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The Law of Hemlock Mountain

by Hugh Lundsford · English · Gutenberg #34208 · 469,707 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Law of Hemlock Mountain

Author: Hugh Lundsford

Illustrator: Douglas Duer


        
Release date: November 4, 2010 [eBook #34208]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34208

Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Katherine Ward, and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAW OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN ***




Produced by David Garcia, Katherine Ward, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)









THE LAW OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

BY HUGH LUNDSFORD

Frontispiece by DOUGLAS DUER


  New York
  W. J. Watt & Company
  PUBLISHERS

  COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
  W. J. WATT & COMPANY

  PRESS OF
  BRAUNWORTH & CO.
  BOOK MANUFACTURERS
  BROOKLYN, N.Y.




[Illustration: "I am sorry," declared Spurrier, humbly. "I didn't know
they were pets. They behaved very much like wild birds."]




CHAPTER I


The officer whose collar ornaments were the winged staff and serpents
of the medical branch, held what was left of the deck in his right
hand and moistened the tip of his thumb against the tip of his
tongue.

"Reenforcements, major?" he inquired with a glance to the man at his
left, and the poker face of the gentleman so addressed remained
impervious to expression as the answer was given back:

"No, I'll stand by what I've got here."

If the utterance hung on a quarter second of indecision it was a
circumstance that went unnoted, save possibly by a young man with the
single bars of a lieutenant on his shoulder straps--and Spurrier gave
no flicker of recognition of what had escaped the others.

Between the whitewashed walls of the room where the little group of
officers sat at cards the Philippine night breeze stirred faintly with
a fevered breath that scarcely disturbed the jalousies.

The pile of poker chips had grown to a bulkiness and value out of
just proportion to the means of army officers below field rank--and
except for the battalion, commander and the surgeon none there held
higher grade than a captaincy. This jungle-hot weather made men
irresponsible.

One or two of the faces were excitedly flushed; several others were
morosely dark. The lights guttered with a jaundiced yellow and sweat
beaded the temples of the players. Sweat, too, made slippery the
enameled surfaces of the pasteboards. Sweat seemed to ooze and simmer
in their brains like the oil from overheated asphalt.

These men had been forced into a companionship of monotony in a
climate of unhealth until their studied politeness, even their forced
jocularity was rather the effort of toleration than the easy play of
comradeship. Their arduously wooed excitement of draw-poker, which had
run improvidently out of bounds, was not a pleasure so much as an
expedient against the boredom that had rubbed their tempers threadbare
and put an edgy sharpness on their nerves.

Captain Comyn, upon whose call for cards the dealer now waited, was
thinking of Private Grant out there under guard in the improvised
hospital. The islands had "gotten to" Private Grant and "locoed" him,
and he had breathed sulphurous maledictions against Captain Comyn's
life--but it was not those threats that now disturbed the company
commander.

Of late Captain Comyn had been lying awake at night and wondering if
he, too, were not going the same way as the unfortunate file. Horribly
quiet fears had been stealing poisonously into his mind--a mind not
given to timidities--and the word "melancholia" had assumed for him a
morbid and irresistible compulsion. No one save the captain's self
knew of these secret hauntings, born of climate and smoldering fever,
and he would not have revealed them on the torture rack. For them he
entertained the same shame as that of a boy grown too large for such
weakness, who shudders with an unconfessed fear of the dark. But he
could no more shake them loose and be free of them than could the
Ancient Mariner rid himself of the bird of ill-omen tied about his
neck. Now he pulled himself together and tossed away a single card.

"I'll take one in the place of that," he commented with studied
carelessness, and Lieutenant John Spurrier, with that infectious smile
which came readily to his lips, pointed a contrast with the captain's
abstraction by the snappy quickness of his announcement:

"If I'm going to trail along, I'll need three. Yes, three, please,
major."

"When Spurrier sits in the game," commented a player who, with a
dolorous glance at the booty before him, threw down his hands, "we at
least get action. Myself, I'm out of it."

The battalion commander studied the ceiling with a troubled furrow
between his brows which was not brought there by the hazards of luck.
He was reflecting that whenever a game was organized it was Spurrier
who quickened its tempo from innocuous amusement to reckless
extravagance. Spurrier, fitted for his life with so many soldierly
qualities, was still, above all else, a plunger. That spirit seemed a
passion that filled and overflowed him. Temperate in other habits, he
played like a nabob. The major remembered hearing that even at West
Point Jack Spurrier had narrowly, escaped dismissal for gambling in
quarters, though his class standing had been distinguished and his
gridiron record had become a tradition.

This sort of game with "the roof off and deuces wild," was not good
for the _morale_ of his junior officers, mused the major. It was like
spiking whisky with absinthe. Yes, to-morrow he would have Spurrier at
his quarters and talk to him like a Dutch uncle.

There were three left battling for the often sweetened pot now, with
three more who had dropped out, looking on, and a tensity enveloped
the long-drawn climax of the evening's session.

Captain Comyn's cheek bones had reddened and his irascible frown lines
deepened. For the moment his fears of melancholia had been swallowed
up in a fitful fury against Spurrier and his smiling face.

At last came the decisive moment of the final call and the show-down,
and through the dead silence of the moment sounded the distant
sing-song of a sentry:

"Corporal of the guard, number one, relief!"

Over the window sill a tiny green lizard slithered quietly and
hesitated, pressing itself flat against the whitewash.

Then the major's cards came down face upward--and showed a queen-high
straight.

"Not quite good enough, major," announced Comyn brusquely as his
breath broke from him with a sort of gasp and he spread out a heart
flush.

But Spurrier, who had drawn three cards, echoed the captain's words:
"Not quite good enough." He laid down two aces and two deuces, which
under the cutthroat rule of "deuces wild" he was privileged to call
four aces.

Comyn came to his feet and pushed back his chair, but he stood
unsteadily. The fever in his bones was playing queer pranks with his
brain. He, whose courtesy had always been marked in its punctilio,
blazed volcano-fashion into the eruption that had been gathering
through these abnormal days and nights.

Yet even now the long habit of decorum held waveringly for a little
before its breaking, and he began with a queer strain in his voice:

"You'll have to take my IOU. I've lost more than I can pay on the
peg."

"That's all right, Comyn," began the victor, "Pay when----" but before
he could finish the other interrupted with a frenzy of anger:

"No, by God, it's not all right! It's all wrong, and this is the last
game I sit in where they deal a hand to you."

Spurrier's smiling lips tightened instantly out of their infectious
amiability into a forbidding straightness. He pushed aside the chips
he had been stacking and rose stiffly.

"That's a statement, Captain Comyn," he said with a warning note in
his level voice, "which requires some explaining."

The abrupt bursting of the tempest had left the others in a tableau of
amazement, but now the authoritative voice of Major Withers broke in
upon the dialogue.

"Gentlemen, this is an army post, and I am in command here. I will
tolerate no quarrels."

Without shifting the gaze of eyes that held those of the captain,
Spurrier answered insistently:

"I have every respect, major, for the requirements of discipline--but
Captain Comyn must finish telling why he will no longer play cards
with me."

"And I'll tell you _pronto_," came the truculent response. "I won't
play with you because you are too damned lucky."

"Oh!" Spurrier's tensity of expression relaxed into something like
amusement for the anticlimax. "That accusation can be stomached, I
suppose."

"Too damned lucky," went on the other with a gathering momentum of
rancor, "and too continuously lucky for a game that's not professional.
When a man is so proficient--or lucky if you prefer--that the card table
pays him more than the government thinks he's worth, it's time----"

Spurrier stepped forward.

"It's time for you to stop," he cautioned sharply. "I give you the
fairest warning!"

But Comyn, riding the flood tide of his passion--a passion of
distempered nerves--was beyond the reach of warnings and his words
came in a bitter outpouring:

"I dare say it was only luck that let you bankrupt young Tillsdale,
but it was as fatal to him as if it bore an uglier name."

The sound in Spurrier's throat was incoherent and his bodily impulse
swift beyond interference. His flat palm smote Captain Comyn's cheek,
to come away leaving a red welt behind it, and as the others swept
forward to intervene the two men grappled.

They were torn apart, still struggling, as Major Withers, unaccustomed
to the brooking of such mutinies, interposed between them the bulk of
his body and the moral force of his indignantly blazing eyes.

"I will have no more of this," he thundered. "I am not a prize-fight
referee, that I must break my officers out of clinches! Go to your
quarters, Comyn! You, too, Spurrier. You are under arrest. I shall
prefer charges against you both. I mean to make an example of this
matter."

But with a strange abruptness the fury died out of Comyn's face. It
left his passion-distorted features so instantly that the effect of
transformation was uncanny. In a breathing space he seemed older and
his eyes held the dark dejection of utter misery. His anger had flared
and died before that grimmer emotion which secretly haunted him--the
fear that he was going the way of climate-crazed Private Grant.

When they released him he turned dispiritedly and left the room in
docile silence. He was not thinking of the charges to be preferred.
They belonged to to-morrow. To-night was nearer, and to-night he must
face those hours of sleeplessness that he dreaded more than all the
penalties enunciated by the Articles of War.

Spurrier, too, bowed stiffly and left the room.

Though it was late when Captain Comyn entered his own quarters, he did
not at once throw himself on the army cot that stood against the
whitewashed wall.

For him the cot held no invitation--only the threat of insomnia and
tossing. His taut nerves had lost the gracious art of relaxation, and
before his thoughts paraded hideously grotesque memories of the few
faces he had ever seen marred by the dethronement of reason.

Already he had forgotten the violent and discreditable scene with
Spurrier, and presently he dropped himself inertly into the camp chair
beside the table at the room's center and opened its drawer.

Slowly his hand came out clutching a service revolver, and his eyes
smoldered unnaturally as they dwelt on it. But after a little he
resolutely shook his head and thrust the thing aside.

He sat in a cold sweat, surrounded by the silence of the Eastern
night, a comprehensive silence which weighed upon him and oppressed
him.

In the thatching of the single-storied adobe building he heard the
rustling of a house snake, and from without, where moonlight seemed to
gush and spill against the cobalt shadows, shrilled the small voice
from a lizard's inflated, crimson throat.

It was all crazing him, and his nails bit into his palms as he sat
there, silent and heavy-breathed. Then he heard footsteps nearer and
louder than those of the pacing sentries, followed by a low rapping of
knuckles on his own door. Perhaps it was Doctor James. He had the
kindly habit of besetting men who looked fagged with the offer of some
innocuous bromide. As if bromides could soothe a brain in which
something had gone _malo_!

"Come in," he growled, and into the room stepped not Major James, but
Lieutenant Spurrier.

Slowly and with an infinite weight of weariness, Comyn rose to his
feet. He might be afraid of lunacy, but not of lieutenants, and his
lips smiled sneeringly.

"If you've come to ask a retraction," he declared ungraciously, "I've
none to offer. I meant all I said."

The visitor stood inside the door calmly eyeing the man who was his
own company commander.

"I didn't come to insist on apologies," he replied after a moment's
silence with an off-hand easiness of tone. "That can wait till you've
gotten over your tantrum. It was another thing that brought me."

"I want to be left alone."

"Aside from the uncomplimentary features of your tirade," went on
Spurrier placidly and he strolled around the table and seated himself
on the window sill, "there was a germ of truth in what you said. We've
been playing too steep a game." He paused and the other man who
remained standing by his table, as though he did not wish to encourage
his visitor by seating himself, responded only with a short, ironic
laugh.

"See here, Comyn," Spurrier's voice labored now with evident
embarrassment. "What I'm getting at is this: I don't want your IOU for
that game. I simply want you to forget it."

But the captain took an angry step forward.

"Do you think I'm a charity patient?" he demanded, as his temper again
mounted to storm pressure. "Why, damn your impertinence, I don't want
to talk to you. I don't want you in my quarters!"

Spurrier slipped from his seat and an angry flush spread to his cheek
bones.

"You're the hell of a--gentleman!" he exclaimed.

The two stood for a few moments without words, facing each other,
while the lieutenant could hear the captain's breath rising and
falling in a panting thickness.

Surgeon James returning from a visit to a colic sufferer was trudging
sleepily along the empty _calle_ when he noted the light still burning
in the captain's window, and with an exclamation of remembrance for
the officer's dark-ringed and sleepless eyes, he wheeled toward the
door. Just as he neared it, a staccato and heated interchange of
voices was borne out to him, and he hurried his step, but at the same
instant a pistol shot bellowed blatantly in the quiet air and into his
nostrils stole the acrid savor of burned powder.

The door, thrown open, gave him the startling picture of Comyn sagged
across his own table and lying grotesque in the yellow light; and of
Spurrier standing, wide-eyed by the window, with the green and cobalt
background of the tropic night beyond his shoulders. While he gazed
the lieutenant wheeled and thrust his head through the raised sash,
under the jalousy.

"Halt!" cried James excitedly, leaping forward to possess himself of
the pistol which Comyn had taken from his drawer and thrust aside.
"Halt, Spurrier, or I'll have to fire!"

The other turned back and faced his captor with an expression which it
was hard to read. Then he shook his shoulders as though to disentangle
himself from an evil dream and in a cool voice demanded:

"Do you mean to intimate, James, that you suspect me of killing
Comyn?"

"Do you mean to deny it?" countered the other incredulously.

"Great God! I oughtn't to have to. That shot was fired through the
window. The bullet whined past my ear while my back was turned. That
was why I looked out just now. Moreover, I am, as you see, unarmed."

"God grant that you can prove these things, Spurrier, but they will
need proof." The doctor turned to bend over the prostrate figure, and
as he did so voices rose from the _calle_ where already had sounded
the alarm and response of running feet. "Or, perhaps," added the
doctor with stubborn suggestiveness, "you acted in self-defense."

Presently the door opened and the corporal of the guard entered and
saluted. His eyes traveled rapidly about the room and he addressed
Spurrier, since James was not a line officer.

"I picked this revolver up, sir, just outside the window," he said,
holding out a service pistol. "It was lying in the moonlight and one
chamber is empty."

Spurrier took the weapon, but when the man had gone James suggested in
an even voice: "Don't you think you had better hand that gun to me?"

"To you? Why?"

"Because this looks like a case for G. C. M. It will have a better
aspect if I can testify that, after the gun was brought in, it wasn't
handled by you except while I saw you?"

"It seems to me"--a belligerent flash darted in the lieutenant's
eyes--"that you are singularly set on hanging this affair around my
neck."

"You were with him and no one else was. If I were you, I'd go direct
to the major and make a statement of facts. He'll be getting reports
from other sources by now."

"Perhaps you are right. Is _he_ dead?"

The surgeon nodded, and Spurrier turned and closed the door softly
behind him.




CHAPTER II


The situation of John Spurrier, who was Jack Spurrier to every man in
that command, standing under the monstrous presumption of having
murdered a brother officer, called for a reaccommodation of the
battalion's whole habit of thought. It demanded a new and unwelcome
word in their vocabulary of ideas, and against it argued, with the hot
advocacy of tested acquaintance, every characteristic of the man
himself, and every law of probability. For its acceptance spoke only
one forceful plea--evidence which unpleasantly skirted the actuality
of demonstration. Short of seeing Spurrier shoot his captain down and
toss his pistol through the open window, Major James could hardly have
witnessed a more damaging picture than the hurriedly opened door had
framed to his vision.

Within the close-drawn cordon of a post, held to military accountability,
facts were as traceable as entries on a card index--and these facts
began building to the lieutenant's undoing. They seemed to bring out
like acid on sympathetic ink the miracle of a Mr. Hyde where his
comrades had known only a Doctor Jekyll.

The one man out of the two skeleton companies of infantry stationed
in the interior town who remained seemingly impervious to the
strangulating force of the tightening net was Spurrier himself.

In another man that insulated and steady-eyed confidence might have
served as a manifest of innocence and a proclamation of clean
conscience. But Spurrier wore a nick-name, until now lightly
considered, to which new conditions had added importance.

They had called him "The Plunger," and now they could not forget the
nickeled and chrome-hardened gambling nerve which had won for him the
sobriquet. There had been the _coup_ at Oakland, for example, when a
stretch finish had stood to ruin him or suddenly enrich him--an
incident that had gone down in racing history and made cafe talk.

Through a smother of concealing dust and a thunder of hoofs, the field
had struggled into the stretch that afternoon, tight-bunched, with its
snapping silks too closely tangled for easy distinguishing--but the
cerise cap that proclaimed Spurrier's choice was nowhere in sight. The
bookmakers pedestalled on their high stools with field glasses glued
to their eyes had been more excited than the young officer on the
club-house lawn, who put away his binoculars while the horses were
still in the back stretch and turned to chat with a girl.

Three lengths from the finish a pair of distended nostrils had thrust
themselves ahead of the other muzzles to catch the judges' eyes, and
bending over steaming withers had nodded a cerise cap.

But the lieutenant who had escaped financial disaster and won a
miniature fortune had gone on talking to the girl.

Might it not be suspected in these circumstances that "Plunger"
Spurrier's refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only an
attitude? He was sitting in a game now with his neck at stake and the
cards running against him. Perhaps he was only bluffing as he had
never bluffed before. Possibly he was brazening it out.

It was not until the battalion had hiked back through bosque and over
mountains to Manila that the lieutenant faced his tribunal: a court
whose simplified methods cut away the maze of technicalities at which
a man may grasp before a civilian jury of his peers.

If, when he actually sat in the room where the evidence was heard, his
assurance that he was to emerge clean-shriven began to reel under
blows more powerful than he had expected, at least his face continued
to testify for him with an outward serenity of confidence.

Doctor James told his story with an admirable restraint and an
absolute absence of coloring. He had meant to go to Comyn, because he
read in his eyes the signs of nerve waste and insomnia; the same
things that had caused too many suicides among the men whose nervous
constitutions failed to adapt themselves to the climate.

Before he had carried his purpose to fulfillment--perhaps a half hour
before--he had gone to look in on the case of Private Grant, who was
suffering from just such a malady, though in a more serious degree.
That private, a mountaineer from the Cumberland hills of Kentucky, had
been to all appearances merely a lunatic, although it was a case which
would yield to treatment or perhaps come to recovery even if left to
itself. On this night he had gone to see if Grant needed an opiate,
but had found the patient apparently sleeping without restlessness,
and had not roused him. At the door of the place where Grant was
under guard, he had paused for a word with Private Severance who
stood there on sentry duty.

It had been a sticky night following a hot day, and in the _calle_
upon which lay the command in billets of nipa-thatched houses, no one
but himself and the sentries were astir during the twenty minutes he
had spent strolling in the moonlight. On rounding a corner he had seen
a light in Comyn's window, and he had gone around the angle of the
adobe house, since the door was on the farther side, to offer the
captain a sleeping potion, too. That was how he chanced on the scene
of the tragedy, just a moment too late for service.

"You say," began Spurrier's counsel, on cross-examination, "that you
visited Private Grant about half an hour before Captain Comyn was
killed and found him apparently resting naturally, although on
previous nights you had thought morphia necessary to quiet his
delirium?"

The major nodded, then qualified slowly:

"Grant had not, of course, been continuously out of his head nor had
he always slept brokenly. There had been lucid periods alternating
with exhausting storm."

"You are not prepared to swear, though, that this seeming sleep might
not have been feigned?"

"I am prepared to testify that it is most unlikely."

"Yet that same night he did make his escape and deserted. That is
true, is it not?"

The major bowed. "He had sought to escape before. That was symptomatic
of his condition."

"And since then he has not been recaptured, though he was in your
opinion too ill and deranged to have deceived you by feigning sleep?"

"Quite true."

"Have you ever heard Grant threaten Captain Comyn's life?"

"Never."

"Whether he had made such threats to your knowledge or not, he did
come from that hill county of the Kentucky mountains commonly called
Bloody Brackton, did he not?"

"I believe so. His enlistment record will answer that."

"You do know, though, that the man on guard duty--the man with whom
you spoke outside--was Private Severance, also from the so-called
Kentucky feud belt and a friend of the sick man?"

"I can testify of my own knowledge only that he was Private
Severance and that he and Grant were of the same platoon--Lieutenant
Spurrier's."

The defense advocate paused and carefully framed a hypothetical
question to be answered by the witness as a medical expert.

