CHAPTER XVI

204

Martin Harrison did not know it, but his lieutenant had redrawn his plans, and redrawn them in a fashion which the chief would have regarded as insubordinate, impractical and sentimental.

Spurrier intended that when the smoke cleared from the field upon which the forces of Harrison and those of Trabue had been embattled, the Harrison banners should be victoriously afloat and the Trabue standards dust trailed. But also he intended that the native land-holders, upon whom both combatants had looked as mere unfortunate onlookers raked by the cross fire of opposing artillery, should emerge as real and substantial gainers.

Of late the man had not escaped the penalty of one who faces responsibility and wields power. He had abandoned as puerile his first impulse, after his marriage, to throw up his whole stewardship to the Wall Street masters. That would have amounted only to an ostentation of virtue which would have surrendered the situation into the merciless hands of A. O. and G., and would have left the mountain folk unprotected.

Yet he could not escape the realization that he would stand with all the seeming of a traitor and a plunderer to any of his simple friends who learned of his activities—for as yet he could confide to no one the plans he was maturing.

It was when the refurnished and enlarged place had been completed that the neighbors came from valley, slope, and cove to give their blessing at the housewarming which was also, belatedly, the “infaring.”

That homely, pioneer observance with which the groom brings home his bride, had not been possible205after the wedding, but now Aunt Erie Toppitt had come over and prepared entertainment on a lavish if homely scale since Glory was not yet well.

To the husband as he stood greeting the guests who arrived in jeans and hodden-gray, in bright shawls and calicoes, came the feeling of contrast and unreality, as though this were all part of some play quaintly and exaggeratedly staged to reflect a medieval period. In the drawing rooms of Martin Harrison and his confreres he had moved through a social atmosphere, quiet, contained, and reflecting such a life as the dramatist uses for background in a comedy of manners. Closing his eyes now he could see himself as he had been when, starting out for such an entertainment, he had paused before the cheval glass in his club bedroom, adding a straightening touch to his white tie, adjusting the set of his waistcoat and casting a critical eye over the impeccable black and white of his evening dress. Here, flannel shirted and booted, corduroy breeched and tanned brown, he stood by the door watching the arrival of guests who seemed to have stepped out of pioneer America or Elizabethan England. There were women riding mules or tramping long roads on foot and trailing processions of children who could not be left at home; men feeling overdressed and uncomfortable because they had donned coats and brushed their hats; even wagons plodding slowly behind yokes of oxen and one man riding a steer in lieu of a horse!

So they came to give Godspeed to his marriage—and they were the only people on God’s green earth who thought of him in any terms of regard save that206regard which sprung from self-interest in his ability to serve beyond others!

Men who were blood enemies met here as friends, because his roof covered a zone of common friendship and under its protection their hatreds could no more intrude on such a day than could pursuit in the Middle Ages follow beyond the sanctuary gates of a cathedral. Inside sounded the minors of the native fiddlers and the scrape of feet “running the sets” of quaint square dances.

The labors of preparation had been onerous. Aunt Erie stood at the open door constituting, with Spurrier and his wife, a “receiving line” of three, and her wrinkled old face bore an affectation of morose exhaustion as to each guest she made the same declaration:

“I hopes an’ prays ye all enjoys this hyar party—Gawd knowsmyback’s broke.”

But Spurrier had not in his letters to Harrison mentioned his marriage, and to Vivien he had not written at all. He thought they would hardly understand, and he preferred to make his announcement when he stood face to face with them, relying on the force of his own personality to challenge any criticism and proclaim his own independence of action. Just now there was no virtue in needlessly antagonizing his chief.

Among the guests who came to that housewarming was one chance visitor who was not expected. He came because the people under whose roof he was being sheltered, had “fetched him along,” and he was Wharton, the man whose purpose hereabouts had set gossip winging aforetime.

207

It seemed to some of the local visitors that despite his entire courtesy, Spurrier did not evince any profound liking for this other “furriner,” and since they had come to accept their host as a trustworthy oracle, they took the tip and were prepared to dislike Wharton, too.

That evening, while blind Joe Givins fiddled, and dancers “ran their sets” on the smooth, new floor, a group of men gathered on the porch outside and smoked. Among them for a time were both Spurrier and Wharton.

The latter raised something of a laugh when he confidently predicted that the oil prosperity, for all its former collapse and present paralysis, was not permanently dead.

“The world needs oil and there’s oil here,” he declared with unctuous conviction. “Men who are willing to gamble on that proposition will win out in the end.”

“Stranger,” responded Uncle Jimmy Litchfield, taking his pipestem from between his teeth and spitting contemptuously at the earth, “ye sees, settin’ right hyar before ye a man that ’lowed he was a millionaire one time, ’count of this hyar same oil ye’re discoursin’ so hopeful about. Thet man’s me. I’d been dirt-pore all my days, oftentimes hurtin’ fer ther plum’ needcessities of life. I’m mighty nigh thet pore still.”

