gregory's lips twisted at the corners into a satirical smile.

"When they comes face ter face with me in ther highroad," he answered
calmly, "we meets an' makes our manners ther same es anybody else--a
man's _got_ ter be civil. But we keeps a'watchin' one another outen ther
tails of our eyes, jest ther same. Them two fellers air Blairs an' them
an' ther Carrs is married in an' out an' back an' fo'th twell they're
all as thick tergether as pigs outen ther same litter."

The traveller's question came a little incredulously.

"You mean--that those men are your actual enemies?"

"_I'd_ call 'em enemies. I knows thet they aims ter git me some day--ef
so be they're able."

"And you--?"

The tall man in the road looked steadily into the face of his companion
for a moment, then said deliberately, "Me? Oh, of course, I aims ter
carcumvent 'em--ef so be _I'm_ able."

When the newcomer had reached a point from which he no longer needed
guidance Asa Gregory wheeled and began to back-track on his steps, but
before he had covered a half mile he turned abruptly from the road and
was swallowed in the thicket where the waxen confusion of rhododendron
and laurel, the tangle of holly and thorn seemed solid and impenetrable.
He went with head bent and noiseless footfall--though the sifting leaves
were crisp--but with eye, ear and nostril delicately alert and
receptive.

As Asa Gregory slipped, shadow like, among the shifting lights of the
late afternoon, his face wore a grim smile, and when he had come to a
point determined by some system of his own, he dropped to a
low-crouching posture and continued his journey a step or two at a time,
with a perfection of caution, and with eyes and ears strained in
expectancy.

Across a gray-green hummock of sandstone, so villainously matted with
blackberry briars that a pointer-dog would have balked at its edge, he
hitched himself forward on his belly. From there he could look down on
the road he had abandoned--and the thick bushes that fringed it, and
there he lay, silent and flat as a lizard, scanning the lower ground.

A less acute and instinctive eye would have made little of it all, save
the variegated colours of the foliage, but after a while he picked out a
scrap of grey-brown buried deep and motionless under the leafage, much
like the hue of the earth itself. His smile became more sardonically set
and his muscles tensed as his rifle barrel was thrust forward. But he
still sprawled there hugging the earth, and finally hushed voices stole
up to him.

"... He's got ter pass by hyar ef he holds ter ther highway.... I reckon
he don't hardly suspicion nothin'." Then a second voice spoke Asa's name
and linked it with foul expletives, yet save for the gray patches in the
brush almost as hard to see as a rabbit crouched in dry grass there was
no visible sign ... no warning.

Asa's face blackened. His thumb lay on the hammer of his rifle and his
thoughts ran to bitter turmoil.

"I _'lowed_ them Blairs hed hit in head ter lay-way me this evenin'," he
mused. "I jest _felt_ hit in my bones, somehow."

The hatred in his veins pulsed and simmered. Here he lay behind them and
above them, while they lurked in ambush waiting for him to pass in front
and below. One shot from his rifle and Jett Blair would never rise. His
face would sag forward--that was all--and as his companion scrambled up
in dismay, he too would fall back. Asa could picture the expression of
astonished panic that would gleam in his eyes for the one brief moment
before he too crumpled. Asa's finger tingled with an itch which only
trigger-pressure could cool and appease.

Yet slowly and resolutely he shook his head. "No," he told himself, "no,
hit won't hardly do. Thar's one murder charge a'hangin' over me now--an'
es fer _them_, thar's time a'plenty. I hain't no-ways liable ter
fergit!"




CHAPTER II


Backward he edged to the far side of the rock, and on he went by a
detour which, in due course, brought him out to the road once more at
that panel of fence where Boone Wellver still sat perched in the deep
preoccupation of his thoughts. These reflections focussed about the
stranger who had lately ridden by, and as Gregory paused, with no
revealing sign in his face of the events of the past half-hour, the boy
blurted out the fulness of his interest.

"Asa, did ye find out who _is_ he? Did ye see thet _sward_ he hed
hangin' ter his saddle, an' did ye note all them qu'ar contraptions he
was totin' along with him?"

"I didn't hev overly much speech with him," was the grave response. "But
he 'lowed he'd done come from acrost ther waters--from somewhars in
t'other world. I reckon he's done travelled wide."

"His looks hain't none common nuther!" Boone's eyes were sparkling; his
imagination galloping free and uncurbed. "I've done read stories about
kings an' sich-like, travellin' hither an' yon unbeknownst ter common
folks. What does ye reckon, Asa, mout _he_ be su'thin' like thet? A king
or su'thin?"

"Ef so be he's a king," opined Asa Gregory drily, "he's shore done
picked him out a God-fersaken place ter go a'travellin' in." The dark
eyes riffled for a moment into a hint of covert raillery. "Ye didn't
chanst ter discarn no crown, did ye, Booney, pokin' a gold prong or two
up outen them saddle pockets?"

Boone Wellver flushed brick-red and straightway his words fell into a
hot disclaimer of gullibility. "I hain't no plum, daft idjit. I didn't,
ter say, _really_ think he was a king--but his looks _wasn't_ none
common."

The older kinsman granted that contention and for a while they talked of
Victor McCalloway, but at length Asa shifted the subject.

"A week come Monday," he informed the boy, "thar's a'goin' ter be a
monstrous big speakin' at Marlin Town. Ther Democrat candi_date_ fer
Governor aims ter speechify an' I 'lowed mebby ye'd love ter go along
with me an' listen at him."

Whenever Asa yielded to the temptation of teasing his young cousin he
hastened to make amends for the indulgence and now the boy's face was
ashine with anticipation.

Customarily in Kentucky from the opening of the campaign to the day of
election the tide and sweep of political battle runs hot and high. But
in that autumn of 1899 all precedents of party feeling were engulfed in
a tidal wave of bitterness and endowed with a new ferocity ominously
akin to war. The gathering storm centred and beat about the head of one
man whose ambition for gubernatorial honours was the core and essence of
the strife. He was, in the confident estimate of his admirers, a giant
whose shoulders towered above the heads of his lesser compatriots. An
election law bore his name--and his adversaries gave insistent warning
that it surrendered the state, bound hand and foot, to a triumvirate of
his own choosing.

Into the wolf-like battle-royal of his party's convention he had gone
seemingly the weakest of three aspirants for the Democratic nomination.
Out of it, over disrupted party-elements, he had emerged--triumphant.

Whether one called him righteous crusader or self-seeking demagogue, the
fact stood baldly clear that his name with an "ism" attached had become
the single issue in that State, and that hero-worship and hatred
attended upon its mention.

Back to the people of the inaccessible hills, living apart, aloof and
neglected, came some of the murmurs of the tempest that shook the
lowlands. Here at the edge of a normally Democratic State which had in
earlier times held slaves and established an aristocracy, the hillsmen
living by the moil of their own sweat had hated alike slave and
slave-holder and had remained solidly Republican. For them it was enough
that William Goebel was not of their party. Basing their judgment on
that premise, they passed on with an uncomplicated directness to the
conclusion that the deleterious things said of him by envenomed orators
were assertions of gospel truth.

Now that man was carrying his campaign into the enemy's country.
Realizing without illusion the temper of the audience which would troop
in from creek-bed and cove and the branch-waters "back of beyond," he
was to speak in Marlin Town where the cardinal faith of the mountains
is, "hate thine enemy!"

In the court-house square of Marlin Town, under the shadow of high-flung
hills, had gathered close-packed battalions of listeners. Some there
were who carried with them their rifles and some who looked as foreign
to even these rude streets as nomads ridden in from the desert.

A brass band had come with the candidate's special train and blared out
its stirring message. There was a fluttering of flags and a brave
showing of transparencies, and to Boone Wellver, aged fifteen, as he
hung shadow-close at Asa Gregory's elbow, it all seemed the splendour of
panoply and the height of pageantry.

From the hotel door, as the man and boy passed it, emerged two gentlemen
who were clothed in the smoother raiment of "Down below," and Boone
pointed them out to his companion.

"Who _air_ they, Asa?" he whispered, and his kinsman carelessly
responded:

"One of 'em's named Masters. He's a coal-mine boss--but I hain't never
seed t'other one, afore now."

Strolling along the narrow plank runway that did service as a sidewalk,
the boy glimpsed also the mysterious stranger who had ridden in on a
mule, with a canvas-covered sword at his saddle ring.

Then the fanfare of the band fell silent and a thin figure in an ancient
frock coat stepped forward on the platform itself and raised its hands
to shout: "Fellow Citizens and Kentuckians of Marlin County!"

Ranged importantly behind the draped bunting stood the corporal's guard
of native Democratic leaders--leaders who were well-nigh without
followers--and who now stood as local sponsors for the Candidate
himself.

Boone caught his breath and listened, his eager eyes conspicuous among
the immobile and stolid faces of the unresponsive throng as the speaker
let flow his words of encomium.

Seeking to compensate by his own vehemence for the unreceptiveness of
his audience, the thin master of ceremonies heaped the Ossa of
fulsomeness upon the Pelion of praise. "And now, men of Marlin," he
shouted in his memorized peroration, "now I have the distinguished
honour of presenting to you the man whose loins are girt in the people's
fight--the--the--ahem,--unterrified champeen of the Commonwealth's
yeomanry--. Gentlemen, the next Governor of Kentucky!"

A peroration without applause is like a quick-step beat upon a loose
drum-head, and an the local sponsor stood back in the dispiriting
emptiness of dead silence--unbroken by a single hand-clap--his face
fell. For several moments that quiet hung like a paralyzing rebuff, then
from the outskirts of the crowd a liquor-thickened voice bellowed--"Next
gov'nor--of hell!"

To the front of the platform, with that derisive introduction,
calmly--even coldly, stepped a dark, smooth-shaven man, over whose
stocky shoulders and well-rounded chest a frock coat was tightly
buttoned.

For a while the Candidate stood looking out, gauging his audience, and
from him there seemed to emanate an assurance of power before his lips
parted. A heavy lock of coal-black hair fell over his forehead, across
almost disdainfully cold eyes went sooty lashes, and dark brows met
above the prominent nose. The whole face seemed drawn in bold charcoal
strokes, uncompromising of line and feature--a portrayal of force.

Then the resonant voice broke silence, and though it came calmly and
moderately pitched, it went out clarion-clear over the crowd like the
note of a fox horn.

"Some one out there shouted--'Next governor of hell!'" he began without
preamble. "I grant you that if any region needs improved government it
is hell, and if there is a state on this earth where a man might hope to
qualify himself for that task, it is this state. Let me try that first,
my friend. I believe in myself, but I am only human."

He launched forthright into arraignment of his enemies with sledge-blows
of denunciation untempered by any concession to time, place or
condition, and though scowls grew vindictively black about him, he knew
that he was holding his audience.

He was a Vulcan forging thunders with words and destructive batteries of
bolts with phrases, and Boone Wellver--trembling with excitement as a
pointer puppy trembles with the young eagerness of the covey-scent in
his nostrils--seemed to be in the presence of a miracle; the miracle of
eloquence.

"My God," breathed the less impressionable Asa Gregory under his breath,
"but thet feller hes a master gift fer lyin'!"

At the end, with one clenched fist raised high, the speaker thundered
out his final words of defiance: "The fight is on, and I believe in
fighting. I ask no quarter and I fear no foe!"

Again he paused, and again save for the valiant enthusiasm on the
platform at his back, he met with no response except a grim and negative
silence.

But this disconcerting stillness was abruptly ripped asunder by a pistol
shot and a commotion of confused voices, rising where figures began to
eddy and mill at the outskirts. The reception committee closed hastily
and protectingly about the candidate, whose challenge seemed to have
been accepted by some irresponsible gun-fighter, but he thrust them back
with a face of unaltered and stony calmness. Though he had finished, he
continued to stand at the front with hands idly resting on the platform
rail as if meaning to demonstrate his contempt for anything like
retreat.

While he still tarried there a tall figure elbowed its way through the
crowd until it stood near. It was the figure of Asa Gregory, and,
raising a hand for recognition, it called out in a full-chested voice:
"Thet shot war fired by a feller thet war full of white licker--an'
they're takin' him ter ther jail-house now. I reckon yore doctrine
hain't hardly converted nobody hyarabouts--but we don't aim ter insult
no visitor."

       *       *       *       *       *

Victor McCalloway had come to Cyrus Spradling's house to remain until he
could arrange a more permanent residence. The purpose that lay behind
his coming was one which he had not felt called upon to explain, and
though he had much to learn of this new place of abode, still he had
come forearmed with some of the cardinals of a necessary understanding.

They were an incurious people with whom he had cast his lot, content
with their remoteness, and it was something that here a man could lose
himself from questions touching the past, so long as he answered frankly
those of the present. It suited McCalloway to seal the back pages and
the bearded men evinced no wish to penetrate them.

Before the snow flew the newcomer was to be housed under his own
roof-tree, and today in answer to the verbal announcement that he was to
have a "working" on the land he had bought, the community was present,
armed with hammer and saw, with adze and plane, mobilized under the
auspices of Cyrus Spradling who moved, like a shaggy patron saint, among
them.

There were men, working shoulder to shoulder, whose enmities were deep
and ancient, but who today were restrained by the common spirit of
volunteer service to a neighbour. Cyrus had seen to it that the
gathering at McCalloway's "house-raising" should not bear the
prejudicial colour of partisanship, but that Carrs and Gregories alike
should have a hand in the activities which were going robustly forward
at the head of Snag Ridge.

Back of Cedar Mountain no architect was available and no builders' union
afforded or withheld labour, but every man was carpenter and artisan in
his own right, and some were "practiced corner-men" as well.

Through the sun-flooded day with its Indian summer dream along the
skyline their axes rang in accompaniment to their homely jests, and the
earnest whine of their saws went up with the minors of voices raised in
the plaintive strains of folk-lore ballads.

The only wage accepted was food and drink. They would have thought as
readily of asking payment for participation in the rough festivities of
the "infare" with which the mountain groom brings his bride from her
wedding to his own house on a pillion at the back of his saddle.

Tomorrow some of these same men, meeting in the roadway, would perhaps
eye each other with suspicion. Riding on, after greetings, they would go
with craned necks, neither trusting the other to depart unwatched, but
today the rude sanctuary of hospitality to the stranger rested over them
and the timbers that went up were raised by the hands of friends and
enemies alike.

But toward sunset the newcomer chanced upon a fight that the simple code
had not safeguarded and that had gained headway before his interference.

Down by the creek-bed, with no audience, he found two boys rolling in a
smother of dust and, until he remembered that the hill code of "fist and
skull" bars neither shod-toe nor bared tooth, he was shocked at the
unmitigated savagery of the combat.

The strenuous pair rolled in a mad embrace, and as he approached, one of
the boys--whose back alone he could see--came to the top of the writhing
heap. While this one gouged, left handed, at eyes which the other
attempted to cover, his right hand whipped out a jack-knife which he
sought to open with his teeth. Out of the commotion came an animal-like
incoherence of snarls and panting profanity, and Victor McCalloway
caught the top boy by his shoulder and dragged him forcibly away from
what threatened to be maiming or worse.

So pried from his victim, on the verge of victory, the boy with a bloody
and unrecognized face stood for an instant heaving of breast and
infuriated, then wrenching himself free from the detaining hand, he gave
a leap as sudden as that of a frightened buck and disappeared behind the
screen of the laurel.

The other figure, with an eye blackened and bleeding from the raw
scratches of finger-nails about the lids, came more slowly to his feet,
his breath rasping with passion and exhaustion. He stood there before
his would-be rescuer--and McCalloway recognized Boone Wellver.

"I'd hev licked him--so his own mammy wouldn't 'a' knowed him ef ye
hadn't 'a' bust in on me," he panted. "I'd done had him down oncet afore
an' I war jest erbout ter turn him under ergin."

A light of suppressed drollery glinted into the eyes of the man whose
ruddy face remained otherwise unsmiling.

"It looked to me as though you were in a situation where nothing could
save you but reinforcements--or surrender," he commented, and the
heaving body of the rescued boy grew rigid while his begrimed face
flamed with chagrin.

"Surrender--knock under--ter _him_!" He spat out the words with a
venomous disgust. "Thet feller war a _Blair_! Did ye ever heer of a
Gregory hollerin' 'enough!' ter a Blair, yit!"

McCalloway stood looking down with an amusement which he was considerate
enough to mask. He knew that Boone, though his surname was Wellver, was
still in all the meaning of feud parlance a Gregory and that in the
bitterness of his speech spoke not only individual animosity but
generations of vendetta. So he let the lad have his say uninterrupted,
and Boone's words ran freshet-like with the churn and tumble of his
anger. "Ye jest misjudged he war a'lickin' me, because ye seed him on
top an' a'gougin' at my eye. But I'd _done been_ on top o' him--an' I'd
a got thar ergin. Ef you'd noted whar I'd done chawed his ear at he
wouldn't 'a' looked so good ter ye, I reckon."

"Suppose he had gotten that knife open." The man still spoke with that
unpatronizing gravity which carries an untold weight of conviction to a
boy's mind. "What would he have done?"

"I reckon he'd a'gutted me--but I didn't nuver aim ter let him git hit
open."

"Are you a fighter by habit, Boone?"

Something in the intonation caused the lad to flush afresh, this time
with the feeling that he had been unduly bragging, and he responded in a
lowered voice. "I hain't nuver tuck part in no gun-battles yit--but when
hit comes ter fist an' skull, I'm accounted ter be a right practiced
knocker an' I kin rass'le right good. What made ye ask me thet
question?"

McCalloway held the angelic blue eyes, so paradoxically set in that
wrath-enflamed face, with his own steady gray ones, and spoke quietly:

"Because if you are going to be a fighting man, it's important that you
should fight properly, I thought perhaps you'd like to talk to me about
it sometime. You see, I've been fighting all my life. It's been my
profession."

Over the freckled face surged a wave of captivated interest. The Blair
boy was forgotten and the voice thrilled into earnest solicitation.
"Would ye l'arn me more about hit some time? What style of fightin' does
ye foller?"

"The fair kind, I trust. Civilized warfare. The trade of soldiering."

"I hain't nuver follered no unfa'r sort nuther," disclaimed Boone, and
his companion smiled enigmatically while he replied meditatively,

"What is fair or unfair--what is courageous or cowardly--is largely a
matter of viewpoint. Some day I dare say you'll go out into the world
beyond the hills and out there you'll find that gouging eyes and chewing
ears isn't called fair--that shooting an enemy from ambush isn't called
courageous."

That was a doctrine, Boone felt, which savoured of sacrilege. If it were
categorically true then his own people were cowards--and to his ardent
hero worship the Gregories and the Wellvers were exemplars of high
bravery, yet this man was no ordinary individual, and he spoke from a
wisdom and experience based on a lifetime of soldiering. A seed of
dilemma had fallen into the fallow soil of the lad's questioning mind,
and as he stood there in a swirl of perplexity he heard the other voice
explaining with a sort of comforting reassurance, "As I said, notions of
right and wrong vary with locality and custom--but it's good for a man
to know more than one standard--one set of ideas. If you ever go out in
the world you'll need that knowledge."

After a period of reflection the boy demanded bluntly,

"Whar-at war ye a'soldierin'?"

For the first time, McCalloway's glance hardened and his tone sharpened.
He had not meant to throw open the discussion to a wide review of his
own past.

