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He drew her to a shadowed corner out of line with both door and window, and seized her passionately in his arms.
“If we—can’t have each other——” he declared tensely, “I don’t want life. You said you’d almost rather see me killed than lose me to another woman. Now, listen!”
Holding her close to his breast, he drew a deep breath and his narrowed eyes softened into something like contentment.
“If you tried to go out first, you’d die before they recognized you. They think I’m alone here and they’ll shoot at the first movement. But ifIgo out first and fight as long as I can then they’ll be satisfied and the way will be clear for you.”
She threw back her head and her hysterical laugh was scornful.
“Clear for me afteryou’redead!” she exclaimed. “Hev ye got two guns? We’ll both go out alive or else neither one of us.”
Then suddenly she drew away from him, and he saw her hurriedly scribbling on a scrap of paper. Outside it was quiet again.
Glory folded the small sheet and took the pigeon from its basket and then, for the first time, Spurrier, who had forgotten the bird, divined her intent.
He was busying himself with laying out cartridges, and preparing for a siege, and when he looked up again she stood with the bird against her cheek, just as she had held the dead quail on that first day.
But before he could interfere she had drawn near the window and he saw that to reach the broken pane175and liberate the pigeon she must, for a moment, stand exposed.
He leaped for her with a shout of warning, but she had straightened and thrust the bird out, and then to the accompaniment of a horrible uproar of musketry that drowned his own outcry he saw her fall back.
Spurrier was instantly on his knees lifting the drooping head, and as her lids flickered down she whispered with a pallid smile:
“The bird’s free. He’ll carry word home—if ye kin jest hold ’em back fer a spell and——”
176CHAPTER XIII
The window through whose broken pane Glory had dispatched her feathered messenger could not be seen into from the exterior. That was a temporary handicap for the besiegers and one upon which, in all their forethought, they had not calculated. It happened that at this hour of the afternoon the slanting sun struck blindingly upon the glass that still remained unbroken and confused the ambushed eyes that raked the place from advantageous points along the upper slopes.
So when Glory had risen there for an instant, against the window itself, the vigilant assassins had been able to make out only the unidentified shadow of a figure moving there, and upon that figure, at point-blank range, they had loosed their volley. Whose figure it was they could not tell, and since they believed their intended victim to be alone they did not question. In the confusion of the instant, with the glare on windowpanes, they missed the spot of light that rose phœnixlike as the pigeon took flight. The frightened bird mounted skyward unnoted and flustered by the bellowing of so much gunnery.
But Spurrier’s shout of horror was heard by the besiegers and misinterpreted as a cry wrung from him under a mortal wound.
The assailants had not seen nor suspected Glory’s approach because she had come from the front, and had177arrived before they, drawing in from the rear and sides, had reached their stations commanding a complete outlook. They had assumed their victim to be in solitary possession and now they also assumed him to be helpless—perhaps already dead.
Yet they waited, following long-revered precepts of wariness, before going onward across the open stretch of the dooryard for an ultimate investigation. He might die slowly—and hard. He might have left in him enough fight to take a vengeful toll of the oncoming attackers—and they could afford to make haste slowly.
So they settled down in their several hiding places and remained as inconspicuous as grass burrowing field mice. The forest cathedral which they defiled seemed lifeless in the hushed stillness of the afternoon as the sun rode down toward its setting.
John Spurrier, inside the house, living where he was supposed to be dead, at first made no sound that carried out to them across the little interval of space.
He was kneeling on the floor with the girl’s head cradled on his knees and in his throat sounded only smothering gasps of inarticulate despair. These low utterances were animal-like and wrung him with the agonies of heartbreak. He thought that she must have died just after the whisper and the smile with which she had announced her success in her effort to save him.
Kneeling there with the bright head inert on his corduroy-clad knee, he fancied that the smile still lingered on her lips even after she had laid down her life for him five minutes from the time he had forsworn her.
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Now that she was gone and he about to go, he could recognize her as a serene and splendid star shining briefly above the lurid shoddiness of his own grasping life—and the star had set.
At first a profoundly stunned and torpid feeling held him numb; a blunt agony of loss and guilt, but slowly out of that wretched paralysis emerged another thought. He was helpless to bring her back and that futility would drive him mad unless out of it could come some motive of action.
She was not only dead, but dead by the hands of murderers who had come after him—and all that remained was the effort to avenge her. Like waters moving slowly at first but swelling into freshet power, wrath and insatiable thirst for vengeance swept him to a sort of madness.