“Did you strike oil in the boom days?” demanded Wharton as he bent eagerly forward.

“I owned me a farm, them days, on t’other side ther mounting,” went on the narrator, “an’ them oil men came along an’ wanted ter buy ther rights offen me.”

“Did you sell?”

208

Uncle Billy chuckled. “They up an’ offered me a royalty of one-eighth of ther whole production. They proved hit up ter me by ’rithmetic an’ algebry how hit would make me rich over an’ above all avarice—but I said no, I wouldn’t take no eighth. I stud out fer asixteenthby crickety!”

Both Spurrier and Wharton smothered their laughter as the latter inquired gravely:“Did they play oneof them royalty games.”

“They done better’n thet. They said, ‘We’ll give ye two sixteenths,’ an’ thet’s when I ’lowed I was es good es a Pierpont Morgan. I wouldn’t nuver hurt fer no needcessity no more.”

“And what was the outcome of it all?” asked Wharton.

Uncle Jimmy’s face darkened. “The come-uppance of ther whole blame business war thet a lot of pore devils what hed done been content with poverty found hit twice as hard ter go on bein’ pore because they’d got to entertainin’ crazy dreams ther same as me. Any man thet talks oil ter me now’s got ter buy outright an’ pay me spot cash. I ain’t playin’ no more of them royaltygames.”

“That’s fair enough,” said Wharton. “But it seems to me that you people are taking the wrong tack. Because the boom collapsed once, you are shutting the door against the possibility of its coming again—and it’s going to come again.”

“A man kin git stung once,” volunteered another native, “an’ hit’s jest tough luck or bewitchment. Ef he gits stung twicet on ther same trumpery, he ain’t no more then a plum’, daft fool.”

209

Wharton lighted a fresh cigar and turned toward Spurrier.

“Mr. Spurrier here, is a man you all know and trust——” he hazarded. “I understand that he’s seen oil fields in the West and Mexico. I wonder what he thinks about it all.”

On the dark porch Spurrier looked at his visitor for a few minutes in silence and his first reply was a quiet question.

“Did I tell you I’d seen oil fields in operation?” he inquired, and Wharton stammered a little.

“I was under that impression,” he said. “Possibly I am wrong.”

“No—you are right enough,” answered the other evenly. “I just didn’t remember mentioning it. What is your question exactly?”

“If I have a hunch that oil holds a future here and am willing to back that hunch, don’t you think I am acting wisely to do it?”

The host sat silent while he seemed to weigh the question with judicial deliberation, and during the pause he realized that the little group of men were waiting intently for his utterance as for the voice of the Delphic oracle.

“I have seen oil operation and oil development,” he said at last. “I have lived here for some time and know the history of the former boom, but I have not bought a foot of ground. That ought to make my opinion clear.”

“Then you don’t believe in the future?”

“Don’t you think, Mr. Wharton,” inquired Spurrier coolly and, his listeners thought, with a shaded note210of contempt, “that what I’ve already said, answers your question? If Ididbelieve in it, wouldn’t I be likely to seek investment at the present stage of land prices?”

John Spurrier was glad that it was dark out there. He knew that the mountain men awaited his judgment as something carrying the sanction of finality and he felt like a Judas. He himself knew that back of his seeming betrayal was a determination to safeguard their rights, but the whole game of maneuvering and dissembling was as impossible to play proudly as it would have been to undertake the duties of a spy.

“I’ll admit,” observed Wharton modestly, “that if I lost some money, it wouldn’t break me—and I’m a stubborn man when I get a hunch. Well, I’m going in to watch them dance.”

He rose and went indoors and Uncle Jimmy, when he put a question acted, in effect, as spokesman for them all.

“What does ye think of thet feller, Mr. Spurrier?”

“I think,” said the opportunity hound crisply, “that he’s a fool, and Scripture says, ‘a fool and his money are soon parted.’”

“An’ ef he seeks ter buy?”

“Sell—by all means—if the price is right!”

The next day when they were alone Glory said:

“I don’t like that man Wharton. He’s got sneaky eyes.”

Her husband laughed. “I can’t say that he struck me pleasantly,” he admitted. “We talked oil out on the porch. He was the optimist and I the pessimist.”

And it was to happen that the first rift in Glory’s211lute of happiness was to come out of Wharton’s agency, though she did not recognize it as his.

For in these times, despite a happiness that made her sing through the days, something like the panic of stage fright was settling over her: a thing yet of the future, but some day to be faced.

So long as life ran quietly, like the shaded streams that went down until they made the rivers of the greater and outer world, she was confident mistress of her life and had no forebodings. Spurrier loved her and she worshiped him—but out there beyond the ridges, the activities of his larger life were calling—or would call. Then they must leave here and she began to dread the thousand little mistakes and the humiliations that might come to him because of her unfamiliarity with that life. Since the bearings of achievement are delicate, she even feared that she might throw out of gear and poise the whole machinery of his success, and in secret Glory was poring over absurd books on etiquette and deportment. That these stereotyped instructions would only hamper her own naturally plastic spirit, she did not know when she read and reread chapters headed, “How to Enter a Drawing-room” and “Hints upon Refined Conversation.”