"I will now ask you to speak from your knowledge of blood tendencies
as affected or distorted by mental abnormalities. Suppose a man to
have been born and raised under a code which still adheres to feudal
violence and the private avenging of personal grievances both real and
fancied. Suppose such a man to have conceived a bitter hatred against
his commanding officer and to have brooded over that hatred until it
had become a fixed idea--a monomania--a determination to kill; suppose
such a man to have known only the fierce influences of his retarded
hills until he came into the army and to have encountered there a
discipline which seemed to him a tyranny. I will ask you whether such
a man might not be apt to react to a homicidal mania under nervous
derangement, and whether such a homicidal mania might not develop its
own craftiness of method?"

"Such," testified the medical officer, "is a conceivable but a highly
imaginative possibility."

Then Private Severance was called and came into the room, where he
stood smartly at attention until instructed to take the witness chair.
This dark-haired private from the Cumberlands looked the soldier from
crown to sole leather, yet his features seemed to hold under their
present repose an ancient stamp of sullenness. It was an intangible
quality rather than an expression, as though it bore less relation to
his present than to some unconquerable survival from generations that
had passed on; generations that had been always peering into shadows
and searching them for lurking perils.

In his speech lingered quaintly remnants of dialect from the laureled
hills that army life had failed to eradicate, and in his manner one
could note a wariness of extreme caution. That was easy to understand,
because Private Severance, too, stood under the charge of having
permitted a prisoner to escape, and his evidence would confront him
later when he in turn occupied the dock.

"I didn't have no speech with Bud Grant that night," he testified,
"but I'd looked in some several times through the window. It was a
barred window, an' every time I peeked through it I could see Bud
layin' there asleep. The moon fell acrost his cot so I could see him
plain."

"When did you see him last?"

"After Major James had been in and come out--a full fifteen minutes
later. I'm able to swear to that, because I noticed the moon just as
the major went out, and, when I looked in through the window the last
time, the moon was a full quarter hour lower down to'rds settin'."

After a moment's pause the witness volunteered in amplification:
"Where I come from we don't have many clocks or watches. We goes by
the sun and moon."

"Then you can swear that if Private Grant fired the shot that killed
Captain Comyn, he must have escaped and eluded your sight; armed
himself, crossed the plaza; turned the corner; accomplished the act
and gotten clean away, all within the brief period of five minutes?"

"I can swear to more than that. He didn't get past me till _after_ the
pistol went off. There wasn't no way out but by the one door, and I
was right at that door all the time until I left it."

"When did you leave?"

The witness gave response without hesitation, yet with the same
serious weighing of his words.

"I was standing there, sorter peerin' up at the stars an' beginning to
feel right smart tired when I heard the shot. I heard the shout of the
corporal of the guard, too, an' then it was that I made my mistake."
He paused and went on evenly. "I hadn't ought to have stirred away
from my post, but it seemed like a sort of a general alarm, an' I went
runnin' to'rds it. That was the first chanst Bud had to get away.
When I got back he was gone."

"You are sure he was still there when the shot sounded?"

"As God looks down, I can swear he was!"

Then the defense took the witness.

"When does your enlistment expire?"

"Two months, come Sunday."

"You know to the day, don't you? You are keenly anxious for that day
to come, aren't you?"

"Why wouldn't I be? I've got folks at home."

"Haven't you and Grant both been malcontents throughout your entire
period of service?"

"It's news to me, if it's true."

"Haven't you often heard Private Grant swear vengeance against Captain
Comyn?"

"Not no more than to belly-ache some little."

"Is it not a fact that since you and Grant ran amuck on the transport
coming over, and Comyn put you both in irons, the two of you had sworn
vengeance against him; that you had both taken the blood oath to get
him?"

Severance looked blankly at his questioner and blankly shook his
head.

"That's all new tidings ter me," he asserted with entire calmness.

"Don't you know that you deliberately let Grant out immediately after
the visit of Major James and slipped him the pistol with which he
fired the shot? Didn't you do that, knowing that when the report
sounded you could make it your excuse for leaving your post, and then
perjure yourself as to the time?"

"I know full well," asserted the witness with an unshaken composure,
"that nothing like that didn't happen."

Fact built on fact until even the defendant's counsel found himself
arguing against a growing and ugly conviction. The pistol had been
identified as Spurrier's, and his explanation that he had left it
hanging in his holster at his quarters, whence some unknown person
might have abstracted it, lacked persuasiveness. The defense built a
structure of hypothesis based upon the fact that the open door of
Spurrier's room was visible from the house where Grant had been
tossing on his cot. The claim was urgently advanced that a skulking
lunatic might easily have seen the glint of blued steel, and have been
spurred in his madness by the temptation of such an implement ready to
his hand. But that, too, was held to be a fantastic claim. So the
verdict was guilty and the sentence life imprisonment. It must have
been death, had the case, for all its warp of presumption and woof of
logic, been other than circumstantial.

The defendant felt that this mitigation of the extreme penalty was a
misplaced mercy. The disgrace could be no blacker and death would at
least have brought to its period the hideousness of the nightmare
which must now stretch endlessly into the future.

It was to a prisoner, sentenced and branded, that Major Withers came
one afternoon when the court-martial of Lieutenant Spurrier had run
its course as topic-in-chief for the Officers' Club at Manila. Other
matters were already crowding it out of the minds it had profoundly
shocked.

"I want to talk to you, Jack," began the major bluntly. "I want to
talk to you with a candor that grows out of the affection we all felt
for you--before this damnable thing upset our little world. My God,
boy, you had life in your sling. You had every quality that makes the
soldier; you had every social requisite except wealth. This besetting
passion for gambling has brought the whole train of disaster--as
logically as if you had killed him at the card table itself."

"You are overlooking the fact, major," interrupted the prisoner dryly,
"that I didn't kill him. Moreover, it's too late now for the warning
to benefit me. I dare say in Leavenworth I shall have no trouble
curbing my passion for gaming." He paused and added with an irony of
despairing bitterness: "But I suppose I should thank you and say, like
the negro standing on the gallows, 'dis hyar is surely g'wine to be a
great lesson ter me.'" Suddenly the voice broke and the young man
wheeled to avert his face. "My God," he cried out, "why didn't you let
them hang me or shoot me? Any man can stiffen his legs and his spine
for five minutes of dying--even public dying--but back of those walls
with a convict's number instead of a name----" There he broke off and
the battalion commander laid a hand on his heaving shoulder.

"I didn't come to rub in preachments while you stood at the edge of
the scaffold or the jail, Jack. My warning may not be too late, after
all. We've passed the matter up to the war department with a strong
recommendation for clemency. We mean to pull every wire that can
honorably be pulled. We're making the most of your good record
heretofore and of the conviction being based on circumstantial
evidence."

He paused a moment and then went on with a trifle of embarrassment in
his voice:

"You know that Senator Beverly is at the governor general's
palace--and that his daughter is with him."

Spurrier wheeled at that and stood facing his visitor with eyes that
had kindled, but in which the light at once faded as he commented
shortly:

"Neither the senator nor Augusta has made any effort to see me since I
was brought to Manila."

"Perhaps the senator thought that was best, Jack," argued Withers.
"For the daughter, of course, I'm not prepared to speak--but I know
that Beverly has been keeping the cable hot in your behalf. Your name
has become so familiar to the operators between here and Washington
that they don't spell it out any more: they only need to rap out Sp.
now--and if I needed a voice to speak for me on Pennsylvania Avenue or
on Capitol Hill, there's no man I'd pick before the senator."

When he had gone Spurrier sat alone and to his ears came the distant
playing of a band in the plaza. Somewhere in that ancient town was the
girl who had not been to see him, nor written to him, even though,
just before his battalion had gone into the bosques across the
mountains, she had let him slip a ring on her finger, and had answered
"yes" to his question--the most personal question in the world.




CHAPTER III


There was a more assured light in Major Withers' eyes when he next
came as a visitor into the prison quarters, and the heartiness of his
hand clasp was in itself a congratulation.

"The thing was carried up to the president himself," he declared.
"Washington is sick of you, Spurrier. Because of you miles of red tape
have been snarled up. Departments have worked overtime until the
single hope of the United States government is that it may never hear
of you again. You don't go to prison, after all, my boy."

"You mean I am pardoned?"

Then, remembering that the rose of his bringing carried a sharp thorn
the senior proceeded with a note of concern sobering his voice.

"The red tape has not only been tangled because of you--but it has
tangled you in its meshes, too, Spurrier. Yes, you are pardoned. You
are as free as I am--but 'in view of the gravely convincing evidence,
et cetera, et cetera'--it seems that some sort of compromise was
deemed necessary."

Spurrier stood where he had risen from his seat and his eyes held
those of his informant with a blending of inquiry and suspense.

"What sort of compromise, major?"

"You leave the army with a dishonorable discharge. The world is open
to you and you've got an equipment for success--but you might as
well recognize from the start that you're riding with a heavy
impost in your saddle clothes, my boy." He paused a moment and then,
dropping his race-track metaphor, went hurriedly on: "For myself, I
think you're guilty or innocent and you ought to be hanged or
clean-shriven. I don't get this dubious middle ground of freedom with
a tarnished name. It's going to crop up to crab things for you just
when they hang in the balance, and I'm damned if I can see its
fairness! It will cause men to look askance and to say 'he was saved
from rope-stretching only by wire-pulling.'"

The major ended somewhat savagely and Spurrier made no answer. He was
gazing out at the patch of blue that blazed hotly through the high,
barred window and, seeing there reminders of the bars sinister that
would henceforth stand between himself and the sky.

The battalion chief interrupted the long pause to suggest:

"The _Empress_ sails on Tuesday. If I were you I'd take passage on
her. I suppose you will, won't you?"

"That depends," answered the liberated man hesitantly. "I've got to
thank the senator--and, though she hasn't sent me any message, there's
a question to ask a girl."

"It's none of my business, of course, Spurrier," came the advising
voice quietly. "But the Beverlys have engaged passage on the
_Empress_. If I were you, I'd drop a formal note of gratitude and
leave the rest until you meet them aboard."

After a moment's thought the other nodded. "I'll follow that
suggestion. It may be less embarrassing for--them."

"The other fellows are going to send a sort of a hamper down to the
boat. There won't be any cards, but you'll know that a spirit of
Godspeed goes with the stirrup cup."

For an instant Spurrier looked puzzled and the major, whose note of
embarrassment had been growing until it seemed to choke him, now
spluttered and sought to bury his confusion under a forced paroxysm of
coughing.

Then impulsively he thrust out his hand and gripped that of the man of
whom just now he could remember only gallant things; soldierly
qualities and gently bred charm.

"In a fashion, Jack, you must shake hands with all of them through me.
I come as their proxy. They can't give you a blowout, you know. They
can't even come to see you off. I can say what I like now. The papers
aren't signed up yet, but afterward--well, you know! Damn it, I forget
the exact words that the Articles of War employ--about an officer who
goes out--this way."

"Don't bother, major. I get your meaning." Spurrier took the proffered
hand in both his own. "No officer can give me social recognition. I
believe the official words are that I shall be 'deemed ignominious.'
Tell the boys I understand."

On the sailing day John Spurrier, whose engagingly bold eyes had not
yet learned to evade the challenge of any glance, timed his arrival on
board almost as surreptitiously as a stowaway. It was from behind the
closed door of his own stateroom that he listened to the deck
commotion of laughter and leave-taking and heard, when the whistle had
shrieked its warning to shore-going visitors, the grind of anchor
chain on winch and windlass.

That evening he dined in an inconspicuous corner by arrangement with
the dining-saloon steward, and bolted his meal with nervous haste.

From afar, as he had stood in a companionway, he had glimpsed a
panama-hatted girl--a girl who did not see him, and who had shown only
between the shifting heads and shoulders of the crowd. He could not
have told even had he been closer whether her gloved left hand still
wore upon its third finger the ring that he had put there--before
things had happened.

He must face the issue of questioning her and being questioned, and he
hoped that he might have his first meeting with her alone--free from
the gaze of other eyes that would torture him, and perhaps mortify
her.

So when the moon had risen and the band had begun its evening concert
he slipped out on deck and took up his station alone at the stern
rail. It was not entirely dark even here, but the light was mercifully
tempered, and upon the promenaders he turned his back, remaining in a
seclusion from which, with sidewise glances, he appraised each figure
that drifted by.

Once his eyes encountered those of a tall and elderly gentleman in
uniform upon whose shoulder straps glittered the brigadier's single
star.

For an instant Spurrier forgot the sadly altered color of his status
and his hand, answering to instinct, rose in salute, while his lips
parted in a smile.

But the older man, who fortunately was alone, after an embarrassed
instant went on, pretending an absent-mindedness that ignored the
salutation. Spurrier could feel that the general was scarcely more
comfortable than himself.

Slowly, at length, he left his outlook over the phosphorescent wake
and drifted isolatedly about the decks, giving preference to the spots
where the shadows lay heaviest. But when his wandering brought him
again to the place he had abandoned at the stern, he found that it had
been preempted by another. A figure stood there alone and so quiet
that at first he hardly distinguished it as separate from the black
contour of a capstan.

But with the realization he recognized a panama hat, from under whose
brim escaped a breeze-stirred strand of dark hair, and promptly he
stepped to the rail, his rubber-soled shoes making no sound.

The girl did not hear him, nor did she, as he found himself
reflecting, feel his presence as lovers do in romances, and turn to
greet him before he announced himself. But as she stood there in the
shadow, with moonlight and starlight around her, his pulses quickened
with an insupportable commotion of mingled hope and fear.

Her beauty was that of the aristocrat. It was this patrician quality
which had first challenged his interest in her and answered to his own
inordinate pride of self-confidence.

He had liked the lightness with which her small feet trod the earth
and the prideful tilt of her exquisitely modeled chin.

After all, he had known her only a short time--and now he realized
that he did not know her well: certainly not well enough to estimate
with any surety how they would meet again, after an interval which had
tarnished the name that had come to him from two generations of
accrued distinction.

He bent forward, and, in a low voice, spoke her name, and she turned
without a start so that she stood looking into his eyes.

"I suppose you know," he began, and for once he spoke without
self-assurance, "that I didn't hunt you out sooner because I wanted to
spare you embarrassment. I knew you were sailing by this boat--and so
I took it, too."

She nodded her head, but remained silent. Her eyes met his and
lingered, but they were like curtained windows and told him nothing.
It was as if she wished to let him pitch the plane of their meeting
without interference, and he was grateful.

"I don't suppose," he began, forcing himself to speak with forthright
directness, "I need protest my innocence to you--and I don't suppose I
need confess that the stigma will stick to me--that in--some
quarters--it will mean ostracism. I wanted to meet you the first time
alone as much for your sake as my own."

"I know----" she agreed faintly, but there was no rush of confidence,
of sympathy that thought only of the black situation in which he
stood.

"I know, too," he went on with the same steadiness, "that but for your
father's efforts I should have had to spend the rest of my life in
prison. Above all, I know that your father made those efforts because
you ordained it."

"It was too horrible," she whispered with a little shudder. "It was
inconceivable."

"It still is," he reminded her. "There is a question, then, to be
asked--a question for you to answer."

The girl's hands dropped on the rail and her fingers tightened as her
eyes, deeply pained, went off across the wake. She seemed unable to
help him, unable to do more than give back monosyllabic responses to
the things he said.

"Of course, I can't assume that the promise you gave me--before all
this--still stands, unless you can ratify it. I'm the same man, yet
quite a different man."

At last she turned, and he saw that her lashes were wet with tears.

"Some day," she suggested almost pleadingly, "some day surely you will
be able to clear your name--now that you're free to give yourself to
it."

He shook his head, "That is going to be the purpose of my life," he
answered. "But God only knows----"

"When you have done that," she impetuously exclaimed, "come back to
me. I'll wait."

But Spurrier shook his head and stiffened a little, not indignantly,
but painfully, and his face grew paler than it had yet been.

"That is generous of you," he said slowly. "That is the best I had the
right to hope for--but it's not enough. It would be a false position
for you--with a mortgage of doubt on your future. I've got to face
this thing nakedly. I've got to depend only on those people who don't
need proof--who simply know that I must be innocent of--of _this_
because it would be impossible for me to be guilty of it--people," he
added, his voice rising with just a moment's betrayal of boyish
passion, "who will take the seeming facts, just as they are, and still
say, 'Damn the facts!'"

"Can I do that?" She asked the question honestly, with eyes in which
sincere tears glistened, and at last words came in freshet volume.
"Can I ignore the fact that father is in public life, where his
affairs and those of his family are public property? You know he is
talked of as presidential timber. Can I ask him to move heaven and
earth to give you back your liberty--and then have his critics say
that it was all for a member of his own family--a private use of
public power?"

"Then you want your promise back?" he demanded quietly.

Suddenly the girl carried her hands to her face, a face all the
lovelier for its distress. "I don't--know what--I want," she gasped.

Her lover stood looking down at her, and his temples grew coldly moist
where the veins stood out.

"If you don't know what you want, dear, I know one thing that you
can't do," he said. "Under these circumstances, your only chance of
happiness would lie in your wanting one thing so much that the rest
wouldn't count." He paused, and then he, too, moved aside and stood
with her, leaning on the rail while in the phosphorescent play of the
water and the broken reflections of the low-hung stars he seemed to
find a sort of anodyne.

"I said that what you offered was the most I had the right to hope
for. That was true. Your father's objections are legitimate. I owe you
both more than I can ever pay--but I won't add to that debt."

"I thought," said the girl miserably, "that I loved you--enough for
anything. The shock of all this--has made my mind swirl so that
now--I'm not sure of anything."

"Yes," he said dully, "I understand."

Yet perhaps what he understood, or thought he understood, just then
was either more or less than implied in the deferential compliance of
his voice. This girl had given her promise to an officer and a
gentleman with two generations of gallant army record behind him and a
promising future ahead. She was talking now to one who, in the words
of the Articles of War was neither an officer nor a gentleman and who
had been saved from life imprisonment only by influence of her own
importuning.

Her own distress of mind and incertitude were so palpable and pathetic
that the man had spoken with apology in his voice, because through him
she had been forced into her dilemma. Yet, until now, he had been
young enough and naive enough to believe in certain tenets of
romance--and, in romance, a woman who really loved a man would not be
weighing at such a time her father's aspirations toward the White
House. In romance, even had he been as guilty as perdition, he would
have stood in her eyes, incapable of crime. Palpably life and romance
followed variant laws and, for a bitter moment, Spurrier wished that
the senator had kept hands off, and left him to his fate.

He had heard the senator himself characterized as a man cold-bloodedly
ambitious and contemptuous of others and, having seen only the genial
side of that prominent gentleman, he had resentfully denied such
statements and made mental comment of the calumny that attaches to
celebrity.

Yet, Spurrier argued to himself, the girl was right. Quite probably if
he had a sister similarly placed, he would be seeking to show her the
need of curbing impulse with common sense.

From a steamer chair off somewhere at their backs came a low peal of
laughter, and the orchestra was busy with a fox trot. For perhaps five
minutes neither of them spoke again, but at last the girl twisted the
ring from her finger. At least her loyalty had kept it there until she
could remove it in his presence. She handed it to him and he turned it
this way and that. The moonlight teased from its setting a jet of cold
radiance.

Then Spurrier tossed it outward and watched the white arc of its
bright vanishing. He heard a muffled sob and saw the girl turn and
start toward the companionway door. Instinctively he took a step
forward following, then halted and stood where he was.

Later, Spurrier forced himself toward the smoke room where already
under cigar and cigarette smoke, poker and bridge games were in
progress, and where in little groups those men who were not playing
discussed the topics of East and West. He was following no urge of
personal fancy in entering that place, but rather obeying a resolution
he had made out there on deck. Now that he had asked his question and
had his answer there was nothing from which he could afford to hide.
He knew that he came heralded by the advance agency of gossip and that
it behooved him from the start to meet and give back glance for
glance: to declare by his bearing that he had no intention of
skulking, and no apologies to make.

Yet, having reached the entrance from the deck, he hesitated, and
while he still stood, with his back to the lighted door of the smoke
room, he reeled under a sudden impact and was thrown against the rail.
Recovering himself with an exclamation of anger, Spurrier found
himself confronting a man rising from his knees, whose awkwardness had
caused the collision.

But the stumbling person having regained his feet, stood seemingly
shaken by his fall, and after a moment, during which Spurrier eyed him
with hostile silence, exclaimed:

"Plunger Spurrier!"

"That is not my name, sir," retorted the ex-officer hotly. "And it's
not one that I care to have strangers employ."

