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When the brook trout began to leap and flash Cappeze delegated Glory to act for him as Spurrier’s guide, and as the girl led the way to the likeliest pools, the young, straight-growing trees were not more gracefully slender.
The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had no delicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair. The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighter than her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom and like the hills she was wild of beauty.
Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to the pagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged to rigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ring within him as a tuning fork rings to its note.
Since the days of Augusta Beverly’s ascendency, he had never felt the need of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. At first he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-hater and more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, an expedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, and Vivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades so long as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been snobs in a sense, and in a sense he too was a snob.
But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things in their primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politer usage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his proffered comradeship for the attitude of the lover—and that would117have been most disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanations that would wound her, embarrass him and arouse the old man’s just ire. For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yet prouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own ground there was no common meeting place between their standards of living.
Yet Glory’s presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich and lyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would have believed in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stood fast when Augusta had cut loose.
This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally—and perhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased him to humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made him step more elastically as she went on ahead.
When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored, Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in grass that waved knee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she moved about crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself, herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.
“Glory,” he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the first time and in a mood of experiment.
As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, she turned toward him and answered in kind.
“What air hit, Jack?”
“Thank you.”
“What fer?”
“For calling me Jack.”
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Then her cheeks colored deeply and she wheeled to her work again. But after a little she faced him once more to say half angrily:
“I called ye Jack because ye called me Glory. You’ve always put a Miss afore hit till now, an’ I ’lowed ye’d done made up yore mind ter be friendly at last.”
“I’ve always wanted to be friendly,” he assured her. “It was you who began with a hickory switch and went on with hard words in Latin.”
The girl laughed, and the peal of her mirth transmuted their status and dispelled her self-consciousness. She came over and stood looking down at him with violet eyes mischievously a-sparkle.
“The co’te,” she announced, “hes carefully weighed there evidence in ther case of Jack Spurrier, charged with ther willful murder of Bob White, and is ready to enter jedgment. Jack Spurrier, stand up ter be sentenced!”
The man rose to his feet and stood with such well-feigned abjectness of suspense that she had to fight back the laughter from her eyes to preserve her own pose of judicial gravity.
“It is well established by the evidence befo’therco’te,” she went solemnly on, “thet ther defendant is guilty on every count contained in the indictment.” She checked off upon the fingers of the left hand the roster of his crime as she summarized it.
“He entered inter an unlawful conspiracy with the codefendant Rover, a setter dawg. He made a felonious assault without provocation. He committed murder in the first degree with malice prepense.”
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Spurrier’s head sank low in mock despair, until Glory came to her peroration and sentence.
“Yet since the defendant is amply proved to be a poor, ignorant wanderer upon the face of the earth, unpossessed of ordinary knowledge, the court is constrained to hold him incapable of discrimination between right an’ wrong. Hence he is not fully responsible for his acts of violence. Mercy as well as justice lies in the province of the law, twins of a sacred parentage and equal before the throne.”
She broke off in a laugh, and so sudden was the transition from absolute mimicry that the man forgot to laugh with her.
“Glory,” he demanded somewhat breathlessly, “have you ever been to a theater in your life? Have you ever seen a real actress?”
“No. Why?”
“Because youareone. Does this life satisfy you? Isn’t there anything off there beyond the hills that ever calls you?”
The dancing eyes grew abruptly grave, almost pained, and the response came slowly.
“Everythingdown thar calls ter me. I craves hit all!”
Spurrier suddenly recalled old Cappeze’s half-frightened vehemence when the recluse had inveighed against the awakening of vain longings in his daughter. Now he changed his manner as he asked:
“I wonder if I’d offend you if I put a question. I don’t want to.”
“Ye mout try an’ see. I ain’t got no power ter answer twell I hears hit.”
“All right. I’ll risk it. Your father doesn’t talk120mountain dialect. His English is pure—and you were raised close to him. Why doyouuse—the other kind?”
She did not at once reply and, when she did, the astonishingly adaptable creature no longer employed vernacular, though she spoke slowly and guardedly as one might who ventured into a foreign tongue.
“My father has lived down below as well as here. He’s a gentleman, but he aims—I mean he intends—to live here now till he dies.”