That Spurrier would suggest going without her to any field into which his work called him, she did not dream. That he would leave her to wait for him here, as the companion only of his backwoods hours, her pride never contemplated.

Yet in the fall Spurrier did just that thing, and to212the letter which induced its doing was signed the name of George Wharton. The latter wrote:

“We must begin to lay out lines for work with the next legislature. There are people in Louisville and Lexington whom you should meet and talk with. I think you had better make your headquarters at one of the Louisville clubs, and when you get here I will put you in touch with the proper bearings.”

“We must begin to lay out lines for work with the next legislature. There are people in Louisville and Lexington whom you should meet and talk with. I think you had better make your headquarters at one of the Louisville clubs, and when you get here I will put you in touch with the proper bearings.”

That much might have puzzled any of the mountaineers who had taken their own cues from Spurrier’s thinly concealed manner of hostility to Wharton, but the last part of the letter would have explained that, too:

“The little game down at your house was nothing short of masterly. Your acting was superb, and though you were the star, I think I may claim to have played up to you well. The device of gaining their confidence so that, of their own accord, they turned to you for counsel—and then seeming to gloom on me when I talked oil, was pretty subtle. I could openly preach buying and instead of turning away from me in suspicion, they fell on me for a sucker. I—and others acting for me—have, as the result, secured a good part of the options we need—and you appear to be of all men, the least interested.”

“The little game down at your house was nothing short of masterly. Your acting was superb, and though you were the star, I think I may claim to have played up to you well. The device of gaining their confidence so that, of their own accord, they turned to you for counsel—and then seeming to gloom on me when I talked oil, was pretty subtle. I could openly preach buying and instead of turning away from me in suspicion, they fell on me for a sucker. I—and others acting for me—have, as the result, secured a good part of the options we need—and you appear to be of all men, the least interested.”

Spurrier read the thing twice, then crushed it savagely in his clenched hand and cursed under his breath. “The damned jackals,” he muttered. “That’s the pack I’m running with—or rather I’m running with them and against them at once.”

But when Spurrier had kissed Glory good-by and she had waved a smiling farewell, she turned back into her house and covered her face with her hands.

213

“I don’t want to believe it,” she declared. “I won’t believe it—but it looks like he’s ashamed to take me with him. Not that I blame him—only—only I’ve got to make myself over. He’sgotto be proud of me!”

214CHAPTER XVI

When he came back for a short stay in the hills between periods of quiet but strenuous affairs in Louisville, he brought gifts that delighted Glory and a devotion that made her forget her misgivings. She had him back, and he found the house expressing in many small ways a taste and discrimination which brought to him a flush of pleasurable surprise. Glory knew the menace that hung over Spurrier. She knew of the malevolent and elusive enmities to which her own life had so nearly become forfeit, and the old terror of the mountain woman for her man became the cross that she must carry with her. Because of her militant father’s antagonisms she had been inured from childhood to the taut moment of suspense that came with every voice raised at the gate and every knock sounding on the door.

There was an element of possible threat in each arrival. She had become, as one has need to be, under such circumstances, somewhat fatalistic as to the old dangers. Now that the fear embraced her husband as well as her father, the philosophy which she had cultivated failed her. Yet their happiness was so strong that it threw off these things and drew upon the treasury of the present.

Spurrier, who talked little of his own dangers, was far from forgetting. His suspicion of Colby strengthened, and he looked forward to the day as inevitable215when there must be a reckoning between them, which would not be a final reckoning unless one of them died, and for that encounter he went grimly prepared.

One thing puzzled him. Of Sim Colby he had thought as a somewhat solitary character, whose relations with his neighbors, though amicable, were yet rather detached. He had seemed to have few intimates, yet if he had led this attack, he was palpably able to muster at his back a considerable force of men for a desperate project. That meant that the infection of hatred against himself had spread from a single enmity to the number, at least, of the men who had joined in the battle, and it had been a battle in which more than one had fallen. Before, he had recognized a single enemy. Henceforth he must acknowledge plural enmities.

And along that line of reasoning the next step followed logically.

Who would suggest himself as so natural a leader for a murder enterprise as Sam Mosebury, whose record was established in such matters? Certainly if this suspicion were well-founded it would be safest to know.

Spurrier, despite all he had heard of Sam Mosebury, was reluctant to entertain the thought. The man might be, as Cappeze painted him, the head and front of an infamously vicious system, yet there was something engaging and likable about him, which made it hard to believe that for hire or any motive not nearly personal he would have conspired to do murder.

So among the many claims upon Spurrier’s attention was the effort to find out where Sam Mosebury216stood, and it was while he was thinking of that problem that he encountered the object of his thoughts in person. The spot was one distant from his own house. Indeed it was near Colby’s cabin—still apparently empty—that the meeting took place.