The man drew back a step, and the light from the doorway fell across a
face a little beyond middle age; showing a broad forehead and strongly
chiseled features upon which sat an expression of directness and
force.

"My apology is, at least, as ready as was my exclamation," declared
the stranger in a pleasant voice that disarmed hostility. "The term
was not meant offensively. I saw you at Oakland one day when a race
was run, and I've heard certain qualities of yours yarned about at
mess tables in the East. I ask your pardon."

"It's granted," acceded Spurrier of necessity. "And since you've heard
of me, you doubtless know enough to make allowances for my short
temper and excuse it."

"I _have_ heard your story," admitted the other man frankly. "My name
is Snowdon. It's just possible you may have heard of me, too."

"You're not Snowdon the engineer: the Panama Canal man, the Chinese
railway builder, are you?"

"I had a hand in those enterprises," was the answer, and with a slight
bow the gentleman went his way.

The spot where the two men had stood talking was far enough aft to
look down on the space one deck lower and one degree farther astern,
where, as through a well space, showed the meaner life of the
steerage. There was a light third-class list on this voyage, and when
Spurrier moved out of the obscurity which had been thrown over him by
the life boat's shadow, he stood gazing idly down on an empty
prospect. He gazed with an interest too moodily self-centered for easy
inciting.

He himself stood now clear shown under the frosted globe of an
overhead light and, after a little, roused to a tepid curiosity, he
fancied he could make out what seemed to be a human figure that clung
to the blackest of the shadows below him.

He even fancied that in that lower darkness he caught the momentary
dull glint of metal reflecting some half light, and an impression of
furtive movement struck in upon him. But after a moment's scrutiny,
which failed to clarify the picture, he decided that his imagination
had invented the vague shape out of nothing more tangible than shadow.
If there had been a man there he seemed to have dissolved now.

So Spurrier turned away.

Had his eyes possessed a nearer kinship to those of the cat, which can
read the dark, he would have altered his course of action from that
instant forward. He would, first, have gone to the captain and
demanded permission to search the steerage for an ex-private of the
infantry company that had lately been his own; a private against whose
name on the muster roll stood the entry: "Dead or deserted."

Yet when he turned on his heel and passed from the lighted area he
unconsciously walked out of range of a revolver aimed at his
breast--thereby temporarily settling for the man who fingered the
trigger his question, "to shoot or not to shoot."

For Private Grant, a fleeing deserter, convalescent from fever and
lunacy, had been casting up the chances of his own life just then and
debating the dangers and advantages of letting Spurrier live.
Recognizing his former officer as he himself looked out of his hiding,
his first impulse had been one of panic terror and in Spurrier he had
seen a pursuer.

The finger had twitched nervously on the trigger--then while he
wavered in decision the other had calmly walked out of range. Now, if
he kept out of sight until they reached Frisco, the deserter told
himself, a larger territory would spread itself for his escape than
the confines of a steamer, and he belonged to a race that can bide its
time.




CHAPTER IV


Spurrier entered the smoke room and stood for a moment in its
threshold.

There were uniforms there, and some men in them whom he had known,
though now these other-time acquaintances avoided his eye and the
necessity of an embarrassment which must have come from meeting it.

But from an alcove seat near the door rose a stocky gentleman, well
groomed and indubitably distinguished of guise, who had been tearing
the covering from a bridge deck.

"Spurrier, my boy," he exclaimed cordially, "I'm glad to see you. I
read your name on the list. Won't you join us?"

This was the man who had rolled away the mountains of official inertia
and saved him from prison; who had stipulated with his daughter that
she should not write to him in his cell; and who now embraced the
first opportunity to greet him publicly with cordial words. Here,
reflected the cashiered soldier, was poise more calculated than his
own, and he smiled as he shook his head, giving the answer which he
knew to be expected of him.

"No, thank you, senator." Then he added a request: "But if these
gentlemen can spare you for a few minutes I would appreciate a word
with you."

"Certainly, my boy." With a glance about the little company which
made his excuses, Beverly rose and linked his arm through Spurrier's,
but when they stood alone on deck that graciousness stiffened
immediately into manner more austere.

"I've seen Augusta," began the younger man briefly, "and told her I
wouldn't seek to hold her to her promise. I suppose that meets with
your approval?"

The public man, whom rumor credited with presidential aspirations,
nodded. "Under the circumstances it is necessary. I may as well be
candid. I tried vainly to persuade her to throw you over entirely, but
I had to end in a compromise. She agreed not to communicate with you
in any manner until your trial came to its conclusion."

The cashiered officer felt his temples hammering with the surge of
indignant blood to his forehead. This man who had so studiedly and
successfully feigned genuine pleasure at seeing him, when other eyes
were looking on, was telling him now with salamander coolness that he
had urged upon his daughter the policy of callous desertion. The
impulse toward resentful retort was almost overpowering, but with it
came the galling recognition that, except for Beverly's bull-dog
pertinacity, Spurrier himself would have been a life-termer, and that
now humility became him better than anger.

"Did you seek to have Augusta throw me over, without even a
farewell--because you believed me guilty, sir?" His inquiry came
quietly and the older man shook a noncommittal head.

"It's not so much what I think as what the world will think," he made
even response. "To put it in the kindest words, Spurrier, you rest
under a cloud."

"Senator," said the other in measured syllables, "I rest, also, under
a great weight of obligation to you, but, there were times, sir, when
for a note from her I'd willingly have accepted the death penalty."

"I won't pretend that I fail to understand--even to sympathize with
you," came the answer. "You must see none the less that I had no
alternative. Augusta's husband must be--well, like Caesar's wife."

"There is nothing more to be said, I think," admitted Spurrier, and
the senator held out his hand.

"In every other matter, I feel only as your friend. It will be better
if to other eyes our relations remain cordial. Otherwise my efforts on
your behalf would give the busy-bodies food for gossip. That's what we
are both seeking to avoid."

Spurrier bowed and watched the well-groomed figure disappear.

The cloudless days and the brilliant nights of low-hung stars and
phosphor waters were times of memorable opportunity and paradise for
other lovers on that steamer. For Spurrier they were purgatorial and
when he realized Augusta Beverly's clearly indicated wish that he
should leave her free from the embarrassment of any tete-a-tete, he
knew definitely that her silence was as final as words could have made
it. The familiar panama hat seen at intervals and the curve of the
cheek that he had once been privileged to kiss seemed now to belong to
an orbit of life remote from his own with an utterness of distance no
less actual because intangible.

The young soldier's nature, which had been prodigally generous, began
to harden into a new and unlovely bitterness. Once he passed her as
she leaned on the rail with a young lieutenant who was going to the
States on his first leave from Island duty, and when the girl met his
eyes and nodded, the cub of an officer looked up--and cut him dead
with needless ostentation.

For the old general, who had pretended not to see him, Jack Spurrier
had felt only the sympathy due to a man bound and embarrassed by a
severe code of etiquette, but with this cocksure young martinet, his
hands itched for chastisement.

Throughout the trying voyage Spurrier felt that Snowdon, the engineer,
was holding him under an interested sort of observation, and this
surveillance he mildly resented, though the entire politeness of the
other left him helpless to make his feeling outspoken. But when they
had stood off from Honolulu and brought near to completion the last
leg of the Pacific voyage, Snowdon invited him into his own stateroom
and with candid directness spoke his mind.

"Spurrier," he began, "I'd like to have a straight talk with you if
you will accept my assurance of the most friendly motive."

Spurrier was not immediately receptive. He sat eying the other for a
little while with a slight frown between his eyes, but in the end he
nodded.

"I should dislike to seem churlish," he answered slowly. "But I've had
my nerves rubbed raw of late, and they haven't yet grown callous."

"You see, it's rather in my line," suggested Snowdon by way of
preface, "to assay the minerals of character in men and to gauge the
percentage of pay-dirt that lies in the lodes of their natures. So
I've watched you, and if you care to have the results of my
superficial research, I'm ready to report. No man knows himself until
introduced to himself by another, because one can't see one's self at
sufficient distance to gain perspective."

Spurrier smiled. "So you're like the announcer at a boxing match," he
suggested. "You're ready to say, 'Plunger Spurrier, shake hands with
Jack Spurrier--both members of this club.'"

"Precisely," assented Snowdon as naturally as though there had been no
element of facetiousness in the suggestion. "And now in the first
place, what do you mean to do with yourself?"

"I have no idea."

"I suppose you have thought of the possibilities open to a West Point
man--as a soldier of fortune?"

"Yes," the answer was unenthusiastic. "Thought of them and discarded
them."

"Why?"

The voice laughed and then spoke contemptuously.

"A man's sword belongs to his flag. It can no more be honorably hired
out than a woman's love. I can see in either only a form of
prostitution."

"Good!" exclaimed Snowdon heartily. "I couldn't have coached you to a
better answer. Are you financially independent?"

"On the contrary, I have nothing. Until now there was my pay and----"
He paused there but went on again with a dogged self-forcing. "I might
as well confess that the gaming table has always left a balance on my
side of the ledger."

"I haven't seen you playing since you came aboard."

"No. I've cut that out----"

"Good again--and that brings us to where I stop eliciting information
about yourself and begin giving it. I had heard of your gambling
exploits before I saw you. I found that you had that cold quality of
nerve which a few gamblers have, fewer than are credited with it, by
far! Incidentally, it's precisely the same quality that makes notable
generals--and adroit diplomats--if they have the other qualities to
support it. It's sublimated self-control and boldness. You were using
it badly, but it was because you were seeking an outlet through the
wrong channels. So I studied you, quite impersonally. Your situation
on board wasn't easy or enviable. You knew that eyes followed you and
tongues wagged about you with a morbid interest. You saw chatting
groups fall abruptly silent when you approached them and officers you
had once fraternized with look hurriedly elsewhere. In short, my young
friend, you have faced an acid test of ordeal, and you have borne
yourself with neither the defiance of braggadocio, nor the visible
hint of flinching. If I were looking for a certain type of specialized
ability, I should say you had qualified."

A flush spread on the face of the listener.

"You are indeed introducing me to some one I haven't known," he said.

"I know, too," went on Snowdon, "that there has been a girl--and," he
hastened to add as his companion stiffened, "I mention her only to
show you that my observations have not been _too_ superficial. Those
qualities which I have catalogued have engaged my attention, because
they are rare--rare enough to be profitably capitalized."

"All this is parable to me, sir."

"Quite probably. I mean to construe it. There are men who originate or
discover great opportunities of industry--and they need capital to
bring their plans to fruition--but capital can be approached only
through envoys and will receive only ambassadors who can compel
recognition. The man who can hope to be successfully accredited to the
court of Big Money must possess uncommon attributes. Pinch-beck
promoters and plausible charlatans have made cynics of our lords of
wealth."

"What would such a man accomplish," inquired Spurrier, "aside from a
sort of non-resident membership in the association of plutocrats?"

"He would," declared Snowdon promptly, "help bridge the chasm between
the world's unfinanced achievers, and its unachieving finances."

"That," conceded the ex-soldier, "would be worth the doing."

"John Law at twenty-one built a scheme of finance for Great Britain,"
the engineer reminded him. "He could come into the presence of a king
and in five minutes the king would urge him to stay. Force and
presence can make such an ambassador, and those things are the veins
of human ore I've assayed in you in paying quantities."

Spurrier looked across at the strange companion whom chance had thrown
across his path with a commotion of pulses which his face in no wise
mirrored into outward expression. It had begun to occur to him that if
a man is born for an adventurous life even the Articles of War cannot
cancel his destiny.

"It would seem," he suggested casually enough, "that this need of
which you speak is for fellows, in finance, who can carry the message
to Garcia, as it were. Isn't that it?"

"That's it, and messengers to Garcia don't tramp on each other's
heels. Yet I have spoken of only one phase of the career I'm
outlining. It has another side to it as well, if one man is going to
unite in himself the whole of the possibility."

Snowdon broke off there a moment and seemed to be distracted by some
thought of his own, but presently he began again.

"My hypothetical man would act largely as a free lance, knocking about
the world on a sort of constantly renewed exploration. He would be the
prospector hunting gold and the explorer searching for new continents
of industrial development, only instead of being just the one or the
other he would be a sort of sublimation. His job would sometimes call
him into the wildernesses, but more often, I think, his discoveries
would lie under the noses of crowds, passed by every day by clever
folk who never saw them--clever folk who are not quite clever
enough."

"It would seem to me that those discoveries," demurred Spurrier
thoughtfully, "would come each time to some highly trained technician
in some particular line."

Snowdon shook his head again. "That's why they have come slowly
heretofore," he declared with conviction. "That man I have in mind is
one with a sure nose for the trail and a power of absorbing readily
and rapidly what he requires of the other man's technical knowledge.
It's the policy that Japan has followed as a nation. They let others
work the problems out over there--then they appropriate the results.
I'm not commending it as a national trait, but for this work it's the
first essential. Having made his discovery, this new type of business
man will enlist for it the needful financial support." He paused again
and Spurrier, lighting a fresh cigarette, regarded him through eyes
slit-narrowed against the flare of the match.

"He must be a sort of opportunity hound," continued Snowdon smilingly.
"He would go baying across the world in full cry and come back to the
kennel at the end of each chase."

Spurrier laughed. "If you'll pardon me, sir," he hazarded, "you make a
very bad metaphor. I should fancy that the opportunity hound would do
the stillest sort of still hunting."

The older man smiled and bowed his head affirmatively.

"I accept the amendment. The point is, do I give you the concept of
the work?"

"In a broad, extremely sketchy way, I think I get the picture,"
replied Spurrier. "But could you give me some sort of illustration
that would make it a shade more concrete?"

His companion sat considering the question for a while and at last
inquired: "Do you know anything about oil? I mean about its
production?"

"I've been on the Pennsylvania Railroad, coming west," testified the
former lieutenant. "And I've run through ragged hills where on every
side, stood clumsy, timber affairs like overgrown windmills from which
some victorious Don Quizote had knocked off the whirligigs. Then I've
read a little of Ida Tarbell."

"Even that will serve for a sort of background. Now, people in general
think of striking oil as they might think of finding money on the
sidewalk or of lightning striking a particular spire--as a matter of
purest chance. To some extent that idea is correct enough, but the
brains of oil production are less haphazard. In the office of a few
gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas hangs a map drawn by the
intelligence department of their general staff. On that map are traced
lines not unlike those showing ocean currents, but their arrows point
instead to currents far under ground, where runs the crude petroleum,
discovered--and undiscovered."

"Undiscovered?" Spurrier's brows were lifted in polite incredulity,
but his companion nodded decisively.

"Discovered and undiscovered," he repeated. "Geological surveys told
the mapmakers how certain lines and structures ran in tendency. Where
went a particular formation of Nature's masonry, there in probability
would go oil. The method was not absolute, I grant you, but neither
was it haphazard. Sitting in an office in Pittsburgh a certain man
drew on his chart what has since been recognized as the line of the
forty-second degree, running definitely from the Pennsylvania fields
down through Ohio and into the Appalachian hills of Kentucky--thence
west and south. Study your fields in Oklahoma, in old Mexico, and you
will find that, widely separated as they are, each of them is marked
by a cross on that map, and that each of them lies along the current
trend which the Pittsburgh man traced before many of them were touched
by a drill."

"That, surely," argued Spurrier, "testifies for the highly skilled
technician, doesn't it?"

"So far. I now come to the chance of the opportunity hound. The
present fields are spots of production here and there. Between them
lie others, virgin to pump or rig. Much of that ground is, of course,
barren territory, for even on an acre of proven location dry holes may
lie close to gushers; one man's farm may be a 'duster' while his
neighbor's spouts black wealth. But along that charted line run the
probabilities."

Into Spurrier's eyes stole the gleam of the adventuring spirit that
was strong in him.

"It sounds like Robert Louis Stevenson and buried treasure," he
declared with unconcealed enthusiasm, but Snowdon only smiled.

"Remember," he cautioned, "I'm illustrating--nothing more. Now in the
foothills of the Kentucky Cumberlands, for example, some years ago men
began finding oil. It lay for the most part in a country where the
roads were creek beds--remote from railway facilities. It was an
expensive sort of proposition to develop, but the cry of 'Oil! Oil!'
has never failed to set the pack a-running, and it ran."

"I don't remember hearing of that rush," admitted Spurrier.

"No, I dare say you didn't. It was a flare-up and a die-down. The men
who rushed in, plodded dejectedly out again, poorer by the time they
had spent."

"Then the boom collapsed?"

"It collapsed--but why? Because the gentlemen who hold dominion over
oil and gas caucussed and so ordained. They gathered around their map
and stuck pins here and there. They said, 'This oil can come out in
two ways only: by pipe line or tank cars. We will stand aloof and
develop where the cost is less and the profit greater--and without us,
it cannot succeed.'"

"Were there no independent concerns to bring the stuff to market?"

Snowdon laughed. "The gentlemen who hold dominion have their own
defenses against competition. You may have heard of a certain dog in
the manger? Well, they said as they sat about their table on which the
map was spread, 'Some day other fields may run out. Some day something
may set oil soaring until even this yield may be well worth our
attention. We will therefore hold this card in reserve against that
day and that contingency.' So quietly, inconspicuously, yet with a
power that strangled competition, lobbies operated in State
legislatures. The independents failed to secure needful charters--the
lines were never laid. Those particular fields starved, and now the
ignorant mountaineers who woke for a while to dreams of wealth, laugh
at the man who says 'oil' to them. Yet at some properly, or improperly
designated day, those failure fields will flash on the astonished
world as something risen from the dead, and fortunes will blossom for
the lucky."

"Yes?" prompted the listener.

"Now let us suppose our opportunity hound as willing to go
unostentatiously into that country; as willing to spend part of each
year there for a term of years; nipping options here and there,
waiting patiently and watching his chance to slip a charter through
one of those bound and gagged legislatures in some moment of relaxed
vigilance. Such a man might find himself ultimately standing with the
key to the situation in his own hand. It's just a story, but perhaps
it serves to give you my meaning."

"Did I understand you to suggest," inquired Spurrier with a forced
calmness, "that you fancy you see in me the qualities of your
opportunity hound?"

"Our own concern," said Snowdon quietly, "is fortunate enough to have
passed through the period of cooling its heels in the anterooms of
capital, but we can still use a man such as I have described. There's
a place for you with us if you want it."

"When do I go to work?" demanded the former lieutenant rising from his
seat, and Snowdon countered:

"When will you be ready to begin?"

"When we dock at 'Frisco," came the immediate response, "provided I be
allowed time for an affair of my own, two months from now. A certain
private in my old company will be discharged from the service then. I
fancy he'll land there, and I want to be waiting for him when he steps
ashore."

"A reprisal?" inquired Snowdon in a disappointed tone, but the other
shook his head.

"He is the one man through whom there's a chance of clearing my name,"
Spurrier said slowly. "I hope it won't call for violence."




CHAPTER V


Private Grant had been bred of the blood of hatred and suckled in
vindictiveness. He had come into being out of the heritage of feud
fighting "foreparents," and he thought in the terms of his ancestry.

When he had fled into the jungle beyond the island village, though he
had been demented and enfeebled, the instinct of a race that had often
"hidden out" guided him. That instinct and chance had led him to a
native house where his disloyalty gave him a welcome, and there he had
found sanctuary until his fever subsided and he emerged cadaverous,
but free. Word had filtered through to him there of Spurrier's
court-martial and its result.

In the course of time, fever-wasted yet restored out of his
semi-lunacy, he had made his way furtively but successfully toward
Manila and there he had supplemented the sketchy fragments of
information with which his disloyal native friends had been able to
provide him.

He knew now that the accused officer had pitched his defense upon an
accusation of the deserter and the refugee's eyes smoldered as he
learned that he himself had been charged with prefacing his flight
with murder. He knew what that meant. The disgraced officer would move
heaven and earth to clear his smirched name, and the condition
precedent would be the capture of Private Grant and the placing of him
in the prisoner's dock. To be wanted for desertion was grave enough.
To be wanted both for desertion and the assassination of his company
commander was infinitely worse, and to stand in that position and
face, as he believed he would have to, a conspiracy of class feeling,
was intolerable.

Haunting the shadowy places about Manila, Grant had been almost crazed
by his fears but with the lifting of the steamer's anchor, a great
spirit of hope had brightened in him, feeding on the solace of the
thought that, once more in the States, he could lose himself from
pursuit and vigilance.