As she paused Spurrier prompted her.
“Yes—and you?”
“My father thinks that while Idolive here, I’d better fit into the life and talk in the phrases that don’t seem high-falutin’ to my neighbors.”
“I dare say,” he assured her with forced conviction, “that your father is right.”
There was a brief silence between them while the warm stillness of the woods breathed its incense and its langour, then the girl broke outimpulsively:
“I want to see and hear and taste everything, out there!”
Her hands swept outward with an all-embracing gesture toward the whole of the unknown. “There aren’t any words to tell how I want it! What do you want more than anything else, Jack?”
The man remained silent for a little, studying her under half-lowered lids while a smile hovered at the corners of his lips. But the smile died abruptly and it was with deep seriousness that he answered.
“I think, more than anything else, I want a clean name and a vindicated reputation.”
Glory’s eyes widened so that their violet depths became121pools of wondering color and her lips parted in surprise.
“A clean name!” she echoed incredulously. “What blight have you got on it, Jack?” Then catching herself up abruptly she flushed crimson and said apologetically: “That’s a question I haven’t any license to put to you, though. Only you broached the subject yourself.”
“And having broached it, I am willing to pursue it,” he assured her evenly. “I was an army officer until I was charged with unprovoked murder—and court-martialed; dishonorably discharged from the service in which my father and grandfather had lived and died.”
For a moment or two she made no answer but her quick expressiveness of lip and eye did not, even for a startled interval, betray any shock of horror. When she did speak it was in a voice so soft and compassionate that the man thought of its quality before he realized its words.
“Did the man that—that wasreallyguilty go scot free, whilst you had to shoulder his blame?”
There had been no question of evidence; no waiting for any denial of guilt. She had assumed his innocence with the same certainty that her eye assumed the flawlessness of the overheard blue. Her interest was all for his wronging and not at all for his alleged wrong.
The man started with surprise; the surprise of one who had trained himself into an unnatural callousness as a defense against what had seemed a universal proneness to convict. He had told himself that Glory would see with a straighter and more intuitive eye.122He had told her baldly of the thing which he seldom mentioned out of an inquisitiveness to test her reaction to the revelation, but he was unprepared for such unhesitant belief.
“I think you are the first human being, Glory,” he said quietly but with unaccustomed feeling in his voice, “who ever heard that much and gave me a clean bill of health without hearing a good bit more. Why didn’t you ask whether or not I was guilty?”
“I didn’t have to,” she said slowly. “Some men could be murderers and some couldn’t. You couldn’t. You might have tokilla man—but not murder him. You might do lots of things that wouldn’t be right. I don’t know about that—but those people that convicted you were fools!”
“Thank you,” he said soberly. “You’re right, Glory. I was as innocent of that assassination as you are, yet they proved me guilty. It was only through influence that I escaped ending my days in prison.”
Then he gave her the story, which he had already told her father and no one else in the mountains. She listened, thinking not at all of the damaging circumstances, but secretly triumphant that she had been chosen as a confidant.
But that night Spurrier looked up from a letter he was reading and let his eyes wander to the rafters and his thoughts to the trout stream.
It was a letter, too, which should have held his attention. It contained, on a separate sheet of paper, a list of names which was typed and headed: “Confidential Memorandum.” Below that appeared the notation: “Members of the general assembly, under American Oil and Gas influence. Also names of candidates123who oppose them at the next election, and who may be reached by us.”
Spurrier lighted his pipe and his face became studious, but presently he looked up frowning.
“I must speak to old Cappeze,” he said aloud and musingly. “He’s being unfair to her.” And that did not seem a relevant comment upon the paper he held in his hand.
Then Spurrier started a little as from outside a human voice sounded above the chorus of the frogs and whippoorwills.
“Hallo,” it sung out. “Hit’s Blind Joe Givins. Kin I come in?”
A few minutes later into the lamplight of the room shambled the beggar of the disfigured face, whom Spurrier had last seen at the town of Waterfall, led by a small, brattish boy. His violin case was tightly grasped under his arm, and his free hand was groping.
“I’d done sot out ter visit a kinsman over at ther head of Big Wolfpen branch,” explained the blind man, “but ther boy hyar’s got a stone bruise on his heel an’ he kain’t handily go on, ter-night. We wonder could we sleep hyar?”