Here he was kneeling over the unstirring woman he had loved while out there were the murder hirelings who had brought about the tragedy. Her closed and unaccusing eyes, exhorting him as passionate utterances could not have done, incited him to a frenzy. At least some of these culprits must go unshriven, and by his own hand to the death that inevitably awaited himself.
And as Spurrier’s flux of molten emotions seethed about that determination a solidifying transition came over him and his brain cleared of the blind spots of fury into the coherency of a plan.
Out there they would wait for a while to test the completeness of their success. If he gave way to his passion and challenged them as inclination clamored to do, they would dispatch him at leisure.
Just now he was willing enough to die, but entirely179unwilling to die alone. He craved company and a red journey for that final crossing. So once more he looked down into the face on which there was no stir of animation, then very gently bent and kissed the quiet lips.
“If you could come back to me,” he chokingly whispered, “I’d unsay everything, except that I love you. But if there’s a meeting place beyond, I’ll join you soon—when I’ve made them pay for you.”
He lifted her tenderly and, through his agitation, came a sudden realization of how light she was as he laid her gently on his army cot. After that he picked up his rifle and bulged out his pockets with cartridges.
The cockloft above his room, which was reached by a ladder, had windows which were really only loopholes and from there he could better see into the tangle that sheltered his enemies.
He entertained no vain hope of rescue. He asked for no deliverance. The story drew to its ending and he meant to cap it with the one climax to which the last half hour had left anything of significance. Since small things become vastly portentous when written into the margin between life and death, he hoped that before he died he might recognize the face of at least one of the men whom he meant to take with him across the River of Eternity.
So, dedicating himself to that motive, he climbed the ladder.
Peering out through first one and then the other of the loopholes of the cockloft, he waited, and it seemed to him that he waited eternally. He began to fear that his self-sure attackers would content themselves180with an inactive vigil and that after all he was to be cheated.
The sun was westering. The shadows were elongating. The sounds through the woods were subtly changing from the voices of day to those of approaching night.
Still he waited.
Outside also they were waiting; waiting to make sure that it was safe to go in and confirm their presumption that he had fallen.
But when Spurrier had, in a little time as the watch recorded it, served out his purgatorial sentence, he sensed a stir in the massed banks of the laurel and thrust his rifle barrel outward in preparation for welcome. A moment afterward he saw a hat with a downturned brim—a coat with an upturned collar—a pair of shoulders that hunched slowly forward with almostimperceptiblemovement. His mind had become a calculating machine now, functioning with deliberate surety.
The unrecognizable figure out there was a hundred yards away and the rifle he held would bore through the head under the hat crown at that range as a gimlet bores through a marked spot on soft pine.
But a single shot would end the show. No one else would appear and even the dead man would be hauled back by his heels—unidentified. He would wait until he could make his bag of game more worth dying for—more worthherdying for!
Other ages seemed to elapse before the butternut figure showed stretched at length in the tall grass outside the thicket and a second hat appeared. Still Spurrier held his fire until three hats were visible and the181first man, having crawled to a tree trunk, had half risen.
He realized that he could not much longer hold it. At any moment they might rush the place in force of numbers, and from more than one side, smothering his defense—and once in contact with the walls they would need only a lighted torch.
So he sighted with target-range precision and fired, following the initial effort with snap-shots at the second and third visible heads.
He had the brief satisfaction of seeing the first man plunge forward, clawing at the earth with hands that dropped their weapon. He saw the second stumble, recover himself, stumble again and then start crawling backward with a disabled, crablike locomotion, while the third figure turned, unharmed, and ran to cover. But at the same moment he heard shouts and shots from the other side which called him instantly to the opposite loophole and, once there, kept him pumping his rifle against what appeared to be a charge of confused figures that he had no leisure to inspect. They, too, fell back under the vigor of his punishment, and Spurrier found himself reloading in a silence that had come as suddenly as the noise of the onrush.
He had shot down two assailants, but both had been retrieved beyond sight by their confederates, and the besieged man groaned with a realization of defeated purpose. The sun was low now and soon it would be too dark to see. Then the trappers would close in and take the rat out of the trap. What he failed to do while daylight lasted, he would never do.
In only one respect did his judgment fail him as he sought to forecast the immediate future. It seemed to182him that he had spent hours there in the cockloft, whereas perhaps thirty minutes had elapsed.
He had been thinking of the pigeon, but had put aside hope as to succor from that agency. Old Cappeze was not interested in pigeons. The bird would go to roost in its dovecote and sit all night with its head tucked placidly under its wing—and the plea for help unread on its leg—and the lawyer would never think of looking into the dovecote.