Then he had seen, on the same ship, the face of the man whom, above
all others, he had occasion to fear!

For their joint lives the world was not large enough. One of them must
die, and in the passion that swept over him with the dread of
discovery. Grant had skirted a relapse into his recent mania.

At that moment when Spurrier had looked down and he had looked up, the
deserter had seen only one way out, and that was to kill. But when the
other had moved away, seemingly without recognition, his thoughts had
moved more lucidly again.

Until he had tried soldiering he had known only the isolated life of
forested mountains and here on a ship at sea he felt surrounded and
helpless--almost timid. When he landed at San Francisco, if his luck
held him undiscovered that long, he would have dry land under him and
space into which to flee.

The refugee had hated Comyn. Now Comyn was dead and Grant transferred
his hatred from the dead captain to the living lieutenant, resolving
that he also must die.

The moment to which he looked forward with the most harrowing
apprehension was that when the vessel docked and put her passengers
ashore. Here at sea a comforting isolation lay between first and
third cabin passengers and one could remain unseen from those deck
levels that lay forward and above. But with the arrangements for
disembarkation, he was unfamiliar, and for all he knew, the steerage
people might be herded along under the eyes of those who traveled
more luxuriously. He might have to march in such a procession,
willy-nilly, over a gang-plank swept by a watchful eye.

So Private Grant brooded deeply and his thoughts were not pretty. Also
he kept his pistol near him and when the hour for debarkation arrived
he was ripe for trouble.

It happened that a group of steerage passengers, including himself,
were gathered together much as he had feared they might be, and
Grant's face paled and hardened as he saw, leaning with his elbows on
a rail above him and a pipe in his mouth, the officer whom he
dreaded.

Grant's hand slipped unobtrusively under his coat and his eyes
narrowed as his heart tightened and became resolved.

Spurrier had not yet seen him but at any moment he might do so. There
was nothing to prevent the wandering and casual glance from alighting
on the spot where the deserter stood, and when it did so the
mountaineer would draw and fire.

But as the ex-officer's eyes went absently here and there a girl
passed at his back and perhaps she spoke as she passed. At all events
the officer straightened and stiffened. Across his face flashed
swiftly such an expression as might have come from a sudden and
stinging blow, and then, losing all interest in the bustle of the
lower decks, the man turned on his heel and walked rapidly away.

The deserter's hand stole away from the pistol grip and his breath ran
out in a long, sibilant gasp of relief and reaction. When later he had
landed safely and unmolested, he turned in flight toward the mountains
that he knew over there across the continent--mountains where only
bloodhounds could run him to earth.

Beyond the rims of those forest-tangled peaks he had never looked out
until he had joined the army, and once back in them, though he dare
not go, for a while, to his own home county, he could shake off his
palsy of fear.

He traveled as a hobo, moneyless, ignorant, and unprepossessing of
appearance, yet before the leaves began to fall he was at last
tramping slopes where the air tasted sweeter to his nostrils, and the
speech of mankind fell on his ear with the music of the accustomed.

The name of Bud Grant no longer went with him. That, since it carried
certain unfulfilled duties to an oath of allegiance, he generously
ceded to the United States Army, and contented himself with the random
substitute of Sim Colby.

Now he tramped swingingly along a bowlder-broken creek bed which by
local euphemism was called a road. When his way led him over the
backbone of a ridge he could see, almost merged with the blue of the
horizon, the smoky purple of a sugar loaf peak, which marked his
objective.

When he passed that he would be in territory where his journeying
might end. To reach it he must transverse the present vicinity in
which a collateral branch of his large family still dwelt, and where
he himself preferred to walk softly, wary of possible recognition.

To the man whose terror had seen in every casual eye that rested on
him while he crossed a continent, a gleam of accusation, it was as
though he had reached sanctuary. The shoulders that he had forced into
a hang-dog slough to disguise the soldierly bearing which had become
habitual in uniform, came back into a more buoyant and upright swing.
The face that had been sullen with fear now looked out with something
of the bravado of earlier days, and the whole experience of the
immediate past; of months and even years, took on the unreality of a
nightmare from which he was waking.

The utmost of caution was still required, but the long flight was
reaching a goal where substantial safety lay like a land of promise.
It was a land of promise broken with ragged ranges and it was fiercely
austere; the Cumberland mountains reared themselves like a colossal
and inhospitable wall of isolation between the abundant richness of
lowland Kentucky to the west, and Virginia's slope seaward to the
east.

But isolation spelled refuge and the taciturn silences of the men who
dwelt there, asking few questions and answering fewer, gave promise of
unmolested days.

These hills were a world in themselves; a world that had stood,
marking time for a hundred and fifty years, while to east and west
life had changed and developed and marched with the march of the
years. Sequestered by broken steeps of granite and sand stone, the
human life that had come to the coves and valleys in days when the
pioneers pushed westward, had stagnated and remained unaltered.

Illiteracy and ignorance had sprung chokingly into weed-like
prevalence. The blood-feud still survived among men who fiercely
insisted upon being laws unto themselves. Speech fell in quaint
uncouthness that belonged to another century, and the tides of progress
that had risen on either hand, left untouched and uninfluenced the
men and women of mountain blood, who called their lowland brethren
"furriners" and who distrusted all that was "new-fangled" or
"fotched-on."

Habitations were widely separated cabins. Roads were creekbeds. Life
was meager and stern, and in the labyrinths of honeycombed and
forest-tangled wilds, men who were "hidin' out" from sheriffs, from
revenuers, from personal enemies, had a sentimental claim on the
sympathy of the native-born.

This was the life from which the deserter had sprung. It was the life
to which with eager impatience he was returning; a life of countless
hiding places and of no undue disposition to goad a man with
questioning.

Through the billowing richness of the Bluegrass lowlands, he had
hurried with a homing throb in his pulses. As the foothills began to
break out of the fallow meadows and the brush to tangle at the fringe
of the smoothness, his breath had come deeper and more satisfying.
When the foothills rose in steepness until low, wet streamers of cloud
trailed their slopes like shrapnel smoke, and the timber thickened and
he saw an eagle on the wing, something like song broke into being in
his heart.

He was home. Home in the wild mountains where air and the water had
zest and life instead of the staleness that had made him sick in the
flat world from which he came. He was home in the mountains where
others were like him and he was not a barbarian any longer among
contemptuous strangers.

He plodded along the shale-bottomed water course for a little way and
halted. As his woodsman's eye took bearings he muttered to himself:
"Hit's a right slavish way through them la'rel hills, but hit's a
cut-off," and, suiting his course to his decision, he turned upward
into the thickets and began to climb.

An hour later he had covered the "hitherside" and "yon side" of a
small mountain, and when he came to the highway again he found himself
confronted by a half dozen armed horsemen whose appearance gave him
apprehensive pause, because at once he recognized in them the
officialdom of the law. The mounted travelers drew rein, and he halted
at the roadside, nodding his greeting in affected unconcern.

The man who had been riding at the fore held in his left hand the
halter line of a led horse, and now he looked down at the pedestrian
and spoke in the familiar phrase of wayside amenity.

"Howdy, stranger, what mout yore name be?"

"Sim Colby from acrost Hemlock Mountain ways, but I've done been west
fer a year gone by, though, an' I'm jest broguein' along to'rds
home."

The questioner, a long, gaunt man with a face that had been scarred,
but never altered out of its obstinate set, eyed him for a moment,
then shot out the question:

"Did ye ever hear tell of Sam Mosebury over thet-away?"

It was lucky that the fugitive had given as his home a territory with
which he had some familiarity. Now his reply came promptly.

"Yes, I knows him when I sees him. Some folks used ter give him a
right hard name over thar, but I reckon he's all right ef a man don't
aim ter crowd him too fur."

"I don't know how fur he mout of been crowded," brusquely replied the
man with the extra horse, "but he kilt a man in Rattletown yestiddy
noon an' tuck ter ther woods. I'm after him."

The foot traveler expressed an appropriate interest, then added:

"Howsomever, hit ain't none of my affair, an' seein' thet I've got a
right far journey ahead of me, I'll hike along."

But the leader of the mounted group shook his head.

"One of my men got horse flung back thar an' broke a bone inside him.
I'm ther high sheriff of this hyar county, an' I hereby summons ye ter
go along with me an' ack as a member of my possy."

Under his tan Private Grant paled a little. This mischance carried a
triple menace to his safety. It involved riding back to the county
seat where some man might remember his face, and recall that two
years ago he had gone away on a three years' enlistment. But even if
he escaped that contingency, it meant tarrying in this neighborhood
through which he had meant to pass inconspicuously and rapidly. To be
attached to a _posse comitatus_ riding the hills on a man hunt meant
to challenge every passing eye with an interest beyond the casual.

Finally, though he might well have forgotten him, the man whose trail
he was now called to take in pursuit had once known him slightly, and
if they met under such hostile auspices, might recognize and denounce
him.

But the sheriff sat enthroned in his saddle and robed in the color of
authority. At his back sat five other men with rifles across their
pommels, and with such a situation there was no argument. The law's
officer threw the bridle rein of the empty-saddled mount to the man in
the road.

"Get up on this critter," he commanded tersely, "and don't let him git
his head down too low. He follers buck-jumpin'."

When Grant, alias Colby, found that the men riding with him were more
disposed to somber silence than to inquisitiveness or loquacity, he
breathed easier. He even made a shrewd guess that there were others in
that small group who answered the call of the law as reluctantly as
he.

Sam Mosebury was accounted as dangerous as a rattlesnake, and Bud
doubted whether even the high sheriff himself would make more than a
perfunctory effort to come to grips with him in his present
desperation.

When the posse had ridden several hours, and had come to a spot in the
forest where the trail forked diversely, a halt was called. They had
traveled steep ways and floundered through many belly-deep fords. Dust
lay gray upon them and spattered mud overlaid the dust.

"We've done come ter a pass, now," declared the sheriff, "where hit
ain't goin' ter profit us no longer ter go trailin' in one bunch. We
hev need ter split up an' turkey tail out along different routes."

The sun had long crossed the meridian and dyed the steep horizon with
burning orange and violet when Bud Grant and Mose Biggerstaff, with
whom he had been paired off, drew rein to let their horses blow in a
gorge between beetling walls of cliff.

"Me, I ain't got no master relish for this task, no-how," declared
Mose morosely as he spat at the black loam of rotting leaves. "No man
ain't jedgmatically proved ter me, yit, thet ther feller Sam kilt
didn't need killin'."

Bud nodded a solemn concurrence in the sentiment. Then abruptly the
two of them started as though at the intrusion of a ghost and, of
instinct, their hands swept holsterward, but stopped halfway.

This sudden galvanizing of their apathy into life was effected by the
sight of a figure which had materialized without warning and in
uncanny silence in a fissure where the rocks dripped from reeking moss
on either side.

It stood with a cocked repeating rifle held easily at the ready, and
it was a figure that required no heralding of its identity or menace.

"Were ye lookin' fer me, boys?" drawled Sam Mosebury with a palpable
enjoyment of the situation, not unlike that which brightens the eyes
of a cat as it plays with a mouse already crippled.

With swift apprehension the eyes of the two deputies met and effected
an understanding. Mose Biggerstaff licked his bearded lips until their
stiffness relaxed enough for speech.

"Me an' Sim Colby hyar," he protested, "got summoned by ther high
sheriff. We didn't hev no rather erbout hit one way ner t'other. All
we've got ter go on air ther _dee_scription thet war give ter us--an'
we don't see no resemblance atween ye an' ther feller we're atter."

The murderer stood eying them with an amused contempt, and one could
recognize the qualities of dominance which, despite his infamies, had
won him both fear and admiration.

"Ef ye thinks ye'd ought ter take me along an' show me ter yore high
sheriff," he suggested, and the finger toyed with the trigger, "I'm
right hyar."

"Afore God, no!" It was Bud who spoke now contradicting his colleague.
"I've seed Sam Mosebury often times--an' ye don't no fashion faver
him."

Sam laughed. "I've seed ye afore, too, I reckon," he commented dryly.
"But ef ye don't know me, I reckon I don't need ter know _you_,
nuther."

The two sat atremble in their saddles until the apparition had
disappeared in the laurel.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gray-templed and seamed of face, Dyke Cappeze entered the courthouse
at Carnettsville one day a few months later and paused for a moment,
his battered law books under his threadbare elbow, to gaze around the
murky hall of which his memory needed no refreshing.

About the stained walls hung fly-specked notices of sheriff's sales,
and between them stamped long-haired, lean-visaged men drawn in by
litigation or jury service from branchwater and remote valley.

Out where the sun lay mellow on the town square was the brick
pavement, on which Cappeze's law partner had fallen dead ten
years ago, because he dared to prosecute too vigorously. Across
the way stood the general store upon which one could still see the
pock-marking of bullets reminiscent of that day when the Heatons
and the Blacks made war, and terrorized the county seat.

Dyke Cappeze looked over it all with a deep melancholy in his eyes. He
knew his mountains and loved his people whose virtues were more
numerous, if less conspicuous, than their sins. In his heart burned a
militant insurgency. These hills cried out for development, and
development demanded a conception of law broader gauged and more
serious than obtained. It needed fearless courts, unterrified juries,
intrepid lawyers.

He had been such a lawyer, and when he had applied for life insurance
he had been adjudged a prohibitive risk. To-day the career of three
decades was to end, and as the bell in the teetering cupola began to
clang its summons he shook his head--and pressed tight the straight
lips that slashed his rugged face.

On the bench sat the circuit-riding judge of that district; a man to
whom, save when he addressed him as "your honor," Dyke Cappeze had not
spoken in three years. They were implacable enemies, because too
often the lawyer had complained that justice waited here on
expediency.

Cappeze looked at the windows bleared with their residue of dust and
out through them at the hills mantling to an autumnal glory. Then he
heard that suave--to himself he said hypocritical--voice from the
bench.

"Gentlemen of the bar, any motions?"

Wearily the thin, tall-framed lawyer came to his feet and stood erect
and silent for a moment in his long, black coat, corroding into the
green of dilapidation.

"May it please your honor," he grimly declared. "I hardly know whether
my statement may be properly called a motion or not. It's more a
valedictory."

He drew from his breast pocket a bit of coarse, lined writing paper
and waved it in his talon-like hand.

"I was retained by the widow Sales, whose husband was shot down by Sam
Mosebury, to assist the prosecution in bringing the assassin to
punishment. The grand jury has failed to indict this defendant. The
sheriff has failed to arrest him. The court has failed to produce
those witnesses whom I have subpoenaed. The machinery of the law which
is created for the sole purpose of protecting the weak against the
encroachments of the malevolent has failed."

He paused, and through the crowded room the shuffling feet fell silent
and heads bent excitedly forward. Then Cappeze lifted the paper in his
hand and went on:

"I hold here an unsigned letter that threatens me with death if I
persist with this prosecution. It came to me two weeks ago, and since
receiving it I have redoubled my energy. When this grand jury was
impaneled and charged, such a note also reached each of its members. I
know not what temper of soul actuates those men who have sworn to
perform the duties of grand jurors. I know not whether these threats
have affected their deliberations, but I know that they have failed to
return a true bill against Sam Mosebury!"

The judge fingering his gavel frowned gravely. "Does counsel mean to
charge that the court has proven lax?"

"I mean to say," declared the lawyer in a voice that suddenly mounted
and rung like a trumpeted challenge, "that in these hills of Kentucky
the militant spirit of the law seems paralyzed! I mean to say that
terrorism towers higher than the people's safeguards! For a lifetime I
have battled here to put the law above the feud--and I have failed. In
this courthouse my partner fought for a recognition of justice and at
its door he paid the penalty with his life. I wish to make no charges
other than to state the facts. I am growing old, and I have lost heart
in a vain fight. I wish to withdraw from this case as associate
commonwealth counsel, because I can do nothing more than I have done,
and that is enough. I wish to state publicly that to-day I shall take
down my shingle and withdraw from the practice of law, because law
among us seems to me a misnomer and a futile semblance."

In a dead silence the elderly attorney came to his period and gathered
up again under his threadbare elbow his two or three battered books.
Turning, he walked down the center aisle toward the door, and as he
went his head sagged dejectedly forward on his chest.

He heard the instruction of his enemy on the bench, still suave:

"Mr. Clerk, let the order be entered striking the name of Mr. Cappeze
from the record as associate counsel for the commonwealth."

It was early forenoon when the elderly attorney left the dingy law
office which he was closing, and the sunset fires were dying when he
swung himself down from the saddle at his own stile in the hills and
walked between the bee-gums and bird boxes to his door. But before he
reached it the stern pain in his eyes yielded to a brightening
thought, and as if responsive to that thought the door swung open and
in it stood a slim girl with eyes violet deep, and a beauty so
alluring and so wildly natural that her father felt as if youth had
met him again, when he had begun to think of all life as musty and
decrepit with age.




CHAPTER VI


Except in that narrow circle of American life which follows the doings
and interests of the army and navy, the world had forgotten, in the
several years since its happening, the court-martial and disgrace of
John Spurrier--but Spurrier himself had not been able to forget.

His name had become forcefully identified with other things and, in
the employ of Snowdon's company, he had been into those parts of the
world which call to a man of energy and constructive ability of major
calibre. But the joy of seeing mine fields open to the rush where
there had been only desert before: of seeing chasms bridged into
roadways had not been enough to banish the brooding which sprung from
the old stigma. In remote places he had encountered occasional army
men to remind him that he was no longer one of them and, though he was
often doing worthier things than they, they were bound by regulations
which branded him.

So Spurrier had hardened, not into outward crustiness of admitted
chagrin, but with an inner congealing of spirit which made him look on
life as a somewhat merciless fight and what he could wrest from life
as the booty of conquest.

One day, in Snowdon's office after a more than usually difficult
task had reached accomplishment, the chief candidly proclaimed
justification for his first estimate of his aide, and Spurrier
smiled.

"It's generous of you to speak so, sir," he said slowly, "and I'm glad
to leave you with that impression--because with many regrets I _am_
leaving you."

The older man raised his brows in surprise.

"I had hoped our association would be permanent," he responded. "I
suppose, though, you have an opening to a broader horizon. If so it
comes as recognition well earned."

"It's an offer from Martin Harrison, sir," came the reply in slowly
weighed words. "There are objections, of course, but the man who gains
Harrison's confidence stands in the temple of big money."

"Yes. Of course Harrison's name needs no amplification." The man who
had opened a door for Spurrier in what had seemed a blank wall, sat
for a moment silent then broke out with more than his customary
emphasis of expression. "Objection from me may seem self-interested
because I am losing a valuable assistant. But--damn it all, Harrison
is a pirate!"

Spurrier's tanned cheeks flushed a shade darker but he nodded his
head. His fine eyes took on that glint of hardness which, in former
times, had never marred their engaging candor.

"I'd like to have you understand me, sir. I owe you that much and a
great deal more. I know that Harrison and his ilk of big money
operators are none too scrupulous--but they have power and opportunity
and those are things I must gain."

"I had supposed," suggested Snowdon deliberately, "that you wanted two
things above all else. First to establish your innocence to the
world, and secondly, even if you failed in that, to make your name so
substantially respected that you could bear--the other."

"Until recently I had no other thought." The young man rose and stood
with his fine body erect and as full of disciplined strength as that
of a Praxiteles athlete. Then he took several restless turns across
the floor and halted tensely before his benefactor.

"I have let no grass grow under my feet. You know how I have run
down every conceivable clue and how I stand as uncleared as the day
the verdict was brought at Manila. I've begun to despair of
vindication.... I am not by nature a beast of prey.... I prefer
fair play and the courtesies of sportsmanlike conflict."

He paused, then went forward again in a hardening voice: "But in this
land of ours there are two aristocracies and only two--and I want to
be an aristocrat of sorts."

"I didn't realize we had even so much variety as that," observed
Snowdon and the younger man continued.

"The real aristocracy is that of gentle blood and ideals. Our little
army is its true nucleus and there a man doesn't have to be rich. I
was born to that and reared to it as to a deep religion--but I've been
cast out, unfrocked, cashiered. I can't go back. One class is still
open to me; the brazen, arrogant circles of wealth into which a
double-fisted achiever can bruise his way. I don't love them. I don't
revere them, but they offer power and I mean to take my place on their
tawdry eminence. It's all that's left."

"I'm not preaching humility," persisted Snowdon quietly. "I started
you along the paths of financial combat and I see no fault in your
continuing, but may I be candid to the point of bluntness?"