"If you and I are going to be good friends, you mustn't ask too many
questions," he said curtly. "It doesn't make a boy popular."

"I axes yore pardon; I didn't aim at no offence." The apology was
prompt, yet puzzled, and carried with it a note of injured dignity. "I
'lowed ye proffered ter tell me things--an' even ef ye told me all ye
knowed, I wouldn't go 'round blabbin' no-whars. I knows how ter hold my
own counsel."

This time it was the seasoned man of experience who flushed. He felt
that he had first invited and then rebuffed a natural inquiry, and so
he, in turn, spoke apologetically: "I shall tell you things that may be
useful--but I sha'n't answer every question."

After a long silence Boone spoke again, with the altered voice of
diffidence:

"I reckon I hain't got nothin' more ter say," he contributed. "I reckon
I'll be farin' on."

"You looked as if you were spilling over with things to say."

"I had hit in head ter say some sev'ral things," admitted the youthful
clansman, "but they was all in ther manner of axin' more questions, so I
reckon I'll be farin' on."

Victor McCalloway caught the deep hunger for information that showed out
of those independent young eyes, and he caught too the untutored
instinct of politeness, as genuine and unaffected as that of a desert
Sheik, which forced repression. He laid a kindly hand on the boy's
shoulder.

"Go ahead and ask your questions, then," he directed, "and I'll answer
what I like and refuse to answer the rest. Is that a fair arrangement?"

The brown face glowed. "Thet's es fa'r es airy thing kin be," was the
eager response. "I hain't nuver seed nothin' but jest these hyar
hills--an' sometimes hit kinderly seems like ter me thet ef I kain't
light out an' see all ther balance, I'll jest plain swell up an' bust
with ther cravin'."

"You study history--and geography, don't you, Boone?"

"Huh-huh." The tousled head nodded. "But thar's a passel of thet book
stuff thet a man kain't believe nohow. Hit ain't _reasonable_."

"What books have you read?"

"Every single damn one thet I could git my hands on--but thet hain't
been no lavish plenty." With a manner of groping for some point of
contact with the outer world, he added, "I've got a cousin thet's in
ther army, though. He's in ther Philippines right now. Did you soldier
in ther Philippines?" Abruptly Boone broke off, and then hastily he
prompted as he raised a hand in a gesture of caution, "Don't answer thet
thar question ef ye hain't got a mind ter! I jest axed hit heedless-like
without studyin' what I war a'doin'."

McCalloway laughed aloud. "I'll answer it. No, I've never soldiered in
the Philippines nor anywhere under the American flag. My fighting has
all been with what you call the 'outlanders.'"




CHAPTER III


McCalloway's house had been chinked and sealed within a few weeks and
now he was living under its roof. Boone had been out there often, and
one day when he went on to Asa Gregory's cabin his mind was unsettled
with the ferment of conflicting standards. Heretofore Asa had been his
sole and sufficient hero. Now there were two, and it was dawning upon
him, with a travail of dilemma, that between the essentials of their
creeds lay an irreconcilable divergence.

As the boy reached his kinsman's doorstep in the lengthening shadows of
late afternoon, Asa's "woman" came out and hung a freshly scoured
dish-pan on a peg. In her cheeks bloomed a colour and maturity somewhat
too full-blown for her twenty years. Asa had married the "purtiest gal"
on five creeks, but the gipsy charm of her dark, provocative eyes would
die. Her lithe curves would flatten to angularity and the lustre fade
out of her hair's burnished masses with a few seasons of drudgery and
child-bearing.

"Howdy, Booney," she said in greeting, and, without removing his hat, he
demanded curtly, "Whar's Asa at?"

"He ain't come in yit." A suggestion of anxiety sounded through the
voice of Araminta Gregory. It was an apprehension which experience
failed to mitigate. She had married Asa while he stood charged with
homicide. The threat of lurking enemies had shadowed the celebration of
wedding and infare. She had borne his child while he sat in the
prisoner's dock. Now she was weaning it while he went abroad under bond.
One at least knew when the High Court sat, but one could neither gauge
nor calculate the less formal menace that lurked always in the
laurel--so one could only wait and endeavour to remain clear eyed.

It was twilight before the man himself came in, and he slipped so
quietly across the threshold into the uncertain light of the room that
Boone, who sat hunched before the unkindled hearth, did not hear his
entrance. But in the door-frame of the shed kitchen the wife's taut
sense of waiting relaxed in a sigh of relief. Until tomorrow at least
the silent fear was leashed.

An hour later, with the heavy doors protectingly barred, the man and the
boy who considered himself a man took their seats at the rough table in
the lean-to kitchen, but Araminta Gregory did not sit down to meat with
them. She would take her place at table when the lordlier sex had risen
from it, satisfied, since she was only a woman. She did not even know
that the custom whose decree she followed lacked universal sanction,
and, not knowing it, she suffered no discontent.

From the hearth where the woman bent over crane and frying-pan, her face
hot and crimson, the red and yellow light spilled out into the primitive
room, catching, here, the bright colour of drying pepper-pods strung
along the rafters--there the duller glint of the house-holder's rifle
leaning not far from his hand. With the flare, the shadows of the
corners played a wavering hide-and-seek.

Asa ate in abstracted silence, intent upon his side-meat and
"shucky-beans," but the boy, who was ordinarily ravenous, only dallied
with his food and his freckled face wore the set of a preternatural
solemnity.

"Don't ye love these hyar molasses no more, Booney?" inquired Araminta,
to whose mind such an unaccustomed abstinence required explanation, and
the boy started with the shock of a broken revery and shook his head.

"I don't crave no more of 'em," he replied shortly. Once again his
thoughts enveloped him in a silence which he finally broke with a
vehement interrogation.

"Asa, did ye ever heer anybody norrate thet hit's cowardly ter shoot an
enemy from ther bresh?"

Asa paused, his laden knife suspended midway twixt platter and mouth.
For an instant his clear-chiseled features pictured only surprise for
the unexpected question--then they hardened as Athenian faces hardened
when Plato "corrupted the youth with the raising up of new gods."

"Who's been a'talkin' blamed nonsense ter ye, Boone?" he demanded in a
terse manner tinctured with sharpness.

The boy felt his cheeks grow suddenly hot with a quandary of
embarrassment. To McCalloway he stood pledged to keep inviolate the
confidence of their conversations, and it was only after an awkward
pause that he replied with a halting lameness:

"Hit hain't jist p'intedly what nobody's been a'tellin' me. I ... I seed
in a book whar hit said somethin' ter thet amount." Suddenly with an
inspirational light of augmented authority, he added, "The Circuit-rider
hisself read outen ther Scriptures suthin' 'bout not doin' no murder."

Asa carried the knife up to his lips and emptied its blade. Having done
so, he spoke with a deliberate and humourless sincerity.

"Murder's a right ugly word, Boone, an' one a feller ought ter be
kinderly heedful erbout usin'. Barrin' ther Carrs an' Blairs an'
sich-like, I don't know nobody mean enough ter foller murderin'.
Sometimes a man's p'intedly fo'ced into a _killin'_, but thar's a heap
of differ betwixt them two things."

The grave face of the boy was still clouded with his new-born
misgivings, and reading that perplexity, his kinsman went on:

"Myself I've done been obleeged ter kill some sev'ral men. I plum
deplores hit. I wouldn't hold no high notion of anybody thet tuck ther
life of a feller-bein' without he _was_ plum obleeged ter do hit--ner of
no man thet _didn't_ ef hit war his cl'ar duty. Hit's done been ther
rise of fifty y'ars now since ther war first started up betwixt us an'
ther Carrs. Hit warn't none of my doin', but ever since then--off an'
on--my kinsfolk an' yourn hes done been shot down from ther la'rel--an'
we've done hit back an' sought ter hold ther score even--or a leetle
mite better. I've got my choice atween bein' run away from ther land
whar I was born at or else"--he let his hand drop back with a simple
gesture of rude eloquence until its fingers rested on the leaning
rifle--"or else I hev need ter give my enemies ther only style of
fightin' thet will avail. Seems like ter me hit'd be right cowardly ter
run away."

To the boy these principles had never before needed defence. They had
been axioms, yet now he parried with a faltering demurrer:

"Ther books says that, down below, when fellers fights, they does hit in
ther open."

"Alright. Thet's ther best way so long as _both_ of 'em air in ther
open. But ef one stands out in ther highway an' tother lays back in ther
timber, how long does ye reckon ther fight's a'goin' ter last? A man may
love ter be above-board--but he's _got_ ter be practical."

It was the man now who sat forgetful of his food, relapsing into a
meditative silence. The leaping fire threw dashes of orange high-lights
on his temple and jaw angle and in neither pattern of feature nor
quality of eye was there that degenerate vacuity which one associates
with barbarous cruelty.

His wife, turning just then from the hearth, saw his abstraction--and
understood. She knew what tides of anxious thought and bitter
reminiscence had been loosed by the boy's questioning, and her own face
too stiffened. Asa was thinking of the malign warp and woof which had
been woven into the destiny of his blood and of the uncertain tenure it
imposed upon his own life-span. He was meditating perhaps upon the
wrinkled crone who had been his mother; "fittified" and mumbling
inarticulate and unlovely vagaries over her widowed hearth.

But Araminta herself thought of Asa: of the dual menace of assassination
and the gallows, and a wave of nauseating terror assailed her. She shook
the hair resolutely out of her eyes and spoke casually:

"La! Asa, ye're lettin' yore vittles git plum cold whilst ye sets thar
in a brown study." Inwardly she added with a white-hot ferocity of
passion, "Ef they lay-ways him, or hangs him, thank God his baby's a
man-child--an' I'll know how ter raise hit up ter take a full
accountin'!"

But as the man's face relaxed and he reached toward the biscuit plate
his posture froze into an unmoving one--for just an instant. From the
darkness outside came a long-drawn halloo, and the poised hand swept
smoothly sidewise until it had grasped the rifle and swung it clear of
the floor. The eye could hardly have followed Asa's rise from his chair.
It seemed only that one moment found him seated and the next standing
with his body warily inclined and his eyes fixed on the door, while his
voice demanded:

"Who's out thar?"

"Hit's me--Saul Fulton. I wants ter have speech with ye."

As the householder stepped forward, Araminta blocked his way, and spoke
in hurried syllables, with her hands on his two shoulders. "Hit hain't
sca'cely heedful fer ye ter show yoreself in no lighted doorway in ther
night time, Asa. Thet's how yore uncle died! I'll open hit an' hev a
look, first, my own self."

The husband nodded and stood with the cocked rifle extended, while the
wife let down the bar and ushered in a visitor who entered with
something of a swagger and the air of one endowed with a worldly wisdom
beyond the ordinary.

In raw-boned wiriness and in feature, Saul Fulton was typically a
mountaineer, but in dress and affectation of manner he was a nondescript
aping the tawdrily and cheaply urban. His dusty hat sat with an impudent
tilt on crisp curls glossed with pomade and his stale cigar-butt tipped
upward, under a rakish moustache.

Fulton was the sort of mountaineer by whom the outer world misjudges
and condemns his race. He had left the backwoods to dwell among
"furriners" as a tobacco-raising tenant on a Bluegrass farm, and there
he had been mongrelized until he was neither wolf nor house-dog but a
thing characterized by the vices of each and the virtues of neither. In
him highland shrewdness had deteriorated into furtive cunning, and
mountain self-respect had tarnished into the dull discontent of class
hatred. But when he came to the hills, clad in shoddy finery to visit
men in honest homespun, he bore himself with a cocksure dare-deviltry
and malapert condescension. Saul was Asa Gregory's cousin, and since
Asa's family still held to the innate courtesies of the barbarian, they
received him unquestioningly, fed him, and bade him "Set ye a cheer in
front of the chimley-place."

"I heer tell," suggested Asa with casual interest, "thet politics is
waxin' middlin' hot down thar in ther settlemints."

After the mountain fashion the host and Boone had kicked off their heavy
shoes and spread their bare toes to the warmth of the blaze. Saul, as a
man of the world, refrained from this gaucherie.

"Hell's red fire an' Hell's black smoke--hit hain't only ter say
politics this time." The response came with oracular impressiveness
while the speaker twirled his black moustache. "Hit savours a damn sight
more of civil war!"

"I heered ther Democrat candidate speak at Marlin Town," contributed
Asa with tepid interest. "I 'lowed he hed a right hateful
countenance--cruel-like, thet is ter say."

Here spoke the estimate of partisanship, but Saul straightened in his
chair and his eyes took on a sinister glitter.

"Thet's ther identical thing thet brought me hyar ter ther hills. I come
ter bear tidin's ter upstandin' men like you. We're goin' ter need ye,
an' onlessen we all acts tergether our rights air goin' ter be
everlastin'ly trompled in ther dust."

Gregory crumpled a handful of "natural leaf" and filled his pipe-bowl.
His gesture was as lazy and easy as that of a purring cat. "Oh, pshaw,
Saul," he deprecated, "I don't take no master interest in politics
nohow. I always votes ther Republican ticket because I was raised up ter
do thet--like most everybody else in these mountings."

"But I'm a'tellin' ye this time thet hain't agoin' ter be enough ter
do!" The visitor leaned forward and spoke with impassioned tenseness.
"I've been dwellin' down thar amongst rich folks in ther flat Bluegrass
country an' I _knows_ what I'm sayin'. Ther Democrat air es smart es
Satan's circuit-rider. Y'ars back he jammed a crooked law through ther
legislater jest a'lookin' forward ter this time an' day. Now he's cocked
an' primed ter steal ther office, like he stole ther nomination, an'
human freedom will be dead an' buried for all time in ther State of old
Kaintuck."

Into Gregory's eyes as he listened stole an awakening light of interest
and indignation. Up here among the eyries of eagles the threat of
tyranny is hateful beyond words, and its invocation is a conjure spell
of incitement. But at once Asa's face cleared to an amused smile as he
inquired, "How does he aim ter compass all thet deviltry--ef ther people
votes in ther other feller?"

The momentum of his own philippics had brought Saul Fulton to his feet.
Down there where one party had been split in twain and the other had
slipped all leash of decorum's restraint, he had been virulently
inoculated with the virus of hate, and now, since his memory was
tenacious, he swept, without crediting quotations, into a freshet of
argument that echoed every accusation and exaggerated every warning of
that merciless campaign.

For a half hour he talked, with the fiery volubility of a prophet
inciting fanatics to a holy war, while his simple audience listened,
yielding by subconscious stages to his bitter text. At last he came to
the point toward which he had been progressing.

"Down thar ther purse-proud Demmycrats calls us folks blood-thirsty
barbarians. Ter th'ar high-falutin' fashion o' thinkin' we're meaner
than ther very dirt under th'ar feet. Even ther niggers scorns us an'
calls us 'pore white trash.' When this man once gits in power he aims
ter make us feel ther weight of his disgust an' ter rule us henceforth
with bayonets an' milishy muskets. Afore this matter ends up thar's
liable ter be some shovellin' of graveyard dirt."

"Looks right smart like hit mout be needful," acquiesced Gregory; and
Saul knew that he had won a convert to action.

The insidious force of the visitor's appeal to mountain passion had
stolen into the veins of his hearers until it was not strange that their
eyes narrowed and their lips compressed into lines of ominous
straightness.

"Now this air what I come hyar ter name ter ye, Asa." Saul reseated
himself and waved his cigar stub impressively. "Troublesome days air
a'comin' on an' us mountain men hev need ter lay by our own private
grievances an' stand tergether fer a spell."

Asa's face darkened, with the air of a man who has discovered the catch
in an outwardly fair proposition.

"What air ye a'drivin' at?" he demanded shortly, and his visitor
hastened to explain.

"I wants thet all ther good Republicans in this deestrict shell send a
telegram ter our candi_date_ thet we've done made a truce to our
enmities hyar at home, an' thet we all stands shoulder ter shoulder,
Gregories an' Carrs, Fultons an' Blairs alike, ter defend our rights es
freemen."

Asa Gregory rose slowly and stood on his hearth with his feet wide apart
and his head thrown back. From straight shoulders to straight legs he
was as unmoving, for a space, as bronze, but when he spoke his voice
came out of his deep chest with the resonance of low and far-reaching
thunder.

"Saul," he began, with a guarded deliberation, "I stands indicted before
ther High Co'te fer ther killin' of old man Carr. Ther full four seasons
of ther year hain't rolled round yit sence I buried my daddy out thar
with a Carr bullet drilled through his heart. Ther last time any man
preached a truce ter us Gregorys we agreed ter hit--an' my daddy was
lay-wayed an' shot ter death whilest we war still a'keepin' hit plum
faithful. Ther man thet seeks ter beguile me _now_ with thet same
fashion of talk comes askin' me ter trust my life an' ther welfare of my
woman an' child ter ther faithless word of liars!"

His voice leaped suddenly out of its difficult timbre of restraint and
rang echoing against the chinked timbers of the walls.

"I've done suffered grievously enough already by trustin' ter infamy.
From now on I'll watch them enemies thet's nighest me fust--an' them
thet's further off atterwards. My God A'mighty, ef ye warn't my own
blood kin, I couldn't hardly suffer ye ter tarry under my roof atter
ye'd give voice ter sich a proffer!"

Araminta Gregory had listened from the kitchen door but now she swept to
her husband's side and turned upon her visitor the wrath of blazing eyes
and a heaving bosom.

"We hain't askin' no odds of nobody," she flared in a panting transport
of fury. "Asa kin safeguard his own so long es he hain't misled with
lyin' an' false pledges."

"Don't fret yoreself none, Araminty," said the man, reassuring her with
a brusque but not ungentle hand on her trembling arm. Then he turned
with regained composure to Saul, as he inquired: "Does ther Carrs
proffer ter drap tha'r hell-bent detarmination ter penitenshery me or
hang met?"

Somewhat dubiously Fulton shook his head in negation.

"I reckon they 'low ye'd only mistrust 'em ef they proffered _thet_. All
they proposes is thet ontil this election's over an' sottled--not jest
at ther polls, but sottled fer good an' all--thar won't be no hand
raised erginst you ner yourn. I reckon ye kin bide yore time thet long,
an' when this racket's over ye'll be plum free ter settle yore own
scores." He paused, then added insinuatingly, "Every week a trial's put
off hit gits harder fer ther prosecution. Witnesses gits scattered like
an' men kinderly disremembers things."

Asa Gregory, confronted with a new and complicated problem, sank back
into his seat and his attitude became one of deep meditation. He glanced
at the bowl of his dead pipe, leaned forward and drew a burning fagot
from the fire for its relighting; then, at length, he spoke with a
judicial deliberation.

"This hyar's a solid Republican deestrick. We don't need no truce ter
make us vote ther ticket."

The messenger from the outer world shook a dubious head. "Votin' ther
ticket hain't enough. Thar's ergoin' ter be a heap of fancy mathematics
in tallyin' thet vote all over ther State. Up hyar we've got ter make up
fer any deefault down below. We kain't do thet without we all stands
solid. Ef thar's any bickerin' them crooks'll turn hit ter account, but
ef we elects our man he hain't ergoin' ter fergit us."

"So fur es thet goes," mused Asa, "I hain't a'seekin' no favours from
ther Governor."