Spurrier bowed to the law of the mountains, which does not deny shelter to the wayfarer, but he shivered fastidiously at the unkempt raggedness of his tramp-like visitor, and he slipped into his pocket the papers in his hand.
That night before Spurrier’s hearth, as in elder times before the roaring logs of some feudal castle, the wandering minstrel paid his board with song and music; his voice rising high and tremulous in quaint tales set to measure.
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But on the next morning the boy set out on some mission in the neighborhood and left his charge to await his return, seated in a low chair, and gazing emptily ahead.
Spurrier went out to the road in response to the shout of a passing neighbor, and left his papers lying on the table top, forgetful of the presence of the sightless guest, who sat so negligibly quiet in the chimney corner.
When he entered the room again the blind man had risen from his seat and moved across to the hearth. On the threshold the householder halted and stood keenly eyeing him while he groped along the mantel shelf as if searching with wavering fingers for something that his eyes could not discover—and the thought of the papers which he had left exposed caused an uneasy suspicion to dart into Spurrier’s mind. Any eye that fell on that list would have gained the key to his whole strategy and intent, but, of course, this man could not see. Still Spurrier cursed himself for a carelessfool.
“I was jest seekin’ fer a match,” said Joe Givins as a slight sound from the other attracted his attention. “I aimed ter smoke for a leetle spell.”
The host struck a match and held it while the broken guest kindled his pipe, then he hurriedly glanced through his papers to assure himself that nothing had been disturbed—and though each sheet seemed as he had left it, the uneasiness in Spurrier’s mind refused to be stilled.
Presumably this bat-blind ragamuffin was no greater menace to the secrecy of his plans than a bat itself would have been, yet a glimpse of this letter would125have been so fatal that he asked himself anxiously, “How do I know he’s not faking?” The far-fetched apprehension gathered weight like a snowslide until suddenly out of it was born a grim determination.
He would make a test.
Noiselessly, while the ugly face that had been mutilated by a blasting charge gazed straight and sightlessly at him, Spurrier opened the table drawer and took from it a heavy calibered automatic pistol. It was a deadly looking thing and it needed no cocking; only the silent slipping forward of a safety catch. In this experiment Spurrier must not startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfy himself that his sight was genuinely dead.
“I thought,” said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchingly studied the other face through narrowed lids, “that when sight went, the enjoyment of tobacco went with it.” As he spoke he raised and leveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into the staring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the baleful stamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly as a gargoyle of hatred.
If the man were by any possibility shamming it would take cold nerve to sit there without any hint of confession as this unwarned demonstration was made against him—a demonstration that seemed genuine and murderous. For an instant Spurrier fancied that he heard the breath rasp in the other’s throat, but that, he realized, must have been fancy. The face itself altered no line of expression, flickered no eyelid. It remained as it had been, stolid and126blank, so that the man with the pistol felt ashamed of his suspicion.
But Spurrier rose and leaned across the table slowly advancing the muzzle until it almost touched the bridge of the nose, just between the eyes he was so severely testing. Still no hint of realization came from the threatened guest. Then the voice of the blind man sounded phlegmatically:
“That’s what folks say erbout terbaccy an’ blind men—but, by crickety, hitain’t so.”
John Spurrier withdrew his pistol and put it back in the drawer.
“I guess,” he said to himself, “he didn’t read my letters.”
127CHAPTER X
Across a tree-shaded public square from the courthouse and “jail house” at Carnettsville stood a building that wore the dejected guise of uncomforted old age, and among the business signs nailed about its entrance was the shingle bearing the name of “Creed Faggott, Atty. at Law.”
The way to this oracle’s sanctum lay up a creaking stairway, and on a brilliant summer day not long after Spurrier had entertained his blind guest it was climbed by that guest in person, led by the impish boy whose young mouth was stained with chewing-tobacco.
This precocious child opened the door and led his charge in and, from a deal table, Creed Faggott removed his broganned feet and turned sly eyes upon the visitors, out of a cadaverous and furtive face.