He paused for permission and Spurrier prompted: "Yes, please go on."

"Then," finished Snowdon, "since you've been with me I've watched you
grow--and you _have_ grown. But I've also seen a fine chivalric sense
gradually blunting; a generous predisposition hardening out of
flexibility into something more implacable, less gracious. It's a
pity--and Martin Harrison won't soften you."

For a while Spurrier stood meditatively silent, then he smiled and
once more nodded his head.

"There isn't a thing you've said that isn't true, Mr. Snowdon,
and you're the one man who could say it without any touch of
offensiveness. I've counted the costs. God knows if I could go back
to the army to-morrow with a shriven record, I'd rather have my
lieutenant's pay than all the success that could ever come from
moneyed buccaneers! But I can't do that. I can't think of myself
as a fighting man under my own flag whose largest pay is his
contentment and his honor. Very well, I have accepted Hobson's
choice. I will join that group which fights with power, for power;
the group that's strong enough to defy the approval they can't
successfully court. I _have_ hardened but I've needed to. I hope I
shan't become so flagrant, however, that you'll have to regret
sponsoring me."

Snowdon laughed.

"I'm not afraid of that," he made hasty assurance. "And my friendliest
wishes go with you."

Since that day John Spurrier had come to a place of confidence in the
counsels over which Harrison presided with despotic authority.

The man in the street, deriving his information from news print, would
have accorded Martin Harrison a place on the steering committee of the
country's wealth and affairs, and in such a classification he would
have been both right and wrong.

There were exclusive coteries of money manipulation to which Harrison
was denied an entree. These combinations were few but mighty, and
until he won the sesame of admission to their supreme circle his
ambition must chafe, unsatisfied: his power, greater than that of many
kings, must seem to himself too weak.

It must not be inferred that Harrison was embittered by the wormwood
of failure. His trophies of success were numerous and tangible enough
for every purpose except his own contentment.

To-night he was smiling with baronial graciousness while he stood
welcoming a group of dinner guests in his own house, and as his butler
passed the tray of canapes and cocktail glasses the latest arrival
presented himself.

The host nodded. "Spurrier," he said, "I think you know every one
here, don't you?"

The young man who had just come was perfectly tailored and self-confident
of bearing, and as vigorous of bodily strength as a wrestler in training.
The time that had passed over him since he had left Snowdon's company for
wider and more independent fields had wrought changes in him, and in so
far as the observer could estimate values from the externals of life,
every development had been upward toward improvement. Yet, between the
man's impressive surface and his soul lay an acquired coat of cynicism and
a shell of cultivated selfishness.

John Spurrier, who had renounced the gaming table, was more
passionately and coldly than ever the plunger, dedicated to the single
religion of ambition. He had failed to remove the blot of the
court-martial from his name, and, denied the soldier's ethical place,
he had become a sort of moss-trooper of finance.

Backed only by his personal qualifications, he had won his way into a
circle of active wealth, and though he seemed no more a stranger there
than a duckling in a pool, he himself knew that another simile would
more truly describe his status.

He was like an exhibition skater whose eye-filling feats are
watched with admiration and bated breath. His evolutions and dizzy
pirouettings were performed with an adroit ease and grace, but he
could feel the swaying of the thin ice under him and could never
forget that only the swift smoothness of his flight stood between
himself and disaster.

He must live on a lavish scale or lose step with the fast-moving
procession. He must maintain appearances in keeping with his
associations--or drop downscale to meaner opportunities and paltrier
prizes. The wealth which would establish him firmly seemed always just
a shade farther away than the reach of his outstretched grasp.

"We were just talking about Trabue, Spurrier," his host enlightened
him as he looked across the rim of his lifted glass, with eyes
hardening at the mention of that name.

Spurrier did not ask what had been said about Trabue, but he guessed
that it savored of anathema. For Trabue, whose name rarely appeared in
the public announcements of American Oil and Gas, was none the less
the white-hot power and genius of that organization--its unheralded
chief of staff. Just as A. O. and G. dominated the world of finance,
so he dominated A. O. and G.

Harrison laughed. "I'm not a vindictive man," he declared in humorous
self-defense, "but I want his scalp as Salome wanted the head of John
the Baptist."

The newly arrived guest smiled quietly.

"That's a large order, Mr. Harrison," he suggested, "and yet it's in
line with a matter I want to take up with you. My conspiracy won't
exactly separate O. H. Trabue from his scalp lock, but it may pull
some pet feathers out of his war bonnet. I'm leaving to-morrow on a
mission of reconnaissance--and when I come back----"

The eyes of the elder and younger engaged with a quiet interchange of
understanding, and Spurrier knew that into Martin's mind, as crowded
with activities as a busy harbor, an idea had fallen which would grow
into interest.

When dinner was announced, the adventurer de luxe--for it was so that
he recognized himself in the confessional of his own mind--took in the
daughter of his host, and this mark of distinction did not escape the
notice of several men.

Spurrier himself was gravely listening to some low-voiced aside from
the girl who nibbled at an olive, and who merited his attention.

She was tall and undeniably handsome, and if her mentality sparkled
with a cool and brilliant light rather than a warm and appealing glow,
that was because she had inherited the pattern of her father's mind.

If, notwithstanding her wealth and position, she was still unmarried
three seasons after her coming-out, it was her own affair and
possibly his good fortune. For when the Jack Spurrier of these days
contemplated marriage at all, he thought of it as an aid to his career
rather than a sentimental adventure.

"I'm leaving in the morning," he was saying in a low voice, "for the
Kentucky Cumberlands, where I'm told life hasn't changed much since
the pioneers crossed over their divide. It's the Land of Do-Without."

"The Land of Do-Without?" she repeated after him. "It's an expressive
phrase, Jack. Is it your own or should there be quotation marks?"

Spurrier laughed as he admitted: "I claim no credit; I merely quote,
but the land down there in the steeps is one, from all I hear, to stir
the imagination into terms more or less poetic."

He leaned forward a little and his engaging face mirrored his own
interest so that the girl found herself murmuring: "Tell me something
about it, then."

"It is," he assured her, "a stretch of unaltered mediaevalism entirely
surrounded by modernity--yet holding aloof. Though the country has
spread to the Pacific and it lies within three hundred miles of
Atlantic tidewater, it is still our one frontier where pioneers live
under the conditions that obtained in the days of the Indian."

"That seems difficult to grasp," she demurred, and he nodded his
head, abstractedly sketching lines on the damask cloth with his oyster
fork.

"When the nation was born," he enlightened, "and the questing spirit
of the overland voyagers asserted itself, the bulk of its human tide
flowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through Cumberland Gap lay
their one discovered gate in the wall that nature had built to the sky
across their path. It was a wall more ancient than that of the Alps
and between the ridges many of them were stranded."

"How?" she demanded, arrested by the vibrant interest of his own
voice, and he continued with a shrug of the shoulder.

"Many reasons. A pack mule fallen lame--a broken wagon-wheel; small
things were enough in such times of hardship to make a family settle
where it found itself balked. The more fortunate won through to 'take
the west with the axe and hold it with the rifle.' Then came railroads
and steamboats, going other ways, and the ridges were swallowed again
by the wilderness. The stranded brethren remained stranded and they
did not alter or progress. They remained self-willed, fiercely
independent and dedicated to the creed 'Leave us alone.' Their life
to-day is the life of two centuries ago."

The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require no
penciling.

"That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought you
the most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? I
didn't know you ever ran on cold trails." She spoke with a delicately
shaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own viewpoint, yet
he knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldly
attainment.

He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon,
the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind had
harked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now he
only smiled with diplomatic suavity.

"Pearls," he said, "don't feed oysters into robustness. They make
'em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in these
hills, where I'm going, might starve for centuries over buried
treasure--which some one else might find."

The girl nodded.

"In the stories," she answered, though she did not seem disturbed at
the thought, "the stranger in the Cumberlands always arouses the ire
of some whiskered moonshiner and falls in a creek bed pierced by a
shot from the laurel."

Spurrier grinned.

"Or he falls in love with a barefoot Diana and teaches her to adore
him in return."

Miss Harrison made a satirical little grimace. "At least teach her to
eat with a fork, too, Jack," she begged him. "It will contribute to
your fastidious comfort when you come back here to sell your pearls at
Tiffany's or in Maiden Lane, or wherever it is that one wholesales his
treasure-trove."

       *       *       *       *       *

If John Spurrier had presented the picture of a man to the manner born
as he sat with Martin Harrison's daughter at Martin Harrison's table,
he fitted into the ensemble, too, a week later, as he crossed the
hard-tramped dirt of the street from the railway station at Waterfall
and entered the shabby tavern over the way--for the opportunity hound
must be adaptable.

Here he would leave the end of the rails and travel by mule into a
wilder country, for on the geological survey maps that he carried with
him he had made tracings of underground currents which it had not been
easy to procure.

These red-inkings were exact miniatures of a huge wall chart in the
headquarters of American Oil and Gas, and to others than a trusted few
they were not readily accessible. How Spurrier had achieved his
purpose is a separate story and one over which he smiled inwardly,
though it may have involved features that were not nicely ethical.

The tavern had been built in the days when Waterfall had attracted men
answering the challenge of oil discovery. Now it had fallen wretchedly
into decay, and over it brooded the depression of hopes and dreams
long dead. Gladly Spurrier had left that town behind him.

Now, on a crisp afternoon, when the hill slopes were all garbed in the
rugged splendor of the autumn's high color, he was tramping with a
shotgun on his elbow and a borrowed dog at his heels. He had crossed
Hemlock Mountain and struck into the hinterland at its back.

Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but he
had discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning at
Hell's Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for a
hundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet into
the sky. Along this entire length it offered only a few passes over
which a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.

He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-chinked log-cabin,
where he had shared the single room with six human beings and two
dogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which was
segregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding with
scraps simplified the problem of stock raising.

His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retired
lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had
stopped along the railroad.

Cappeze was a "queer fellow," a recluse who had quit the villages and
drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither
win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and,
having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of
Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and
Spurrier meant to know him.

So he pretended to hunt quail--in a country where a covey rose and
scattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow.
One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficiently
careless of the things which were really the core and center of his
interest. And now Cappeze's place ought to be near by.

Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble,
and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle with
distended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking away
into the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.

Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: "He's made a stand
on a rabbit. That dog's a liar and the truth is not in him!"

But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque
pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for
the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.

Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder of
whirring wings with which quail break cover.

The ground seemed to burst with a tiny drumming eruption of up-surging
feathery shapes, and Spurrier's gun spoke rapidly from both barrels.
Save for the two he had downed, the covey crossed a little rise beyond
a thicket of blackberry brier where he marked them by the tips of a
few gnarled trees, and the man nodded his head in satisfaction as the
dog he had libeled neatly retrieved his dead birds and cast off again
toward the hummock's ridge.

Spurrier, following more slowly, lost sight of his setter and, before
he had caught up, he heard a whimpering of fright and pain. Puzzled,
he hastened forward until from a slight elevation, which commanded a
burial ground, choked with a tangle of brambles and twisted fox
grapes, he found himself looking on a picture for which he was
entirely unprepared.

His dog was crouching and crawling in supplication, while above him,
with eyes that snapped lightning jets of fury, stood a slender girl
with a hickory switch tightly clenched in a small but merciless hand.

As the gunner came into sight she stood her ground, a little startled
but obdurately determined, and her expression appeared to transfer
her anger from the animal she had whipped to the master, until he
almost wondered whether she might not likewise use the hickory upon
him.

He tried not to let the vivid and unexpected beauty of the apparition
cloud his just indignation, and his voice was stern with offended
dignity as he demanded:

"Would you mind telling me why you're mistreating my dog? He's the
gentlest beast I ever knew."

The girl was straight and slim and as colorful as the landscape which
the autumn had painted with crimson and violet, but in her eyes flamed
a war fire.

"What's that a-bulgin' out yore coat pocket, thar?" she demanded
breathlessly. "You an' yore dog air both murderers! Ye've been
shootin' into my gang of pet pa'tridges."

"Pet--partridges?" He repeated the words in a mystified manner, as
under the compulsion of her gaze he drew out the incriminating bodies
of the lifeless victims.

The girl snatched the dead birds from him and laid their soft breasts
against her cheek, crooning sorrowfully over them.

"They trusted me ter hold 'em safe," she declared in a grief-stricken
tone. "I'd kept all the gunners from harmin' 'em--an' now they've done
been betrayed--an' murdered."

"I'm sorry," declared Spurrier humbly. "I didn't know they were pets.
They behaved very much like wild birds."

The dog rose from his cowering position and came over to shelter
himself behind Spurrier, who just then heard the underbrush stir
at his back and wheeled to find himself facing an elderly man with a
ruggedly chiseled face and a mane of gray hair. It was a face that
one could not see without feeling a spirit force behind it, and when
the man spoke his sonorous voice, too, carried a quality of
impressiveness.

"He didn't have no way of knowin', Glory," he said placatingly to the
girl. "Bob Whites are mostly wild, you know." Then turning back to the
man again he courteously explained: "She fed this gang through last
winter when the snows were heavy. They'd come up to the door yard an'
peck 'round with the chickens. She's gifted with the knack of gentlin'
wild things." He paused, then added with a grim touch of irony. "It's
a lesson that it would have profited me to learn--but I never could
master it. You're a furriner hereabouts, ain't you?"

"My name is John Spurrier," said the stranger. "I was looking for Dyke
Cappeze."

"I'm Dyke Cappeze," said the elderly man, "an' this is my daughter,
Glory. Come inside. Yore welcome needs some mendin', I reckon."




CHAPTER VII


As John Spurrier followed his host between rhododendron thickets that
rose above their heads, he found himself wondering what had become of
the girl, but when they drew near to an old house whose stamp of
orderly neatness proclaimed its contrast to the scattering hovels of
widely separated neighbors, he caught a flash of blue gingham by the
open door and realized that the Valkyrie had taken a short cut.

The dog, too, had arrived there ahead of its master and was
fawning now on the girl, who leaned impulsively over to take the
gentle-pointed muzzle between her palms.

"I'm sorry I whopped ye," she declared in a silver-voiced contrition
that made the man think of thrush notes. "Hit wasn't _yore_ fault
no-how. Hit was thet--thet stuck-up furriner. I _hates_ him!"

The setter waved its plumed tail in forgiveness and contentment, and
the girl, discovering with an upward glance that she had been
overheard, rose and stood for a moment defiantly facing the object of
her denunciation, then, as embarrassment flooded her cheeks with
color, fled into the house.

The sense of having stepped back into an older century had been
growing on John Spurrier ever since he had turned away from the town
of Waterfall, and now it possessed him with a singular fascination.

Here was a different world, somber under its shadow of frugality, and
breathing out the heavy atmosphere of isolation. The spirit of this
strange life looked out from the wearied eyes of Dyke Cappeze as he
sat filling his pipe across the hearth, a little later, and it sounded
in his voice when he announced slowly:

"It's not for me to withhold hospitality in a land where a ready
welcome is about all we have to offer, and yet you could hardly have
picked a worse house to come to between the Virginia border and the
Kaintuck ridges."

Spurrier raised his brows interrogatively, and at the same moment he
noticed matters hitherto overlooked. The windows were heavily
shuttered and his host sat beyond the line of vision from the open
door--with a rifle leaning an arm's length away.

"Coming as a stranger," continued Cappeze, "you start without
enmities--with a clean page. You might spend your life here and find a
sincere welcome everywhere--so long as you avoided other men's
controversies. But you come to me and that, sir, is a bad beginning--a
very bad beginning."

A contemplative cloud of smoke went up from the pipe, and the voice
finished in a tone of bitterness.

"I'm the most hated man in this region where hatreds grow like
weeds."

"You mean because you have stood out for the enforcement of law?"

The other nodded, "It has taken me a lifetime," he observed, "to learn
that the mountains are stronger, if not more obstinate, than I."

"Is that the only reason they hate you?" inquired the visitor, and the
lawyer, removing the pipe stem from his teeth, regarded him for a
space in silence. Then he commented quietly:

"If you knew this country better, you wouldn't have to ask that
question. In Athens, I believe, they ostracized Aristides because he
was 'too just a man.'"

"Nonetheless, I'm glad I came to you."

Cappeze smiled gravely. He had a rude sort of dignity which Spurrier
found beguiling; a politeness that sprang from a deeper rooting than
mere formula.

"Merely coming to see me--once in a while--won't damn you, I reckon. A
man has a license to be interested in freaks. But take my advice, and
I sha'n't be offended. Tell every one that you hold no brief for me
and listen with an open mind when they blackguard me."

Spurrier laughed. "In a place where assassination is said to come
cheap, you have at least been able to take care of yourself, sir."

"That," said the other slowly, "is as it happens. My partner was less
lucky. My own luck may break some day."

"And yet you go on living here when you'd be safe enough anywhere
else."

"Yes, I go on living here. It's a land where a man's mind starves and
where the great marching song of the world's progress is silent--and
yet----" Again he paused to draw in and exhale a cloud of pipe smoke.
"Yet there's something in the winds that blow here, in the air one
breathes, that 'is native to my blood.' Elsewhere I should be
miserable, sir, and my daughter----"

He came to an abrupt stop and Spurrier took him up quickly. "She
seems young and vital enough to crave all of life's variety."

"But she is contented, sir." The elderly man spoke eagerly as though
to convince himself and quiet troubling doubts. "She, too, would
rather be here. We know this life and take it as we find it."

Spurrier felt that the conversation was tending into channels too
personal for the participation of a chance acquaintance, and he guided
it to a less intimate subject.

"I understand, Mr. Cappeze, that in the campaign just ended, you
stumped this district whole-heartedly in behalf of one of the
candidates for the circuit judgeship."

Again the hawk-keen blaze flared in the eyes of his host.

"You are mistaken, sir," he declared with heated emphasis. "It was
less _for_ a candidate than _against_ one that I worked. The man whom
circumstances compelled me to support was a poor thing, but he was
better than his adversary."

"Was it party spirit that prompted you, then?" inquired the guest,
feeling that politeness called for some show of interest.

"Sometimes I think," said the lawyer with a grim smile, "that from
some men God withholds the blessed power of riding life's waves. All
they can do is to buffet and fight and wear themselves out. Perhaps
I'm that sort. The man who won--who succeeded himself on the bench--is
an expedientist. So long as he presides, timid juries will return
timid verdicts and the law will falter. I took the stump to brand him
before the people as an apostate to his oath. I knew he would win,
but I meant to make him wear his trade-mark of cowardice along with
his smirk of self-righteousness!"

As Spurrier listened, not to a feudist but to a man who had worn
himself out fighting feudism, there came to him like a revelation an
appreciation of the bitterness which runs in the grim undertow of this
blood.

"I believe," he suggested, glancing sidewise at the door beyond which
he heard the thrushlike voice of the girl, "that you made an issue of
a murder case which collapsed--a case in which you had been employed
to prosecute."

"Yes," Cappeze told him. "Because I believe it to be one in which the
officers of the court lay down and quit like dogs. The defendant was a
red-handed bully, generally feared--and the law was in timid keeping.
I am still trying to have the grand jury call before it the
prosecutor, the sheriff, and every deputy who served on that posse. I
want to make them tell, on oath, just how hard they sought to
apprehend the assassin--who still walks boldly and freely among
us--unwhipped of justice."

Spurrier rose, deeply impressed by the headstrong, willful courage of
this old insurgent, whose daughter's eyes were so full of spring
gentleness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Far up the dwindling thread of a small water course, where the forest
was jungle-thick, a log cabin hung perched to a rocky cornfield that
tilted like a steep roof, and under its shingles Sim Colby dwelt
alone. Since his coming here he had been assimilated into the
commonplace life of the neighborhood and the question of his
origin was no longer discussed. The time had gone by when even an
acquaintance of other days would be apt to calculate that his term of
enlistment in the army had not run its full course. Moreover, there
were no such acquaintances here; none who had known him before he
changed his name from Grant to Colby. The shadow of dread which had
once obsessed him had gradually and imperceptibly lightened until
for weeks together he forgot how poignantly it had once haunted him.
He had painstakingly established a reputation exemplary beyond the
tendencies of his nature in this new habitat--since trouble might
cause closed pages to reopen.

Now on a November afternoon a deputy sheriff, serving summonses in
that neighborhood dismounted at the door where Sim stood with his hand
resting on the jamb, and the two mulled over what sparse gossip the
uneventful neighborhood afforded.