"Why hain't ye?" Saul lowered his voice a little for added effect. "Ye
faces a murder trial, don't ye? I reckon a Republican Governor, next
time, mout be right willin' ter grant ye a pardon ef ye laid by yore own
grievances fer ther good of ther party--hit wouldn't be no more'n fa'r
jestice."

"What guaranty does these enemies of mine offer me?" inquired Asa
coolly. "Does they aim ter meet me half way?"

"Hit's like this," Saul spoke now with undisguised excitement: "Ther
boys air holdin' a rally ternight over at ther incline.... A big lawyer
from Loueyville is makin' a speech thar.... They wants thet I shell
fotch ye back along with me--an' thet ye shan't tote no rifle-gun ner no
weepin' of airy sort. Tom Carr'll be thar too--unarmed."

At the name Asa Gregory flinched as if he had been smitten in the face,
but the messenger went persuasively on:

"Thar'll be es many of our folks thar es his'n. They'll be consortin'
tergither plum peaceable--twell ye walks inter ther room. Them Gregories
an' them Carrs air all armed. Hit's jest you an' Tom thet hain't. When
we comes inter ther place, Tom'll start down ther aisle to'rds ye--an'
you'll start up to'rds Tom." The speaker paused, and Asa prompted in a
low, restrained voice, though his face was chalky pale with smothered
emotion:

"Go on! I'm hearkenin'."

Saul shrugged his shoulders. "Wa'al, thet's all. Ye knows ther rest es
well es I does. Them fellers on both sides air trustin' their lives ter
ther two of ye. Ef you an' Tom shakes hands they'll all ride home quiet
as turtle-doves--an' take off th'ar coats ter beat this man fer
Governor. Ef you an' Tom _don't_ shake hands--or ef one or t'other of ye
makes a single fightin' move, every gun under thet roof'll start poppin'
an ther place'll be a slaughter house. They all knows thet full well.
Ther lawyer knows hit, too--an' he's a'riskin' hit fer ther sake of his
party."

The indicted man took a step forward. "Stand up hyar an' look me in ther
eyes," he commanded shortly, and, when Fulton rose, they stood, face to
face, so close that each could feel the breath of the other's lips.

The steady brown eyes bored into the shiftier pupils of greenish-gray
with an implacable searching, and Asa's voice came in an uncompromising
hardness:

"Saul, ye're askin' me ter trust ye right far. I hain't got nothin' but
yore word fer hit thet thar'll be airy man over thar at thet meetin' but
them thet seeks my life. This may be what ye says hit is or hit may be a
trap--but ye're a kinsman of mine, an' I've got a license ter believe
ye--oncet. Ef ye're lyin' ter me, ye're mighty apt ter hev ter pay fer
hit."

"Ef I'm lyin' ter ye, Asa," came the prompt response, "I'm ready ter pay
fer hit."

Gregory drew on his coarse socks and heavy shoes. "Alright," he acceded
curtly, "I'm a'goin' along with ye now, an' I reckon we'd better
hasten."

"Don't go, Asa," pleaded Araminta. "Don't take no sich chanst." But as
her husband looked into her eyes she slowly nodded her head. "Ye're
right," she said falteringly. "I was jest skeered because I'm so
worrited. Of course ye've _got_ ter go. Hit's fer yore country."

When the door had closed the woman dropped limply into a chair. Her
pupils were distended and her fingers twisted in aimless gropings. After
a while she looked about a little wildly for Boone Wellver. It was
something to have his companionship during the hours of suspense--but
the boy's chair, too, was empty. His rifle was missing from its corner.

She know now what had happened. Boone had slipped uninvited and secretly
out into the night. He had said nothing, but he meant to follow the pair
unseen, and if he found his hero threatened, there would be one armed
follower at his back.

From the crib in one corner rose an uneasy whimper and Araminta went to
soothe her baby at her breast.




CHAPTER IV


When Boone surreptitiously slipped out of the house he had plunged
recklessly into the thorn-tangle for a shorter cut than the two men
would take: a road of precipitous peril but of moments saved.

If the possibility which Saul had admitted came to fruition and the guns
started popping, the peril lay not in the course of subsequent minutes
but at the pregnant instant when Asa Gregory's face was first seen in
the door. It would be in that breathing-space that the issue would find
settlement, and it would hang, hair-balanced, on the self-restraint of
two men whose hard-held hatred might break bounds and overwhelm them as
each thought of the father slain by violence. It would be a parlous
moment when their eyes, full of stored-up and long-curbed rancour, first
engaged and their hostile palms were required to meet and clasp.

Young as he was, Boone understood these matters. He knew how the resolve
which each had undertaken might collapse into swift destruction as the
hot tides rushed into their temples. If their mutual concession of
manner was not balanced to exact nicety--if either Tom or Asa seemed to
hold back and throw upon the other the brunt of the difficult
conciliation by so much as a faltering stride--there would be
chaos--and Boone meant to be there in time.

In this pocketed bit of wilderness, the incline had been built years
ago, and it had been a challenge to Nature's mandate of isolation.

As the crow flew, the railroad that might afford an outlet to market was
not so many miles away, but it might as well have been ten times as
distant. Between lay a wall of hills interposing its grim prohibition
with a timbered cornice lifted twenty-five hundred feet towards the sky
and more than a day's journey separated those gaps where wheels could
scale and cross. Long ago local and visionary enthusiasts had built a
huge warehouse on a towering pinnacle with an incline of track dropping
dizzily down from it to the creek far below. Its crazy little cars had
been hauled up by a cable wound on a drum with the motive force of a
straining donkey-engine. But so ambitious an enterprise had not survived
the vicissitudes of hard times. Its simple machinery had rusted; its
tracks ran askew with decay upon their warped underpinning of teetering
struts.

Now the warehouse stood dry-rotting and unkempt, its spaces regularly
tenanted only by the owl and bat. Through its unpatched roof one caught,
at night, the peep of stars and its hulking sides leaned under the
buffet of the winds which raced, screaming, around the shoulder of the
mountain.

Towards this goal Boone was hurrying, forgetful now of any divided
standards of thought, thinking only of the kinsman whom his boyhood had
exalted with ardent hero-worship--and of that kinsman's danger. A
rowelling pressure of haste drove him, while snares of trailing
creepers, pitfalls blotted into darkness and the thickness of
jungle-like undergrowth handicapped him with many stubborn difficulties.

Sometimes he fell and scrambled up again, bruised and growling but
undiscouraged. Sometimes he forsook even the steep grade of the foot
trail for shorter cut-offs where he pulled himself up semi-perpendicular
walls of cliff, trusting to a hand-grip on hanging root or branch and a
foothold on almost nothing.

But when he was still a long way off he saw a pale flare against the sky
which he knew was a bonfire outside the warehouse, and by the
brightening of that beacon from pallor to crimson glow he measured his
progress.

Inside the building itself another battle against time was being
fought: a battle to hold the attention of a crowd in the background of
whose minds lurked the distrait suspense of waiting for a graver climax
than that of oratorical peroration. About the interior blazed pine
torches and occasional lanterns with tin reflectors. Even this
unaccustomed effort at illumination failed to penetrate the obscurity of
the corners or to carry its ragged brightness aloft into the rafters.
Beyond the sooty formlessness of encroaching shadows one felt rather
than saw the walls, with their rifts through which gusty draught caused
the torches to flare and gutter, sending out the incense of their resin.

Between the Circuit Judge, before whom Asa must face trial and the
County Judge, sat Basil Prince, the principal speaker of the evening,
and his quiet eyes were missing nothing of the mediaevalism of the
picture.

Yet one might have inferred from his tranquillity of expression that he
had never addressed a gathering where the fitful glare of torches had
not shone upon repeating rifles and coon skin caps: where the faces had
not been set and grim as though keyed to an ordeal of fire and lead.

He was noting how every fresh arrival hesitated near the door and
glanced about him. In that brief pause and scrutiny he recognized the
purport of a division, for as each newcomer stepped to the left or the
right of the centre aisle he thereby proclaimed himself a Carr or a
Gregory--taking shrewd thought of clan-mobilization. Then as a low drone
of talk went up from the body of the house and a restless shuffling of
feet, the speaker and his reception committee could not escape the
realization of an ugly tension; of an undertow of anxiety moving deep
beneath the surface affectation of calm. A precarious spirit brooded
there.

The Circuit Judge leaned over toward Prince, whispering nervously
through a smile of courteous commonplace: "Maybe we've made a mistake to
attempt it, General. They seem dangerously restless and tight-strung,
and they've got to be so gripped that they'll forget everything but
your words for a spell!" The speaker, in his abstraction, relapsed
abruptly out of judicial dignity into mountain crudity of speech. "Hit's
ergoin' ter be like holdin' back a flood tide with a splash-dam. Thank
God ef any man kin do thet, I reckon hit's you."

The Louisville lawyer nodded, "I'll try, sir," was his brief response.

As the speaker of the moment dropped back, General Prince came to his
feet and with him rose the Circuit Judge who was to introduce him. That
prefatory address was brief, for the infection of restiveness was
spreading and loosely held interests were gravitating to mischief.

Yet as General Prince stood quietly waiting, with his slender and
elderly figure straight poised and his fine face, for all its
intellectuality, remaining the steel-jawed face of a fighter, the
shuffling feet quieted and straying glances came to focus. There was a
commanding light in the unquailing eyes and these men who knew few
celebrities from the world without, knew both his name and his record.
They gazed steadfastly at him because, though he came now as a friend he
had in another day come as a foe, and the weight of his inimical hand
had come down to them through the mists of the past as word-of-mouth. In
the days of the war between the States, the mountains had thrust their
wedge of rock and granite-loyal Unionism through the vitals of
Confederate territory. While the mobility of the gray forces were balked
there to a heavy congestion, one command, bitterly hated and grudgingly
admired, had seemed capable of defying mountain ranges and of laughing
at torrents. Like a scathe that admitted no gainsaying, it came from
nowhere, struck, without warning, and was gone again unpunished. Its
name had been a metaphor for terror.

Morgan's Men! That brilliant organization of partisan raiders who slept
in their saddles and smote Vulcan-like. The world knew of them and the
Cumberlands had felt their blows. General Basil Prince had been one of
their commanders. Now, a recognized authority on the use of cavalry, a
lawyer of distinction, a life-long Democrat, he stood before Republicans
pouring out the vials of his wrath upon the head of the man whom he
charged with having betrayed and disrupted his own party and with
attempting to yoke freedom into bondage.

Faces bent forward with eyes lighting into an altered mood, and the
grimness which spelled danger relaxed grudgingly into attention.

The speaker did not underestimate his task. It was not enough to play
the spell-binder for a definite period. He must unflaggingly hold them
vassals to his voice until the entrance of Asa Gregory gave him pause.

Never had Basil Prince spoken with a more compelling force or a fierier
power of invective, and his voice had rung like a bugle for perhaps
three-quarters of an hour when in the shadowed darkness beyond the walls
the figure of a boy halted, heavily panting.

Boone paused only for a little, testing the condition of his rifle's
breech and bolt, recovering his spent breath. Then he slipped nearer and
peered through the slit where a board had been broken away in the wall
itself. Within he saw figures bending forward and intent--and his brow
knit into furrows as he took in at a glance the division of the clans,
each to its separate side of the house. They had come, Saul said, to
bring peace out of dissension, but they had paradoxically arranged
themselves in readiness for conflict.

Through a gaping door at the rear, of which he knew, and which lay as
invisible as a rent in a black curtain, because the shadows held
undisputed sway back there, the boy made a noiseless entrance. Up a
ladder, for the rungs of which he had to feel blindly, he climbed to a
perch on the cross-beams, under the eaves, and still he was as blanketed
from view as a bat in an unlighted cavern. The only dim ghost of glow
that went with him were two faint phosphorescent points where he had
rubbed the sights of his rifle with the moistened heads of matches.

For the eloquence of the speaker, which would at another time have
enthralled him, he had now no thought, because lying flattened on a
great square-hewn timber, he was searching the crowd for the face of Tom
Carr.

Soon he made it out below him, to his right, and slowly he trained his
rifle upon the breast beneath the face.

That was all he had to do for the present--except to wait.

When Asa came in, if matters went badly and if Tom made a motion to his
holster or a gesture to his minions, there would be one thing more, but
it involved only the crooking of a finger which snuggled ready in the
trigger-guard.

The boy's muscles were badly cramped up there as the minutes lengthened
and multiplied. The timber was hard and the air chill, but he dared not
invite discovery by free movement.

Then suddenly with a short and incisive sentence following on longer and
more rounded phrases, the speaker fell silent. Boone could not properly
appreciate the ready adroitness with which General Prince had clipped
his oratory short without the seeming of a marred effect. He only knew
that the voice spoke crisply and halted and that the speaker was
reaching out his hand, with matter-of-fact gesture, toward the gourd in
the water bucket on the table.

Instantly the shuffling of feet grated its signal of an awakening
apprehension--an uneasiness which had been temporarily lulled. There was
an instant, after that, of dead hush, and then a twisting of necks as
all eyes went to the door.

The men on each side of the house drew a little closer and more
compactly together, widening and emphasizing the line of the aisle
between; becoming two distinct crowds where there had been one, loosely
joined. Hands gestured instinctively toward guns laid by, and halted in
cautious abeyance. Through the cobwebbed spaciousness and breathless
quiet of the place sounded the ill-omened quaver of a barn owl.

In the door stood Asa Gregory, his hands hanging at his sides with a
studied inertness as his eyes travelled slowly, appraisingly, about the
place. His attitude and expression alike were schooled into passiveness,
but as he saw another figure rise from just in front of the stage and
stand in momentary irresolution, the muscles of his jaw hardened and
into his eyes flashed a defiant gleam. His lids contracted to the
narrowness of slits, as though struggling to shut out some sudden and
insufferable glare. His chest heaved in a gasp-like breath and the hands
which he sought to keep hanging, slowly closed and clenched as muscles
tauten under an electric shock. Then, as if in obedience to impulses
beyond volition, the right hand came upward toward the left
armpit--where his pistol holster should have been.

At the sight of his enemy rising there before him, Asa Gregory had seen
red, and the length of the aisle away, Tom Carr stood struggling with an
identical transport of reeling self-control. Like a reflection in a
mirror his face too blackened in sinister hatred and his hand too moved
toward the empty holster.

The strained tableau held only for a breathing space, but it was long
enough for acceptance as a signal. It was long enough to afford the
orator of the evening a swift, photographic impression of flambeaux
giving back the glint of drawn pistols to right and left of the aisle;
of the ducking of timid heads; of a crowd holding a pose as tense and
ready as runners set on their marks--yet breathlessly awaiting the overt
signal.

It was long enough, too, for Boone Wellver, crouched in the rafters, to
close one eye and sight his rifle on the back of Tom Carr--and to draw a
shallow breath of nerve-tension and resolution as his finger balanced
the trigger--a finger which sheer strain was perilously contracting.

In that same instant Asa Gregory and Tom Carr were brought back to
themselves by the feel of emptiness where there should have been the
bulge of concealed weapons--and by all the resolution for which that
disarmament stood.

With a convulsive bracing of his shoulders, Gregory relaxed again,
throwing out his arms wide of his body, and Carr echoed the peace
gesture.

As his deep-held breath came with long exhalation from his chest, Asa
walked steadily down the aisle--while Tom Carr went to meet him half
way.

Standing face to face, the two enemies lifted stubbornly unwilling hands
for the consummation of the peace-pact. Their palms touched and fell
swiftly apart as though each had been scorched. Their faces were the
stoic faces of two men undergoing a necessary torture. But the thing was
done and the rafters rocked with an uproar of applause.

That clamour killed out a lesser sound, as the held breath in Boone
Wellver's chest hissed out between teeth that suddenly fell to
chattering. His body, for just a moment, shook so that he almost lost
his balance on his precarious perch, as the flexed emotions that had
keyed him to the point of homicide burst into relief like a released
spring ... and with shaken but careful fingers he let down the cocked
rifle hammer.

Then with a voice of smooth and quieting satisfaction the orator from
Louisville raised his hands.

"I've just seen a big thing done," he said, "and now I move that you
instruct your chairman to send a telegram of announcement to the next
Governor of Kentucky."

He had to pause there until order could be restored out of a bedlam of
yelling, laughing and handshaking. When there was a possibility of being
heard again he held up a message which he had scribbled during that
noisy interval. "I move you that you say this to our standard-bearer:
'Here in the hills of Marlin we have laid aside feudism to rescue our
State from an even more dangerous thing. Here old enmities have been
buried in an alliance against tyranny.'"

Boone had not recognized the face of Victor McCalloway in the audience,
because that gentleman had been sitting quietly back in the shadows with
the detachment of a looker-on among strangers, but now as the boy stood
outside the door, he saw the Scot shaking hands with the speaker of the
evening and heard him saying:

"General Prince, it has long been my ambition to meet you, Sir. I have
soldiered a bit myself and I know your record. The committee has paid me
the honour of permitting me to play your host for the night."

There was no moon and the heavens were like a high-hung curtain of
purple-black plush, spangled with the glitter of cold stars. A breeze
harping softly through the tree-tops carried a touch of frost, but Boone
Wellver sat on a rounded hump of rock, well back from the road, with
eyes that were wide and themselves starry under the spell of his
reflections.

Since the coming of McCalloway Boone had been living in a world of
fantasy. He had been seeing himself as no longer an ignorant lad,
sleeping on a husk-pallet, in the cock-loft of a cabin, but as a
personality of greater majesty and spaciousness of being. Tonight he had
heard General Prince speak and under the fanning of oratory his
dream-fires were hotly aglow. As he sat on the rock with the soft
minstrelsy of the wind crooning overhead, a score of hearth-stone
recitals came back to memory; all saga-like stories of the prowess of
Morgan's men. It seemed that he could almost hear the strain of stirrup
leathers and the creak of cavalry-gear; the drum-beat of many hoofs.

This great man who had ridden at the head of that command was even now
on his way to Victor McCalloway's house and there he would remain until
tomorrow morning. What marvellous stories those two veterans would
furnish forth from their own treasuries of reminiscence!

Suddenly Boone rose with an abrupt but fixed resolve. "By Godelmighty!"
he exclaimed. "I reckon I'll jest kinderly sa'anter over thar and stay
all night, too. I'd love ter listen at 'em talk."

Here in the hills where the very meagreness makes a law of hospitality
he had never heard of a traveller who asked a night's lodging being
turned away. Yet when he arrived and lifted his hand to knock he
hesitated for a space, gulping his heart out of his throat, suddenly
stricken with the enormity of intruding himself, unbidden, upon such
notable presences.

Then the door swung open, and the boy found himself stammering with a
tongue that had become painfully and ineptly stiff:

"I've done got belated on ther highway--an' I'm leg-weary," he
prevaricated. "I 'lowed mebby ye'd suffer me ter come in an' tarry till
mornin'."

Over the preoccupation of McCalloway's face broke an amused smile, and
he stepped aside, waving his hand inward with a gesture of welcome.

"General Prince, permit me to present my young friend, Boone Wellver,"
he announced, stifling the twinkle of his eyes, and speaking with
ceremonial gravity. "He is a neighbour of mine--who tells me he has
dropped in for the night."

The seated gentleman with the gray moustache and beard came to his feet,
extending his hand, and under the overwhelming innovation of such
courtesy, Boone was even more palpably and painfully abashed. But as
vaguely comprehended etiquette, he recognized its importance and
accordingly came forward with the stiffness of an automaton.