Now, since he had failed and must die unavenged—for the wounding of two unidentified enemies failed of satisfaction—he must utilize what was left of life intensively. Once more before he died, he wanted to see the face of the woman whom he had forsworn; the woman who was worth infinitely more than the tawdry regards for which he had given her up.
So he went down the ladder and knelt beside the cot.
He laid his ear close to the bosom and could have sworn that it fluttered to a half heartbeat.
Suddenly Spurrier closed his hands over his face and for the first time in years he prayed.
“Almighty Father,” he pleaded, “give her back to me! Give me one other chance—and exact whatever price Thy wisdom designates.”
To Toby Austin’s meager farm, which abutted on that of Dyke Cappeze, that afternoon had trudged Bud Hawkins. In all the mountain region thereabout his name was well known and any man of whom you had asked information would have told you that Bud was “the poorest and the righteousest man that ever rode circuit.”
For Bud was among other things a preacher. To183use his own words, “I farms some, I heals bodies some, an’ I gospels some.” And in each of his avocations he followed faithfully the lights of his conscience.
His own farm lay a long way off, and now he was here as a visitor. This afternoon he fared over to the house of Dyke Cappeze as was his custom when in that neighborhood. He regarded Cappeze as a righteous man and a “wrastler with all evil,” and he came bearing the greetings of a brotherhood of effort.
The sun was low when he arrived, and the old lawyer confessed to a mild anxiety because of Glory’s failure to return before the hour which her clean-cut regularity fixed as the time of starting the supper preparations.
“She took a carrier pigeon over to Aunt Erie Toppit’s,” explained Dyke, “and I looked for her back before now.”
“I sometimes ’lows, Brother Cappeze,” asserted the visitor with an enthusiasm of interest, “thet in these hyar days of sin when God don’t show Hisself in signs an’ miracles no more, erbout ther clostest thing ter a miracle we’ve got left, air ther fashion one of them birds kin go up in ther air from any place ye sots hit free at an’ foller ther Almighty’s finger pointin’ home.”
Cappeze told him that there was just now only one pigeon in the dovecote, where the pair belonged, but that one he offered to show, and idly be led the way to the place back above the henroosts.
It is, however, difficult for any man to sink his own absorptions in those of another, and so it fell about that on the way Cappeze stopped at the barn he was building and which was not yet quite complete.
“Brother Hawkins,” he said, “as we go along I want184to show you the barn I’ve been planning for years—and at last have nearly realized.”
In the crude, unfinished life of the hills, lean-tos and even rock ledges are pressed into service as barns, but the man who has erected an ample and sound structure for such a purpose, stamps himself as one who “has things hung up,” which is the mountain equivalent for wealth.
“That barn,” explained Cappeze, pausing before it in expansiveness of mood, “is a thing I’ve wanted ever since I moved over here. A good barn stands for a farm run without sloven make-shift—and that one cost me well-nigh as much money as my dwelling house. I reckon it sounds foolish, but to me that building means a dream come true after long waiting. I’ve skimped myself saving to build it, and it’s the apple of my eye. If I saw harm come to it, I almost think it would hurt me more than to lose the house I live in.”
“I reckon no harm won’t come ter hit, Brother Cappeze,” reassured the other. “Yit hit mout be right foresighted to insure hit erginst fire an’ tempest.”
“Of course I will—when it’s finished,” said the other as he led the way inside, and then as he played guide, he forgot the pigeons and swelled with the pride of the builder, while time that meant life and death went by, so that it was quite a space later that they emerged again and went on to the destination which had first called them.
But having arrived there, the elder man halted and his face shadowed to a disturbed perplexity.
“That’s strange,” he murmured. “One pigeon’s inside—the hen—and there’s the cocktryingto get in.185It’s the bird Glory took with her. It must have gotten away from her.”
“’Pears like ter me,” volunteered the preacher, “hit’s got some fashion of paper hitched on ter one leg. Don’t ye dis’arn hit, Brother Cappeze?”
Cappeze started as his eyes confirmed the suggestion. Hurriedly he ran up the ladder to the resting plank where the bird crooned and preened itself, plainly asking for admittance to its closed place of habitation. Perhaps his excited manner alarmed the pigeon, which would alight on Glory’s shoulder without a qualm, for as the man reached out his hand for it, it flutteringly eluded him and took again to the air.