“You don’t let no grass grow under your feet, do you, Joe?” inquired the lawyer shortly. “When the day rolls round, you show up without default or miscarriage.” He paused as the boy led the blind man to a chair and then facetiously capped his interrogation. “I reckon I don’t err in surmisin’ that you’ve come to collect your pension?”
The blind man gazed vacantly ahead. “Who, me?” he inquired with half-witted dullness.
“Yes, you. Who else would I mean?”
“Hit’s due, ain’t hit—my money?”
“Due at noon to-day and noon is still ten minutes128off. I’m not sure the company didn’t make a mistake in allowing you such a generous compensation for your accident.” There was a pause, then Faggott added argumentatively: “Your damage suit would have come to naught, most likely.”
“Thet ain’t ther way ye talked when I lawed ther comp’ny,” whined the blind man. “Ye ’peared to be right ambitious ter settle outen co’te in them days, Mr. Faggott.”
“The company didn’t want the thing hanging on. They got cold feet. Well, I’ll give you your check.”
“I’d ruther have hit in cash money—silver money,” stipulated the recipient of the compromise settlement. “I kin countthetover by ther feel of hit.”
Faggott snorted his disgust but he deposited in the outstretched palm the amount that fell due on each quarterly pay day, and the visitor thumbed over every coin and tested the edges of all with his teeth. After that, instead of rising to go, he sat silently reflective.
“That’s all, ain’t it,” demanded the attorney, and something like a pallid grin lifted the lip corners in the blind man’s ugly face.
“Not quite all,” replied Joe Givins as he shook his head. “No, thar’s one other leetle matter yit. I’d love ter hev ye write me a letter ter ther comp’ny’s boss-man in Looeyville. I kinderly aims ter go thar an’ see him.”
This time it was the attorney who, with an incredulity-freighted voice, demanded: “Who, you?”
“Yes, sir. Me.”
“The Louisville manager,” announced Faggott loftily, “is a man of affairs. The company conducts its business here through its local counsel—that’s me.”
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“Nevertheless an’ notwithstandin’, I reckon hit’ll kinderly pleasure ther boss-man ter talk terme—when he hears what I’ve got ter tell him.”
A light of greed quickened in the shyster’s narrow eyes. It was possible that Blind Joe had come by some scrap of salable information. It had been stipulated when his damage suit was settled, that he should, paradoxically speaking, keep his blind eyes open.
“See here, Joe,” the attorney, no longer condescending of bearing, spoke now with a wheedling insistence, “if you’ve got any tidings, tell ’em to me. I’m your friend and I can get the matter before the parties that hold the purse strings.”
Joe Givins stretched out a wavering hand and groped before him. “Lead me on outen hyar, boy,” he gave laconic command to his youthful varlet. “I’m tarryin’ overlong an’ wastin’ daylight.”
“What’s daylight to you, Joe?” snapped Faggott brutally, but recognizing his mistake he, at once, softened his manner to a mollifying tone. “Set still a spell an’ let’s have speech tergether—an’ a little dram of licker.”
Ten minutes of nimble-witted fencing ensued between the two sons of avarice, and at their end the blind man stumped out, carrying in his breast pocket a note of introduction to a business man in Louisville—whose real business was lobbying and directing underground investigations—but the lawyer was no wiser than he had been.
And when eventually from the murky lobby of the Farmers’ Haven Hotel, which sits between distillery warehouses in Louisville, the shabby mountaineer was130led to the office building he sought, he was received while more presentable beings waited in an anteroom.
It chanced that on the same day John Spurrier spoke to Dyke Cappeze of Glory.
“When we went fishing,” he said, “I asked her whether she never felt a curiosity for the things beyond the ridges—and her eagerness startled me.”
An abrupt seriousness overspread the older face and the answering voice was sternly pitched.
“I should be profoundly distressed, sir,” said Cappeze, “to have discontent brought home to her. I should resent it as unfriendly and disloyal.”
“And yet,” Spurrier’s own voice was quickened into a more argumentative timber, “she has a splendid vitality that it’s a pity to crush.”
“She has,” came the swift retort, “a contented heart which it’s a pity to unsettle.”
The elder eyes hardened and looked out over the wall of obstinacy that had immured Dyke Cappeze’s life, but his words quivered to a tremor of deep feeling.