"Old Cappeze, he's a-seekin' ter rake up hell afresh an' brew more
pestilence fer everybody," announced the deputy glumly.

"What's he projeckin' at now?" asked Sim.

"He's seekin' ter warm over thet ancient Sam Mosebury case afore ther
grand jury. Come ter think of hit, Sim, ye rid with ther high sheriff
yoreself thet time, didn't ye?"

Moodily the other nodded. That was a matter he preferred to leave
buried.

"Waal, Cappeze is claimin' now thet ther possy didn't make no master
effort ter lay hands on Sam. He aims ter hev all ye boys tell ther
grand jury what ye knows erbout ther matter."

The deputy turned away, but in afterthought he paused, thrashing idly
with his switch at the weed stalks, as he retailed an almost forgotten
item of news.

"A furriner come ter town yistidday, an' sot out straightway acrost
Hemlock Mountain fer old Cappeze's dwellin' house."

"What manner of man war he, Joe?" Sim's interest was perfunctory. Had
he been haled into the grand-jury room in those earlier days, the
prospect would have bristled with apprehensions, but now he had behind
him the background of respectability and Mose Biggerstaff, who alone
knew of his craven behavior as a member of the posse, was dead. Sim
felt secure in his mantle of virtue.

"He war a right upstandin' sort of feller--ther furriner," enlightened
the deputy. "He goes under ther name of Spurrier--John Spurrier."

As though an electric wire of high tension had broken and brushed him
in falling, Sim Colby's attitude stiffened and every muscle grew taut
from neck to ankles as his jaw sagged.

The deputy, with his foot already in the stirrup, missed the terror
spasms of the face gone suddenly putty gray. He missed the gasp that
contracted the throat and caused its breath to wheeze, and when he
glanced back again from his saddle, the other had, with an effort of
sheer desperation, regained his outward semblance of composure. He
still leaned indolently against the door frame, but now he needed its
support, because all his nerves jumped and a confusion like the
swarming of angry bees filled his brain.

Afterward he groped his way inside and dropped down into a low chair
by the hearth. For a long time he sat there breathing stertorously
while the untended fire died away to ashen dreariness. The sun went
down beyond the pine tops and still he sat dully with his hands
hanging over his knees, their fingers twitching in panic aimlessness.

Out of a past that he had cut away from the present had arisen a ghost
of hideous menace. Here into the laurel which had promised sanctuary
his Nemesis had pursued him.

Two men with the guilt of a murder standing between them had come into
a radius too small to contain them both. It was as if they had met on
a narrow log spanning a chasm where only one could pass and the other
must fall.

If old Cappeze dragged him to the courthouse now, he would be
delivered over to Spurrier, waiting there to identify him, as a fox in
a trap is delivered to the skinning knife. That must be the meaning of
the stranger's visit to the lawyer.

Sim Colby went to an ancient and dilapidated bureau and from a
creaking drawer took out a memento which, for some reason, he had
preserved from times not treasured in memory. He carried it to the
open door and stood looking at it as it lay on the palm of his hand
with the light glinting upon it.

It was a sharpshooter's medal, for, whatever his military shortcomings,
Private Grant had been an efficient rifleman, and as he looked at it
now his lips twisted into a grim smile. Then he took his rifle from its
corner and, sitting on the doorstep, polished it with a fond
particularity, oiling its mechanism and burnishing its bore.

Already Spurrier had made arrangements to ensconce himself under the
roof of a house he had rented. Already the faces that he met in the
road were, for the most part, familiar, and without exception they
were friendly. Quick on the heels of his first disgust for the squalor
of this lapsed and retarded life, had succeeded an exhilaration born
of the wine-like sparkle of the air and the majestic breadth of vistas
across ridge and valley. As he watched mile-wide shadows creep between
sky-high lines of peaks, his dreams borrowed something of their
vastness.

Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken
spaces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter
of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood
virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil
derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of
refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of
conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power.

One afternoon Spurrier started over to the house he had rented, but
into which he had not yet moved. The way lay for a furlong or more
through a gorge deeply and somberly shaded. Even now, at midday, the
sunlight of the upper places left it cloistered and the bowlders
trooped along in ferny dampness, where the little waters whispered.

Beside a bulky hummock of green-corroded sandstone the man halted and
stood musingly, with eyes downcast and thoughts uplifted--uplifted
to the worship of his one god: Ambition. At his feet was an oily
sediment along the water's edge and the gravel was thick with
"sand blossom"--tiny fossil formations that are prima facie evidence
of oil. Then, without warning, he felt a light sting along his
cheek and the rock-walled fissure reverberated under what seemed a
volley of musketry.

But the magnified and crumbling effect of the echo struck him with a
less poignant realization than a slighter sound and a sharper one. As
if a taut piano wire had been sharply struck, came the clear whang
that he recognized as the flight song of a rifle bullet, and, whatever
its origin it called for a prompt taking of cover.

Spurrier side-stepped as quickly as a boxer, and stood, for the moment
at least, bulwarked behind the rock that was so providentially close.

"I'm John Spurrier--a stranger in these parts," he sung out in a
confident voice of forced boldness and cheerfulness. "I reckon you've
made a mistake in your man."

There was no answer and Spurrier cautiously raised his hat on the end
of a stick with the same deliberation that might have marked his
action had it been his own head emerging from cover.

Instantly the hidden rifle spoke again and the hat came down pierced
through its band, while the rocks once more reverberated to multiplied
detonations.

"It would seem," the man told himself grimly, "that after all there
was no mistake."

He was unarmed and in no position to pursue investigations of the
mystery, but by crawling along on his belly he could keep his body
shielded behind the litter of broken stone that edged the brook until
he reached the end of the gorge itself and came to safer territory.

Slowly, Spurrier traveled out of his precarious position, flattening
himself when he paused to rest and listen, as he had made his men
flatten themselves over there in the islands when they were going
forward without cover under the fire of snipers.




CHAPTER VIII


Spurrier was not frightened, but he was deeply mystified, and when he
reached the cabin which he was preparing for occupancy he sat down on
the old millstone that served as a doorstep and sought enlightenment
from reflection and the companionship of an ancient pipe.

In an hour or two "Uncle Jimmy" Litchfield, under whose smoky roof he
was being temporarily sheltered, would arrive with a jolt wagon and
yoke of oxen, teaming over the household goods that Spurrier meant to
install. Already the new tenant had swept and whitewashed his cabin
interior and had let the clear winds rake away the mildew of its long
vacancy. Now he sat smoking with a perplexity-drawn brow, while a
tuneful sky seemed to laugh mockingly at the absurd idea of riflemen
in ambush.

Every neighbor had manifested a spirit of cordiality toward him. To
many of them he was indebted for small and voluntary kindnesses, and
he had maintained a diplomatic neutrality in all local affairs that
bore a controversial aspect.

Certainly, he could not flatter himself that as yet any premonition of
danger had percolated to those distant centers of industry against
which he was devising a campaign of surprise. One explanation only
presented itself with any color of plausibility.

That trickle of water might come to the gorge from a spot back in the
laurel where, under the shelter of a felled hemlock top, some one
tended a small "blockade" distillery; some one who resented an
invasion of his privacy.

Yet even that inference was not satisfactory. Only yesterday a man had
offered him moonshine whisky, declaring quite unsuspiciously: "Ef
ye're vouched fer by Uncle Jimmy, I ain't a'skeered of ye none. I made
thet licker myself--drink hearty."

Of the real truth no ghostly glimmer of suspicion came in even the
most shadowy fashion to his mind.

His efforts to trace to definite result some filament of fact that
might prove the court-martial to have reached a conclusion at variance
with the truth, had all ended in failure. That the matter was hopeless
was an admission which he could not afford to make and which he
doggedly denied, but with waning confidence.

This state of mind prevented him from suspecting any connection
between this present and mysterious enmity and those things which had
happened across the Pacific.

He had kept himself informed as to the movements of Private Severance
and when that time-expired man had stepped ashore at San Francisco,
John Spurrier had been waiting to confront him, even though it
involved facing men who had once been brother officers and who could
no longer speak to him as an equal.

From the former soldier, who brought a flush to his cheeks by saluting
him and calling him "Lieutenant," he had learned nothing. There had
been no reason to hope for much. It was unlikely that he would be
able to shake into a damaging admission of complicity--and any
statement of value must have amounted to that--the witness who had
come unscathed out of the cross-examination of two courts-martial.

Indeed Spurrier had expected to encounter unveiled hostility in the
attitude of the mountaineer, who had been doing sentry duty at the
door through which the prisoner, Grant, had escaped. It might have
followed logically upon the officer's defense, which had sought to
involve that sentinel as an accomplice in the fugitive's flight, and
even in the murder itself.

But Severance had greeted him without rancor and with the disarming
guise of candid friendliness.

"I'd be full willin' ter help ye, Lieutenant--ef so be I could," he
had protested. "I knows full well yore lawyers was plum obliged ter
seek ter hang ther blame wharsoever they was able, an' I ain't
harborin' no grudge because I happened ter be one they sought ter
hurt. But I don't know nothin' that kin aid ye."

"Do you think Grant escaped alive?" demanded Spurrier, and the other
shook his head.

"I feels so plum, dead sartain he died," came the prompt response,
"thet when I gits back home I'm goin' ter tell his folks he did. Bud
Grant was a friend of mine, but when he went out inter thet jungle he
was too weakly ter keer fer hisself an' ef he'd lived they would hev
done found him an' brought him back."

Spurrier had come to embrace that belief himself. The one man whose
admission, wrung from him by persuasion or compulsion, could give him
back his clean name, must have perished there in the _bijuca_
tangles. The hope of meeting the runaway in life had died in the
ex-officer's heart and consequently it did not now occur to him to
think of the deserter as a living menace.

At length he rose and stood against the shadowy background of his
door, which was an oblong of darkness behind the golden outer
clarity.

Off in the tangle of oak and poplar and pine a ruffed grouse drummed
and a "cock of the woods" rapped its tattoo on a sycamore top.

Once he fancied he heard a stirring in the rhododendron where its
large waxen leaves banked themselves thickly a hundred yards distant,
and his eyes turned that way seeking to pierce the impenetrable
screen--but unavailingly. Perhaps some small, wild thing had moved
there.

Then, as had happened before that afternoon, the stillness broke to a
rifle shot--this time clean and sharp, unclogged by echoes.

Spurrier stood for an instant while a surprised expression showed in
his out-staring eyes, then he swayed on his feet. His hands came up
and clutched spasmodically at his left breast, and with a sudden
collapse he dropped heavily backward, and lay full length, swallowed
in the darkness that hung beyond the door.

Over the rhododendron thicket quiet settled drowsily again, but
through the toughness of interlaced branches stole upward and outward
an acrid powder smell and a barely perceptible trickle of smoke.

Crouched there, his neutral-hued clothing merging into the earth tones
about him, a man peered out, but he did not rise to go forward and
inspect his work. Instead, he opened the breech block of his piece
and with unhurried care blew through the barrel--cleansing it of its
vapors.

"I reckon thar ain't no needcessity to go over thar an' look at him,"
he reflected. "When they draps down _thet_-away, they don't git up no
more--an' some person from afar mout spy me crossin' ther dooryard."

So he edged backward into the tangle, moving like a crawfish and
noiselessly took up his homeward journey.

When the slow plodding ox team came at last to the dooryard and Uncle
Billy stood shouting outside the house, Sim Colby, holding to tangles
where he would meet no chance wayfarer, was already miles away and
hurrying to establish his alibi against suspicion, in his own
neighborhood--where no one knew he had been absent.

Though it be an evil thing and shameful to confess, ex-private Bud
Grant, alias Sim Colby, traveled light-heartedly, roweled by no
tortures of conscience, but blithe in the assurance of a ghost laid,
and a peril averted.

He would have been both amazed and chagrined had he remained peering
from his ambuscade, for when Uncle Billy's shadow fell through the
open door the man to whom he had come rose from a chair to meet him,
and he presented no mangled or blood-stained breast to the eyes of his
visitors.

"Ye ain't jest a-quippin' with me, be ye?" demanded the old
mountaineer incredulously when he had heard the story in all its
detail. "This hyar's a right serious-soundin' matter--an' ye ain't
got no enemies amongst us thet I've heered tell of."

Spurrier pointed out the spot in the newly whitewashed wall where the
bullet lay imbedded with its glint of freshly flattened lead.

"After the first experience," he explained, "I'd had some time to
think. I was standing in the door so I fell down--and played dead." He
added after a pause quietly: "I've seen men shot to death, and I
happened to know how a man drops when it's a heart hit. I fell inside
where I'd be out of sight, because I was unarmed, and all I could do
was to wait for you. I watched through the door, but the fellow never
showed himself."

"Come on, boys," commanded the old mountaineer in a determined voice.
"Let's beat thet la'rel while ther tracks is still fresh. Mebby we
mout l'arn somethin' of this hyar monstrous matter."

But they learned nothing. Sim Colby had spent painstaking thought upon
his effort and he had left no evidence written in the mold of the
forest.

"Hit beats all hell," declared the nonplussed Uncle Billy at last.
"I ain't got ther power ter fathom hit. Ef I war you I wouldn't
talk erbout this ter no man save only me an' old Dyke Cappeze.
Still-huntin' lands more game then blowin' a fox horn." And
Spurrier nodded his head.

Though Spurrier for a few days after that slipped through the gorge
with the stealth of a sharpshooter, covering himself behind rocks as
he went, he heard no sound there more alarming than the chatter of
squirrels or the grunt of a strayed razor-back rooting among the
acorns. Gradually he relaxed his vigilance as a man will if his
nature is bold and his dreams too sweeping to be forever hobbled by
petty precautions.

The purpose which he privately served called for ranging the country
with a trained eye, and with him went the contour maps upon which were
traced red lines.

One day he came, somewhat winded from a stiff climb, to an eminence
that spread the earth below him and made of it a panorama. The bright
carnival of the autumn was spending itself to its end, but among trees
already naked stood others that clung to a gorgeousness of color the
more brilliant in the face of death. Overhead was flawless blue, and
there was a dreamy violet where it merged mistily with the skyline
ridges.

"All that it needs," mused the man whimsically and aloud, "is the
music of Pan's pipes--and perhaps a small chorus of dryads."

Then he heard a laugh and, wheeling suddenly, discovered Glory Cappeze
regarding him from the cap of a towering rock where, until he had
reached this level, she had been hidden from view. Now she flushed
shyly as the man strode over and confronted her.

"Do you still hate me?" he inquired.

"I reckon thet don't make no master differ ter ye, does hit?" The
musical voice was painfully diffident, and he remembered that she had
always been shy with him except on that first meeting when the leaping
anger in her eyes had burned away self-consciousness.

"You know," he gravely reminded her, "when I first saw you, you were
on the point of thrashing me. You had me cowed and timid. Since then
I've come to think of you as the shooting star."

He paused, waiting for her to demand an elucidation of that somewhat
obscure statement, but she said nothing. She only sat gazing over his
head toward the horizon, and her cheeks were excitedly flushed from
the delicate pink of apple bloom to the warmer color of peach
blossom.

"Since you don't ask what I mean," he continued easily, "I shall tell
you. I've been to your house perhaps four or five times. From afar,
each time, I've seen a scrap of color. Sometimes it has been blue,
sometimes red, but always it has vanished with the swiftness of a
shooting star. It is a flash and it is gone. Sometimes from beyond a
door I also hear a voice singing."

He leaned his elbows on the rock at her feet and stood gazing into the
eyes that would not meet his own, and still she favored him with no
response. After a little silence the man altered his tone and spoke
argumentatively:

"You forgave the dog, you know--why not the man?"

That question carried her thoughts back to the murdered quail and a
gusty back-flash of resentment conquered her diffidence. Her sternness
of tone and the thrushlike softness of her voice, mingled with the
piquancy of paradox.

"A dawg don't know no better."

"Some dogs are very wise," he assured her. "And some men very
foolish."

"The dawg," she went on still unplacated, "got right down on his
stomach and asked my pardon. I _hed_ ter fergive him, when he humbled
hisself like that."

"I'm willing," John Spurrier amiably assured her, "to get right down
on my stomach, too."

Then she laughed, and though she sought to retreat again into her
aloofness, the spell was broken.

"Am I forgiven?" he demanded, and she shook her head doubtfully though
no longer with conviction.

"No," she told him; then she added with a startlingly exact mimicry of
her father's most legalistic manner: "No. The co'te will take the case
under advisement an' defer jedgment."

"I forgot," he said, "that you are a lawyer's daughter. What were you
looking at across there--so fascinatedly?"

"Them hills," she enlightened succinctly.

Spurrier studied her. Her deep eyes had held a glow of almost
prayerful enchantment for which her laconic words seemed inadequate.

Watching her out of the tail of his eye he fell into borrowed phrases:
"'Violet peaks uplifted through the crystal evening air.'"

She shot a glance at him suddenly, eagerly; then at once the lids
lowered, masking the eyes again as she inquired:

"Thet thar's poetry, ain't hit?"

"I'm prepared to go to the mat with any critic who holds the
contrary," he assured her.

"Hit's comin' on ter be night. I've got ter start home," she
irrelevantly announced, as she slid from her rough throne, and the man
fell boldly in step at her side.

"When your honor rules on the matter under advisement," he said
humbly before their paths separated, "please remember that the
defendant was a poor wretch who didn't know he was breaking the law."

For the first time their glances engaged fully and without avoidance,
and a twinkle flashed in the girl's pupils.

"_Ignorantia legis neminem excusat_," she serenely responded, and
Spurrier gasped. Here was a girl who could not steer her English
around the shoals of illiteracy, giving him his retort in Latin:
"Ignorance of the law excuses no one." Of course, it meant only that
her quick memory had appropriated and was parroting legal phrases
learned from her father, but it struck the chord of contrasts, and to
the man's imagination it dramatized her so that when she had gone on
with the lissome grace of her light stride, he stood looking after
her.

Rather abruptly after that the autumn fires of splendor burned out to
the ashes of coming winter, and then it was that Spurrier went north.
As his train carried him seaward he had the feeling that it was also
transporting him from an older to a younger century, and that while
his mind dwelt on the stalwart and unsophisticated folk with whom he
had been brushing shoulders, the life resolved itself into an austere
picture against which the image of Glory stood out with the quick
vividness of a red cardinal flitting among somber pine branches.

Because she was so far removed from his own orbit he could think of
her impersonally and enjoy the thought as though it were of a new type
of flower or bird, recognizing her attractive qualities in a detached
fashion.

As Spurrier gave himself up to the relaxation of reminiscence with
that abandon of train travel which admits of no sustained effort, he
began comparing this life, left over from another era, with that he
had known against more cultivated and complex backgrounds.

Then in analytical mood he reviewed his own past, looking with a
lengthening of perspective on the love affair that had been broken by
his court-martial. His adoration of the Beverly girl had been youthful
enough to surround itself with young illusions.

That was why it had all hurt so bitterly, perhaps, with its ripping
away of his faith in romantic conceptions of love-loyalty.

He wondered now if he had not borne himself with the Quixotic
martyrdom of callowness. He had sought to shield the girl from even
the realization that her lack of confidence was ungenerous. He had
sought to take all the pain and spare her from sharing it. But she had
solaced herself with a swift recovery and a new lover, and had he been
guilty she could not have abandoned him more cavalierly. Well, that
softness belonged to an out-grown stage of development.

He had seen himself then as obeying the dictates of chivalry. He
thought of it now as inexperienced folly--perhaps, so far as she was
concerned, as a lucky escape. His amours of the present were not so
naively conducted. To Vivian he had paid his attentions with an eye
watchful of material advantages. They belonged to a sophisticated
circle which seasoned life's fare rather with the salt of cynicism
than with the sugar of romanticism. Yet the thought of Vivian caused
no pulse to flutter excitedly.

The glimpse of Glory had been refreshing because she was so honest and
sincere that she disquieted one's acquired cynicism of viewpoint. One
might as well spout world-wisdom to a lilac bush as to Glory! Yet
there was a sureness about her which argued for her creed of
wholesome, simple things and old half-forgotten faiths which one would
like to keep alive--if one could.