The opportunity hound had made several trips over there of late, because he required to know something of Colby’s activities, and, of course, when he came he observed a surreptitious caution which sought to guard against any hint leaking through to Colby of his own surveillance. He firmly believed that Sim was “hiding out,” and that despite the seeming emptiness of his habitation he was not far away.

So it was Spurrier, the law-abiding man, who was skulking in the laurel while the notorious Mosebury walked the highway “upstanding” and openly—and the man in the thicket stooped low to escape discovery. But his foot slipped in the tangle and a rotting branch cracked under it, giving out a sound which brought Mosebury to an abrupt halt with his head warily raised and his rifle poised. He, too, had enemies and must walk in caution.

There had been times when Sam’s life had hinged on just such trivial things as the snapping of a twig, and now, peering through the thickets Spurrier saw a flinty hardness come into his eyes.

Sam stepped quietly but swiftly to the roadside and sheltered himself behind a rock. He said no word, but he waited, and Spurrier could feel that his eyes were boring into his own place of concealment with a scrutiny that went over it studiously and keenly, foot by foot.

He hurriedly considered what plan to pursue. If217Mosebury was in league with Colby, to show himself would be almost as undesirable a thing as to show himself to Colby direct. Yet if he stayed there with the guilty seeming of one in hiding, Mosebury would end by locating him—and might assume that the hiding was itself a proof of enmity. He decided to declare himself so he shouted boldly: “It’s John Spurrier,” and rose a moment later into view.

Then he came forward, thinking fast, and when the two met in the road, mendaciously said:

“I guess it looks queer for a man with a clear conscience to take to the timber that way, Mr. Mosebury—but you may remember that I was recently attacked, and I don’t know who did it.”

Mosebury nodded. “I’d be ther last man ter fault ye fer thet,” he concurred. “I was doin’ nigh erbout ther same thing myself, but I didn’t know ye often fared over this way, Mr. Spurrier.”

“No, it’s off my beat.” Spurrier was now lying fluently in what he fancied was to be a game of wits with a man who might have led the siege upon his house. “I was just going over to Stamp Carter’s place. He wanted me to advise him about a property deal.”

For a space Sam stood gravely thoughtful, and when he spoke his words astonished the other.

“Seein’ wehevmet up, accidental-like, I’ve got hit in head ter tell ye somethin’ deespite hit ain’t rightly none of my business.” Again he paused, and it was plain that he was laboring under embarrassment, so Spurrier inquired:

“What is it?”

“Of course, I’ve done heered ther talk erbout yore218bein’ attacked. Don’t ye really suspicion no special man?”

“Suspicion is one thing, Mr. Mosebury, and knowledge is another.”

“Yes, thet’s Bible truth, an’ yit I wouldn’t marvel none yore suspicions went over thet-away—an’ came up not fur off from hyar.” He nodded his head toward Sim Colby’s house, and Spurrier, who was steeled to fence, gave no indication of astonishment. He only inquired:

“Why should Mr. Colby hold a grudge against me?”

“I ain’t got no power of knowin’ thet.” Mosebury spoke dryly. “An’ es I said afore, hit ain’t none of my business nohow—still I does know thet ye’ve been over hyar some sev’ral times, an’ every time ye came, ye came quietlike es ef ye sought ter see Sim afore Sim seedyou.”

“You think I’ve been here before?”

“No, sir, I don’t think hit. I knows hit. I seed ye.”

“Saw me!”

“Yes, sir, seed ye. Hit’s my business to keep a peeled eye in my face.”

So Spurrier’s careful secrecy had been transparent after all, and if this man was an ally of Colby’s, Colby already shared his knowledge. More than ever Spurrier felt sure that his suspicions of the man whose eyes had changed color, were grounded in truth.

“Howsomever,” went on Mosebury quietly, “I ain’t nuver drapped no hint ter Sim erbout hit. I ain’t, gin’rally speakin’, no meddler, but ef so be I kin forewarn219ye ergainst harm, hit would pleasure me ter do hit.”

There was a cordial ring of sincerity in the manner and voice, which it was hard to doubt, so the other said gravely:

“Thank you. I did suspect Colby, but I have no proof.”

“I don’t know whether Sim grudges ye or not,” continued Mosebury. “He ain’t nuver named ther matter ter me nowise, guise, ner fashion—but Simwasn’t with ther crowd thet went atter ye. He didn’t even know nothin’ erbout hit. Sometimes a man comes to grief by barkin’ up ther wrong tree.”

Again suspicion came to the front. This savored strongly of an attempt to alibi a confederate, and Spurrier inquired bluntly:

“Since you broached this subject, I think it’s fair to ask you another question. You tell me whodidn’tcome. Do you know whodid?”

For a moment Mosebury’s face remained blank, then he spoke stiffly.

“I said I’d be glad ter warn ye—but I didn’t say I war willin’ ter name no names. Thet would be mighty nigh ther same thing es takin’ yore quarrel onto myself.”