“I’ve given her an education of sorts. She knows more law than some judges, and if she’s ignorant of the world of to-day she’s got a bowing acquaintance with the classics. I’m not wholly selfish. If there was some one—down below that I could send her to—some one who would love her enough because she needs to be loved—I’d stay here alone, and willingly, despite the fact that it would well-nigh kill me.” He paused there and his eyes were broodingly somber, then almost fiercely he went on: “I would trust her in no society where she might be affronted or belittled. I would rather see her live and die here, talking the131honest, old crudities of the pioneers, than have her venture into a life where she could not make her own terms.”
“Perhaps she could make her own terms,” hazarded Spurrier, and the other snapped his head up indignantly.
“Perhaps—yes—and perhaps not. You yourself are a man of the world, sir. What would—one of your own sort—have to offer her out there?”
Under that challenging gaze the man from the East found himself flushing. It was almost as though under the hypothetical form of the question, the father had bluntly warned him off from any interference unless he came as an avowed suitor. He had no answer and again the lawyer spoke with the compelling force of an ultimatum.
“She must stay here with me, who would die for her, until she goes to some man who offers her everything he has to offer; some man who would die for her, too.” His voice had fallen into tenderness, but a stern ring went with his final words. “Meanwhile, I stand guard over her like a faithful dog. I may be old and scarred but, by God, sir, I am vigilant and devoted!” He waved his thin hand with a gesture of dismissal for a closed subject, and in a changed tone added:
“I’ve recently heard of two other travelers riding through—and they have taken up several land options.”
“What meaning do you read into it, Mr. Cappeze?”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. If he had no explanation to offer, it was plain that he did not regard the coming of the strangers as meaningless.
“I’m going,” said Spurrier casually, “to make a132trip up Snake Fork to the head of Little Quicksand. Is there any one up there I can call on for lodging and information?”
The lawyer shook his head. “It’s a mighty rough country and sparsely settled. You’ll find a lavish of rattlesnakes—and a few unlettered humans. There’s a fellow up there named Sim Colby who might shelter you overnight. He lives by himself, and has a roof that sheds the rain. It’s about all you can ask.”
“It’s enough,” smiled Spurrier, and a few days later he found himself climbing a stiff ascent toward a point where over the tree-tops a thread of smoke proclaimed a human habitation.
He was coming unannounced to the house of Sim Colby, but if he had expected his visit to be an entire surprise he was mistaken, and if he had known the agitation that went a little way ahead of him, he would have made a wide detour and passed the place by.
Sim was hoeing in his steeply pitched field when he saw and recognized the figure which was yet a half-hour’s walk distant, by the meanderings of the trail. The hoe fell from his hand and his posture stiffened so inimically that the hound at his feet rose and bristled, a low growl running half smothered in its throat.
Doubtless, Colby reasoned, Spurrier was coming to his lonely house with a purpose of venom and punishment, yet he walked boldly and to the outward glance he seemed unarmed. Hence it must be that in the former army officer’s plan lay some intent more complex than mere open-and-shut meeting and slaying: some carefully planned and guileful climax to be approached by indirection. Very well, he would also play the game out, burying his suspicion under a guise133of artlessness, but watching every move—and when the moment came striking first.
At a brook, as he hastened toward his house by a short cut, he knelt to drink, for his throat was damnably dry, and in the clear water the pasty pallor and terror of his face was given back to him, and warned him. But also the mirroring brought another thought and the thought fathered swift action. In the army he had been spare and clean-shaven and a scar had marked his chin. Now he was bearded. He carried a beefier bulk and an altered appearance.
Could there be any possibility of Spurrier’s failing to recognize him—of his having been, after all, ignorant of his presence here?
Yet his eyes would be recognizable. They were arrestingly distinctive, for one of them was pale-blue and the other noticeably grayish.
By the path he was following, stalks of Jimson weed grew rank, and Sim, rising from his knees, pulled off a handful of leaves and crushed them between his palms. When he had reached the house his first action was to force from this bruised leafage a few drops of liquid into a saucer and this juice he carefully injected into his eyes.
Then he went to the door and squinted up at the sun. It would be fifteen minutes before Spurrier would arrive and fifteen minutes might be enough. He half closed his eyes, because they were stinging painfully, and sat waiting, to all appearances indolent and thoughtless.