Snow drifted in the air and made a nimbus about each arc light as
Spurrier's taxi, turning between the collonade pillars of the
Pennsylvania Station, gave him his first returning glimpse of New
York. He had come East in obedience to a wired summons from Martin
Harrison, brief to curtness as were all business messages from that
man of few and trenchant words. The telegram had been slow crossing
the mountain, but Spurrier had been prompt in his response.

A tempered glare hung mistily above the Longacre Square district
through the snow flurries to the north, and the rumbled voice of the
town, after these months in quiet places, was to the returned pilgrim
like the heavy breathing of a monster sleeping out a fever.

At the room that he kept at his club in Fifth Avenue--for that was a
part of the pretentious display of affluence made necessary by his
ambitious scheme of things--he called up a number from memory. It was
a number not included in the telephone directory, and, recognizing the
voice that answered him, he said briefly:

"Manners, this is Mr. Spurrier. Will you tell Mr. Harrison I'm on the
wire?"

"Hello, Spurrier," boomed a deep voice after an interval. "We're
dining out this evening and we go to the opera afterward, but I want a
word with you to-night. In fact, I want you to start for Russia on
Wednesday. Drop into our box, and drive home with me for a few minutes
afterward."

Russia on Wednesday! Spurrier's unoccupied hand clenched in
irritation, but his voice was as unruffled as if he had been asked to
make ready for a journey to Hoboken. He knew enough of Harrison's
methods to ask no questions. If they could have been answered over the
phone Harrison could have found many men to send to Russia. It was
because they were for his ear alone that he had been called to New
York.

That evening he listened to "Otello" with thoughts that wandered from
the voices of the singers. They refused even to be chained by the
novelty of a slender tenor as a new Russian star held the spotlight.
He was studying the almost too regular beauty of Vivian Harrison's
profile as she sat serene and self-confident with the horseshoe of the
Metropolitan beyond her.

At midnight Spurrier sat with Harrison in his study and listened to a
crisp summarizing of the Russian scheme. It proved to be a project
boldly conceived on a broad scale and requiring an ambassador
dependable enough and resourceful enough to decide large matters as
they arose, without cabling for instructions.

In turn Spurrier talked of his own past doings, and through their
cigar smoke the seeming idleness of those weeks assayed a wealth of
exact information and stood revealed as the incubation period of a
large conception. Keenly formulated plans emerged from his recitals so
simply and convincingly that the greater financier leaned forward and
let his cigar die.

Then Harrison rose and paced the room.

"You know something about me, Spurrier," he began. "When I came East
they laughed at me--if they deigned to notice me at all. They said:
'Here comes a bushleaguer who thinks he's good enough for the big
game. It's one more lamb to the shearing shed.' That's the East,
Spurrier! That's cocksure New York! They sneer at a Western-bred
horse--or a Western-trained prize fighter--and when the newcomer licks
the best they've got they straightway let out a holler that they
taught him all he knows. Why, New York would die of lassitude and
anaemia if it wasn't for blood infusions from the provinces!"

Spurrier gazed interestedly at the tall figure of the man with
the sandy red mustache, and the snapping eyes, who for all his
impeccability of evening dress, might have taken a shovel or
pick from a section hand and taught him how to level a road bed.
Harrison laughed shortly.

"They haven't inhaled me so far. I brought only a million with me to
this town, and I've got--well, I've got plenty, but I can't call it a
day quite yet. There's one buccaneer to be settled with first! He's
got to go to the mat with me and come up bloody enough to admit that
he's been in a ruction. He chooses to pretend that I'm nonexistent,
and I won't stand being ignored! I want to leave my mark on that man,
and with God's help--and yours--I'm going to do it!"

"You mean Trabue?" asked Spurrier, and Harrison's head gave a decisive
jerk of affirmation while the hot glow of his eyes made his companion
think of smelting furnaces.

"That's why this thing of yours interests me. That's why I'm willing
to get behind you and back you to the hilt," the big fellow of finance
went on. "A. O. and G. are trying to hold others out of this Kentucky
field. That proves that they think enough of it to be hurt by having
it torn from their teeth. All I need to know is what will hurt them!
If you can take some teeth along with the bone, so much the better."
He paused, then in a voice that had altered to cold steadiness,
commanded: "Now, give me your facts."

"At present prices of oil," summarized Spurrier, "the development
back of Hemlock Mountain wouldn't pay. With higher market values, it
_would_ pay, but less handsomely than other fields A. O. and G. can
work. Once the initial cost is laid out, the profit will be
constant. The A. O. and G. idea is to hold it in reserve and await
developments--meanwhile keeping up the 'no trespass' sign."

"Doesn't the range practically prohibit railroading?"

"Possibly--but it doesn't prohibit pipe lines."

Spurrier opened the packet he had brought in his overcoat pocket and
spread a map under the flooding light of a table lamp.

"I have traced there what seems to me a practical piping route," he
explained. "I call it the neck of the bottle. There is a sort of gap
through the hills and a porous formation caused by a chain of
caverns. Nature is willing to help with some ready-made tunnels."

"Why haven't they discovered that?"

"The oil development of fifteen years ago never crossed Hemlock
Mountain. It came the other way."

Harrison stood thinking for a time, then demanded tersely: "Have you
secured any land or options?"

"Not an acre, nor an inch," laughed Spurrier. "This is a waiting game.
I don't mean to appear interested. If any man offered to give me a
farm I should say it wasn't worth State taxes."

"How do we get the property into our hands then?"

"The buying must be gradual and through men with whom we appear to
have no connection."

"And the State charter--how about that?"

"There lies the chief problem," admitted Spurrier. "The charter must
come from a legislature that A. O. and G. can, at present, control."

"What," Harrison shot the question out like a cross-examiner, "is the
present attitude of the natives toward oil and oil men?"

"Indifference and skepticism." The reply was prompt but the
amplification more deliberate. "Once they saw wealth ahead--then the
boom collapsed, and they have no longer any faith in the magic of the
word 'oil.'"

"I presume," suggested Harrison, "you are encouraging that disbelief?"

Spurrier's face clouded, but only for a moment. "I am the most
skeptical of all the skeptics," he assented, "and yet I'm sorry that
they can't be gainers. They are an honest, upstanding folk and they
have always felt the pinch of privation. After all they are the
rightful owners and development of their country ought to benefit
them. Of course, though, to forecast the possibilities would kill the
game. We can't take them into our confidence without sounding a
warning to the enemy."

"Growing sentimental?" queried Harrison dryly, and the younger man
shook his head.

"No," he responded slowly, "I can't afford that--yet."

"And see that you don't," admonished the chief sharply. "Bear in mind,
as you have in the past, that we don't want to depend on men of
brittle resolution and temperamental squeamishness. We are in this
thing toward a definite end and not as humanitarian dreamers.
However----" He broke off abruptly and added in a milder voice, "I
don't have to caution you. You understand the proposition."

For some minutes the cigar smoke floated in a silent room, while
Martin Harrison sat with the knitted brows of concentrated thought.
Spurrier did not interrupt the mental process which he knew had the
heat and power of an ore smelter, reducing to fluid amenability the
hard metal of a stubborn proposition. He knew, too, that the fuel
which fed the fire was his principal's animosity against Trabue,
rather than the possibilities or extent of the loot. This, no less
than the mountain vendetta, was, in last analysis, a personal feud and
in the parlance of the Cumberlands a "war was in ther b'ilin'."

At last Harrison straightened up and tossed away his cigar.

"You are ambitious, Spurrier," he said. "Put this thing over and I
should say that all your ambitions can come to realization."

While he sat waiting Spurrier had lifted from the table a photograph
of Vivien, appropriately framed in silver. He had taken it up idly
because it was a new portrait and one that he had not before seen, but
into the gesture the father read a deeper significance. It was as if
Spurrier had asked "All my ambitions?" and had emphasized his question
by laying his hands on the picture of the girl. That, thought
Harrison, was an audacious suggestion, but it was Spurrier's audacity
that recommended him.

Slowly the capitalist's eyes lighted into an amused smile as their
glance traveled from the younger face to the framed photograph, and
slowly he nodded his head.

"_All_ your ambitions," he repeated meaningly, then with the electric
snap of warning in his voice he added an admonition: "But don't
underestimate the difficulties of your undertaking. You are bucking
the strongest and most relentless piracy in finance. You will incur
enmities that will stop nowhere, and you must operate in a country
where murderers are for 'hire.'"

The threat of personal danger just at that moment disquieted John
Spurrier less than the other curtailment of freedom implied in
Harrison's words; the tacit acceptance of him as Vivien's suitor. It
came to him abruptly that he did not love Vivien; that he wished to
remain untrammeled. Heretofore, he had always postponed matrimonial
thoughts for the misty future. Now they became embarrassingly near and
tangible.

But quick on this realization followed another. Here was an offered
alliance of tremendous advantage and one not to be ignored. To be
Vivien's husband might fail of rapture, but to be Martin Harrison's
son-in-law meant triumph. It meant his own nomination as heir apparent
and successor in that position of cardinal importance to which he had
looked upward as to a throne.

There was no trace of dubiety in his voice as he answered:

"I have counted the handicaps, sir. I'm taking my chance with open
eyes."




CHAPTER IX


Sim Colby, after that day when he had slipped through the laurel, had
gone back to his own house and waited for the talk of John Spurrier's
mysterious death to drift along the waterways where news is the only
speedy traveler.

There had been no such gossip and he had dared betray his interest by
no inquiry, but he knew it could have only one meaning; that he had
failed.

Spurrier was alive, and obviously he was holding his counsel
concerning his narrow escape. This silence seemed to Sim Colby an
ominous thing indicative of some crafty purpose--as if the intended
victim were stalking grimly as well as being stalked. Sim came of a
race that knows how to bide its time and that can keep bright the edge
of hatred against long-delayed reprisals. It was certainly to be
presumed that Spurrier had taken some of his friends into his
confidence and that under the mantle of silence over on Little Turkey
Tail, these friends were now watchfully alert. The enterprise that had
once failed could not be reundertaken at once. Sim must wait for the
vigilance to "blow over," and while he waited the rancor of his hatred
must fester with the thorn-prickings of a thousand doubts and
apprehensions.

Then he heard one day that Spurrier had left the mountains, and on
another day the news was brought that the grand jury had declined to
reopen the old issues of the murder case in which Mosebury had
escaped justice. Both these things were comforting in themselves, but
they failed of complete reassurance for the deserter.

Men said that Spurrier was coming back again, so the day of reckoning
was only deferred--not escaped.

The determination with which Sim had set out on his mission of death
had largely preempted his field of thought. Now, after weeks and
months of brooding reflection, he himself had become only a sort of
human garment worn by the sinister spirit of resolve.

So all that winter while John Spurrier was away as the ambassador,
practicing in Moscow and Odessa the adroit arts of financial
diplomacy, the fixed idea of his assassination was festering in the
mind of the man who lived, under an assumed name, at the head of
Little Quicksand.

That obsession took fantastic shapes and wove webs of grotesque
patterns of hate as Colby, who had been Grant, sat brooding before his
untidy hearth while the winter winds wailed about the eaves and lashed
the mountain world into forlorn bleakness.

And while Colby meditated unendingly on the absentee and built ugly
plans against his return, so in another house and in another spirit,
the ex-officer was also remembered.

Winter in these well-nigh roadless hills meant a blockade and a siege
with loneliness and stagnation as the impregnably intrenched
attackers. The victims could only wait and endure until the rescue
forces of spring should come to raise the chill and sodden barricade,
with a flaunting of blossom-banners and the whispered song of warm
victory.

Glory Cappeze, for the first time in her life, suffered from
loneliness. She had thought herself too used to it to mind it much,
but John Spurrier had brought a new element to her existence and left
behind him a void. She had been hardly more than an onlooker to his
occasional visits with her father, but she had been a very interested
onlooker. When he talked a vigorous mind had spoken and had brought
the greater, unknown, outer world to her door. The striking face with
its square jaw; the ingrained graces and courtesies of his bearing;
the quickness of his understanding--all these things had been a light
in the gray mediocrity of uneventful days and a flame that had fired
her imagination to a splendid disquiet.

The infectious smile and force of personality that had been a
challenge to more critical women, had been almost dazzling qualities
to the mountain girl of strangled opportunities.

But it was that last meeting in which he had thawed her shyness into
friendliness that Glory remembered most eagerly. That had seemed to
make of Spurrier not only a hero admired from a distance but a hero
who was also a friend, and she was hungry for friends.

So it came to pass that to these two widely variant welcomes, neither
of which he suspected, John Spurrier was returning from Russia when
spring had lightly brushed the Cumberland slopes with delicate
fragrance and the color of blossoming.

In Louisville, in Frankfort, and in other Kentucky towns along his way
the returning man had made stops and investigations, to the end that
he came primed with certain information of an ex-cathedra sort.

The fruits of this research included an abstract of the personnel of
the legislature and the trend of oil influences in State politics, and
he studied his notebook as he traveled from the rolling, almost
voluptuous fertility of the bluegrass section to the piedmont where
the foothills began to break the sky.

On the porch of the dilapidated hotel at Waterfall a sparse crowd
centered about a seated figure, and when he had reached the spot
Spurrier paused, challenged by a sense of the medieval, that gripped
him as tangibly as a hand clapped upon his shoulder.

The seated man was blind and shabby, with a beggar's cup strapped to
his knee, and a "fiddle" nestling close to the stubbled chin of a
disfigured face. He sang in a weird falsetto, with minors that rose
thin and dolorous, but he was in every essential the ballad singer who
improvised his lays upon topical themes, as did Scott's last
minstrel--a survival of antiquity.

Now he was whining out a personal plaint in the words of his "song
ballet."

  "I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an' green,
  I used ter work a standard rig an' drill fer kero_sene_."

The singer's lugubrious pathos appeared to be received with attentive
and uncritical interest. Beyond doubt he took himself seriously and
sadly.

  "I used ter know a woman's love, an' read a woman's eyes,
  An' look into my baby's face an' dwell in paradise,
  Until a comp'ny foreman, plum' heedless in his mind
  Let nitroglycer_een_ explode an' made me go stone blind."

Spurrier, half-turning, saw a traveling salesman standing at his elbow
with a repressed grin of amusement struggling in his glance.

"Queer card, that," whispered the drummer. "I've seen him before; one
of the wrecks left over from the oil-boom days. A 'go-devil' let loose
too soon and blinded him." He paused, then added as though by way of
apology for his seeming callousness: "Some people say the old boy is a
sort of a miser and has a snug pile salted away."

Spurrier nodded and went on into the office, but later in the day he
sought out the blind fiddler and engaged him in conversation. The
man's blinding had left him a legacy of hate for all oil operators,
and from such relics as this of the active days Spurrier knew how to
evoke scraps of available information. It was not until later that it
occurred to him that he had answered questions as well as asked
them--but, of course, he had not been indiscreet.

With John Spurrier, riding across hills afoam with dogwood blossom and
tenderly vivid with young green, went persistently the thought of the
blind beggar who seemed almost epic in his symbolism of human wreckage
adrift in the wake of the boom. Yet he was honest enough to admit
inwardly that should victory fall to his banners there would be
flotsam in the wake of his triumph, too; simple folk despoiled of
their birthright. He came as no altruist to fight for the native
born. He, no less than A. O. and G., sought to exploit them.

When he went to the house of Dyke Cappeze he did not admit the
curiosity, amounting to positive anxiety, to see again the little
barbarian, who slurred consonants, doubled her negatives, split her
infinitives and retorted in the Latin of Blackstone. Yet when Glory
did not at once appear, he found himself unaccountably disappointed.

"There's been another stranger in here since you went away," the old
man smilingly told him. "What is he doing here? That's the one burning
question debated along the highways when men 'meet and make their
manners.'"

"Well," laughed Spurrier, "what _is_ he doing here?"

Cappeze shrugged his bent shoulders as he knocked the rubble from his
pipe and a quizzical twinkle came into his eyes.

"So far as I can make out, sir, he's as much a gentleman of leisure as
you are yourself."

Spurrier knew what an excellent subterfuge may sometimes lie in
frankness, and now he had recourse to its concealment.

"Good heavens, Mr. Cappeze, I'm no idler!" he declared. "I'm
associated with capitalists who work me like a mule. Since I saw you,
for example, I've been in Russia and I've been hard-driven. That's why
I come here. If I couldn't get absolutely away from it all now and
then, I'd soon be ready for a madhouse. Here I can forget all that and
keep fit."

Cappeze nodded. "That's just about the way I sized you up. At first,
folks pondered about you, too, but now they take you on faith."

"I hope so--and this new man? Has he stepped on anybody's toes?"

"Not yet. He hasn't even bought any land, but there have been some
several transfers of property, in other names, since he came. He _may_
be some man's silent partner."

"What sort of partnership would it be?"

"God knows." For an instant the shrewd eyes leaped into a glint of
feeling. "These poor benighted devils suspect the Greeks bearing
gifts. Civilization has always come here only to leave its scar. They
have been stung once--over oil. God pity the man who seeks to sting
them again."

"You think," Spurrier responded lightly, as one without personal
interest, "they wouldn't take it kindly?"

Once again the sonorous and kindly voice mounted abruptly to
vehemence.

"As kindly, sir, as a wolf bitch robbed, the second time, of her
whelps. It's all a wolf bitch has."

That evening as he walked slowly homeward with a neighbor whom he had
met by the way, Spurrier came face to face with Wharton, the other
stranger, and the mountaineer performed the offices of introduction.

The two men from the outer world eyed each other incuriously and
parted after an exchange of commonplaces.

When Spurrier separated from his chance companion, the hillsman
drawled: "Folks _says_ thet feller's buyin' land. God knows what fer
he wants hit, but ef he _does_ hone fer hit, hit's kinderly probable
thet hit's wuth holdin' on to."

When the brook trout began to leap and flash Cappeze delegated Glory
to act for him as Spurrier's guide, and as the girl led the way to the
likeliest pools, the young, straight-growing trees were not more
gracefully slender.

The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had no
delicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair.
The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighter
than her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom and
like the hills she was wild of beauty.

Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to the
pagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged to
rigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ring
within him as a tuning fork rings to its note.

Since the days of Augusta Beverly's ascendency, he had never felt the
need of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. At
first he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-hater
and more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, an
expedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, and
Vivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades so
long as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been snobs
in a sense, and in a sense he too was a snob.

But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things in
their primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politer
usage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his proffered
comradeship for the attitude of the lover--and that would have been
most disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanations
that would wound her, embarrass him and arouse the old man's just ire.
For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yet
prouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own ground
there was no common meeting place between their standards of living.

Yet Glory's presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich and
lyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would have
believed in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stood
fast when Augusta had cut loose.

This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally--and
perhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased him
to humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made him
step more elastically as she went on ahead.

When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored,
Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in grass that waved
knee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she moved
about crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself,
herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.

"Glory," he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the first
time and in a mood of experiment.

As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, she
turned toward him and answered in kind.

"What air hit, Jack?"

"Thank you."

"What fer?"

"For calling me Jack."

Then her cheeks colored deeply and she wheeled to her work again. But
after a little she faced him once more to say half angrily:

"I called ye Jack because ye called me Glory. You've always put a Miss
afore hit till now, an' I 'lowed ye'd done made up yore mind ter be
friendly at last."

"I've always wanted to be friendly," he assured her. "It was you who
began with a hickory switch and went on with hard words in Latin."

The girl laughed, and the peal of her mirth transmuted their status
and dispelled her self-consciousness. She came over and stood looking
down at him with violet eyes mischievously a-sparkle.

"The co'te," she announced, "hes carefully weighed there evidence in
ther case of Jack Spurrier, charged with ther willful murder of Bob
White, and is ready to enter jedgment. Jack Spurrier, stand up ter be
sentenced!"

The man rose to his feet and stood with such well-feigned abjectness
of suspense that she had to fight back the laughter from her eyes to
preserve her own pose of judicial gravity.

"It is well established by the evidence befo' ther co'te," she went
solemnly on, "thet ther defendant is guilty on every count contained
in the indictment." She checked off upon the fingers of the left hand
the roster of his crime as she summarized it.

"He entered inter an unlawful conspiracy with the codefendant Rover, a
setter dawg. He made a felonious assault without provocation. He
committed murder in the first degree with malice prepense."

Spurrier's head sank low in mock despair, until Glory came to her
peroration and sentence.