“Then that’s all you can tell me—that it wasn’t Colby?”

“Mr. Spurrier,” rejoined the mountaineer seriously, “yeknowsjedgmatically an’ p’intedly thet ye’ve got enemies that means business. I ain’t nuver seed a man yet in these hills what belittled a peril sich as yourn thet didn’t pay fer hit—with his life.”

“I don’t belittle it, but what can I do?”

220

Sam Mosebury stood with a gaze that wandered off over the broken sky line. So grave was his demeanor that when his words came they carried the shock of inconsistent absurdity.

“Thar’s a witch woman, thet dwells nigh hyar. Ef I war in youre stid, I’d git her ter read ther signs fer me an’ tell me what I had need guard ergainst most.”

“I’m afraid,” answered Spurrier, repressing his contempt with difficulty, “I’m too skeptical to pin my faith to signs and omens.”

Again the mountain man was looking gravely across the hills, but for a moment the eyes had flashed humorously.

“I reckon we don’t need ter cavil over thet, Mr. Spurrier. I don’t sot no master store by witchcraft foolery my ownself. Mebby ye recalls thet oncet I told ye a leetle story erbout my cat an’ my mockin’ bird.”

“Yes,” Spurrier began to understand now. “You sometimes speak in allegory. But this time I don’t get the meaning.”

“Waal, hit’s this fashion. Idon’tknow who ther men war thet tried ter kill ye. Thet’s God’s truth, but I’ve got my own notions an’ mebby they ain’t fur wrong. I ain’t goin’ ter name no names—but ef so be ye wants ter talk ter ther witch woman,I’llhev speech with her fust. What comes outen magic kain’t hardly make me no enemies—but mebby hitmoutenable ye ter discern somethin’ thet would profit ye to a master degree.”

Spurrier stood looking into the face of the other and then impulsively he thrust out his hand.

“Mr. Mosebury,” he said, “I’ll be honest with you.221I half suspected you—because I’d met you at Colby’s and I knew you hated Cappeze. I owe you an apology, and I’m glad to know I was wrong.”

“Mr. Spurrier,” replied the other, “ef Ihedattempted yore life I wouldn’t hev failed, an’, moreover, I don’t hate old Cappeze. Ther man thet wins out don’t hev no need ter harbor hatreds. He hates me because he sought ter penitentiary me—an’ failed.”

“When shall we go to consult the oracle?” asked Spurrier, and Mosebury shook his head.

“I reckon mebby I mout seem over cautious—even timorouslike ter ye, in bein’ so heedful erbout keepin’ outen sight in this matter,” he said. “But them thet knows my record, knows Iain’t, jest ter say easy skeered. You go home an’ wait an’ afore long I’ll write ye a letter, tellin’ ye when ter go an’ how ter go. Then ye kin make ther journey by yoreself.”

“That looks like common sense to me,” declared the other, and he went home, forgetting the witch woman on the way, because of the other and lovelier witchcraft that he knew awaited him in his own house.

Spurrier, despite his dangers, responsibilities, and conflict of purposes, was happy. He was happy in a simpler and less complicated way than he had ever been before, because his heart was in the ascendancy, and Glory, he thought, was “livin’ up to her name.”

If he could have thrust some other things into the same dark cupboard of half-contemptuous philosophy to which he relegated his own dangers, he might have been even happier. But a mentor who had rarely troubled him in past years became insistent and audible222through the silences—speaking with the voice of conscience.

He remembered telling Vivian Harrison, over the consommé, that pearls did not make oysters happy and that these illiterates of the hills might have hidden wealth in the shells of their isolation and gain nothing more than the oyster. Indeed, he had thought of them no more than the pearl fisherman thinks of the low form of life whose diseased state gives birth to treasure. They inhabited a terrain over which he and the forces of American Oil and Gas were to do battle, and like birds nesting on a battlefield, they must take their chances.

It was no longer possible to maintain that callous indifference. These men, to whom he could not, without disclosing his strategy and defeating his purpose, tell the truth, had befriended him.

They were human and in many ways lovable. If he succeeded, they would, upon his own advice, have sold their birthrights.

However, he gave an anodyne to his conscience with the thought that if victory came to him there would be wealth enough for all to share. Having won his conquest, he could be generous, rendering back as a gift a part of what should have been theirs by right. The means of doing this he had worked out but he could confide to no one. He had embarked as cold bloodedly as Martin Harrison had ever started on any of the enterprises that had made him a money baron. Indeed it had been Spurrier who had fired the chief with interest in the scheme, and if the thing were culpable the culpability had been his own. Then he had come to realize that in the human equation was a223factor that he had ignored: the rights of the ignorant native. He had fought down that recognition as the voice of sentimentality until at last he had no longer been able to fight it down. Between those two states of mind had been a war of mental agony and conflict, of doubt, of vacillation. The conclusion had not been easily reached. Now he meant to carry on the war he had undertaken unaltered as to its objective of winning a victory for Harrison over Trabue and the myrmidons of A. O. and G., but he meant to bring in that victory in such a guise that the native would share in the division of the spoils. He knew that Harrison, if he had an intimation of such an amendment of plan, would sharply veto it, but when the thing was done it would be too late to object—and meanwhile Spurrier regarded himself no less the trustee of the mountain-land holder than the servant of Martin Harrison. He was willing to shoulder, out of his own stipulated profits, the chief burden of this division, and in the end he would have driven a better bargain for his simple friends than they could have hoped to attain for themselves.