Spurrier plodded on, measuring the distance to the smoke thread until he came in view of the cabin134itself, then he approached slowly since the stiff climb had winded him.
Now he could see the shingle roof and the log walls, trailed over with morning-glory vines, and in the door the slouching figure of a man. He came on and the native rose lazily.
“My name’s John Spurrier,” called out the traveler, “and Lawyer Cappeze cited you to me as a man who might shelter me overnight.”
The man who had deserted chewed nonchalantly on a grass straw and regarded the other incuriously—which was a master bit of dissembling. Between them, it seemed to Sim Colby who had once been Private Grant, lay the body of a murdered captain. Between them, too, lay the guilt of his assassination. To the Easterner’s appraisal this heavy-set mountaineer with unkempt hair and ragged beard was merely a local type and yet in one respect he was unforgettable.
It was his eyes. They were arrestingly uncommon eyes and, once seen, they must be remembered. What was the quality that made one notice them so instantly, Spurrier questioned himself. Then he realized.
They were inkily black eyes, but that was not all. There seemed to be in them no line of demarcation between iris and pupil—only liquid pools of jet.
The two men sat there as the shadows lengthened and talked “plumb friendly” as Colby later admitted to himself. They smoked Spurrier’s “fotched-on” tobacco and drank native distillation from the demijohn that Colby took down from its place on a rafter. Yet the host was filling each tranquilly flowing135minute with the intensive planning of a hospitality that was, like Macbeth’s, to end in murder.
Spurrier would sleep in an alcovelike room which could be locked from the outside. Back through the brush was a spot of quicksand where a body would leave no trace. One thing only troubled the planning brain. He wished he could learn just who knew of his guest’s coming here; just what precautions that guest had taken before embarking on such a venture.
From outside came a shout, interrupting these reflections, and Sim was at once on his feet facing the front door, with a surreptitious hand inside his shirt, and one eye covertly watching Spurrier, even as he looked out. A snarl, too, drew his lips into an unpleasant twist.
The Easterner put down to mountain caution the amazing swiftness with which the other had come from his hulking proneness to upstanding alertness. But with equal rapidity, Sim’s pose relaxed into ease and he shouted a welcome as the door darkened with a figure physically splendid in its spare strength and commanding height.
Spurrier rose and found himself looking into a face with most engaging eyes and teeth that flashed white in smiling.
For a moment as the newcomer gazed at Sim Colby his expression mirrored some sort of surprise and his lips moved as if to speak, but Spurrier could not see, because Colby’s back was turned, the warning glance that shot between the two, and the big fellow’s lips closed again without giving utterance to whatever he had been on the point of saying—something to do with eyes that had mystifyingly changed their color.
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“Mister Spurrier, this hyar’s Sam Mosebury,” announced the host. “Mebby ye mout of heered tell of him.”
Spurrier nodded. So this was the outlaw against whose terrorism old Cappeze had broken his Quixote lances, the windmill that had unhorsed him; the man with a criminal record at which a wild region trembled.
“I’ve heered tell of Mr. Spurrier, too,” vouchsafed the murderer equably. “He’s a friend of old Dyke Cappeze’s.”
The “furriner” made no denial. Though he had been sitting with his head in the jaws of death ever since he entered this door, it had been without any presentiment of danger. Now he felt the menace of this terrorist’s presence, and that menace was totally fictitious.
“Mr. Cappeze has befriended me,” he answered stiffly. “I reckon that’s not a recommendation to you, is it?”
The man who had newly entered laughed. He drew a chair forward and seated himself.
“I reckon, Mr. Spurrier, hit ain’t none of my business one way ner t’other,” he said. “Anyhow, hit ain’t no reason why you an’ me kain’t be friends, is hit?”
“It doesn’t make any difficulty with me,” laughed Spurrier in relief, “if it doesn’t with you.”
Sam Mosebury looked at him, then his voice came with a dry chuckle of humor.
“Over at my dwellin’ house,” he announced with a pleasant drawl, “I’ve got me a pet mockin’-bird—an’ I’ve got me a pet cat, too. Ther three of us meks up ther fam’ly over thar.”