But now his curiosity was aroused. Possibly Glory meant to stay the night at Aunt Erie’s and had sent him her announcement in this form. He went for grain and scattered it, and after repeated efforts succeeded in capturing the messenger.
But when he loosened the paper and read it his face went abruptly white and from his lips escaped an excited “Great God!”
He thrust the note into the preacher’s hand and rushed indoors, emerging after a few minutes with eyes wildly lit and a rifle in his hands. Bud Hawkins understood, for he had read in the interval the scribbled words:
Stopped at Jack Spurrier’s house. It’s surrounded. Men are shooting at us on all sides.
Stopped at Jack Spurrier’s house. It’s surrounded. Men are shooting at us on all sides.
Dyke Cappeze was the one man to whom Spurrier had confided both the circumstances of his mysterious waylaying and the matter of the rattlesnakes and now186the father was not discounting the peril into which his daughter had strayed.
“I’m going on ahead, Brother Hawkins,” he announced. “I want you to send out a general alarm and to follow me with all the armed men you can round up.” There he halted in momentary bewilderment. In that sparsely peopled territory the hurried mustering of an adequate force on such short order was in itself almost an impossibility. There were no means of communication. Abruptly, the old lawyer wheeled and pointed a thin and quivering index finger toward his beloved barn.
“There’s just one way,” he declared with stoical directness. “All my neighbors will come to fight a fire. I’ve got to set my own barn to get them here!”
Five minutes later the structure sent up its black massed summons of smoke, shot with vermilion, as the shingles snapped and showed glowingly against the black background of vapor, even in the brightness of the afternoon.
Dyke Cappeze himself was on his way, and the preacher remaining behind was meeting and dispatching each hurried arrival. As he did so his voice leaped as it sometimes leaped in the zealot’s fervor of exhortation, and he sent the men out into the fight with rifle and shotgun as trenchantly as he expounded peace from the pulpit.
When a dozen men had ridden away, scattering gravel from galloping hoofs, he rode behind the saddle cantle of the last, for it was not his doctrine to hold his hand when he sent others into battle. Also he might be needed there as a minister, a doctor, or both.
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As sunset began to wane to twilight the attackers who lay circled about Spurrier’s cabin found themselves growing restive.
And inside John Spurrier was a man reanimated by the faint signs of life which he had discovered in Glory.
A pulse still fluttered in her heart, but it throbbed flickeringly and its life spark was pallid. Every moment this malevolent pack held its cordon close was as surely a moment of strangling her faint chance as if their fingers had been physically gripping her soft throat. And he could only kneel futilely beside her and wait!
From his loopholes upstairs he saw once more two hats and gave their wearers shot for shot, but when they kept their rifles popping he suspected their purpose and dashed across the floor in time to send three rapidly successive bullets into a little group that had detached itself from the timber on that side and was creeping toward the house. One crawling body collapsed and lay sprawling without motion. Two others ran back crouching low and were lost to sight.
So he swung pendulumlike from side to side, firing and changing base, and when his second turn brought him to the window through which he had shot his man, he saw that the body had already been removed from sight.
188CHAPTER XIV
It was a hopeless game and a grim one. He could not cover all the defenses long in single-handed effort, and the best he could hope for was to die in ample companionship. Now, two men had reached broad-girthed oaks, halfway between thicket and house. There they were safe for the next rush.
So this was the end of the matter! Spurrier reloaded his rifle and went down the ladder. Hastily he carried Glory into the room at the back and overturned his heavy table to serve as a final barricade. He elected to die here when they swarmed the door from which he could no longer keep them, crowning the battle with a finale of punishment as they crowded through the breach.
But the minutes dragged with irksome tension. He was keyed up now, wire-tight, for the finish, and yet silence fell again and denied him the relief of action. To Spurrier it was like a long and cruel delay imposed upon a man standing blindfolded and noosed on the scaffold trap. Then the quiet was ripped with a totally wasteful fusillade, as though every attacker outside were pumping his gun in a contest of speed rather than effect.
Spurrier smiled grimly. Let them burn their powder—he would have his till they massed in front of his muzzle and the barrier fell.
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“When the barrier fell!” Crouched there behind the table where he meant to sell his life in that brief space that seemed long, the words brought with them the memory of one of the few poems that had ever meant much to him—and while he awaited death his mind seized upon the lines—a funeral address in soliloquy!