Yet in him was being reborn an element of character, which had long been repressed.

And there in the other section of the State where political connections had to be established and the skids of intrigue greased, much stood waiting to be done. Already most of what could be accomplished here on the ground had progressed to a point from which the end could be seen.

John Spurrier, the seeming idler, could control almost all the territory needful for his right of way—all except a tract belonging to Brother Bud Hawkins,224cautiously left for the last because he wished to handle that himself and did not yet wish to appear in the negotiations.

In the intricate workings of such a project by a campaign of secrecy, the matter was not only one of acquiring a certain expanse of a definite sort of property in a given region, but of acquiring holdings that commanded the only practicable route through passable gaps. This special lie and trend of ground he thought of and spoke of, in his business correspondence, as “the neck of the bottle.” When he held it, it mattered little who else had liquid in the bottle. It could come out only through his neck and, therefore, under his terms. Yet even when that was achieved, there remained the need of the corkscrew without which he himself could make no use of his range-wide jug of crude petroleum. That corkscrew was the charter to be had from a legislature where American Oil and Gas was supposed to have sentinels at the door.

He could not take Glory with him on these trips, because Glory was of the hills, and loyal to the hills—and he could not yet take the natives into his confidence. For the same reason he could give her only business reasons of the most general and evasive character for leaving her behind.

But the work that Spurrier had done so far was only the primary section of a broader design. What he had accomplished affected the oil field on the remote side of Hemlock Mountain, the part of the field that the earlier boom had never touched, and his entire project looked to a totality embracing also the225“nigh” side, where his operations still existed only in projection.

It was while this situation stood that there came to him one day two letters calling upon him for two irreconcilable courses of action. One was from Louisville, urging him to return there at once to busy himself with political plannings; the other was a rude scrawl from Sam Mosebury setting an appointment with the “witch woman.”

Spurrier was reluctant to go to Louisville. It meant laying aside the little paradise of the present for the putting on of heavy harness. It necessitated another excuse to Glory, and more than that, being away from Glory. Yet that was the bugle call of his mission, and he fancied that whatever threatened him here in the hills was a menace of local effect. If that were true he would not need the warning which the unaccountable desperado, Sam Mosebury, meant to relay to him through channels of alleged magic, until he came back.

Therefore, the witch could wait. But in that detail Spurrier erred, and when he answered the summons that called him to town without his occult consultation, he unwittingly discarded a warning which he needed there no less than in the hills.

He was called upon to choose a turning without pause, and he followed his business instincts. It happened that instinct misled him.

226CHAPTER XVII

One afternoon Trabue, the unadvertised dictator of American Oil and Gas, sat with several of his close subordinates in a conference that had to do with Martin Harrison, the man he assumed to ignore.

“Unless some unforeseen thing sends oil soaring,” ventured Oliver Morris, “this fellow Spurrier is having his trouble for his pains. My idea is that he’s seeking to tease us into counter activity—and trail after us in the profits.”

“And if somethingshouldsend oil soaring,” crisply countered Cosgrove, “he’d have us distanced with a runaway start.”

“Who is this man Spurrier?” demanded Trabue himself. “What does our research department report?”

“He’s a protégé of Martin Harrison’s.”

Trabue appeared to find the words illuminating, and a shrewd irony glinted in his brief smile.

“If he’s Harrison’s man, he’s out to knife me—and he has resources at his back. Tell me more about him.”

Cosgrove took from his portfolio a neatly typed memorandum, and read from it aloud:

Former army officer who gained the sobriquet of “Plunger” Spurrier: Court-martialed and convicted upon charge of227murder, and pardoned through efforts of Senator Beverly. Associated with various enterprises as a general investigator and initiative expert. Rumor has it that Harrison is grooming him as his own successor.

Former army officer who gained the sobriquet of “Plunger” Spurrier: Court-martialed and convicted upon charge of227murder, and pardoned through efforts of Senator Beverly. Associated with various enterprises as a general investigator and initiative expert. Rumor has it that Harrison is grooming him as his own successor.

“If his reputation is that of a plunger,” argued Morris, “my guess is that he’s playing a long-shot bet for a killing.”

“And you guess wrong. If Harrison has picked this fellow to wear his own mantle, the man is more than a gambling tout. It is only lunacy to underestimate him or dismiss him with contempt.”

Cosgrove nodded his concurrence and amplified it. “In my judgment he’s something of a genius with a chrome-nickeled nerve, but he’s adroit as well as bold. He has operated only through others and has kept himself inconspicuous. Except for an accident, we should have had no warning of his activities.”