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Spurrier looked at the strong-featured face as he prompted, “Yes?”
“Waal,” Sam Mosebury waved his hand, and even his gestures had a spacious bigness about them, “ef God Almighty didn’t see fit fer thet thar bird an’ thet thar cat ter love one another—I don’t seek ter alter His plan. Nonetheless I sets a passel of store by both of ’em.” He filled his pipe, then his words became musing, possibly allegorical. “Mebby some day I’llreelax a leetle mite too much in watchin’ an’ then I reckon ther cat’ll kill ther bird—but thet’s accordin’ ter nature, too, an’ deespite I’ll grieve some, I won’t disgust ther cat none.”
That night Spurrier lay on the same shuck-filled mattress with the man whom the law had not been strong enough to hang, and for a while he remained wakeful, reflecting on the strangeness of his bed-fellowship.
But, had he known it, his life was saved that night because the murderer had arrived and provided an interfering presence when the plans on foot required solitude.
138CHAPTER XI
Perhaps old Cappeze had spoken too late when he sounded his sharp warning to the newcomer against unsettling the simple contentment of his daughter’s mind. Always realizing his transient status in the aloofness of this life, Spurrier had scrupulously guarded his contact with the girl who belonged to it and who had no prospect of escaping it. He had sought to behave to her as he might have behaved to a child, with grave or gay friendliness untouched by those gallantries that might have been misunderstood, yet treating her intelligence with full and adult equality.
But his inclination to see more of her than formerly was one that he indulged because it gave him pleasure and because a failure to do so would have had the aspect of churlishness.
Those self-confessed traces of snobbery that adhered to this courtier at the throne of wealth, were attributes of which the girl saw nothing. Neither did she see the shell of cynicism which Spurrier had cultivated and this was not because her insight failed of keenness, but because in these surroundings they were dormant qualities.
The self that he displayed here was the self of the infectious smile, of the frank boldness and good humor that had made him beloved among his army139mess-mates before these more gracious qualities had been winter-killed by misfortune.
So he was the picturesque and charming version of himself, and he became to Glory an object of hero worship, whose presence made the day eventful and whose intervals of absence were filled with dreams of his next coming.
It was about this time that John Spurrier, the “opportunity hound,” made a disquieting discovery. It came upon him one night as he sat on the porch of Dyke Cappeze’s log house at twilight, with pipes glowing and seductive influences stealing into the senses. Daylight color had faded to the mistiness of tarnished silver except for a lemon afterglow above western ridges that were violet-gray, and the evening star was a single lantern hanging softly luminous, where soon there would be many others.
Cadenced and melodious as a lullaby fraught with the magic of the solitudes, the night song of frog and whippoorwill rose stealingly out of silence, and the materialist who had been city bound so much since conviction of crime had shadowed his life discovered the thing which threatened danger.
It came to him as his eyes met those of Glory, who sat in the doorway itself—since she, at least, need not fear to show her face to any lurking rifleman.
The yellow lamplight from within outlined the lovely contour of her rounded cheek and throat and livened her hair, but it was not only her undeniable beauty that caused Spurrier sudden anxiety. It was the eyes and what he read in them. Instantly as their gazes engaged she dropped her glance but, in the moment before she had masked her expression, Spurrier140knew that she had fallen in love with him. The eyes had said it in that instant when he had surprised them. They had immediately seized back their secret and hidden it away, but not in time.
The opportunity hound rose and knocked the ash from his pipe. He wondered whether old Dyke Cappeze, sitting there inscrutable and dimly shaped in the shadows, had shared his discovery—that grizzled old watchdog who was not too far gone to fight for his own with the strength of his yellowed fangs.
The visitor shook hands and walked moodily home, and as he went he sought to dismiss the matter from his mind. It was all a delusion, he assured himself; some weird psychological quirk born of a man’s innate vanity; incited by a girl’s physical allurement. He would go to sleep and to-morrow he would laugh at the moonshine problem. But he did not find it so easy to sleep. He remembered one of those men in the islands who had become a melancholiac. The fellow had been normal at one moment; then without warning something like an impenetrable shadow had struck across him. He had never come out of the shadow. So this disquiet—though it was abnormal elation rather than melancholy, had suddenly become a fact with himself, and instead of dismissing it Spurrier found himself reacting to it. Not only was Glory Cappeze in love with him but—absurdity of absurdities—he was in love with Glory!