"Howdy," he said with a stupendous solemnity. "I've done heerd tell of
ye right often, an' hit pleasures me ter strike hands with ye. Folks
says ye used ter be one of ther greatest horse-thievin' raiders that
ever drawed breath."

When the roar of General Prince's laughter subsided--a laughter for
which Boone could see no reason, the boy drew a chair to the corner of
the hearth and sat as one may sit in the wings of a theatre, his breath
coming with the palpitation of simmering excitement. Soon the elders
seemed to have forgotten him in the heated absorption of their debate.
They were threshing over the campaigns of the war between the States and
measuring the calibre of commanders as a backwoods man might estimate
the girth and footage of timber.

Boone nursed contented knees between locked fingers while the debate
waxed warm.

Not only were battles refought there in retrospect, with such
illuminating vividness as seemed to dissolve the narrow walls into a
panoramic breadth of smoking, thunderous fields, but motive and intent
were developed back of the engagements.

Boone in the chimney corner sat mouse-quiet. He seemed to be rapturously
floating through untried spaces on a magic carpet.

McCalloway replenished the fire from time to time, and though midnight
came and passed, neither thought of sleep. It was as if men who had
dwelt long in civilian inertia, were wassailing deep again in the heady
wine of a martial past, and were not yet ready to set aside their
goblets of memory.

The forgotten boy, electrically wakeful, huddled back, almost stifling
his breath lest he should be remembered and sent to bed.

The speakers fell eventually into a silence which held long and was
complete save for the light hiss and crackle of the logs, until Basil
Prince's voice broke it with a low-pitched and musing interrogation. "I
sometimes wonder whether the chemistry of a great war today would bring
forth mightier or lesser reactions. Would the need call into evidence
men of giant stature? Have we, in our time, greater potential geniuses
than Grant and Lee?"

McCalloway shook his head. "I question it," he declared. "I question it
most gravely. I am myself a retired soldier. I have met most of the
European commanders of my day, I have campaigned with not a few. Several
have demonstrated this or that element of greatness, but not one the
sheer pre-eminence of genius."

"And yet--" General Prince rose abruptly from his chair, under the
impulse of his engrossed interest. "And yet, there was quite recently,
in the British Army, one figure that to my mind demonstrated true
genius, sir,--positive and undeniable genius. Tragedy claimed him before
his life rounded to fulfilment. Not the tragedy of the field--which is
rather gold than black--but the unholy and--I must believe--the
undeserved tragedy of unwarrantable slander. If General Hector Dinwiddie
had not died by his own hand in Paris, two years ago, he would have
compelled recognition--and history's grudging accolade. It is my belief,
sir, that he was of that mighty handful--the military masters."

For a while, McCalloway offered neither assent nor denial. His eyes
held, as if by some hypnotic influence in the coals, were like those of
the crystal gazer who sees shadowy and troubling pictures, and even in
the hearth-flare the usually high-colour of his Celtic cheeks appeared
faded into a sort of parchment dulness. Such a tide of enthusiasm was
sweeping the other along, though, that his host's detachment and
taciturnity went unobserved.

"Dinwiddie was not the man to have been guilty of those things, which
scandal whispered of him," persisted Prince, with such spirited
animation as might have characterized him had he been confronting a jury
box, summing up for the defence, "but he could not brook calumny." The
speaker paused to shake his head sadly, and added, "So he made the mad
mistake of self-destruction--and robbed Great Britain of her ablest and
most brilliant officer."

"Perhaps," McCalloway suggested in a speculative and far-away voice,
"perhaps he felt that his usefulness to his country was ended when his
name was dragged into the mire."

"And in that he erred. Such a man would have emerged, clean-shriven,
from the smirching of slander. His detractors would have stood damned by
their own infamous falsity--had he only faced them out and given them
the lie."

"Then you believe--in spite of the seemingly overpowering evidence which
they produced against him--that the charges _were_ false?"

McCalloway put the question slowly. "May I ask upon what you base your
opinion? You know all they said of him: personal dishonesty and even
ugly immorality?"




CHAPTER V


The one-time cavalry leader caught up the challenge of the question.

"Upon what do I base my opinion, sir? I base it upon all the experience
of my life and all my conceptions of personal honour. For such a man as
Dinwiddie had proven himself to be under a score of reliable tests, the
thing was a sheer impossibility. It was a contradiction in the terms of
nature. His was the soul of a Knight, sir! Such a man could not cheat
and steal and delight in low vices."

"Yet," came the somewhat dubious observation, "even Arthur's table had
its caitiff knights, if you remember."

The Kentuckian's exclamation was almost a snort. "Dinwiddie was no such
renegade," he protested. "At least I can't believe it. Glance at his
record, man! The son of an Edinburgh tradesman, who forced his way up
from the ranks to pre-eminence. He did it, too, in an army where caste
and birth defend their messes against invasion, and, as he came from the
ranks to a commission, so he went on to the head. There must have been a
greatness of soul there that could hardly care to wallow in
viciousness." As Prince paused, a spasm of emotion twitched the lips of
his host, and McCalloway's pipe died in fingers that clutched hard upon
its stem.

But because McCalloway sat unmoving, making no comment of any sort, the
Kentuckian continued. It was as though he must have his argument
acknowledged.

"I can see the tradesman's son, Sir Hector Dinwiddie, D.S.O., K.C.B.,
Major General, Aide de Camp to the Queen, promising Britain another
glorious name--but as God in heaven is my judge, I cannot see him
soiling his character, or degrading the uniform he wore!"

A moment of dead silence hung heavily between the walls of the room.
Boone Wellver saw Victor McCalloway pass an uncertain hand across his
eyes, and move his lips without speech, and then he heard Prince demand
almost impatiently,

"But you say you have served in the British Army. Surely you do not
believe that he was guilty?"

McCalloway, called out of his detached quiet by a direct question,
raised his head and nodded it in a fashion of heavy inertia.

"General Prince," he replied with an effort, "there are two reasons why
I should be the last man alive to add a syllable of corroboration to the
evil things that were said of Dinwiddie. I myself have been a soldier
and am a civilian. You may guess that a man whose career has been active
would not be living the petty life of a hermit if fortune had dealt
kindly with him. The officer who has suffered from a warrantless
disgrace--which he cannot disprove--is hardly the judge to condemn
another similarly charged.

"That, sir, is one reason why I should not contradict your view."

McCalloway rose slowly from his chair and, after standing for a moment
with shoulders that drooped from their military erectness, went with an
inelastic step to the corner of the room and came back, carrying a
sword.

"There is also another reason based on personal partiality," he added.
"I knew him so well that after the world heard of his suicide--and after
my own misfortunes forced me into retirement, I might often have hired
my sword because of my familiarity with his military thought."

Boone Wellver saw the throat work spasmodically, and wondered what it
all meant as the carefully schooled words went on again, with a gauged
steadiness.

"I have admired your own record, General Prince. I owe you frankness,
but I have chapters in my life which I cannot confide to you.
Nevertheless, I am glad we have met. Look at that blade." He held out
the sword. In the leap and flicker of the firelight Boone could catch
the glint of a hilt that sent out the sparkle of jewelry and inlaid
enamel. Slowly General Prince slid the sabre from the scabbard, and bent
forward, studying an inscription upon the damascened steel itself. For a
moment he held it reverently before him, then straightened up and his
voice trembled with a note of mystified wonderment.

"But this--" he said incredulously, "this is Dinwiddie's
sabre--presented by--"

McCalloway smiled stiffly, but he held up a hand as if entreating
silence.

"It _is_ his sword," he answered, but dully and without ardour, "and, if
it means anything to you--he knew the facts of my own life, both the
open and the hidden--and he trusted me enough to leave that blade in my
keeping."

"To me, you required no recommendation, sir," said Basil Prince slowly.
"If you _had_ needed it, this would be sufficient. You had the
confidence, even the love it seems, of the greatest military genius of
our age."

On the following morning, Boone made his farewells, reluctantly as one
who has glimpsed magic and who sets his face again to dull realities.

The Southerner, who had laid down his sword when its cause was lost and
the Celt who had sheathed his, when his name was tarnished, stood
together in the crystal-clear air of the heights, looking down from a
summit over crags and valleys that sparkled with the rime of frost.

Undulating like a succession of arrested waves, were the ramparts of the
ridges stretching into immeasurable distances. They were almost leafless
now, but they wrapped themselves in colour tones that touched them into
purple and blue. They wore atmospheric veils, mist-woven, and sun-dyed
into evanescent and delicate effects of colour, but the cardinal note
which lay upon them, as an expression rests upon a human face, was
their declaration of wildness; their primitive note of brooding
aloofness.

"They are unchanged," declared General Prince in a low voice. "The west
has gone under the plough. The prairies are fenced. Alaska even is
won--. These hills alone stand unamended. Here at the very heart of our
civilization is the last frontier, and the last home of the
trail-blazer." His eyes glistened as he pointed to a wisp of smoke that
rose in a cove far under them, straight and blue from its clay-daubed
chimney.

"There burns the hearth fire of our contemporary ancestors, the stranded
wagon voyagers who have changed no whit from the pioneers of two hundred
years ago."

Victor McCalloway nodded gravely, and his companion went on.

"With one exception this range was the first to which the earth, in the
travail of her youth, gave birth. Compared with the Appalachians, the
Himalayas and the Alps are young things, new to life. On either side of
where we stand a youthful civilization has grown up, but these ridges
have frowned on, unaltered. Their people still live two centuries behind
us."

McCalloway swept out his hands in a comprehensive gesture.

"When you leave this spot, sir, for your return, you travel not only
some two hundred miles, but also from the infancy of Americanism to its
present big-boyhood. Pardon me, if that term seems disrespectful," he
hastened to add. "But it is so that I always think of your nation, as
the big growing lad of the world family. Titanically strong,
astonishingly vigorous of resource, but, as yet, hardly adult."

The Kentuckian, standing spare and erect, typical of that old South
which has caught step with the present, yet which has not outgrown the
gracious touch of a more courtly past, smiled thoughtfully while his
younger companion, who had known the life of court and camp, in the
elder hemisphere, puffed at his blackened pipe: "Adult or adolescent, we
are altering fast, casting aside today the garments of yesterday,"
admitted Prince. "In my own youth a gentleman felt the call of honour to
meet his personal enemy on the duelling field. I have, myself, answered
that call. In my young manhood I donned the gray, with a crusader's
ardent sincerity, to fight for the institution of human slavery. Today
we think in different terms."

Upon them both had fallen a mood; the mood of gazing far backward and
perhaps also of adventuring as far forward in the forecasting of human
transition.

Such a spirit may come to men who have, in effect, stepped aside from
the march of their own day, into an elder regime--a pioneer setting.

To Basil Prince, in the fore-shortening of retrospect, all the gradual
amendments of life, as he had known them in their enactment, stood forth
at once in a gigantic composition of contrasts; heroically pictured on a
single canvas.

"Now," he reflected, "we hear the younger generation speak with a
pitying indulgence of the archaic stodginess of mid-Victorian
ideas--and, my God, sir, that was all only yesterday, and this
mid-Victorian thought was revolutionary in its newness and its
advancement! I can remember when it startled the world: when Tennyson
was accounted a wild radical, and Darwin a voice savouring strongly of
heresy."

McCalloway filled a fresh pipe. He sent out a cloud of tobacco smoke and
set back his shoulders.

"In my belief, your radical poet said one true thing at least," he
observed.

    "... I doubt not through the ages, one increasing purpose runs.

"That purpose lies towards the swallowing of the local, and the
individualistic, the national even into the international. It lies
toward the broadest federation of ideals that can exist in harmony." He
paused there, and in the voice of one expecting contradiction, added:
"And that end will not be attained in parliaments, but on the
battlefield."

"The creed of Americanism," Prince reminded him, "rests on the pillars
of non-interference with other states and of a minimum of meddling among
our own."

"So far, yes," admitted the Scot, but his eyes held a stubborn light of
argument. "Yet I predict that when the whole story of Americanism is
written, it will be cast to a broader plot."

On General Prince's lips flickered a quiet smile.

"Is there a broader thing than independence?" he inquired, and the
answer came back with a quick uptake.

"At least a bigger thing, sir. Breadth is only one dimension, after all.
A larger concept, perhaps, comes by adding one syllable to your word and
making it interdependence. Inexorably you must follow the human cycle
and some day, sir, your country must stand with its elder brethren,
grappled in the last crusade. Then only will the word Americanism be
completely spelled."

The Kentuckian's eyes kindled responsively to the animation of his
companion's words, his manner. It was a phase of this interesting man
that he had not before seen, but his own response was gravely calm,

"I am thinking," he said whimsically, "that this wine-like air has gone
to our heads. We are standing in a high place, dreaming large dreams."

The Scot nodded energetically.

"I dare say," he acceded. "After all a hermit is thrown back on dreaming
for want of action." He broke off and when he spoke again it was with a
trace of embarrassment, almost of shyness which brought a flush to his
cheeks.

"I've been living here close to the life that was the infancy of your
nation, and I've been imagining the wonder of a life that could start
as did that of these hardy settlers and pass, in a single generation,
along the stages that the country, itself, has marched to this day. It
would mean birth in pioneer strength and simplicity, and fulfilment in
the present and future. It would mean ten years lived in one!"

"It would have had to begin two centuries ago," Prince reminded him,
"and to run, who can say, how far forward?"

Half diffidently, half stubbornly, McCalloway shook his head.

"You saw that boy last night who called you a 'great horse-thievin'
raider'?" The gray eyes twinkled with reminiscence. "In every essential
respect he is a lad of two hundred years ago. He is a pioneer boy, crude
as pig-iron, unlettered and half barbaric. Yet his stuff is the raw
material of which your people is made. It needs only fire, water, oil
and work to convert pig-iron into tempered steel."

Prince looked into his companion's eyes and found them serious.

"You mean to try," he sceptically inquired, "to make the complete
American out of that lad in whose veins flows the blood of the
vendetta?"

"I told you that we hermits were dreamers," answered McCalloway. "I've
never had a son of my own. I think it would be a pretty experiment, sir,
to see how far this young back-woodsman could go."

       *       *       *       *       *

Strange indeed would have seemed to any prying eye the occurrences
within the walls of McCalloway's cabin on those many evenings which
Boone Wellver spent there. But of what took place the boy breathed no
word, despite the almost feverish eagerness that glowed constantly in
his blue eyes. His natural taciturnity would have sealed his lips had he
given the "furriner" no pledge of confidence, and even McCalloway never
guessed how strict was the censorship of that promise as Boone
construed its meaning. Inasmuch as he could not be sure just what
details, out of the summary of their conversations, fell under the
restrictive ban, he set upon the whole association a seal of Masonic
silence. And Victor McCalloway, recognizing that dependable discretion,
talked with a freedom which he would have permitted himself with few
other companions.

Sometimes he read aloud from books whose pages were, to the young
listener, gates swinging open upon gilded glimpses of chivalry, heroism
and those thoughts which are not groundling but winged and splendid.
Sometimes through the hills where the distances shimmered with an ashen
ghost of brilliance, they tramped together, a peripatetic philosopher
and his devoted disciple.

But strangest and most fantastical of all, were the hours they spent
before McCalloway's hearth when the man threw off his coat and rolled
his sleeves high over scarred forearms while the boy's eyes sparkled
with anticipation. And at outside mention of these sessions, McCalloway
himself might have reddened to the cheekbones, for then it was that the
man produced improvised wooden swords and placed himself, feet wide
apart and left hand elevated in the attitude of the fencer's salute.
Facing him was a solemn, burning-eyed pupil and adversary of fifteen in
a linsey-woolsey shirt and jeans overalls. The lad with his freckled
face and his red-brown shock of hair made an absurd contrast with the
gentleman whose sword play possessed the exquisite grace and deft
elegance of a Parisian fencing master--but Boone had the astonishing
swiftness of a panther cub, and a lightning play of wrist and agility of
limb. How rapidly he was gaining mastery over his foil he could not,
himself, realize because standing over against him was one of the best
swords of Europe, but this enthusiasm, which was a very passion to
learn, was also a thing of which he never spoke outside.




CHAPTER VI


With winter came desolation. The sumac no longer flared vermilion and
the flaming torches of the maples were quenched.

Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through
viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate
gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skies from its pallid dawn to its
setting in a bed of inflamed and angry clouds.

And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another
spirit came with it--equally grim.

The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable
culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater
lengths--when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked
loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There
was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of
blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of
election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from
both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted
dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with
weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.

As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to
the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the
Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly
Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps,
to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats
asseverated that the "Bloody Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a
response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:

"How much do you need?"

Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the
rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.

In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty horsemen
were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked
creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light
of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice
brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and
dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the
ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek
of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin Town.

That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners
certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as
quietly as it had formed.

In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and
injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin
fluctuated: the outcome wavered.

When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was
sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly
political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin
County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing
in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage
single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to
make Boone his assistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road,
it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.

He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being
waged--he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where
these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky,
pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the pawns.

Victor McCalloway smiled when Boone told him, in a voice shaken with
emotion, that the day had come when he could go out and see the world.

Boone and Saul slept, that night, in a mining town with the glare of
coke furnaces biting red holes through the surrounding blackness of the
ridges.

To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly
colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of
embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to
maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through
widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When
the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing
bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and
lofty. Here it seemed to lie prone. The very air tasted flat in his
nostrils and, missing the screens of forested peaks, he felt a painful
want of privacy--like a turtle deprived of its shell, or a man suddenly
stripped naked.

Upon his ears a thousand sounds seemed to beat in tumult--and
dissonance. Men no longer walked with a soundless footfall, or spoke in
lowered voices.

In the county seat to which they brought their gaunt cattle, his
bewilderment mounted almost to vertigo, for about the court house square
were congregated men and beasts--all unfamiliar to the standards of his
experience.

The native beef here was fat, corn-fed stock, and the hogs were rounder
and squatter than the mast-nourished razor-backs he had known at home.
The men, too, who bought and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller
voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in
soft caution. Upon himself from time to time he felt amused glances, as
though he, like his bony steers, stood branded to the eye with the
ineradicable mark of something strayed in from a land of poverty.

But when eventually the cattle had been sold, Saul took him on to the
capitol of the State, and there, on the twelfth of December, he stood,
with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state
house and gazed up at the platform upon which the choice of his own
people was being inaugurated as Governor.

Boone was dazzled by the gold-laced uniforms of all the colonels on the
retiring executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of
the winter afternoon, his soul was all but satiated with the heady
intoxication of full living.

On a brilliantly frosted morning, when the weed stalks by the roadside
were crystal-rimmed, and the sky was an illimitable arch of blue
sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth
stone walls and well-kept fences. Yet for all his enthusiasm of
admiration, a new sense of misgiving and vague trouble began to settle
heavily at his heart.

No one, along the way, halted to "meet an' make their manners."
Vehicles, drawn by horses that lifted their hocks and knees high, passed
swiftly and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a
thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably
obtruded itself upon realization. At home, where every man was poor,
there had been no sense of inferiority, but here was a regime of
disquieting contrasts.