“For the journey is done and the summit attained,And the barriers fall——”
“For the journey is done and the summit attained,And the barriers fall——”
“For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall——”
He strained his ears to his listening and then through his head ran other verses:
“I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,The best and the last!I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and foreboreAnd bade me creep past——”
“I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,The best and the last!I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and foreboreAnd bade me creep past——”
“I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forebore
And bade me creep past——”
Was that a battering-ram against timber that he heard? He fingered the trigger.
“Then a light, then thy breast,O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,And with God be the rest!”
“Then a light, then thy breast,O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,And with God be the rest!”
“Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!”
But the door did not fall. The rifle cracking became interspersed with alarmed outcries of warning and confusion. He could even hear the brush torn with the hurried tramping of running feet, and then the pandemonium abruptly stopped dead, and after a long period of inheld breath there followed a loud rapping on the door and a voice of agonized anxiety shouted:
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“In God’s name open if ye’re still alive. It’s Cappeze—and friends!”
The psychological effect of that recognized voice upon John Spurrier, and of its incredible meaning, was strange to the point of grotesquerie. Its sound carried a complete reversal of everything to which his mind had been focussed with a tensity which had keyed itself to the acceptance of a violent death, and with the reversal came reaction. There was no interim of preparation for the altered aspect of affairs. It was precisely as though a runaway train furiously speeding to the overhang of an unbridged chasm had suddenly begun dashing in the contrary direction with no shade of lessening velocity, and no grinding of breaks to a halt between time.
Spurrier had taken no thought of physical strain. He had not known that he was wearied with nerve wrack and pell-mell dashing from firing point to firing point. He knew nothing of the picture he made with clothing torn from his scrambling rushes up-ladder and down-ladder and his crouching and shifting among the rough nail-studded spaces of the cockloft. Of the face, sweat-reeking and dust-smeared, he had no realization, but when that voice called out and he knew that rescuers were clamoring where assassins had laid siege, the stout knees under him buckled weakly, and the fingers that had fitted his rifle as steadily as part of its own metallic mechanism became so inert that they could scarcely maintain their grip upon the weapon.
John Spurrier, emotionally stirred and agitated as he had never been in battle, because of the limp figure that lay under that roof, stood gulping and struggling191for a lost voice with which to give back a reply. He rocked on his feet and then, like a drunken man went slowly and unsteadily forward to lift the bar of the door.
When he had thrown it wide the rush of anxious men halted, backing up instinctively, as their eyes were confused by the inner murk and their nostrils assailed by the acrid stench of nitrate, from the vapors of burnt powder that hung stiflingly between the walls and ceiling rafters. Old Cappeze was at their front and when he saw before him the battle begrimed and drawn visage of the man, he looked wildly beyond it for the other face that he did not see, and his voice broke and rose in a high, thin note that was almost falsetto as he demanded: “Where is she? Where’s Glory?”
John Spurrier sought to speak but the best he could do was to indicate with a gesture half appealing and half despairing to the door of the other room, where she lay on his army cot. The father crossed its threshold ahead of him and dropped to his knees there with agonized eyes, and Bud Hawkins, the preacher and physician, not sure yet in which capacity he must act, was bent at his shoulder, while Spurrier exhorted him with a recovered but tortured voice, “In God’s name, make haste. There’s only a spark of life left.”
From the crowd which had followed and stood massed about the door came a low but unmistakable smother of fury, as they saw the unmoving figure of the girl, and those at the edge wheeled and ran outward again with the summary resoluteness that one sees in hounds cast off at the start of the chase.
Upon those who remained Brother Hawkins192wheeled and swept out his hands in a gesture of imperative dismissal.
“Leave us alone, men,” he commanded. “I needs ter work alone hyar—with ther holp of Almighty God.”
But he worked kneeling, tearing away the clothing over the wounded breast, and while he did so he prayed with a fervor that was fiercely elemental, yet abating no whit of his doctor’s efficiency with his surprisingly deft hands, while his lips and heart were those of the religionist.
“Almighty Father in Heaven,” he pleaded, “spare this hyar child of Thine ef so be Thy wisdom suffers hit.”
There he broke off and as though a different man were speaking, shot over his shoulder the curt command: “Fotch me water speedily—Because Almighty Father, she’s done fell a victim of evil men thet fears Thee not in th’ar hearts!”
After a little Brother Hawkins dismissed even the father and Spurrier from the room and worked on alone, the voice of his praying sounding over his activity.
Ten minutes later, in a crowded room, Bud Hawkins, preacher and physician, laid one hand on Spurrier’s shoulder and the other on Cappeze’s.