It was as irreconcilable with all the logic of his own nature as any conceivable thing could be, yet it was undeniably true.
But Spurrier had been there in the hills when summer had overcome winter. He had seen trickles of141water grow into freshets and feed rivers. He had seen clouds as large as one’s hand swell abruptly into tempests that cannonaded mightily through the peaks, with the lashing of torrents, the sting of lightnings, and the onsweep of hurricanes. He had seen the pink flower of laurel and rhododendron make fragrant magic over wastes of chocolate and slag-gray mountain sides, and in himself something akin to these elemental forces had declared itself. He found himself two men, and though he swore resolutely that his brain should dominate and govern, he also recognized in himself the man of new-born impulses who drew the high air into his chest with a keen elation, and who wanted to laugh at the artificial things that life has wrought into its structure of accepted civilization.
That insurgent part of himself found a truer congeniality in the company of grizzled old Dyke Cappeze than that of Martin Harrison; a stronger comradeship in the frank laugh of Glory than in the cool intelligence of Vivien’s smile.
Glory’s brain was as alert as quicksilver, and her heart as high and clean as the hills. Yet in his own world these two would be as unplaced as gypsies strayed from their dilapidated caravan. Moreover, it was ordained that he was to win his game and upon him was to be conferred an accolade—the hand, in marriage, of his principal’s daughter.
Spurrier laughed a little grimly to himself. Of the woman whose hand had been half-promised him he could think dispassionately and of this other, whom he could not take with him into his world of artificial values, he could not think at all without a pounding142of pulses and a tumult which he thought he had left behind him with his early youth.
In character and genuine metal of mind, Glory was the superior of most of those women he knew, yet because she was country bred and trained to a code that did not obtain elsewhere, she could no more be removed from her setting than a blooming eidelweiss could be successfully transplanted in a conservatory. He himself was fixed into a certain place which he had attained by fighting his way, in the figurative sense at least, over the bodies of the less successful and the less enduring. It was too late for him to transplant himself, and he and she were plants of differing soil, as though one were a snow flower and one a tropic growth.
Also there were immediate things of which to think, such as an unexpired threat upon his life.
Already he had escaped the assassin’s first effort, and he had no guess where the enmity lay which had actuated that attack. That it still existed and would strike again he had a full realization. He was not walking in the shadow of dread but, because he knew of the menace lurking where all the faces were friendly, he had begun to feel that companionship of suspense: that nearness of something in hiding under which men lived here; and under which women grew old in their twenties.
And it is not given to a man to live under such conditions, and remain the man who fights only across mahogany tabletops in offices. Yet John Spurrier scornfully reasoned that if he could not remain himself even in a new and altered habitat, he was a weakling, and he had no intention of proving a weakling.
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His hand had grasped the plow-haft and, for the present, at least, his loyalty belonged to his undertaking.
This inward conflict went with him as he rode across the singing hills to gather up his mail at the nearest post office and he told himself, “I am a fool to ponder it.”
Then his thoughts ran on: “It is dwelling on factitious things that gives them force. Life presents a Janus aspect of the double-faced at times, but a man must choose his way and ignore the turnings. Glory has pure charm. She has a quick mind and a captivating beauty, but so far as I’m concerned, she is simply out of the picture. I could be mad about her, if I let myself—but presumably I am not adrift on a gulf stream of emotionalism.”
When he had spent an hour in the dusty little town and turned again into the coolness of the hills, he dismounted under the shade of a “cucumber tree” and glanced through those letters that were still unopened. One envelope was addressed in a hand that tantalized memory with a half sense of the familiar, and Spurrier’s brow contracted in perplexity.
Then his face grew abruptly grave. “By heavens!” he exclaimed. “It’s Withers—Major Withers! What can he be writing about?”
He opened it and drew out the sheet of paper, and, as he read, his expression went through the gamut of surprise and incredulity to a settled sternness of purpose that made his face stony.
“If it’s true,” he exclaimed, “the man is mine to kill! No, not to kill, either, but to take alive at all costs.”