When they at last turned through a gate with stone pillars, he caught
sight of a long maple and oak-flanked avenue, and at its end a great
brick house. Against the age-tempered facade stood out the trim of white
paint and the dignity of tall, fluted columns. He marvelled that Saul
Fulton had been able in so short a time to buy himself such a palace.

But while he still mulled over his wonderment in silence, Saul led him
by a detour around the mansion and its ivory-white out-buildings, and
continued through back pastures and fields, disfigured by black and
sharp tobacco stubble. Boone followed past fodder-racks and pig-sties,
until they brought up at a square, two-roomed house with blank,
unpainted walls, set in a small yard as barren as those of the hills,
but unrelieved by any background of laurel or forest. About this
untempered starkness of habitation stretched empty fields, snow-patched
and desolate, and the boy's face dropped as he heard his kinsman's
announcement, "This hyar's whar I dwells at."

"Who--who dwells over yon at t'other house?" came Boone's rather timid
query. "Ther huge brick one, with them big white poles runnin' up in
front."

Saul laughed with a rasping note in his voice, "Hit b'longs ter Colonel
Tom Wallifarro, ther lawyer, but he don't dwell thar hisself, save only
now an' then."

Fulton paused, and his face took on the unpleasant churlishness of class
hatred. "Ther whole kit and kaboodle of 'em will be hyar soon, though.
They all comes back fer Christmas, an' holds dancin' parties, and
carousin's, damn 'em!"

A seriously puzzled expression clouded the boy's eyes, and he asked
simply, "Hain't ye friendly with 'em, Saul?"

"No," was the short rejoinder, "I hain't friendly with no rich lowlander
that holds scorn fer an honest man jest because he's poor."

On subsequent occasions when Boone passed the "great house" it seemed
almost as quiet as though it were totally untenanted, but with the
approach of Christmas it awoke from its sleep of inactivity.

The young mountaineer was trudging along one day through a gracious
woodland, which even, in the starkness of winter, hinted at the nobility
that summer leafage must give to its parklike spaces. His way carried
him close to the paddocks flanking the ample barns, and he could see
that the house windows were ruddy from inner hearth fires, and decked
with holly wreaths.

In the paddocks themselves were a dozen persons, all opulent of seeming,
and what interested the passer-by, even more than the people, were the
high-headed, gingerly stepping horses that were being led out by negro
boys for their inspection.

In the group Boone recognized the man whom Asa had identified that day
in Marlin as Mr. Masters, a "mine boss," and the gentleman who had come
with him out of the mountain hotel. The boy surmised that this latter
must be Colonel Tom Wallifarro himself, the owner of all these acres.

There was a small girl too, whom Masters called "daughter." Boone had
for girls the fine disdain of his age, and this one he guessed to be
some four or five years younger than himself. But she was unlike any
other he had ever seen, and it puzzled him that so much attention should
be squandered on a "gal-child," though he acknowledged to himself--"but
she's plum purty." He went by with a casual glance and a high chin, but
in his brain whirled many puzzling thoughts, springing from a first
glimpse of wealth.




CHAPTER VII


It was Christmas eve night, and General Basil Prince, who had hurriedly
changed to evening dress after his arrival by a late train, halted for a
moment at the stairhead to look down. On his distinguished face played a
quiet smile. In these rapidly changing times, pride of lineage and
deference for tradition were things less openly voiced than in other
days which he could remember.

Probably that was as it should be, he reflected, yet an elderly fellow
might enjoy the fragrance of old lavender or the bouquet of memory's
vintage.

When he came here to the country house of his friend Wallifarro, it
seemed to him that he stepped back into those days when gracious
ceremonies held and dancers trod the measured figures of the minuet.

He wondered if in many places one could find just such another coterie
of intimates as the little group of older men who gathered here: men who
had been boyhood comrades in the Orphan Brigade, or Morgan's Cavalry:
men who had, since the reconstruction, distinguished themselves in
civilian life, weaving into a new pattern the regathered threads of
fortune.

Gazing down upon the broad hall, with the parquetry of its floors
cleared for dancing, Basil Prince warmed to a glow of pride in these
people who were his people. Aristocracies had risen and tottered since
history had kept its score, but here, surviving all change, remained a
simple graciousness, and a stamina of great heartedness like that which
royal breeding had instilled into those satin-coated horses out there in
their barns; steadfastness of courage and a high spirit.

Holly and mistletoe festooned the doorways, logs roared on brass
andirons, and silver-sconced candles glowed against an ivory softness of
white wainscoting and the waxed darkness of mahogany. He loved it all;
the simple uncrowded elegance; the chaste designs of silver, upon which
the tempered lights found rebirth; the ripe age of the family portraits.
It stood for a worthy part of America--a culture that had ripened in the
early wilderness.

Morgan Wallifarro was home from Harvard for his first vacation, and as
General Prince eyed the boy his brows puckered in the momentary ghost of
a frown. This lad, alone of all the young folk in the laughing groups,
struck him as one to whom he could not accord an unreserved approval--as
one whose dress and manner grated ever so slightly with their marring
suspicion of pose. But this, he told himself, was only the conceit of
extreme youth. Morgan was named for his old chieftain of the partisan
cavalry. He was Tom Wallifarro's boy, and if there was anything in blood
he must ultimately develop into worthiness.

"He's the best stock in the world," mused the General. "He's like a
fractious colt just now--but when he's had a bit of gruelling, he'll run
true to form."

The fiddles swung into a Sousa march, and couples drifted out upon the
floor. General Prince stood against the wall, teasing and delighting a
small girl with short skirts and beribboned hair. It was Anne Masters,
that bewitching child who in a few years more would have little leisure
for gray-heads when the violins sang to waltz-time.

The music ran its course and stopped, as all music must, and the couples
stood encoring. Some one, flushed with dancing, threw open the front
door, and a chilly gust swept in from the night. Then quite suddenly
General Prince heard Morgan Wallifarro's laugh break out over the hum of
conversation.

"Well, in Heaven's name," satirically inquired that young gentleman,
"what have we here?"

It was a strange picture for such a framing, yet into the eyes of
General Prince flashed a quick indignant light and under his breath he
muttered, "That young cub, Morgan! He disappoints me."

Seen across the sparkling shoulders and the filmy party gowns of the
girls, beyond the black and white of the men's evening dress, was the
parallelogram of the wide entrance-door, and centred on its threshold,
against the night-curtain, bulked a figure which hesitated there in
momentary indecision and grotesque inappropriateness.

It was a boy, whose long mop of red-brown hair was untrimmed and whose
eyes were just now dazzled by the unaccustomed light and sparkle upon
which they looked. His shirt was of blue cotton, his clothes patched and
shoddy, but under a battery of amused glances he sensed a spirit of
ridicule and stiffened like a ramrod. A drifting peal of laughter from
somewhere brought his chin up, and a red tide flooded into his cheeks.
The soft and dusty hat which he clasped in his hand was crumpled under
the pressure of his tightening fingers.

Then Boone Wellver's voice carried audibly over the hall and into the
rooms at the side.

"I heered tell thet thar war a dancin' party goin' forward hyar," he
announced simply, "an' I 'lowed I'd jest as lieve as not fare over fer a
spell."

Boone had intended no comedy effect. He spoke in decorous gravity, and
he knew of no reason why an outburst of laughter should sweep the place
as he finished. Prince caught an unidentified voice from his back. It
was low pitched, but it fell on the silence that succeeded the laugh,
and he feared that the boy must have caught it too.

"One of the tobacco-yaps from the back of the place, I expect."

At once General Prince stepped forward and laid his hand on Boone's
shoulder. Under his palm he felt a tremor of anger and hurt pride, and
he spoke clearly.

"This young gentleman," he said--and though his eyes were twinkling with
a whimsical light, his voice carried entire and calculated gravity--"is
a friend of mine, Mr. Boone Wellver of Marlin County. I've enjoyed the
hospitality of his people." There was a puzzled pause, and the General,
whose standing here was as secure as that of Petronius at Nero's court,
continued.

"In the mountains when a party is given no invitations are issued. Word
simply goes out as to time and location, and whoever cares to
come--comes."

The explanation was meant for those inside, but the boy in the doorway
caught from it a clarifying of matters for his own understanding as
well. Obviously here one did _not_ come without being bidden, and that
left him in the mortifying attitude of a trespasser. It came with a
flash of realization and chagrin.

He yearned to blot himself into the kindly void of the night behind
him--yet that rude type of dignity which was bred in him forbade the
humiliation of unexplained flight. Such a course would indeed stamp him
as a "yap," and however shaggy and unkempt his appearance might be in
this ensemble of silk and broadcloth he was as proud as Lucifer.

Heretofore a "dancing-party" had meant to him, shuffling brogans where
shadows leaped with firelight and strings of fiddle and "dulcimore"
quavered out the strains of "Turkey-in-the-straw" or "I've got a gal at
the head of the hollow."

He had expected this to be different, but not _so_ different, and he had
need to blink back tears of shame.

But, all the more for that, he drew himself straight and stiff and spoke
resolutely, though his voice carried the suspicion of a tremor.

"I fear me I've done made a fool mistake an' I reckon I'll say farewell
ter you-all, now."

Even then he did not wheel precipitately, under the urge of his anxiety
to be gone, but paused with a forced deliberation, and, as he tarried,
little Anne Masters stepped impulsively forward.

Anne had reigned with a captivating absolutism from her cradle on. Swift
impulses and ready sympathies governed much of her conduct, and they
governed her now.

"This is _my_ party," she declared. "Uncle Tom told me so at dinner, and
I specially invite you to come in." She spoke with the haste of one
wishing to forestall the possible thwarting of elderly objection, and
ended with a dancing-school curtsey before the boy in hodden gray. Then
the music started up again, and she added, "If you like, I'll give you
this waltz."

But Boone Wellver only shifted from one uneasy foot to the other,
fingering his hat brim and blinking owlishly. "I'm obleeged ter ye," he
stammered with a sudden access of awkwardness, "but I hain't never run a
set in my life. My folks don't hold hit ter be godly. I jest came ter
kinderly look on."

"Anne, dear," translated Basil Prince, "in the mountains they know only
the square dances. Isn't that correct?" The boy nodded his head.

"Thet's what I aimed ter say," he corroborated. "An' I'm beholden ter
ye, little gal, none-the-less."

"And now, come with me, Boone," suggested the old soldier,
diplomatically steering the unbidden guest across the hall and into the
library where over their cigars and their politics sat the circle of
devoted veterans.

Colonel Tom Wallifarro was standing before the fire with his hands
clasped at his back. "I had hoped against hope," he was indignantly
asserting, "that when the man's own hand-made triumvirate denied him
endorsement, he would end his reign of terror and acknowledge defeat."

"A knowledge of the candidate should have sufficed to refute that idea,"
came the musical voice of a gentleman, whose snow-white hair was like a
shock of spun silver.

"I was in Frankfort some days ago when Mr. Goebel sat there in
conference with his favoured lieutenants. It was reported that he
declared himself indifferent as to the outcome, but that he would abide
by the decision of his party whips. The reporters were besieging those
closed doors, and at the end you all know what verdict went over the
wires: 'Being a loyal Democrat I shall obey the mandate of my party--and
make a contest before the legislature for the office of governor, to
which I was legally elected.'"

Just then Basil Prince came forward, leading his protege. Possibly a
wink passed over Boone Wellver's head. At all events the circle of
gentlemen rose and shook hands as sedately as though they had been
awaiting him--and Boone, hearing the titles, colonel, senator, governor,
was enthralled beyond measure.

A half hour later, Morgan Wallifarro burst tempestuously in, carrying a
large package, and wearing an expression of excited enthusiasm.

"General," he exclaimed, "I have disobeyed orders and opened one
Christmas gift before tomorrow. I suspected what it was, sir--and I
couldn't wait."

Forgetful of the pretty girls in the rooms beyond, he ripped open the
parcel and laid on the centre table a pair of beautifully chased and
engraved fencing foils, and the masks that went with them.

"I simply had to come in and thank you at once, sir," he added
delightedly. "Father, bend that blade and feel the temper! Look at the
engraving too! My monogram is on the guard."

While his elders looked indulgently on, the lad made a pass or two at an
imagined adversary, and then he laughed again.

"By George, I wish I had one of the fencing-class fellows here now."

Boone bent forward in his chair, his eyes eagerly fixed on the
glittering beauty of the slender, rubber-tipped blades. His lips parted
to speak, but closed again without sound, while Morgan lunged and
parried at nothing on the hearth-rug. "'We're the cadets of Gascogny,'"
the son of the house quoted lightly. "'At the envoy's end I touch.'"
Then regretfully he added, "I wish there was some one to have a go with.
Are there any challengers, gentlemen?"

The boy in hodden-gray slipped from his chair.

"I reckon ef ye're honin' fer a little sward-fightin' I'll aim ter
convenience ye," he quietly invited.

For an instant Morgan gazed at him in silence. Without discourtesy, it
was difficult to reply to such an absurd invitation, and even the older
men felt their reserve of dignity taxed with the repression of mirth as
they contemplated the volunteer.

"I'm sorry," apologized Morgan, when the silence had become oppressive,
"but these foils are delicate things. For all their temper, they snap
like glass in hands that aren't accustomed to them. It takes a bit of
practice, you see."

The note of condescension stung Boone painfully and his eyes narrowed.
"All right. Hev hit yore own way," he replied curtly. "I thought ye
wanted some sward-practice."

With a sudden flash of memory there came back to Basil Prince's mind the
picture of Victor McCalloway's cabin and Dinwiddie's sword--and, with
the memory, an idea. "Morgan," he suavely suggested, "your challenge was
general, as I understood it, and I don't see how you can gracefully
decline. If a blade breaks, I'll see that it's replaced."

The young college man could hesitate no longer, though he felt that he
was being forced into a ludicrous position, as he bowed his unwilling
acquiescence.

But when the two adversaries took their places where the furniture had
been hastily cleared away, the men widened their eyes and bent forward
absorbed. The mountain lad had suddenly shed his grotesqueness. He
dropped his blade and lifted it in salute, not like a bumpkin but with
the finished grace of familiarity--the sweeping confidence of perfect
ease. As he stepped back, saying "On guard," his left hand came up at
balance and his poise was as light as though he had been reared in the
classroom of a fencing-school.

Morgan went into that contest with the disadvantage of utter
astonishment. He had received some expensive instruction and was on the
way toward becoming a skilled hand with the rapier, but the "tobacco
yap" had been schooled by one of the first swords of Europe.

At the first sharp ring of steel on steel one or two persons
materialized in the library door, and they were speedily augmented by
fresh arrivals, until the circle of bare-shouldered girls and attendant
cavaliers pressed close on the area of combat. Backward and forward,
warily circling with a delicate and musical clatter of engaging steel
between them, went the lad in broadcloth and the boy in homespun.

It was, at best, unequal, but Morgan gave the most that he had, and
against a lesser skill he would have acquitted himself with credit.

After a little there came a lunge, a hilt pressed to lower blade, a
swift twist of a wrist, and young Wallifarro's foil flew clear of his
hand and clattered to the floor. He had been cleanly disarmed.

Boone drew the mask from his tousled head and shuffled his feet. That
awkwardness which had been so absent from his moments of action
descended upon him afresh as he awoke to the many watching eyes. Morgan
held out a hand, which was diffidently received, and acknowledged
frankly, "You're much the better man--but where in Heaven's name did you
learn to fence like that?"

The mountain boy flushed, suddenly realizing that this too was a matter
included in his pledge of confidence to Victor McCalloway.

"Oh," he evasively responded, "I jest kinderly picked hit up--hyar an'
thar as I went along."

As soon as possible after that, Boone made his escape, and it was
characteristic of his close-mouthed self-containment that at Saul
Fulton's cabin he said nothing as to where he had spent his Christmas
eve.




CHAPTER VIII


On the afternoon of Christmas day, as Boone stood by the gate of Saul's
rented patch, looking off across the wet bareness of the fields to the
gray and shallow skyline, he was more than a little homesick for the
accustomed thickness of forest and peak. He at last saw two mounted
figures coming toward him, and recognized General Prince and Anne
Masters.

"We rode by to wish you a very merry Christmas," announced the girl, and
the General added his smile and greeting.

"I'm--I'm obleeged ter both of you-all," stammered Boone as Anne,
leaning over, handed him a package.

"I thought maybe you'd like that. It's a fruit-cake," she informed him,
"I brought it because we think our cook makes it just a little bit
better than anybody else."

Something told Boone Wellver that the girl, despite her fine clothes and
manners, was almost as shy with him as he felt toward her, and in the
thought was a sort of reassurance.

"Hit's right charitable-like of ye ter fotch hit ter me," he responded,
slowly, and the child hastened to make a denial.

"Oh, no, please don't think that. It wasn't charity at all. It was
just--" But as she paused, General Prince interrupted her with a hearty
laugh.

"Yes, it was, Anne," he announced. "The word is like the dances. It has
a different significance in the hills. For instance when you go to visit
your father in Marlin County, Boone will be charitable to you too--or,
as we would say, courteous."

"Be ye comin' ter ther mountains?" demanded Boone, and the sudden
interest which rang in his voice surprised himself.

Fearful lest he had displayed too much enthusiasm, he withdrew
cautiously into his almost stolid manner again. "I'm beholden ter ye fer
this hyar sweet cake," he said. "Hit's ther fust Christmas gift I ever
got."

The house party ended a few days after that, so the mansion became again
a building of shuttered windows and closed doors, and as the old year
died and the new one dawned, Saul himself was frequently absent on
mysterious journeys to Frankfort.

Sometimes he returned home with a smoulder in his eyes, and once or
twice he brought with him a companion, who sat broodingly across the
hearth from him and discussed politics, not after the fashion of frank
debate but in the sinister undertones of furtiveness. On one particular
night in the first week of January, while Saul was entertaining such a
visitor, a knock sounded on the door, and when it was opened a man
entered, whose dress and bearing were of the more prosperous strata and
who seemed to be expected.

Boone overheard the conversation which followed from the obscurity of
the chimney corner, where he appeared to be napping and was overlooked.

"I'm right sorry you was called on to journey all the way here from
Frankfort," began Saul apologetically, but the other cut him short with
a crisp response.

"Don't let that worry you. There are too many eyes and ears in
Frankfort. You know what the situation is now, don't you?"

"I knows right well thet ther Democrat aims ter hev ther legislater seat
him. He's been balked by ther people an' his own commission--an' now
thet's his only chanst."

"The Governor says that if he leaves the state house it will be on a
stretcher," announced the visitor defiantly. "But there are more
conspiracies against us on foot than I have leisure to explain. The time
has come for you mountain men to make good."

Saul rose and paced the floor for a minute, then halted and jerked his
head toward the companion whom he had brought home with him that
evening.

"Shake hands with Jim Hollins of Clay County," he said briefly. "We've
done talked it all over and he understands."

"All right. It's agreed then that you take Marlin and Mr. Hollins takes
Clay. I have representatives in the other counties arranged for. These
men who come will be fed and housed all right. There'll be special
trains to bring them, and ahead of each section will be a pilot engine,
in case the news leaks out and anybody tries to use dynamite."

"All right, then. We'll round ye up ther proper kind of men--upstandin'
boys thet ain't none timorous."

The man in good clothes dropped his voice to an impressive undernote.