“Men,” he said in a hushed voice, “I fears me ther shot thet hit her was a deadener. Yit I kain’t quite fathom hit nuther. She’s back in her rightful senses ergin—but she don’t seem terwantto live, somehow. She won’t put for’ard no effort.”
Spurrier wheeled to face them both and his voice came with tense, gasping earnestness.
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“Before she dies, Brother Hawkins,” he pleaded, “you’re a minister of the gospel—I want you to marry us.” He wheeled then on the rescuers, who stood breathing heavily from exertion and fight.
“Two of you men stay here as wedding witnesses,” he commanded. “One of you ride hell-for-leather to the nearest telephone and call up Lexington. Have a man start with bloodhounds on a special train. The rest of you get into the timber and finecomb it for some scrap of cloth—or anything that will give the dogs a chance when they get here.”
Once more Spurrier was the officer in command, and snappily his hearers sprang to obedience, but when the place had almost emptied, the three turned and went into the back room, and, kneeling there beside the wounded girl, Spurrier whispered:
“Dearest, the preacher has come—to wed us.”
Glory’s eyes with their deeps of color were startlingly vivid as they looked out of the pallid face upon which a little while ago John Spurrier had believed the white stamp of death to be fixed.
The features themselves, except the eyes, seemed to have shrunken from weakness into wistful smallness, and if the girl had returned, in the phrases of the preacher, “to her rightful senses” it had been as one coming out of a dream who realizes that she wakes to heartburnings which death had promised to smooth away.
Now, as the man stretched out his hand to take hers and drew a ring from his own little finger, the violet eyes on the rough pillow became transfigured with a luminous and incredulous happiness. But at once they clouded again with gravity and pain.
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Spurrier was offering to marry her out of pity and gratitude. He was seeking to pay a debt, and his authoritative words were spoken from his conscience and not from his heart.
So the lips stirred in an effort to speak, failed in that and drooped, and weakly but with determination Glory shook her head. She had been willing to die for him. She could not argue with him, but neither would she accept the perfunctory amends that he now came proffering.
Spurrier rose, pale, and with a tremor of voice as he said to the others: “Please leave us alone—for a few moments.” Then when no one was left in the room but the girl on the bed and the man on his knees beside it, he bent forward until his eyes were close to hers and his words came with a still intensity.
“Glory, dearest, though I don’t deserve it, you’ve confessed that you love me. Now I claim the life you were willing to lay down for me—and you can’t refuse.”
There was wistfulness in her smile, but through her feebleness her resolution stood fast and the movement of her head was meant for a shake of refusal.
“But why, dear,” he argued desperately, “why do you deny me when we know there’s only one wish in both our hearts?”
His hands had stolen over one of hers and her weak fingers stirred caressingly against his own. Her lips stirred too, without sound, then she lay in a deathlike quiet for a moment or two summoning strength for an effort at speech, and he, bending close, caught the ghost of a whisper.
“I don’t seek payment ... fer what I done.” A195gasp caught her breath and silenced her for a little but she overcame it and finished almost inaudibly. “It was ... a free-will gift.”
John Spurrier rose and sat on the side of the bed. His voice was electrified by the thrill of his feeling; a feeling purged of all artificiality by the rough shoulder touch of death.
“I’m asking another gift, now, Glory; the greatest gift of all. I’m asking yourself. Don’t try to talk—only listen to me because I need you desperately. Except for you they would have killed me to-day—but my life’s not worth saving if I lose you after all. I’m two men, dearest, rolled into one—and one of those men perhaps doesn’t deserve much consideration, but there’s some good in the other and that good can’t prevail without you any more than a plant can grow without sun.”
With full realization, he was pitching his whole argument to the note of his own selfish needs and wishes, and yet he was guided by a sure insight into her heart. Brother Hawkins had said she had no wish to live and would make no fight, and he knew that he might plead endlessly and in vain unless he overcame her belief that he was actuated merely by pity for her. If she could be convinced that it was genuinely he who needed her more than she needed him, her woman quality of enveloping in supporting love the man who leaned on her, would bring consent.
“I sought to strengthen myself for success in life,” he went on, “by strangling out every human emotion that stood in the way of material results. I serve men who sneer at everything on God’s earth except the196practical, and I had come to the point where I let those men shape me and govern even my character.”
She had been listening with lowered lids and as he paused, she raised them and smiled wanly, yet without any sign of yielding to his supplications.
