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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 formations88that 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.
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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.
90CHAPTER 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 ofplausibility.
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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 he92would 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 thebijuca93tangles. 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.94Instead, 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 downthet-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’95matter—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 vigilance96as 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 mergedmistilywith 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.97You 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. I98hedter 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,”99he 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 or100bird, 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 seasoned101life’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:
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“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 information103and 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 anæmia 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!”
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“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, itwouldpay, 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.105Nature 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 have106always 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 this107thing 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.
“Allyour 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.
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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.”
109CHAPTER 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 old110issues 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 preëmpted 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.
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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 came112primed 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 kerosene.”
“I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an’ green,I used ter work a standard rig an’ drill fer kerosene.”
“I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an’ green,
I used ter work a standard rig an’ drill fer kerosene.”
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,113Until a comp’ny foreman, plum’ heedless in his mindLet nitroglycereenexplode an’ made me go stone blind.”
“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,113Until a comp’ny foreman, plum’ heedless in his mindLet nitroglycereenexplode an’ made me go stone blind.”
“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,
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Until a comp’ny foreman, plum’ heedless in his mind
Let nitroglycereenexplode 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 fight114for 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, “whatishe 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.”
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“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. Hemaybe 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: “Folkssaysthet feller’s buyin’ land. God knows what fer he wants hit, but ef hedoeshone fer hit, hit’s kinderly probable thet hit’s wuth holdin’ on to.”