"Yet since the defendant is amply proved to be a poor, ignorant
wanderer upon the face of the earth, unpossessed of ordinary
knowledge, the court is constrained to hold him incapable of
discrimination between right an' wrong. Hence he is not fully
responsible for his acts of violence. Mercy as well as justice lies in
the province of the law, twins of a sacred parentage and equal before
the throne."

She broke off in a laugh, and so sudden was the transition from
absolute mimicry that the man forgot to laugh with her.

"Glory," he demanded somewhat breathlessly, "have you ever been to a
theater in your life? Have you ever seen a real actress?"

"No. Why?"

"Because you _are_ one. Does this life satisfy you? Isn't there
anything off there beyond the hills that ever calls you?"

The dancing eyes grew abruptly grave, almost pained, and the response
came slowly.

"_Everything_ down thar calls ter me. I craves hit all!"

Spurrier suddenly recalled old Cappeze's half-frightened vehemence
when the recluse had inveighed against the awakening of vain longings
in his daughter. Now he changed his manner as he asked:

"I wonder if I'd offend you if I put a question. I don't want to."

"Ye mout try an' see. I ain't got no power ter answer twell I hears
hit."

"All right. I'll risk it. Your father doesn't talk mountain dialect.
His English is pure--and you were raised close to him. Why do _you_
use--the other kind?"

She did not at once reply and, when she did, the astonishingly
adaptable creature no longer employed vernacular, though she spoke
slowly and guardedly as one might who ventured into a foreign tongue.

"My father has lived down below as well as here. He's a gentleman, but
he aims--I mean he intends--to live here now till he dies."

As she paused Spurrier prompted her.

"Yes--and you?"

"My father thinks that while I _do_ live here, I'd better fit into the
life and talk in the phrases that don't seem high-falutin' to my
neighbors."

"I dare say," he assured her with forced conviction, "that your father
is right."

There was a brief silence between them while the warm stillness of the
woods breathed its incense and its langour, then the girl broke out
impulsively:

"I want to see and hear and taste everything, out there!"

Her hands swept outward with an all-embracing gesture toward the whole
of the unknown. "There aren't any words to tell how I want it! What do
you want more than anything else, Jack?"

The man remained silent for a little, studying her under half-lowered
lids while a smile hovered at the corners of his lips. But the smile
died abruptly and it was with deep seriousness that he answered.

"I think, more than anything else, I want a clean name and a
vindicated reputation."

Glory's eyes widened so that their violet depths became pools of
wondering color and her lips parted in surprise.

"A clean name!" she echoed incredulously. "What blight have you got on
it, Jack?" Then catching herself up abruptly she flushed crimson and
said apologetically: "That's a question I haven't any license to put
to you, though. Only you broached the subject yourself."

"And having broached it, I am willing to pursue it," he assured her
evenly. "I was an army officer until I was charged with unprovoked
murder--and court-martialed; dishonorably discharged from the service
in which my father and grandfather had lived and died."

For a moment or two she made no answer but her quick expressiveness of
lip and eye did not, even for a startled interval, betray any shock of
horror. When she did speak it was in a voice so soft and compassionate
that the man thought of its quality before he realized its words.

"Did the man that--that was _really_ guilty go scot free, whilst you
had to shoulder his blame?"

There had been no question of evidence; no waiting for any denial of
guilt. She had assumed his innocence with the same certainty that her
eye assumed the flawlessness of the overheard blue. Her interest was
all for his wronging and not at all for his alleged wrong.

The man started with surprise; the surprise of one who had trained
himself into an unnatural callousness as a defense against what had
seemed a universal proneness to convict. He had told himself that
Glory would see with a straighter and more intuitive eye. He had told
her baldly of the thing which he seldom mentioned out of an
inquisitiveness to test her reaction to the revelation, but he was
unprepared for such unhesitant belief.

"I think you are the first human being, Glory," he said quietly but
with unaccustomed feeling in his voice, "who ever heard that much and
gave me a clean bill of health without hearing a good bit more. Why
didn't you ask whether or not I was guilty?"

"I didn't have to," she said slowly. "Some men could be murderers and
some couldn't. You couldn't. You might have to _kill_ a man--but not
murder him. You might do lots of things that wouldn't be right. I
don't know about that--but those people that convicted you were
fools!"

"Thank you," he said soberly. "You're right, Glory. I was as innocent
of that assassination as you are, yet they proved me guilty. It was
only through influence that I escaped ending my days in prison."

Then he gave her the story, which he had already told her father and
no one else in the mountains. She listened, thinking not at all of the
damaging circumstances, but secretly triumphant that she had been
chosen as a confidant.

But that night Spurrier looked up from a letter he was reading and let
his eyes wander to the rafters and his thoughts to the trout stream.

It was a letter, too, which should have held his attention. It
contained, on a separate sheet of paper, a list of names which was
typed and headed: "Confidential Memorandum." Below that appeared the
notation: "Members of the general assembly, under American Oil and Gas
influence. Also names of candidates who oppose them at the next
election, and who may be reached by us."

Spurrier lighted his pipe and his face became studious, but presently
he looked up frowning.

"I must speak to old Cappeze," he said aloud and musingly. "He's being
unfair to her." And that did not seem a relevant comment upon the
paper he held in his hand.

Then Spurrier started a little as from outside a human voice sounded
above the chorus of the frogs and whippoorwills.

"Hallo," it sung out. "Hit's Blind Joe Givins. Kin I come in?"

A few minutes later into the lamplight of the room shambled the beggar
of the disfigured face, whom Spurrier had last seen at the town of
Waterfall, led by a small, brattish boy. His violin case was tightly
grasped under his arm, and his free hand was groping.

"I'd done sot out ter visit a kinsman over at ther head of Big Wolfpen
branch," explained the blind man, "but ther boy hyar's got a stone
bruise on his heel an' he kain't handily go on, ter-night. We wonder
could we sleep hyar?"

Spurrier bowed to the law of the mountains, which does not deny
shelter to the wayfarer, but he shivered fastidiously at the unkempt
raggedness of his tramp-like visitor, and he slipped into his pocket
the papers in his hand.

That night before Spurrier's hearth, as in elder times before the
roaring logs of some feudal castle, the wandering minstrel paid his
board with song and music; his voice rising high and tremulous in
quaint tales set to measure.

But on the next morning the boy set out on some mission in the
neighborhood and left his charge to await his return, seated in a low
chair, and gazing emptily ahead.

Spurrier went out to the road in response to the shout of a passing
neighbor, and left his papers lying on the table top, forgetful of the
presence of the sightless guest, who sat so negligibly quiet in the
chimney corner.

When he entered the room again the blind man had risen from his seat
and moved across to the hearth. On the threshold the householder
halted and stood keenly eyeing him while he groped along the mantel
shelf as if searching with wavering fingers for something that his
eyes could not discover--and the thought of the papers which he had
left exposed caused an uneasy suspicion to dart into Spurrier's mind.
Any eye that fell on that list would have gained the key to his whole
strategy and intent, but, of course, this man could not see. Still
Spurrier cursed himself for a careless fool.

"I was jest seekin' fer a match," said Joe Givins as a slight sound
from the other attracted his attention. "I aimed ter smoke for a
leetle spell."

The host struck a match and held it while the broken guest kindled his
pipe, then he hurriedly glanced through his papers to assure himself
that nothing had been disturbed--and though each sheet seemed as he
had left it, the uneasiness in Spurrier's mind refused to be stilled.

Presumably this bat-blind ragamuffin was no greater menace to the
secrecy of his plans than a bat itself would have been, yet a glimpse
of this letter would have been so fatal that he asked himself
anxiously, "How do I know he's not faking?" The far-fetched
apprehension gathered weight like a snowslide until suddenly out of it
was born a grim determination.

He would make a test.

Noiselessly, while the ugly face that had been mutilated by a blasting
charge gazed straight and sightlessly at him, Spurrier opened the
table drawer and took from it a heavy calibered automatic pistol. It
was a deadly looking thing and it needed no cocking; only the silent
slipping forward of a safety catch. In this experiment Spurrier must
not startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfy
himself that his sight was genuinely dead.

"I thought," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchingly
studied the other face through narrowed lids, "that when sight went,
the enjoyment of tobacco went with it." As he spoke he raised and
leveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into the
staring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the baleful
stamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly as
a gargoyle of hatred.

If the man were by any possibility shamming it would take cold nerve
to sit there without any hint of confession as this unwarned
demonstration was made against him--a demonstration that seemed
genuine and murderous. For an instant Spurrier fancied that he heard
the breath rasp in the other's throat, but that, he realized, must
have been fancy. The face itself altered no line of expression,
flickered no eyelid. It remained as it had been, stolid and blank, so
that the man with the pistol felt ashamed of his suspicion.

But Spurrier rose and leaned across the table slowly advancing the
muzzle until it almost touched the bridge of the nose, just between
the eyes he was so severely testing. Still no hint of realization came
from the threatened guest. Then the voice of the blind man sounded
phlegmatically:

"That's what folks say erbout terbaccy an' blind men--but, by
crickety, hit _ain't so_."

John Spurrier withdrew his pistol and put it back in the drawer.

"I guess," he said to himself, "he didn't read my letters."




CHAPTER X


Across a tree-shaded public square from the courthouse and "jail
house" at Carnettsville stood a building that wore the dejected guise
of uncomforted old age, and among the business signs nailed about its
entrance was the shingle bearing the name of "Creed Faggott, Atty. at
Law."

The way to this oracle's sanctum lay up a creaking stairway, and on a
brilliant summer day not long after Spurrier had entertained his blind
guest it was climbed by that guest in person, led by the impish boy
whose young mouth was stained with chewing-tobacco.

This precocious child opened the door and led his charge in and, from
a deal table, Creed Faggott removed his broganned feet and turned sly
eyes upon the visitors, out of a cadaverous and furtive face.

"You don't let no grass grow under your feet, do you, Joe?" inquired
the lawyer shortly. "When the day rolls round, you show up without
default or miscarriage." He paused as the boy led the blind man to a
chair and then facetiously capped his interrogation. "I reckon I don't
err in surmisin' that you've come to collect your pension?"

The blind man gazed vacantly ahead. "Who, me?" he inquired with
half-witted dullness.

"Yes, you. Who else would I mean?"

"Hit's due, ain't hit--my money?"

"Due at noon to-day and noon is still ten minutes off. I'm not sure
the company didn't make a mistake in allowing you such a generous
compensation for your accident." There was a pause, then Faggott added
argumentatively: "Your damage suit would have come to naught, most
likely."

"Thet ain't ther way ye talked when I lawed ther comp'ny," whined the
blind man. "Ye 'peared to be right ambitious ter settle outen co'te in
them days, Mr. Faggott."

"The company didn't want the thing hanging on. They got cold feet.
Well, I'll give you your check."

"I'd ruther have hit in cash money--silver money," stipulated the
recipient of the compromise settlement. "I kin count _thet_ over by
ther feel of hit."

Faggott snorted his disgust but he deposited in the outstretched palm
the amount that fell due on each quarterly pay day, and the visitor
thumbed over every coin and tested the edges of all with his teeth.
After that, instead of rising to go, he sat silently reflective.

"That's all, ain't it," demanded the attorney, and something like a
pallid grin lifted the lip corners in the blind man's ugly face.

"Not quite all," replied Joe Givins as he shook his head. "No, thar's
one other leetle matter yit. I'd love ter hev ye write me a letter ter
ther comp'ny's boss-man in Looeyville. I kinderly aims ter go thar an'
see him."

This time it was the attorney who, with an incredulity-freighted
voice, demanded: "Who, you?"

"Yes, sir. Me."

"The Louisville manager," announced Faggott loftily, "is a man of
affairs. The company conducts its business here through its local
counsel--that's me."

"Nevertheless an' notwithstandin', I reckon hit'll kinderly pleasure
ther boss-man ter talk ter _me_--when he hears what I've got ter tell
him."

A light of greed quickened in the shyster's narrow eyes. It was
possible that Blind Joe had come by some scrap of salable information.
It had been stipulated when his damage suit was settled, that he
should, paradoxically speaking, keep his blind eyes open.

"See here, Joe," the attorney, no longer condescending of bearing,
spoke now with a wheedling insistence, "if you've got any tidings,
tell 'em to me. I'm your friend and I can get the matter before the
parties that hold the purse strings."

Joe Givins stretched out a wavering hand and groped before him. "Lead
me on outen hyar, boy," he gave laconic command to his youthful
varlet. "I'm tarryin' overlong an' wastin' daylight."

"What's daylight to you, Joe?" snapped Faggott brutally, but
recognizing his mistake he, at once, softened his manner to a mollifying
tone. "Set still a spell an' let's have speech tergether--an' a little
dram of licker."

Ten minutes of nimble-witted fencing ensued between the two sons
of avarice, and at their end the blind man stumped out, carrying
in his breast pocket a note of introduction to a business man
in Louisville--whose real business was lobbying and directing
underground investigations--but the lawyer was no wiser than he
had been.

And when eventually from the murky lobby of the Farmers' Haven Hotel,
which sits between distillery warehouses in Louisville, the shabby
mountaineer was led to the office building he sought, he was received
while more presentable beings waited in an anteroom.

It chanced that on the same day John Spurrier spoke to Dyke Cappeze of
Glory.

"When we went fishing," he said, "I asked her whether she never felt a
curiosity for the things beyond the ridges--and her eagerness startled
me."

An abrupt seriousness overspread the older face and the answering
voice was sternly pitched.

"I should be profoundly distressed, sir," said Cappeze, "to have
discontent brought home to her. I should resent it as unfriendly and
disloyal."

"And yet," Spurrier's own voice was quickened into a more argumentative
timber, "she has a splendid vitality that it's a pity to crush."

"She has," came the swift retort, "a contented heart which it's a pity
to unsettle."

The elder eyes hardened and looked out over the wall of obstinacy that
had immured Dyke Cappeze's life, but his words quivered to a tremor of
deep feeling.

"I've given her an education of sorts. She knows more law than some
judges, and if she's ignorant of the world of to-day she's got a
bowing acquaintance with the classics. I'm not wholly selfish. If
there was some one--down below that I could send her to--some one who
would love her enough because she needs to be loved--I'd stay here
alone, and willingly, despite the fact that it would well-nigh kill
me." He paused there and his eyes were broodingly somber, then almost
fiercely he went on: "I would trust her in no society where she might
be affronted or belittled. I would rather see her live and die here,
talking the honest, old crudities of the pioneers, than have her
venture into a life where she could not make her own terms."

"Perhaps she could make her own terms," hazarded Spurrier, and the
other snapped his head up indignantly.

"Perhaps--yes--and perhaps not. You yourself are a man of the world,
sir. What would--one of your own sort--have to offer her out there?"

Under that challenging gaze the man from the East found himself
flushing. It was almost as though under the hypothetical form of the
question, the father had bluntly warned him off from any interference
unless he came as an avowed suitor. He had no answer and again the
lawyer spoke with the compelling force of an ultimatum.

"She must stay here with me, who would die for her, until she goes to
some man who offers her everything he has to offer; some man who would
die for her, too." His voice had fallen into tenderness, but a stern
ring went with his final words. "Meanwhile, I stand guard over her
like a faithful dog. I may be old and scarred but, by God, sir, I am
vigilant and devoted!" He waved his thin hand with a gesture of
dismissal for a closed subject, and in a changed tone added:

"I've recently heard of two other travelers riding through--and they
have taken up several land options."

"What meaning do you read into it, Mr. Cappeze?"

The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. If he had no explanation to offer,
it was plain that he did not regard the coming of the strangers as
meaningless.

"I'm going," said Spurrier casually, "to make a trip up Snake Fork to
the head of Little Quicksand. Is there any one up there I can call on
for lodging and information?"

The lawyer shook his head. "It's a mighty rough country and sparsely
settled. You'll find a lavish of rattlesnakes--and a few unlettered
humans. There's a fellow up there named Sim Colby who might shelter
you overnight. He lives by himself, and has a roof that sheds the
rain. It's about all you can ask."

"It's enough," smiled Spurrier, and a few days later he found himself
climbing a stiff ascent toward a point where over the tree-tops a
thread of smoke proclaimed a human habitation.

He was coming unannounced to the house of Sim Colby, but if he had
expected his visit to be an entire surprise he was mistaken, and if he
had known the agitation that went a little way ahead of him, he would
have made a wide detour and passed the place by.

Sim was hoeing in his steeply pitched field when he saw and recognized
the figure which was yet a half-hour's walk distant, by the
meanderings of the trail. The hoe fell from his hand and his posture
stiffened so inimically that the hound at his feet rose and bristled,
a low growl running half smothered in its throat.

Doubtless, Colby reasoned, Spurrier was coming to his lonely house
with a purpose of venom and punishment, yet he walked boldly and to
the outward glance he seemed unarmed. Hence it must be that in the
former army officer's plan lay some intent more complex than mere
open-and-shut meeting and slaying: some carefully planned and guileful
climax to be approached by indirection. Very well, he would also play
the game out, burying his suspicion under a guise of artlessness, but
watching every move--and when the moment came striking first.

At a brook, as he hastened toward his house by a short cut, he knelt
to drink, for his throat was damnably dry, and in the clear water the
pasty pallor and terror of his face was given back to him, and warned
him. But also the mirroring brought another thought and the thought
fathered swift action. In the army he had been spare and clean-shaven
and a scar had marked his chin. Now he was bearded. He carried a
beefier bulk and an altered appearance.

Could there be any possibility of Spurrier's failing to recognize
him--of his having been, after all, ignorant of his presence here?

Yet his eyes would be recognizable. They were arrestingly distinctive,
for one of them was pale-blue and the other noticeably grayish.

By the path he was following, stalks of Jimson weed grew rank, and
Sim, rising from his knees, pulled off a handful of leaves and crushed
them between his palms. When he had reached the house his first action
was to force from this bruised leafage a few drops of liquid into a
saucer and this juice he carefully injected into his eyes.

Then he went to the door and squinted up at the sun. It would be
fifteen minutes before Spurrier would arrive and fifteen minutes might
be enough. He half closed his eyes, because they were stinging
painfully, and sat waiting, to all appearances indolent and
thoughtless.

Spurrier plodded on, measuring the distance to the smoke thread until
he came in view of the cabin itself, then he approached slowly since
the stiff climb had winded him.

Now he could see the shingle roof and the log walls, trailed over with
morning-glory vines, and in the door the slouching figure of a man. He
came on and the native rose lazily.

"My name's John Spurrier," called out the traveler, "and Lawyer
Cappeze cited you to me as a man who might shelter me overnight."

The man who had deserted chewed nonchalantly on a grass straw and
regarded the other incuriously--which was a master bit of dissembling.
Between them, it seemed to Sim Colby who had once been Private Grant,
lay the body of a murdered captain. Between them, too, lay the guilt
of his assassination. To the Easterner's appraisal this heavy-set
mountaineer with unkempt hair and ragged beard was merely a local type
and yet in one respect he was unforgettable.

It was his eyes. They were arrestingly uncommon eyes and, once seen,
they must be remembered. What was the quality that made one notice
them so instantly, Spurrier questioned himself. Then he realized.

They were inkily black eyes, but that was not all. There seemed to be
in them no line of demarcation between iris and pupil--only liquid
pools of jet.

The two men sat there as the shadows lengthened and talked "plumb
friendly" as Colby later admitted to himself. They smoked Spurrier's
"fotched-on" tobacco and drank native distillation from the demijohn
that Colby took down from its place on a rafter. Yet the host was
filling each tranquilly flowing minute with the intensive planning of
a hospitality that was, like Macbeth's, to end in murder.

Spurrier would sleep in an alcovelike room which could be locked from
the outside. Back through the brush was a spot of quicksand where a
body would leave no trace. One thing only troubled the planning brain.
He wished he could learn just who knew of his guest's coming here;
just what precautions that guest had taken before embarking on such a
venture.

From outside came a shout, interrupting these reflections, and Sim was
at once on his feet facing the front door, with a surreptitious hand
inside his shirt, and one eye covertly watching Spurrier, even as he
looked out. A snarl, too, drew his lips into an unpleasant twist.

The Easterner put down to mountain caution the amazing swiftness with
which the other had come from his hulking proneness to upstanding
alertness. But with equal rapidity, Sim's pose relaxed into ease and
he shouted a welcome as the door darkened with a figure physically
splendid in its spare strength and commanding height.

Spurrier rose and found himself looking into a face with most engaging
eyes and teeth that flashed white in smiling.

For a moment as 

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