“If he were to get bitten by a rattlesnake,” growled Morris savagely, “it would be a lucky thing for us. Of course, we might beguile him into our own camp.”

Trabue shook his head in a decisive negation.

“That would only notify him that we recognize his effort and fear it. If the game’s big enough, we don’t want him.” He paused, then added with a grim facetiousness: “As for your other suggestion, we have no rattlesnakes in our equipment.”

The dynamic-minded master of strategy sat balancing a pen-holder on his extended forefinger for a few moments, then he inquired as if in afterthought: “By the way, I feel curious as to how the tip came to us that this conspiracy was on foot. You say that228except for an accident we should not have known it.”

Cosgrove smiled. “It came to this office through the regular channels of our local agencies—and I didn’t inquire searchingly into the details. I gathered, though, that the trail was picked up by a sort of information tout—a fellow who was hurt and compromised a damage suit against us. It seems that he is supposed to be blind—but he could nonetheless see well enough to read some memoranda that chanced to come his way.” The gentleman cleared his throat almost apologetically as he added: “As I remarked I didn’t learn the particulars. I merely took the information for what it might be worth, and set our men to watching.”

“I see,” Trabue made dry acknowledgment. “And what is being done toward watching him?”

“I understand we have a man there who is assuming an enmity toward us and who is ostensibly helping Spurrier to build up political influence.”

“I see,” said Trabue once more, with even a shade more dryness in his voice.

That conversation had taken place quite a long while before the present, but it set into quiet motion the wheels of a large and powerful organization.

The knowledge that John Spurrier was objectionable to A. O. and G. had filtered through to more local, yet confidential, officials, and through them to “men in the field,” and it is characteristic of such delegations of authority, that each department suits the case referred to it to the practical workings of its own environment.

Gentlemen of high business standing in lower229Broadway could permit themselves no violence of language, beyond the intimation that this upstart was a nuisance. Translated into the more candid brutality of camp-following parasites in the wildness of the hills, that mild declaration became: “The man needs killin’. Let’s git him!”

Now, Spurrier found that the visit to Louisville and Lexington, which had promised to be the matter of weeks, must stretch itself into months, and that until the convening and adjournment of the assembly itself, his presence would be as requisite as that of a ship’s officer on the bridge. In one respect he was gratified. American Oil and Gas seemed serenely unsuspicious of any danger. Vigilance seemed lapsed. Those men whose duty it was to watch the corporation’s interest and to hold in line the needed lawmakers, appeared to regard legislative protection as a thing bought and paid for and safe from trespass.

And Spurrier, knowing better, was secretly triumphant, but without Glory he was far from happy.

Had he known what influences were at work with cancerlike corrosions upon her loyalty, what food was nourishing her anxiety, he would have stolen the time to go to her. Hers was an anxiety which she did not acknowledge. Even to herself she denied its existence and against any outside suggestion of inner hurt pride would have risen in valiant resentment.

But in her heart it talked on in whispers that she could not hush. At night she would waken suddenly, wide-eyed with apprehension and seek to reassure herself by the emphasis of her avowals: “He’snotashamed of me. He’s not leaving me because of that!230He’s a big man with big business, and some day he’ll take me with him, everywhere!”

When old Cappeze, a man not given to unreflecting or careless speech, flatly questioned: “Glory—why doesn’t John ever take you with him?” she flinched and fell into exculpations that limped.

The old man was quick to note the pained rawness of the nerve he had touched, and he began talking of something else, but when he was alone once more his old eyes took on that fanatic absorption that came of his deep love for his daughter, and he shook his head dubiously over her future.

One day a neighborhood woman came by Glory’s house and found her standing at the door. Tassie Plumford neither claimed nor was credited with powers of magic, but she, too, might have been called a “witch woman.” In curdled disposition and shrewishness of tongue, she merited the title.

“Waal, waal, Glory Cappeze,” she drawled in her rasping, nasal voice. “Yore man hes done built ye a right monstrous fine house, hyar, ain’t he?”

“Come in and see it, Mrs. Plumford,” invited the young wife. “But my name’s Glory Spurrier now—not Cappeze.”

In the gesture with which the woman drew her shawl tighter about her lean shoulders, she contrived to convey the affront of suspicion and disbelief.

“No, I reckon I ain’t got ther power ter tarry now,” she declined. “I don’t git much time fer gaddin’, an’ be yore name whatsoever hit may, there’s them hyar-abouts es ’lows yore man lavishes everything on ye but his own self. He’s away from ye most of his time, albeit I reckon he’s got car fare aplenty fer two.”

231

Glory stiffened, and without a word turned her back on her ungracious visitor. She went into the house with the tilted chin of one who disdains to answer insolent slanders, but in the tenderness of her heart the barb had nonetheless sunk deep. So people were saying that!

Over at Aunt Erie Toppitt’s the shrew again halted—and there it seemed that she did have time to “tarry,” and roll the morsel of gossip under tongue.