“The picture that you saw,” he swept on torrentially, “was that of a girl whose father employs me. He’s a leader in big affairs and to be his son-in-law meant, in a business sense, to be raised to royalty. Vivien is a splendid woman and yet I doubt if either of us has——” he fumbled a bit for his next words and then floundered on with self-conscious awkwardness, “has thought of the other with real sentiment. Until now, I haven’t known what real sentiment meant. Until now I haven’t appreciated the true values. I discovered them out there in the road when you came into my arms—and into my heart. From now on my arms will always ache for you—and my heart will be empty without you.’”
“But—,” Glory’s eyes were deeper than ever as she whispered laboriously, “but if you’re plighted to her——”
“I’m not,” he protested hotly. “There is no engagement except a sort of understanding with her father: a sort of condescending and tacit willingness on his part to let his successor be his son-in-law as well.”
She lay for a space with the heavy masses of her hair on the rough pillow framing the pale and exquisite oval of her face, and her vivid eyes troubled with the longing to be convinced. Then her lips shaped themselves in a rather pitiful smile that lifted them only at one corner.
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“Maybe ye don’t ... know it Jack,” she murmured, “but ye’re jest seekin’ ... ter let me ... die ... easy in my mind ... and happy.”
“Before God I amnot,” he vehemently contradicted her. “I’m not trying to give but to take. Whether you get well or not, Glory, I want to fight for your life and your love. We’ve faced death, together. We’ve seen things nakedly—together. For neither of us can there ever be any true life—except together.”
His breath was coming with the swift intensity that was almost a sob and, in the eyes that bent over her, Glory read the hunger that could not be counterfeited.
“Anyhow,” she faltered, “we’ve had—this minute.”
Spurrier rose at last and called the others back. He himself did not know when once more he took her hand and the preacher stood over them, whether her responses to the services would be affirmative or negative.
To Spurrier marriage had always seemed an opportunity. It was a thing in which an ambitious man could no more afford yielding to uncalculating impulses than in the forming of a major business connection. Marriage must carry a man upward toward the peak of his destiny, and his wife must bring as her dowry, social reënforcements and distinction.
Now, in the darkening room of a log house, with figures clad in patches and hodden-gray, he held the hand that was too weak to close responsively upon his own, and listened to the words of a shaggy-headed preacher, whose beard was a stubble and whose lips moved over yellow and fanglike teeth.
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Confusedly he heard the questions and his own firm responses to the simple service of marriage as rendered by the backwoods preacher, then his heart seemed to stop and stand as the words were uttered to which Glory must make her answer.
“Will you, Glory, have this man, John Spurrier——”
What would her answer be—assent or negation?
The pause seemed to last interminably as he bent with supplication in his glance over her, and the breath came from his lips with an unconscious sibilance, like escaping steam from a strained boiler, when at last the head on the pillow gave the ghost of a nod.
Even at that moment there lurked in the back of his mind, though not admitted as important, the ghost of realization that he was doing precisely the sort of thing which, in his own world, would not only unclass him but make him appear ludicrous as well.
As for that world of lifted eye-brows he felt just now only a withering contempt and a scalding hatred.
Almost as soon as the simple ceremony ended, Glory sank again into unconsciousness, and the father and preacher, sitting silent in the next room, were unable to forget that though there had been a wedding, they were also awaiting the coming of death.
The night fell with the soft brightness of moon and stars, and through the tangled woods the searchers were following hard on the flight of the assailants—doggedly and grimly, with the burning indignation of men bent on vindicating the good name of their people and community. Yet, so far, the fugitive squad had succeeded not only in eluding capture or recognition, but also in carrying with them their wounded.
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From Lexington, where Spurrier had formed strong connections, a deputy sheriff was riding in a caboose behind a special engine as fast as the roadbeds would permit. The smokestack trailed a flat line of hurrying smoke and the whistle screamed startlingly through the night. At the officer’s knees, gazing up at him out of gentle eyes that belied their profession, crouched two tawny dogs with long ears—the bloodhounds that were to start from the cabin and give voice in the laurel.
Waiting for them was a torn scrap of blue denim such as rough overalls are made of. It had been found in a brier patch where some fleeing wearer had snarled himself.
Yet two days later the deputy returned from his quest in the timber, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry,” he reported. “I’ve done my best, but it’s not been good enough.”
“What’s the trouble?” inquired Cappeze shortly, and the officer answered regretfully:
“This country is zigzagged and criss-crossed with watercourses—and water throws the dogs off. The fugitives probably made their way by wading wherever they could. The longest run we made was up toward Wolf Pen Branch.”
