58
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 Sam59Mosebury 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 therdeescription 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 knowyou, 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 around60the 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, because61too 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 subpœnaed. 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 redoubled62my 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, and63as 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.
64CHAPTER 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, the65chief 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 Iamleaving 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 to66establish 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 Snowdon67quietly. “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 youhavegrown. 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. Ihavehardened 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.”
68
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, every69development 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.
70
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 her71mentality 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 mediævalism 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, and72he 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 own73viewpoint, 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 station74at 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 entire75length 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.
76
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 her77expression 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 to78find 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.”
79CHAPTER 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’tyorefault no-how. Hit was thet—thet stuck-up furriner. Ihateshim!”
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.
80
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 stem81from 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 him82up 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 lessfora candidate thanagainstone 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. I83knew 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 and84the 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 he85paused, 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 time86he sat there breathingstertorouslywhile 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.