"Have them understand clearly that if they are asked why they come, they
shall all make the same response: that in accordance with their
constitutional rights, they are in Frankfort to petition the
legislature--but above all have them well armed."

Saul scratched his chin with a new doubt. "Most mountain men hev guns,
but some of 'em air mighty ancient. I misdoubts ef I kin arm all ther
fellers I kin bring on."

"Then don't bring them." The man, issuing instructions, raspingly barked
out his mandate. "Unarmed men aren't worth a damn to us. If anybody
wants to hedge or back down, let him stay at home. After they get to
Frankfort, it will be too late."

"And when they does git thar," inquired the man from Clay County
incisively, "what then?"

"They will receive their instructions in due time--and don't bring any
quitters," was the sharply snapped response.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bev. Jett was the High Sheriff of Martin County, for in unaltered
Appalachia, with its quaint survivals of Elizabethan speech, where jails
are jail-houses and dolls are puppets, the sheriff is still the High
Sheriff.

Now on a bleak January day, when snow-freighted clouds obscured the
higher reaches of the hills, he was riding along sloppy ways, cut off
from outer life by the steep barrier of Cedar Mountain.

Eventually he swung himself down from his saddle before Asa Gregory's
door and tossed his bridle-rein over a picket of the fence, shouting,
according to custom, his name and the assurance that he came upon a
mission of friendliness.

Bev. Jett remembered that when last he had dismounted at this door there
had been in his mind some apprehension as to the spirit of his
reception. On that occasion he had been the bearer of an indictment
which, in the prolix phrases of the law, made allegation that the
householder had "with rifle or pistol or other deadly weapon loaded with
powder and leaden bullet or other hard and combustible substance,
wilfully, feloniously and against the peace and dignity of the
Commonwealth of Kentucky," accomplished a murder. Now his mission was
more diplomatic, and Asa promptly threw open the door and invited him to
"light down and enter in."

"Asa," said the officer, when he had paid his compliments to the wife
and admired the baby, "Jedge Beard sent me over hyar ter hev speech with
ye. Hit hes ter do with ther matter of yore askin' fer a pardon. Of
course, though, hit's a right mincy business an' must be undertook in
heedful fashion."

Judge Baird, whose name the Sheriff pronounced otherwise, had occupied
the bench when Asa had been less advantageously seated in the prisoner's
dock.

Reflecting now upon the devious methods and motives of mountain
intrigue, Gregory's eyes grew somewhat flinty as he bluntly inquired,
"How does ye mean hit's a mincy business?"

"Hit's like this. Jedge Beard figgers thet atter all this trouble in
Frankfort, with you an' ther Carr boys both interested in ther same
proposition, they mout be willin' ter drap yore prosecution of thar own
will."

Asa Gregory broke into a low laugh and a bitter one.

"So thet's how ther land lays, air hit? He 'lows they'll feel friendly
ter me, does he? Did ye ever see a rattlesnake thet could he gentled
inter a pet?"

"Ye've got ther wrong slant on ther question, Asa," the sheriff hastened
to explain. "The Jedge don't 'low thet ye ought ter _depend_ on no sich
an outcome--an' he hain't dodgin'. None-the-less while he's on ther
bench he's obleeged ter seem impartial. His idee is ter try ter git ye
thet pardon right now if so be hit's feasible--but he counsels thet if
ye does git hit ye'd better jest fold hit up an' stick hit in yore pants
pocket an' keep yore mouth tight. If ther Carrs draps ther prosecution,
then ye won't hev ter show hit at all, an' they won't be affronted
neither. Ef they does start doggin' ye afresh, ye kin jest flash hit
when ye comes ter co'te, an' thet'd be ther end of ther matter. Don't
thet strike ye as right sensible?"

"Thet suits me all right," acceded the indicted man slowly, "provided
I've got a pardon ter flash."

Once more the sheriff's head nodded in reflective acquiescence.

"Thet's why ye'd better hasten like es if ye war goin' down ter
Frankfort ter borry fire. They're liable ter throw our man out--an' then
hit'll be too late." After a pause for impressiveness, the Sheriff
continued,

"Hyar's a letter of introduction from ther Jedge ter ther Governor, an'
another one from ther Commonwealth's attorney. They both commends ye ter
his clemency."

"I'd heered tell thet Saul Fulton an' one or two other fellers aimed
ter take a passel of men ter Frankfort, ter petition ther legislater,"
suggested Asa thoughtfully. "I'd done studied some erbout goin' along
with 'em."

"Don't do hit," came the quick and positive reply. "Ef them fellers gits
inter any manner of trouble down thar ther Governor couldn't hardly
pardon ye without seemin' ter be rewardin' lawlessness. Go by
yoreself--an' keep away from them others."

       *       *       *       *       *

On the evening of the twenty-fifth of January Colonel Tom Wallifarro
stepped from the Louisville train at Frankfort and turned his steps
toward the stone-pillared front of the Capitol Hotel. Across the width
of Main Street, behind its iron fence, loomed the ancient pile of the
state house with its twilight frown of gray stone. The three-storied
executive building lay close at its side. Over the place, he fancied,
gloomed a heavy spirit of suspense. The hills that fringed the city were
ragged in their wintriness, and ash-dark with the thickening dusk.

Bearing a somewhat heavy heart, the Colonel registered and went direct
to his room. Like drift on a freshet, elements of irreconcilable
difference were dashing pell-mell toward catastrophe. Colonel
Wallifarro's mission here was a conference with several cool hands of
both political creeds, actuated by an earnest effort to forestall any
such overt act as might end in chaos.

But the spirit of foreboding lay onerously upon him, and he slept so
fitfully that the first gray of dawn found him up and abroad. River
mists still held the town, fog-wrapped and spectral of contour, and the
Colonel strolled aimlessly toward the station. As he drew near, he heard
the whistle of a locomotive beyond the tunnel, and knowing of no train
due of arrival at that hour, he paused in his walk in time to see an
engine thunder through the station without stopping. It carried neither
freight cars nor coaches, but it was followed after a five-minute
interval by a second locomotive, which panted and hissed to a grinding
stop, with the solid curve of a long train strung out behind it--a
special.

Vestibule doors began straightway to vomit a gushing, elbowing multitude
of dark figures to the station platform, where the red and green
lanterns still shone with feeble sickliness, catching the dull glint of
rifles, and the high lights on faces that were fixed and sinister of
expression.

The dark stream of figures flowed along with a grim monotony and an
almost spectral silence across the street and into the state house
grounds.

There was a steadiness in that detraining suggestive of a matter well
rehearsed and completely understood, and as the light grew clearer on
gaunt cheekbones and swinging guns an almost terrified voice exclaimed
from somewhere, "The mountaineers have come!"




CHAPTER IX

When the senate convened that day, strange and uncouth lookers-on stood
ranged about the state house corridors, and their unblinking eyes took
account of their chief adversary as he entered.

Upon his dark face, with its overhanging forelock, flickered no ghost of
misgiving; no hint of any weakening or excitement. His gaze betrayed no
interest beyond the casual for the men along the walls, whom report
credited with a murderous hatred of himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Boone was fretting his heart out at the cabin of Saul Fulton while he
knew that history was in the making at Frankfort, and on the evening of
the twenty-ninth an eagerness to be near the focus of activity mastered
him. The elements of right and wrong involved in this battle of
political giants were, to his untrained mind, academic, but the drama of
conflict was like a bugle-call--clear, direct and urgent.

He would not be immediately needed on the farm, and Frankfort was only
fifteen miles away. If he set out at once and walked most of the night,
he could reach the Mecca of his pilgrimage by tomorrow morning, and in
his pocket was the sum of "two-bits" to defray the expenses of "snacks
an' sich-like needcessities." For the avoidance of possible discussion,
he slipped quietly out of the back door with no announcement to Saul's
wife. With soft snowflakes drifting into his face and melting on his
eyelashes, he began his march, and for four hours swung along at a
steady three-and-a-half mile gait. At last he stole into a barn and
huddled down upon a straw pile, but before dawn he was on the way again,
and in the early light he turned into the main street of the state
capital. His purpose was to view one day of life in a city and then to
slip back to his uneventful duties.

       *       *       *       *       *

The town had outgrown its first indignant surprise over the invasion of
the "mountain army," and the senator from Kenton had passed boldly
through its unordered ranks, as need suggested. The hill men had fallen
sullenly back and made a path for his going.

This morning he walked with a close friend, who had constituted himself
a bodyguard of one. The upper house was to meet at ten, and it was five
minutes short of the hour when the man, with preoccupied and resolute
features, swung through the gate of the state house grounds. The way lay
from there around the fountain to the door set within the columned
portico.

In circling the fountain, the companion dropped a space to the rear and
glanced about him with a hasty scrutiny, and as he did so a sharp report
ripped the quietness of the place, speedily followed by the more muffled
sound of pistol shots.

The gentleman in the rear froze in his tracks, glancing this way and
that in a bewildered effort to locate the sound. The senator halted too,
but after a moment he wavered a little, lifted one hand with a gesture
rather of weariness than of pain, and, buckling at the knees, sagged
down slowly until he lay on the flag-stoned walk, with one hand pressed
to the bosom of his buttoned overcoat.

Figures were already running up from here and there. As the dismayed
friend locked his arms under the prone shoulders, he heard words faintly
enunciated--not dramatically declaimed, but in strangely matter-of-fact
tone and measure--"I guess they've--got me."

       *       *       *       *       *

Boone Wellver saw a throng of tight-wedged humanity pressing along with
eyes turned inward toward some core of excited interest, and heard the
words that ran everywhere, "Goebel has been shot!"

He felt a sudden nausea as he followed the crowd at whose centre was
borne a helpless body, until it jammed about the door of a doctor's
office, and after that, for a long while, he wandered absently over the
town.

Turning the corner of an empty side street in the late afternoon he came
face to face with Asa Gregory, and his perplexed unrest gave way to
comfort.

Asa was tranquilly studying a theatrical poster displayed on a wall. His
face was composed and lit with a smile of quiet amusement, but before
Boone reached his side, or accosted him, another figure rounded the
corner, walking with agitated haste, and the boy ducked hastily back,
recognizing Saul Fulton, who might tax him with truancy.

Yet when he saw Saul's almost insanely excited gaze meet Asa's quiet
eyes, curiosity overcame caution and he came boldly forward.

"Ye'd better not tarry in town over-long, Asa," Saul was advising in the
high voice of alarm. "I'm dismayed ter find ye hyar now."

"Why be ye?" demanded Asa, and his unruffled utterance was velvet
smooth. "Hain't I got a license ter go wharsoever hit pleasures me?"

"This hain't no safe time ner place fer us mountain fellers," came the
anxiety-freighted reply. "An' you've done been writ up too much in ther
newspapers a'ready. You've got a lawless repute, an' atter this mornin'
Frankfort-town hain't no safe place fer ye."

"I come down hyar," announced Asa, still with an imperturbable suavity,
"ter try an' git me a pardon. I hain't got hit yit an' tharfore I hain't
ready ter turn away."

Gregory began a deliberate ransacking of his pockets, in search of his
tobacco plug, and in doing so he hauled out miscellaneous odds and ends
before he found what he was seeking.

In his hands materialized a corn-cob pipe, some loose coins and
matches, and then--as Saul's voice broke into frightened
exclamation--several rifle and pistol cartridges.

"Good God, man," exploded the other mountaineer, "ain't ye got no more
common sense than ter be totin' them things 'round in this
town--terday?"

Asa raised his brows, and smiled indulgently upon his kinsman. "Why,
ginrally, I've got a few ca'tridges and pistol hulls in my pockets," he
drawled. "Why shouldn't I?"

"Well, git rid of 'em, an' be speedy about it! Don't ye know full well
thet every mountain man in town's goin' ter be suspicioned, an' thet
ther legislater'll vote more money than ye ever dreamed of to stretch
mountain necks? Give them things ter the boy, thar."

Fulton had not had time to feel surprise at seeing Boone, whom he had
left on the farm, confronting him here on the sidewalk of a Frankfort
street. Now as the boy reached up his hand and Asa carelessly dropped
the cartridges into it, Saul rushed vehemently on.

"Boone, don't make no mention of this hyar talk ter nobody. Take yore
foot in yore hand an' light out fer my house--an' ther fust
spring-branch ye comes ter, stop an' fling them damn things into ther
water."

       *       *       *       *       *

When the wires gave to the world the appalling climax of that savagely
acrimonious campaign, a breathlessness of shock settled upon the State
where passion had run its inflammatory course. The reiteration of
Cassandra's prediction had failed to discount the staggering reality,
and for a brief moment animosities were silenced.

But that was not for long. Yesterday the lieutenants of an iron-strong
leader had bowed to his dominant will. Today they stood dedicated to
reprisal behind a martyr--exalted by his mortal hurt.

It appeared certain that the rifle had barked from a window of the
executive building itself--and when police and posses hastily summoned
had hurried to its doors, a grimly unyielding cordon of mountaineers
had spelled, in human type, the words "no admission."

The Secretary of State, who was a mountain man, was among the first to
fall under accusation, and had the city's police officers been able to
seize the Governor, he too would doubtless have been thrown into a cell.
But the Governor still held the disputed credentials of office, and he
sat at his desk, haggard of feature, yet at bay and momentarily secure
behind a circle of bayonets.

Just wrath would not, and could not, long remain only righteous
indignation. Out of its inflammation would spring a hundred injustices,
and so in opposition to the mounting clamour for extreme penalties arose
thundering the counter-voice of protest against a swift and ruthless
sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats.

To the aid of those first caught in the drag-net of vengeful accusation,
came a handful of volunteer defence attorneys, and among them was
Colonel Wallifarro.

The leader with the bullet-pierced breast was dying, and in the
legislature the contest must be settled, if at all, while there was yet
strength enough in his ebbing life currents to take the oath of office.

His last fight was in keeping with his life--the persistence of sheer
resolution that held death in abeyance and refused surrender.

But when the Democratic majority of the assembly gathered at their
chambers, they encountered muskets; when, casting dignity to the snowy
winds, they raced toward an opera house, the soldiers raced with them,
and arrived first. When they doubled like pursued hares toward the Odd
Fellows' Hall, they found its door likewise barred by blade and muzzle.

Among the first men thrown into jail were Saul Fulton and his friend
Hollins of Clay County. Their connection with the arrival of the
mountaineers was not difficult to establish--and for the officers
charged with ferreting out the ugly responsibility, it made a plausible
beginning.

Meanwhile, the majority legislature, thwarted of open meeting, caucussed
in hotel bedrooms, and gave decision for the dying candidate. A hectic
and grotesque rumour even whispered that Mr. Goebel's gallant hold on
life had slipped before the credentials could be placed in his weakened
hand--and that the oath was solemnly administered to a dead body.

Boone had gone back to Saul's farm house, and on the way he had tossed
the cartridges into a brook that flowed along the road, but his brain
was in a swirl of perplexity and in his blood was an inoculation. He
would never know content again unless, in the theatre of public affairs,
he might be an onlooker or an actor.




CHAPTER X


A FEW days after that, he started back again to his mountains. With Saul
in jail and his wife returning to her people, there was nothing further
to hold him here. Indeed, he was anxious now to get home. Like one who
has been bewildered by a plethora of new experiences, he needed time to
digest them, and above all he wanted to talk with Victor McCalloway,
whose wisdom was, to his thinking, as that of a second Solomon. There,
too, was his other hero, Asa, who had returned to the hills as quietly
as he had left them. Boone was burning to know whether, in the whirlpool
of excitement there at Frankfort, his efforts to secure executive
clemency had met with success or failure.

When, immediately upon crossing Cedar Mountain, he presented himself at
McCalloway's house, he was somewhat nonplussed at the grave, almost
accusing, eyes which the hermit gentleman bent upon him.

"I've jest got back hyar from ther big world down below," announced the
boy, "an' I fared straight over hyar ter see ye fust thing." He paused,
a little crestfallen, to note that reserve of silence where he had
anticipated a warmth of welcome, and then he went on shyly: "Thar was
hell ter pay down thar at Frankfort town--an' I seed a good part of ther
b'ilin' with my own eyes."

Very slowly Victor McCalloway made response. "You have witnessed a
tragedy--a crime for which the guilty parties should pay with their
lives. Even then a scar will be left on the honour of your State."

Boone crowded his hands into his coat pockets and shivered in the wet
wind, for as yet he had not been invited across the threshold.

"I don't know nothin' about who done hit," he made calm assertion. "But
fellers like Saul Fulton 'peared ter 'low he plum needed killin."

"Fellows like Saul Fulton!"

The retired soldier drew a long breath, and his eyes narrowed. "You went
down there, Boone, with a kinsman who now stands accused of complicity.
The law presumes his innocence until it proves him guilty, but I'm not
thinking of him much, just now. I'm thinking of _you_." He paused as if
in deep anxiety, then added: "A boy may be led by reckless and wilful
men into--well--grave mistakes.... I believe in you, but you must answer
me one question, and you must answer it on your word of honour--as a
gentleman."

The boy's pupils widened interrogatively, and held those older eyes with
an unfaltering steadiness. In their frank and engaging depths of blue,
as open as the sky, Victor McCalloway read the answer to his question,
and something like a sigh of relief shook him; something spasmodic that
clutched at his throat and his well-seasoned reserve. He had dreaded
that Boone might, in that fanatically bitter association, have brushed
shoulders with some guilty knowledge. He had refused that fear lodgment
in his thoughts as an ungenerous suspicion, but a lurking realization
had persisted. It might need only a short lapse from a new concept to an
inherited and ancient code to make heroes of "killers" for this
stripling.

Slowly and candidly the boy spoke.

"On my word of honour as a gentleman--" His utterance hung hesitantly on
that final word. It was a new thought that it might be applicable to
himself, yet this man was a better and more exacting judge of its
meaning than he, and his heart leaped to the quickened tempo of a new
pride.

"I don't know nothin'--save thet I heered hit named aforehand thet men
war acomin' from ther mountings ter see justice done, an' didn't aim ter
be gainsaid ner thwarted, I 'lowed, though, hit would come about in
fa'r fight--ef so-be hit bred trouble."

That same afternoon Asa Gregory happened by, and because McCalloway had
come to recognize, in his influence, the most powerful feudal force
operating upon the boy's thought, he waited somewhat anxiously to hear
whether the man would express himself on the topic of the assassination.
Since it was no part of wisdom to assail deep-rooted ferocities of
thought in minds already matured beyond plasticity, he did not himself
broach the matter, but he was pleased when Asa spoke gravely, and of his
own volition.

"I done hed hit in head ter go along down thar ter Frankfort with them
boys thet Saul gathered tergether, but now I'm right glad I went by
myself. Thet war a mighty troublous matter thet came ter pass thar."

"Did ye git yore pardon, Asa?" asked Boone, and the older kinsman
hesitated, then made a frank reply.

"I hain't talkin' much erbout thet, son. Ther Governor war hevin' a
right stressful time, an' any favours he showed ter mountain men war
bein' held up ergainst him by his enemies. But I reckon I kin trust both
of ye.... Yes, I got ther pardon."

Late in February an item of news filtered in through the ravines of the
hills which elicited bitter comment. The legislature had voted a reward
fund of $100,000 for the apprehension and conviction of those guilty of
the assassination of Senator Goebel, and, heartened by this spurring,
the pack of detectives, professional and amateur, had cast off full-cry.