“Mebby she’s ther furriner’s lawful wife an’ then ergin mebby she ain’t nuthin’ but his woman,” opined Tassie Plumford. “Hit ain’t none of my business nohow, but a godly woman hes call ter be heedful whar she visits at.”

“A godly woman!” Aunt Erie’s tone stung like a hornet attack. “What has godliness got ter do withyou, anyhow, Tassie Plumford? The records of ther high cote over at Carnettsville hes gotyorerecord fer a witness thet swears ter perjury.”

Mrs. Plumford trembled with rage but, prudently, she elected to ignore the reference to her legal status.

“Ef they was rightfully married,” she retorted, “hit didn’t come ter pass twell old man Cappeze diskivered her alone with him—in his house—jest ther two of ’em—an’ they wouldn’t nuver hevbeendiskivered savin’ an’ exceptin’ fer ther attack on ther furriner.” In the self-satisfaction of one who has scored, she added: “I’ll be farin’ on now, I reckon.”

“An’ don’t nuver come back,” stormed Aunt Erie, whose occasional tantrums were as famous as her usual good humor. “Unless ye seeks ter hev ther dawgs sot on ye.”

While the spiteful and forked little tongues of232gossip were doing their serpent best to poison what had promised to be an Eden for Glory at home in the hills, the husband who was charged with neglecting her was miserable in town.

His work had been the breath of life to him until now, bringing the zestful delight of prevailing over stubborn difficulties, and building bridges that should carry him across to his goal of financial power. Now he found it a necessity that exiled him from a place to which he had come half-contemptuously and to which his converted thoughts turned as the prayers of the true believer turn toward Mecca.

He who had been urban in habit and taste found nothing in the city to satisfy him. The smoke-filled air seemed to stifle him and fill him with a yearning for the clean, spirited sweep of the winds across the slopes. He knew that these physical aspects were trivial things he would have swept aside had they not stood as emblems for a longing of the heart itself—a nostalgia born of his new life and love.

But all the plans that had built one on the other toward a definite end of making an oil field of the barren hills were drawing to a focus that could not be neglected. He could no more leave these things undone than could his idol Napoleon have abandoned his headquarters before Austerlitz, and the sitting of the legislature could not be changed to suit his wishes. Neither could the lining up of forces that were to guide his legislation to its passage be left unwatched.

So the absence that he had thought would be brief, or at worst a series of short trips away from home, was prolonging itself into a winter in Louisville and Frankfort. He found himself as warily busy as a233collie herding a panicky flock, and as soon as one danger was met and averted, a new one called upon him from a new and unsuspected quarter.

Much of the deviousness of playing underground politics disgusted him, and yet he knew he would have regarded it only as an amusing game for high stakes before his change of heart. But now that it was to be a battle for the mountain men as well as for Martin Harrison and for himself, it could be better stomached.

The effort to pick out men who could be trusted in an enterprise where they had to be bought, was one which taxed both his insight into human nature and his self-esteem.

Senator Chew, himself a mountaineer, who had come from a ragged district to the state assembly and who seemed to harbor a hatred against A. O. and G. of utter malevolence, was almost as his other self, furnishing him with eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear, and familiarity with all the devious, unlovely tricks of lobby processes.

But Senator Chew, a countryman, who had capitalized his shifty wits and hard-won education, bent his knee to the brazen gods of cupidity and ambition.

“I don’t just see,” he demurred petulantly to Spurrier, “why you go about this thing the way you do. You’ve got unlimited capital behind you and yet in going after these options you ain’t hardly got hold of any more land than just enough to let your pipe line through. You could get all a man’s property just as cheap per acre as part of it—and when I’ve sweated blood to give you your charter and you’ve sweated234blood to grab your right-of-way, that God-forsaken land will be a Klondike.”

“I hope so,” smiled Spurrier, and his ally went on.

“All right, but why have nothing out of it except a pipe-line? Why not have the whole damn business to split three ways, among Harrison’s crowd, yourself—and the crowd I’ve got to handle?”

“You’re a mountain man, Senator,” the opportunity hound reminded him. “You know that in every other section of the hills to which development has come, the native has reaped only a heart-ache and an empty belly. I am purposely taking only a part of each man’s holding, so that when the oil flows there what he has left will be worth more to him than all of it was before.”

“Hell,” growled the politician. “The men you ought to think about making money for, are the men you need—like me, and the men who back you, like Harrison. These local fellows won’t thank you, and in my opinion you’re a fool, if you’ll permit me to talk plain.”

“Talk as plain as you like, Senator,” smiled the other. “But I think I’m acting with right sound sense. Our field can be more profitably developed among friends than among enemies—even if no consideration other than the practical enters into the problem.”

It was not until Christmas time that Spurrier broke away from his activities in Louisville, and then he came bearing gifts and with a heart full of eagerness. He came elated, too, at the fair promise of his prospects, and confident of victory.

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