29
“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—ofthisbecause it would be impossible for me to be guilty of it—people,” he added, his voice rising with just a moment’s betrayal of30boyish 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 loved31you—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 naïve 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.
32
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.
33
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.”
“Ihaveheard your story,” admitted the other man34frankly. “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. He35would, 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.
36CHAPTER 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 little37company 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.”
38
“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 Cæsar’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 leaned39on 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 superficial40research, 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 stop41eliciting 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 beentoosuperficial. 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.”
42
“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, in43finance, 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.44I’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.”
45
“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.”
46
“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 stuck47pins 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 in48some 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.”
49CHAPTER 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 clear50his 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 dead51captain 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 and52there 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 of53a 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.
54
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 of55the 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,56but 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 some57man 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 aposse comitatusriding 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.