Saul Fulton lay in jail all that winter without trial. Upon the motion
of the Commonwealth, his day in court was postponed by continuance after
continuance.

"I reckon," suggested Asa bluntly, "they aims ter let him sulter in jail
long enough ter kinderly fo'ce him ter drag in a few more fellers
besides himself--but hit won't profit 'em none."

That winter spent its dreary monotony, and through its months Boone
Wellver was growing in mind and character, as well as in bone and
muscle. McCalloway began to see the blossoming of his Quixotically
fantastic idea into some hope and semblance of reality. The boy's brain
was acquisitive and flaming with ambition, and Victor McCalloway was no
routine schoolmaster but an experimenter in the laboratory of human
elements. He was working with a character which he sought to bring by
forced marches from the America of a quaint, broad-hearted past to the
America of the present--and future. Under his hand the pupil was
responding.

The slate-gray ramparts of the hills reeked with the wet of thawing
snows. Watercourses swelled into the freshet-volume of the
"spring-tide." Into the breezes crept a touch of softer promise, and in
sheltered spots buds began to redden and swell. Then came the pale
tenderness of greens, and the first shy music of bird-notes. The sodden
and threadbare neutrality of winter was flung aside for the white
blossoming of dogwood, and in its wake came the pink foam of laurel
blossom.

On one of those tuneful days, while Boone sat on the doorstep of Victor
McCalloway's house, listening to a story of a campaign far up the Nile,
Asa Gregory came along the road, with his long elastic stride, and
halted there. He smiled infectiously as he took the proffered chair and
crumbled leaf tobacco between his fingers for the filling of his cob
pipe.

For a while the talk ran in simple neighbourhood channels. They spoke of
"drappin' an' kiverin'" in the corn fields, and the uncomplicated
activities of farm life. But, after a time, Asa reached into his hip
pocket and drew out a rumpled newspaper, which he tendered to Victor
McCalloway.

"Mr. McCalloway," he said quietly, "ye're a friend of mine, an' right
now I have sore need of counsel with a man of wisdom. I'd be beholden
ter ye ef so be ye'd read thet thar printed piece out loud."

The retired soldier took the sheet, several days old, and with the first
glance at its headlines, his features stiffened and his eyes blazed into
indignation.

"This is a slander!" he exploded. "It's an infamous libel. Do you
actually want me to read it aloud?"

Asa nodded, and, in a voice of protest, McCalloway gave audible
repetition to a matter to which he refused the sanction of belief.

"New Murders for Old." That was the first headline, and the subheads and
the item itself followed in due order:

     "Commonwealth uncovers startling evidence.... Asa Gregory
     indicted for firing fatal shot at Goebel.... Alleged he
     received a pardon for prior offence as price of fresh infamy."

     "Perhaps the most astounding chapter in a long serial of the
     bizarre and melodramatic came to light today when the Franklin
     Grand Jury returned a true bill against Asa Gregory, a
     notorious mountain feudist, charging him with the assassination
     of Governor Goebel. In the general excitement of those days,
     the presence of Gregory in the state capitol escaped notice.
     Now it develops, from sources which the Commonwealth declines
     at this time to divulge, that on the day of the tragedy
     Gregory, who already stands charged with the murder from ambush
     of several enemies, came cold-bloodedly to town to seek a
     pardon for one of these offences, and that in payment for that
     favour he agreed to accept unholy appointment as executioner of
     Governor Goebel. Gregory is now in hiding in the thicketed
     country of his native hills, and it is foreseen that before he
     is taken he may invoke the aid of his clansmen, and precipitate
     further bloodshed."

McCalloway laid down the paper and stared at the blossom-burgeoning
slopes. It was strange, he reflected, that one could so swiftly yield to
the instincts of these high, wild places. For just now it was in his
heart to advise resistance. He thought that trial down there, before
partisan juries and biased judges, would be a farce which vitiated the
whole spirit of justice.

It might almost have been his own sentiments that he heard shrilled out
from the excited lips of the boy; a boy whose cheeks had gone pale and
whose eyes had turned from sky-blue to flame blue.

"They're jest a'seekin' ter git ye thar an' hang ye out of hand, Asa.
Tell 'em all ter go everlastin'ly ter hell! Ye kin hide out hyar in ther
mountains an' five hundred soldiers couldn't never run ye down. Ye kin
cross over inter Virginny an' go wharsoever ye likes--but ef ye suffers
yoreself ter be took, they'll hang ye outen pure disgust fer ther
hills!"

Yes, thought Victor McCalloway, that was just about what would happen.
The boy whom he had been educating to a new viewpoint had, at a stride,
gone back to all the primitive sources of his nature, yet he spoke the
truth. Then the voice of Asa Gregory sounded again with a measured
evenness.

"What does ye think, Mr. McCalloway? I was thar on thet day. I kin hide
out hyar an' resist arrest, like ther boy says, an' I misdoubts ef I
could git any lavish of justice down thar."

"I doubt it gravely, sir," snorted McCalloway. "By Gad, I doubt it most
gravely."

"An' yit," went on the other voice slowly, somewhat heavily, "ef I did
foller thet course hit mout mean a heap of bloodshed, I reckon. Hit'd be
mightily like admittin' them charges they're amakin' too." He paused a
moment, then rose abruptly from his chair. "I come ter ask counsel," he
said, "but afore I come my mind was already done made up. I'm agoin'
over ter Marlin Town termorrer mornin' an' I'm agoin' ter surrender ter
Bev. Jett, ther High Sheriff."

"Don't ye never do hit, Asa," shouted the boy. "Don't ye never do hit!"
but McCalloway had risen and in his eyes gleamed an enthusiastic light.

"It's a thing I couldn't have advised, Mr. Gregory," he said, in a
shaken voice. "It's a thing that may lead--God knows where--and yet it's
the only decent thing to do."




CHAPTER XI


At the edge of Marlin Town stood the bungalow of the coal company's
superintendent, and in its living-room, on either side of a
document-littered table, sat two men. One of them, silvered of temple
and somewhat portly of stature, leaned back with the tranquillity of
complete relaxation after his day's work. His face wore the urbanity of
well-being and prosperity, but the man across from him leaned forward
with an attitude of nervous tension.

To Larry Masters there was something nettling in the very repose with
which his visitor from Louisville crossed his stout and well-tailored
legs. This feeling manifested itself in the jerky quickness of hand with
which the mine superintendent poured whiskey into his glass and hissed
soda after it from the syphon.

"Won't you fill up, Tom," he invited shortly. "The entertainment I can
offer you is limited enough--but at least we have the peg at our
disposal."

"Thank you--no more." Colonel Wallifarro spoke with a pleasingly
modulated voice, trained into effectiveness by years of jury elocution.
"I've had my evening's allowance, except for a night-cap."

Masters rose abruptly from his chair. He tossed down half the contents
of his glass and paced the floor with a restless stride, gnawing at his
close-cropped and sandy moustache. His tall, well-knit figure moved with
a certain athletic vitality, and his florid face was tanned like a
pig-skin saddle-skirt. But his brow was corrugated in a frown of
discontent, and his pale blue eyes were almost truculent.

"By Gad, Tom," he flared out with choleric impetuosity, "you can put
more righteous rebuke into a polite refusal of liquor than most men
could crowd into a whole damned temperance lecture. I dare say, however,
you're quite right. Life spells something for you. It's worth
conserving. You've got assured position, an adoring family, money,
success, hosts of friends. You'd be a blithering fool, I grant you, to
waste yourself in indulgence, but I'm not so ideally situated. I 'take
the cash and let the credit go.'"

"Yet you have, ahead of you, some ten or twelve years more of life than
I can reasonably expect," was the quiet response. "You still have
youth--or youth's fulfilment--early middle-age."

"And a jolly lot that means to me," retorted Masters, with acerbity. "I
live here among illiterates, working for a corporation on a salary pared
to the bone. At the time of life when one ought to be at the top of
one's abilities, I'm the most pathetic human thing under God's arching
sky--a man who started out with big promise--and fell by the wayside.
Heaven help the man who fires and falls back--and if he can retrieve a
bit of temporary solace from that poor substitute"--he jerked a
forefinger toward the bottle--"then I say for Heaven's sake let him
poison himself comfortably and welcome."

Colonel Wallifarro studied the darkened scowl of his companion for a
moment before he replied, and when he spoke his own manner retained its
imperturbability.

"I didn't offer gratuitous criticism, Larry," he suggested. "I merely
declined another toddy."

"You know my case, Tom"--the younger of the two caught him up quickly;
"you know that no younger son ever came out from England with fairer
expectations of succeeding on his own. I've been neither the fool nor
the shirk--and yet--" A shrug of disgust finished the sentence.

Colonel Wallifarro studied his cigar ash without rejoinder, and when
Larry Masters failed to draw a return fire of argument, he sat for a
minute or two glumly silent. Then, as his thoughts coursed back into
other years, a slow light kindled in his eyes, as if for a dead dream.

"You were always sceptical about Middlesboro, even when others were full
of faith--but why?" he demanded. "To you, with your Bluegrass ideas of
fat acres, these hills must always be the ragged fringes of things, a
meagre land without a future. It was only that you lacked imagination."

The speaker swept torrentially on with as much of argumentative warmth
as though he had not just confessed himself ruined by reason of his own
former confidence.

"Where the Gap came through lay the natural gateway of the hills,
hewn out in readiness by the hand of the Almighty. There was
water-power--ore. There was coal, for smelter and market, timber
awaiting the axe and the saw-mill--the whole tremendous treasure house
of a natural Eldorado."

"Perhaps," observed the Colonel, "and yet, when all is said and done, it
was only a boom--and it collapsed. Whatever the causes, the results are
definite."

"Yes, it collapsed, and we went with it." Masters paused to take up and
empty the glass which had started the discussion, then with a heightened
excitement he swept on afresh:

"Yet how near we came! Gad, man, your own eyes saw our conception grow!
You saw lots along what had been creek-bed trails sell at a
footage-price that rivalled New York's best avenues, and you yourself
recognized in me, for all your scepticism, a man with a golden future.
Then--after all that--you saw me jolly well ruined--and yet you prate of
what life may hold for me in the vigour of my middle-age."

"All that happened ten years back, however," the elder man equably
reminded his companion. "It was the old story of a boom and a
collapse--and one misfortune--even one disaster--need not break a man's
spirit. You might have come back."

The eyes of the portly gentleman rested in a momentary glance on the
bottle and glass, but that may have been chance. At least he did not
mention them.

"You think I might have come back, do you?" The voice of the Englishman
had hardened. "I don't want to be nasty or say disagreeable things.
You've been a staunch friend to me--even when Anne found herself growing
bitter against me. Well, I don't blame her. Her people had been leaders
always. She had the divine right to an assured place in society, and I
had failed. I suppose it was natural enough for her to feel that she'd
been done in--but it happened to be the finish of me. I'd sweated blood
to make Middlesboro--and I didn't have the grit left to commence over."

For the first time Colonel Wallifarro's attitude stiffened, bringing up
his silver-crowned head defensively.

"Anne didn't leave you for financial reasons, Larry," he asserted
steadily. "She's my kinswoman, and you are my friend, but no purpose is
to be served by my listening to _ex parte_ grievances from either of
you."

Masters shrugged his shoulders. "I dare say you're quite right," he
admitted. "But be that as it may, she did leave me--left me flat. If she
didn't divorce me, it wasn't out of consideration for my feelings. It
would almost have been better if she had. All I ever succeeded in doing
for her was to make her the poor member of a rich family--and that's not
enviable by half. And yet if I'd been a sheer rotter, I could scarcely
have fared worse."

"If it wasn't consideration for you, at least it was for some one who
should be important to you. As it is, your little girl isn't growing up
under the shadow of a sensational divorce record."

The pale blue eyes of the Englishman softened abruptly, and the lips
under the short-clipped moustache changed from their stiffness to the
curvature of something like a smile. Into his expression came a lurking,
half-shy ghost of winsomeness. "Yes, yes," he muttered, "the kiddie.
God bless her little heart!"

After a moment, though, he drew back his shoulders with a jerk and spoke
again in a harsher timbre.

"Anne has been fair enough with me about the child, though I'm bound to
say I've been jolly well made to understand that it was only a
chivalrous and undeserved sort of generosity. Well, the kiddie's almost
twelve now, and before long she'll be a belle, too--poor, but related to
all the first families."

Masters paused, and when he went on again it was still with the air of a
repressed chafing of spirit.

"I dare say her mother will see to it that she doesn't repeat the
mistake of the previous generation--marrying a man with only a splendid
expectancy. Her heart will be schooled to demand the assured thing. That
pointing with pride--a gesture which you Kentuckians so enjoy--well,
with my little girl, it will all be done toward the distaff branch.
There won't be much said about the wastrel father."

"Perhaps," suggested the other, "you are a little less than just."

"I dare say. She'll be a heart-breaker before long now--and listen,
man"--Masters came a step nearer--"don't make any mistake about me
either. When she's here, the bottle goes under lock and key. I play the
game where she's concerned."

Colonel Wallifarro nodded slowly. "I know that, Larry," he hastily
answered. "I know that. If the breach hadn't widened too far, I'd go as
far as a man could to bring your family together again under one
roof-tree."

"That's no use, of course," admitted Masters with a dead intonation.
"Only remember that down here where I'm chained to my little job, life
ain't so damned gay and sunny at best--and don't begrudge me my
liquor."




CHAPTER XII


During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in
Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been
denied bail, the boy back in the laurel-mantled hills smouldered with
passionate resentment for what he believed to be a monstrous injustice.
In his quest of education he sought refuge from the bitter brooding that
had begun to mar his young features with its stamp of sullenness. Asa
had killed men before, but it had been in that feud warfare which was
sanctioned by his own conscience. Now he stood charged with a murder
done for hire, the mercenary taking off of a man for whom he had no
enmity save that of the abstract and political. Upon his kinsman's
innocence the boy would have staked his life, and yet he must look
helplessly on and see him thrown to the lions of public indignation.

Of Saul, he hardly thought at all. Saul was small-fry. The Commonwealth
would treat him as such, but upon Asa it would wreak a surcharged anger,
because to send Asa Gregory to the gallows would be to establish a
direct link between the Governor who had pardoned him and mountain
murder-lust.

Already the Secretary of State had been disposed of with a promptitude
which, his friends asserted, savoured rather of the wolf pack than the
courtroom. The verdict had been guilty, and his case was now pending on
a motion for rehearing.

Already, too, a stenographer, who had been in the employ of the fugitive
Governor, had been given a life sentence and had preferred accepting it
without appeal to risking the graver alternative of the gallows.

As he lay in jail waiting until the slow grind of the law-mill should
bring him into its hopper, Asa too recognized the extreme tenuousness of
his chances.

But it was not until the wheat had been harvested and threshed in the
rich bluegrass fields that the session of court was called to order,
whose docket held for Asa Gregory the question of life and death.

That trial was to be at Georgetown, a graciously lying town about whose
borders stretched estates, where a few acres were worth as much as a
whole farm in the ragged and meagre hills. It was a town of kindly
people, but just now of very indignant people, blinded by an unbalanced
anger. It was not a hopeful place for a mountaineer with a notched gun
who stood taxed with the murder from ambush of a governor.

Over the door of the brick court house stood an image of the blindfolded
goddess. She was a weather-worn deity, corroded out of all resemblance
to the spirit of eternal youthfulness which she should have exemplified,
and Boone pressed his lips tight, as he entered with McCalloway, and
noted that the scales which she held aloft were broken, but that the
sword in the other hand was intact--and unsheathed.

At the stair head, in precaution against the electrically charged
tension of the air, deputies passed outspread hands over the pockets and
hips of each man who entered, in search for concealed weapons. About the
semicircular table, fronting the bench and the prisoner's dock, sat the
men of the press, sharpening their pencils and--waiting.

Under the faded portrait of Chief Justice Marshall a battery of windows
let in the summer sun and the mellow voice of a distant negro, raised
somewhere in a camp-meeting song.

Across a narrow alleyway were other windows in another building, and
beyond them operators sat idling by newly installed telegraph keys.
These men had no interest in the routine of the "running story." That
was a matter to be handled by the regular telegraph offices. These
newly strung wires would be dedicated to a single "flash"--when the
climax came. Then the reporters would no longer be sitting at their
crescent-shaped table. A few of them would stand framed in those
courtroom windows under the portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, and as
the words fell from the lips that held doom, their hands would rise,
with one, two, three, or four fingers extended, as the case might
warrant. In response to that prearranged signal, the special operators
would open their keys and--if one finger had been shown--over their
lines would run the single but sufficient word "death." Two fingers
would mean "life imprisonment"; three, "acquittal"; four would indicate
a "hung-jury." That time was still presumably far off, but the
arrangement for it was complete.

In a matter of seconds after that grim pantomime occurred, foremen of
printing crews standing by triple-decked presses in Louisville, in
Cincinnati--in many other towns as well--would reach down and lift from
the floor one of the several type metal forms prepared in advance to
cover each possible exigency. A switch would be flipped. Back to the hot
slag of the melting pots would go the other half-cylinders, and within
three minutes papers, damp with ink and news, would be pouring from the
maws of the presses into the hands of waiting boys.

To Boone these preparations were not yet comprehensible, but as
McCalloway led him to a seat far forward he felt the tense atmosphere of
place and moment.

He recognized, in those lines of opposing counsel, an array of
notability. He picked out, with a glare of hatred, the bearded man whom
the prosecution had brought as co-counsel, from another State, because
of his great repute as a breaker-down of witnesses under
cross-examination. Then his eyes lighted, as down the aisle came the
full figure of Colonel Tom Wallifarro--to take its place among the
attorneys for the defence. There was reassurance in his calmness and
unexcited dignity.

And after interminable preliminaries, he heard the voice of the clerk
droning from his docket, "The Commonwealth of Kentucky, against Asa
Gregory; wilful murder," and after yet other delays the velvety
direction from the bench, "Mr. Sheriff, bring the prisoner into court."

Asa's face, as he was led through the side door, was less bronzed than
formerly, but his carriage was no less erect or confident. In a new suit
of dark colour, with fresh linen instead of his hickory shirt, clean
shaven and immaculately combed, the defendant was a transformed person,
and if there remained any semblance of the highland desperado, it was to
be found only in the catlike softness of his tread and the falcon
alertness of his fine eyes. Pencils at the press table began their light
scratching chorus--the reporters were writing their description of the
accused.

Asa Gregory's line of defence had been foreshadowed in the examining
court. He had sworn that he arrived on the day of the shooting to
petition a pardon, and he had known nothing of what was in the air
until, from street talk, he learned of the tragedy.

The chief issue of fact pivoted on his testimony that on that day he had
not been near the state house or executive building. The Commonwealth
would contradict that claim with the counter assertion that, straight as
a hiving bee, Asa had hastened from the train to the Governor's official
headquarters, where he had been cold-bloodedly rehearsed in his grim
duties. After firing the shot, the prosecution would contend he had
taken command of the other mountaineers who refused to the police the
privilege of entry and search.

Through days, weeks even, after that, Boone sat, always in the same
place, with steadfast confidence in the eyes which he bent upon his
kinsman.