That was the direction, Spurrier silently reflected, of Sim Colby’s house, but he made no comment.
Brother Hawkins, who was leaving that afternoon, laid a kindly hand on Spurrier’s shoulder.
“Thet’s bad news,” he said. “But I kin give ye better. I kin almost give ye my gorrantee thet ther gal’s goin’ ter come through. Hit’swantin’ter live thet does hit.”
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Spurrier’s eyes brightened out of the misery that had dulled them, and as to the failure of the chase he reassured himself with the thought that the dogs had started toward Sim Colby’s house, and that he himself could finish what they had begun.
Those tawny beasts had coursed at the behest of a master who was bound by the limitations of the law, but he, John Spurrier, was his own master and could deal less formally and more condignly with an enemy to whom suspicion pointed—and there was time enough.
201CHAPTER XV
And yet on that day when the bobwhites had sounded and the blow had fallen, Sim Colby was nowhere near the opportunity hound’s house. He sat tippling in a mining town two days’ journey away, and he had no knowledge of what went on at home. His companion was ex-Private Severance—once his comrade in arms.
The town was one of those places which discredit the march of industry by the mongrelized character of its outposts. The wild aloofness of the hills and valleys was marred there by the shacks of the camp and its sky soiled by a black reek of coke furnaces.
Filth physical and moral brooded along the unkempt streets where the foul buzz of swarming flies sounded over refuse piles, and that spirit of degradation lay no less upon the unclean tavern, where the two men who had once worn the uniform sat with a bottle of cheap whisky between them.
Colby, who had need to maintain his reputation for probity at home, made an occasional pilgrimage hither to foregather with his former comrade and loosen the galling rein of restraint. Just about the time when the attack on Spurrier’s house had begun, he had leaned forward with his elbows on the table, his face heavy and his eyes inflamed, pursuing some topic of conversation which had already gained headway.
“These hyar fellers that seeks ter git rid of Spurrier,”202he confided, “kinderly hinted ’round thet they’d like ter git me ter do ther job for ’em, but I pretended like I didn’t onderstand what they war drivin’ at, no fashion at all.”
“Why didn’t ye hearken ter ’em?” questioned Severance practically. “Hit hain’t every day a man kin git paid fer doin’ what he seeks ter do on his own hook.”
But Colby grinned with a crafty gleam in his eye and poured another drink.
“What fer would I risk ther penitenshery ter do a killin’ fer them fellers when, ef I jest sets still on my hunkers they’ll dominefer me,” he countered.
For a time after that whatever enemies Spurrier had seemed to have lost their spirit of eagerness. One might have presumed that to the rule of amity which apparently surrounded him, there was no exception—and so the mystery remained unsolved. Even blind Joe Givins made a detour in a journey to stop at Spurrier’s house and sing a ballad of his own composition anent the mysterious siege and to express his indignation at the “pizen meanness” of men who would father and carry forward such infamies.
And Glory, who had penetrated so deeply into the shadow that life had seemed ended for her, was recovering. Into her pale cheeks came a new blossoming and into the smile of her lips and eyes a new light that was serene and triumphant. She had been too happy to die.
While the summer waned and the beauties of autumn began to kindle, the young wife grew strong, and her husband, seemingly, had nothing to do except to wander about the hills with her and discover in her new charms. Neighborly saws and hammers were203ringing now as his place was transformed from its simple condition to the “hugest log house on seven creeks.”
In some respects he wished that his factitious indolence were real, for he felt no pride in the occult fashion in which he was directing the activities of his henchmen. And yet a few months ago this progress would have been food for satisfaction—almost triumph.
His plans, as outlined to Martin Harrison were by no means at a standstill. They were going forward with an adroit drawing in and knitting together of scattered strands, and the warp and woof of this weaving were coming into definite order and pattern.
The dual necessity was: first to slip through a legislature which was supposedly under the domination of American Oil and Gas, a charter which should wrest from that concern the sweet fruits of monopoly, and secondly, to secure at paltry prices the land options that would give the prospective pipe line its right of way.
As this campaign had been originally mapped and devised it had not been simple, but now it was complicated by a new and difficult element. In those first dreams of conquest the native had been no more considered than the red Indian was considered in the minds of the new world settlers. Spurrier himself had brushed lightly aside this aspect of the affair. Every game has and must have its “suckers.” And their sorry destiny it is to be despoiled. Now the very term that he had used in his thoughts, brought with it an amendment. It is not every game that must have its suckers but every bunco game.