Into the press dispatches began to steal mention of a boy in a cheap but
new suit of store clothes, whose eyes held those of the prisoner with a
rapt and unwavering constancy. It was even said that the amazingly
steady courage of the defendant seemed at times of unusual stress to
lean on that supporting confidence, and that whenever they brought him
from jail to courtroom, he looked first of all for the boy, as a pilot
might look for a reef-light.

Shortly before the Commonwealth was ready to close, rumours went abroad.
It was hinted that new and sensational witnesses would take the stand,
with revelations as spectacular as the climax of a melodrama.

Boone had followed the evidence with a tense absorption. He had marked
the effect of each point; the success or failure of every blow, and he
realized what a powerful web was being woven about the man in whom he
fully believed. There was no escaping the cumulative and strengthening
effect of circumstance built upon circumstance.

He recognized, too, how like a keystone in an arch was the dependence of
the State upon proving one thing: that Asa had been present, just after
the shooting, and in command of those who barred the doors of the
executive building against legitimate search. He took comfort in the
fact that so far it had not been established by one sure piece of
evidence. Then came the last of the Commonwealth's announced witnesses.

Upon the faces of the attorneys for the prisoner quivered a dubious
expression of apprehension--as they waited the promised assault of the
masked batteries. The son of the man who had walked at Senator Goebel's
side, when he fell, took the stand and told with straightforward
directness the story of the five minutes after the shot had sounded. He
and a policeman had sought entrance to the building, which presumably
harboured the assassin--and mountain men had halted him at the door,
under the leadership of one to whom the rest deferred. He described that
commander with fulness of detail, and it was as if he were painting in
words a portrait of the man in the prisoner's dock.

"I was there as a volunteer--to see that no one who might be guilty
escaped from the building," testified the witness with convincing
candour. "I noticed one man in particular--because he seemed to be the
unofficial leader of the rest. Some one called him Asa."

The man's voice was responsibly, almost hesitantly, grave, and on the
faces in the jury box one could read the telling impression of his
words.

Then the bearded attorney, whose fame was secure as a heckler of
witnesses, rose dramatically from his chair.

"Do you see that man in the courtroom now?"

For a matter of seconds testifier and prisoner gazed with level
directness into each other's eyes, while over the crowded courtroom hung
a tense pall of stillness.

Then the witness spoke in a tone of bewilderment--his words coming
slowly--as though they surprised himself.

"No. I don't think I see him here."

The poised figure of the lawyer, drawn statuesquely upright, winced as
painfully as though a trusted hand had smitten him, and in his abrupt
change of expression was betrayal of dismay and chagrin.

"You say--you can't--identify him!" he echoed incredulously.

Stubbornly the man who was testifying shook his head.

"May I explain in my own way?" he inquired, and as the lawyer barked
raspingly back at him, the Court intervened:

"This is your own witness--You must understand the impropriety of
attempting to force him."

"While I was looking at the defendant there, just now," went on the man
in the chair, "I was seeing only his side face, and I was positive that
he was the person I was describing. Feature for feature and line for
line ... the likeness seemed exact. I was willing to swear to it.... But
when he turned and faced me ... I saw something else ... and now I don't
think he _is_ the man."

The words came in a puzzled and dumfounded confession, and the witness
paused, then went resolutely on again: "This man has a fine pair of
clear and well-matched eyes, when one sees them both at once.... That
one at the door had something ... I can't say just what it was ... that
marred one eye. I shouldn't call it a cast exactly ... but they didn't
match."

Abruptly the State dismissed that witness, and about the defence tables
went quiet but triumphant smiles--which the jury did not miss, as the
pencils of the press writers raced. But over Boone Wellver's face passed
a shadow, and Asa, catching his eye across the heads of the crowd, read
the motion of the boy's moving lips, as, without sound, they shaped the
words, "Keep cool now, Asa! Keep cool."




CHAPTER XIII


The prosecution had other trumps yet to play. It called a name, which
brought into the courtroom, with shambling and uncertain step, a man
whose face was pasty with prison pallour. His thin body was garbed in
the zebra-stripes of the penitentiary's livery, and the hand that he
raised to take oath trembled. His voice, too, carried a quaver of
weakness in its first syllable.

Here at length was the promised sensation. The stenographer who had
accepted his life-term had become star witness for the State. Now,
enlisted from the ranks of the accused, he had undertaken to tell what
purported to be the inside story of the plot.

To hear his words, one had to bend attentively, yet, when he had talked
for an hour, the scratching of pencils at the press table sounded,
through his pauses, almost clamorous, and there was no other sound.

Boone sat, tight of muscle, with his eyes steadfastly fixed on Asa. He
thought that just now he was needed, but at the pit of his stomach
gnawed a sickness of dread, and it seemed to him that already he could
see the gallows rising from its ugly platform.

The bearded lawyer who had once battered down this man's own defence now
stood before him, shepherding his words on toward their climax. Faint
response followed sharp interrogation with a deadly effectiveness.

"When did you first meet the defendant--Asa Gregory?"

"On the thirtieth of January--in the forenoon."

"Where?"

"At my office in the state house."

"Did your office adjoin that of the Secretary of State?"

"It did."

"What occurred at that time and place?"

"Mr. Gregory rapped.... I let him in.... He handed me a letter from the
Governor, and we went into the Secretary's room.... Then he went over to
the window and looked out--and drew the blind part of the way down. For
a while he just studied the room ... taking in its details."

The man in convict garb paused and fell into a fit of broken coughing.

"Did you have any conversation with him?"

"I did, sir."

"What was it, in substance?"

"I explained to him that the plan was to kill Senator Goebel, when he
came to the senate that morning. I showed him two rifles in the
corner.... They were of different makes."

"What did he do then?"

"He had me explain the way to get to the basement. He kneeled down by
the window and sighted one of the guns.... He piled up several law books
to rest it on ... and then he said that he was ready...."

McCalloway's teeth were tight-clamped as he listened.

"Yes, go on."

"He said he had come to get a pardon for 'blowing down old man
Carr'--and was ready to give back favour for favour. Presently I saw
Senator Goebel turning in at the gate, and I said, 'That's him,' and he
said, 'I see him,' and I turned and slipped out of the room. As I was on
the stairs, I heard a rifle shot--and then several pistol shots."

Boone Wellver groaned, and the current of his arteries seemed to run in
icy trickles through his body, but he kept his eyes steadfastly fixed on
Asa, whose life, he felt sure, this man was swearing away in perjury.
Asa gazed back. He even inclined his head with just the ghost of a nod,
and the boy knew that he meant that for encouragement.

Through hours of that day the ghastly story unwound itself, and its
tremendous impact, gaining rather than losing impressiveness from the
faltering style of its telling, left the defence staggered and numbed.
McCalloway, glancing down at the boy's drawn face, felt his own heart
sicken.

But when at last the man with the gray face and the gray, striped livery
had gone, the Commonwealth's attorney rose and said in the full-throated
voice of master of the show, "Now, we will call Saul Fulton."

Saul, who had been indicted but never tried! Saul, too, had taken the
enemy's pay! Neither McCalloway nor Boone doubted that all this drama of
alleged revelation was fathered in falsity out of the reward fund and
its workings, yet one realized out of mature experience, and the other
out of instinct, that to the jury it must all seem irrefutable
demonstration.

In marked contrast with the sorry drabness of that last witness was the
swagger of the next, who came twirling his moustache with the gusto of
pure bravado.

Saul went back of the other's story and ramified its details. He told of
the mountain army which he had helped to recruit, and swore that that
force had come with a full understanding of its mission.

"We went to ther legislature every day, expectin' trouble," he declared,
with a full-voiced boastfulness. "And we were ready to weed out the
Democratic leaders when it started."

"To what purpose was all that planned?" purred the examining lawyer, and
the response capped it with prompt assurance:

"The object was to have a Republican majority before we got through
shooting."

"And you were willing to do your part?"

Virtuously boomed the reply: "If it was in fair battle, I was willin',
yes, sir."

Saul particularized. He recounted that he had himself nominated Asa as a
dependable gun-fighter, and that on the day of the tragedy he had met
Asa on the streets of Frankfort. Asa, he asserted, had brazenly
displayed a pocketful of cartridges.

"He said to me," proceeded the witness; "'Them ca'tridges comes out of a
lot thet's done made hist'ry. Whenever I looks over ther sights of a
rifle-gun, I gits me either money or meat, an' this time I've done got
me both.'"

Boone Wellver had been leaning tensely forward in his seat as he
listened. Here at last, to his own knowledge, the words that were
cementing his kinsman's doom were utterly and viciously false. He had
been a witness to that meeting, and it had been Saul and not Asa who had
seen danger in the possession of cartridges. It had been Saul, too, who
had excitedly instructed him to destroy the evidence.

But Saul continued glibly: "Asa had done named ter me, back thar in ther
mountains, thet he reckoned him an' ther Governor could swap favours. So
when we met up that day in Frankfort, he said, 'Me an' ther Big Man, we
got tergether an' done a leetle business.'"

The courtroom was tensely, electrically silent, when a boy rose out of
his chair, and with the suddenness of a bursting shell shrilled out in
defiance:

"Thet's a damn lie, Saul, an' ye knows hit! I was right thar an--!" The
instant clatter of the Judge's gavel and the staccato outbreak of the
Judge's voice interrupted the interruption. "Silence! Mr. Sheriff, bring
that disturber before the Court."

Still trembling with white-hot indignation, Boone was led forward with
the sheriff's hand on his shoulder, until he stood under the stern
questioning of eyes looking down from the bench.

But instantly, too, Colonel Wallifarro's smoothly controlled voice was
addressing the Court: "May it please your Honour, before you punish this
boy I should like to offer a word or two of explanation."

So Boone did not go to jail, but, after a sharp reprimand, he was sworn
as a witness for the defence, and excluded from the courtroom.

When he took the witness-stand later, it was with a recovered
composure--and his straightforward story went far toward shaking the
impression Saul had left behind him--yet not far enough.

He realized, with black chagrin, that as long as he had sat there
steadfastly calm, he had been to Asa a tower of strength--but that when
he had broken out he had forfeited that privilege--and left his kinsman
unsuccoured.

At last the Commonwealth closed, and Asa himself came to the stand. Had
he been possessed of a lawyer's experience he could hardly have evaded
more skilfully the snares set in his path, as with imperturbable
gallantry he met his skilled hecklers. The even calmness of his velvety
eyes became a matter of newspaper report, and when he had finished his
direct testimony and had been turned over to the enemy, the fashion in
which he cared for himself also found its way into the news columns.

Asa kept before him the realization that he had been advertised as a
"bad man" and an assassin. Just now he was intent upon impressing the
jury with his urbane proof against exasperation, even when the invective
of insinuation mounted to ferocity,

"You have known the witness, Saul Fulton, for years, have you not?"
demanded the cross-examiner.

"I've known him all my life."

"Can you state any motive he should have for offering malicious and
false evidence against you?"

"Any reason for his lyin'?"

The prisoner gazed at the barking attorney with a calm seriousness and
replied suavely:

"No, sir, only that he's swearin' to save his own neck from the
rope--an' thet's a right pithy reason, I reckon."

Yet all the while that he was making his steep, uphill fight, Asa was
feeling a secret disquiet growing to an obsession within him. He could
not forget that some one upon whose reassurance he had leaned had been
banished from that place where his enemies were bent upon his undoing.
He felt as if the red lantern had been quenched on a dangerous
crossing--and the psychology of the thing gnawed at his overtried
nerves.

Boone's freckled face and wide blue eyes had seemed to stand for
serenity, where all else was hectic and fevered.

To Asa, that intangible yet tranquillizing support had meant what the
spider meant to Bruce, and now it had been taken from him.

The bearded attorney who had destroyed defendant after defendant was
battering at him, with the massed artillery of vindictive and
unremitting aggressiveness.

For a long while Asa fenced warily--coolly, remembering that to slip the
curb upon his temper meant ruin, but as assault followed assault,
through hours, his senses began to reel, his surety began to weaken, and
his eyes began to see red.

The attorney who was scourging him with the whips of law saw the first
break in his armour and bored into it, with ever-increasing
vindictiveness.

Into Asa's mind flashed a picture of the cabin back home, of the wife
suffering an agony of anxiety; of the baby whom he might never again
see. He seemed groping with his gaze for the steadying eyes of the boy,
who was no longer there--whom he desperately needed.

"Asa's gittin' right mad," whispered one mountaineer to another. "I'd
hate ter encounter him, right now, in a highway--an' be an enemy of
his'n."

But the bearded attorney, who was not in the highway, only badgered and
heckled him with a more calculating precision and, as he slowly shook
the witness out of self-restraint into madness, he was himself
deliberately circling from his place at the Commonwealth's table to a
position directly back of the jury box.

Now, having achieved that vantage point, he watched the prisoner's face
grow sombre and furious as the prisoner's head lowered like that of a
charging bull.

One more question he put--a question of deliberate insult, which brought
an admonitory rap of the Judge's gavel; then he thrust out an accusing
finger which pointed straight into the defendant's face.

"Look at him now, gentlemen of the jury," he dramatically thundered.
"Look at those mismated eyes and determine whether or not this is the
man who blocked the state-house doorway--the assassin who laid low a
governor!"

Gazing from their seats in the jury-box, the men of the venire saw
before them and facing them a prisoner whose two fine, calm eyes had
been transfigured and mismated by passion--whose pupils were marked by
some puzzling phenomenon of rabid anger that seemed to leave them no
longer twins.

It was much later that the panel came in from the room where it had
wrangled all night, but that had been the decisive moment. Three or four
reporters detached themselves from their places at the press table and
stood close to the windows.

Then the foreman spoke, for in Kentucky the jury not only decides guilt
but fixes the penalty, and the reporters raised one finger each--It
meant that the verdict was death.




CHAPTER XIV


As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the
afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the
platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away
from a finished chapter.

The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears,
usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for
service.

Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned
to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own
tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing
under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.

Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies,
and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of
swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the
cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the
farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her
grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.

McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the
convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this
impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of
its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now
he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his
sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the
face of his youthful protege began to lighten. Boone was as yet too
young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of
his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must
break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut--and dual. Asa's "woman" must
have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be
wrung from its stinted productivity--and he must put behind him that
ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned
to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.

One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house,
knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of
frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first
raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.

But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sight of whose face
McCalloway bent forward as though confronted by a spectre--and indeed
the newcomer belonged to a world which he had renounced as finally as
though it had been of another incarnation.

This visitor was lean and weather-beaten. His face was long and somewhat
dour, but tanned brown, and instead of speaking he brought his hand to
his temple with a smart salute. It was such a salute as bespoke a long
life of soldiering and the second nature of military habit. The voice in
which McCalloway greeted him was almost unrecognizable as his own,
because it was both far away and strained.

"Sergeant!" he exclaimed; "what has brought you here?"

"The lad, sor'r," the other gravely reminded him. "I must speak with ye
alone. 'Tis a verra private and a verra serious matter that brings me."

Boone had never heard so hard a note in his benefactor's voice as that
which crept into his curt reply:

"It must needs be--to warrant your coming without permission,
MacTavish."

They were just finishing their daylight supper, and the boy rose,
pushing back his chair. Faithfully he regarded his pledge of respecting
the other's privacy whenever he was not invited to share it, and
instinctively he felt that this was no moment for his intrusion.

"I reckon I'll hev ter be farin' over thar ter see how Asa's woman's
comin' on," he remarked casually, as he reached for the hat that lay at
his feet. "Like es not she needs a gittin' of firewood erginst
nightfall."

But the matter-of-fact tone and manner were on the surface. Boone
secretly distrusted the few messages that came to his preceptor from the
outside world. By such voices he might be called back again and hearken
to the summons. Boone could not contemplate existence with both his
idols ravished from his temple.

Now he closed the door behind him in so preoccupied a mood that he left
his rifle standing against the wall forgotten and McCalloway remained
standing by the table rather inflexible of posture and sternly
inquisitorial of countenance.

"MacTavish," he said in sharply clipped syllables, "you are one of
few--a very few--who know of my incognito and address. I have relied
upon you implicitly to guard those secrets. I trust you can explain
following me into what you must know was a retirement not to be
trespassed upon without incurring my anger--my very serious anger."

Respectfully, but with a face full of eager resoluteness, the other
saluted again.

"General," he said, "it's China--they need you there."

"Sergeant"--an angry light leaped in the steel-gray eyes--"if they want
me in China some one whom I have trusted has betrayed my identity. No
living soul there ever heard of Victor McCalloway, _Mister_ McCalloway,
not General Anything, mind you!"

The newcomer crossed to the centre of the room, and his movements were
quick and precise, as are those of the drill-ground.

"To every other man on earth ye may be _Mister_ McCalloway--but to me ye
are my general. Before I'd betray any trust ye might place in me, sor'r,
I'd cut off that hand at the wrist, as ye ken, sor'r, full well. I've
told nae soul where ye wor'r. I've only said that I'd seek for ye."

"But in God's name how--?"

"If I may interrupt ye, sor'r, I am no longer Sergeant Major MacTavish;
I'm a time-retired man at home, but when I wear a uniform now it's that
of the army of the Manchu Emperor. They seek to reorganize their army
along western lines. They want genius. They ken nothin' of ye save that
one Victor McCalloway was once a British officer of high rank who served
so close to Dinwiddie, that Dinwiddie's strategy is known to him.--Read
this, sor'r, and ye'll understand more of the matter."

The General took the large, official-looking missive and stood for a
moment with a drawn and concentrated brow before he slit its linen-lined
covering.

The feel of the thing in his fingers brought to him a certain stirring
and quickening of the pulses: such a restiveness as may come to the
retired thoroughbred at the far-off sound of the paddock bugle, or to
the spent war horse at the rolling of drums.

The heavy blue paper and the thick seal set into disquieting momentum an
avalanche of memories. Active days which he had resolved to forget were
conjured into rebirth as he handled this bulky envelope which proclaimed
its officialdom. Even the daily papers came to him here with desultory
lack of sequence. He knew in disjointed fashion how that same summer an
anti-foreign revolt had broken out in Shantung and spread to Pechili. He
had read that the Japanese Government had dispatched twenty thousand men
to China. Later he had followed the all too meagre accounts of how the
Allies had raced for Peking to relieve the besieged legations. The young
Emperor's ambition to impress upon his realm the stamp of western
civilization had made him, for two years, a virtual prisoner to the
Empress Dowager and her reactionaries. Now in turn the Empress Dowager
was in flight and, presumably, the Japanese, working in concert with
agents of the captive Emperor and Prince Ching, were looking toward the
future.--It would seem that they divined once more the opportunity to
Occidentalize army and government. If so, it was the rising of a world
tide which might well run to flood, and it offered him a man's work. At
all events, this letter which caused his fingers to itch and tremble as
they held it, came from high Japanese sources and it was addressed only
"Excellency," without a name. The envelope itself was directed to "The
Honourable Victor McCalloway."

For a long time he stood there immovable, looking at the paper, as great
dreams marched before him. Organization, upbuilding--that was his
_metier_!

Seeing the rapt concentration of his brow and the hunger of his eyes,
the former British sergeant spoke again with persuasive fervour:

"Go under any name ye like, sor'r; ye'll be prompt to give it glory! For
many years I served under ye, General. For God's sake, let me take my
commands from ye once again! Come out to China, sor'r, where they need a
great soldier--and can keep silen

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