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That was an assertion which there was neither health nor wisdom in contradicting and Spurrier waited. His last card was played.
“And I am going to cast you aside—bankrupt you—ruin you!” blazed out Harrison, “unless you absolutely meet my requirements during a period of probation. That period will engage you in a very different matter. For the present you are through with the Kentucky mountains. The new task will be a difficult one, and it should put you on your mettle. It is one that can’t be accomplished at all unless you can do it. You have that one chance to retrieve yourself. Take it or leave it.”
“What are your terms?”
“You will sail to-morrow for Liverpool. I will give you explicit instructions to-night. Go prepared for an extended stay abroad.”
For the first time Spurrier’s face paled and insurrection flared in his pupils.
“Sail for Europe to-morrow!” he exclaimed vehemently. “I’ll see you damned first! Doesn’t it occur to you that a man has his human side? I have a wife and a home and when I am ordered to leave them for an indefinite time I’m entitled to a breathing space in which to set my own affairs in shape. I am willing enough to undertake your bidding—but not to-morrow.”
Spurrier paused at the end of his outbreak and stood looking down at the seated figure, which to all intents and purposes might have been the god that held, for him, life and death in his hand.
And as he looked Spurrier thought he had never seen such glacial coldness and merciless indifference267in any human face. He had known this man in the thundering of passion before which the walls about him seemed to tremble, but this manifestation of adamant implacability was new, and he realized that he had invited destruction in defying it.
“As you please,” replied Harrison crisply, “but it’s to-morrow or not at all. I’ve already outlined the alternative and since you refuse, our business seems concluded. Next time you feel disposed to talk or think of what you’re entitled to, remember that my view is different. All your claims stand forfeit in my judgment. You are entitled to just what I choose to offer—and no more.”
The chief glanced toward the door with a glance of dismissal, and the door became to Spurrier the emblem of finality. Yet he did not at once move toward it.
“I appreciate the need of prompt obedience, where there is an urge of haste,” he persisted, “but if a few days wouldn’t imperil results, I want those days to make a flying trip to Kentucky and to my wife.”
The face of the seated man remained obdurately set but his eyes blazed again with a note of personal anger.
“At a time when I was reasonably interested, you chose to leave me unenlightened about your domestic arrangements. Now I can claim no concern in them. Most wives, however, permit their husbands such latitude of movement as business requires. If yours does not it is your own misfortune. I think that’s all.”
Spurrier knew that the jaws of the trap were closing on him. He had been too hasty in his outburst268and he turned toward the door, but as his hand fell on the bronze knob Harrison spoke again.
“Think it over, Spurrier. I can—and will ruin you—unless you yield. It is no time for maudlin sentiment, but until five-thirty this afternoon, I shall not consider your answer final. Up to that hour you may reconsider it, if you wish.”
“I will notify you at five,” responded the lieutenant as he let himself out and closed the door behind him.
That day the opportunity hound spent in an agony of conflicting emotions. That the other held a bolt of destruction and was in the mood to launch it he did not pretend to doubt. If it were launched even the land upon which his cottage stood would no longer be his own. He must either return to Glory empty-handed and bankrupt, or strain with a new tax, the confidence he had asked of her, with the pledge that he would return soon and for good.
But if, even at the cost of humbled pride and Glory’s hurt, he maintained his business relations, the path to eventual success remained open.
As long as the cards were being shuffled chance beckoned and at five o’clock Spurrier went into a cigar-store booth and called a downtown telephone number.
“You hold the whip hand, sir,” he announced curtly when a secretary had put Harrison on the wire. “When do I report for final instructions?”
“Come to my house this evening,” ordered the master.
Most of the hours of that evening, except the two in Harrison’s study, Spurrier spent in writing to Glory, tearing up letter after letter while the nervous moisture269bedewed his brow. It was so impossible to give her any true or comprehensive explanation of the pressing weight of compulsion. His messages must have the limp of unreason. He was crossing the ocean without her and she would read into it a sort of abandonment that would hurt and wound her. He had taxed everything else in life, and now he was overtaxing her loyalty.
Yet he believed that if in his depleted treasury of life there was one thing left upon which he could draw prodigally and with faith, it was that love; a love that would stand staunch though he were forced to hurt it once again.
So Spurrier sailed and, having arrived on European soil, took up the work that threw him into relations with men of large caliber in Capel Court and Threadneedle Street. His mission carried him to the continent as well; from Paris to Brussels and from Brussels to Hamburg and Berlin, where the quaint customs of the Kentucky Cumberlands seemed as remote as the life of Mars—remote but, to Spurrier, as alluring as the thought of salvation to a recluse who has foresworn the things of earth.
In terms of dead reckoning, Berlin is as far from Hemlock Mountain as Hemlock Mountain is from Berlin, but in terms of human relations Glory felt the distance as infinitely greater than did her husband. To him the Atlantic was only an ocean three thousand miles wide; often crossed and discounted by familiarity. To her it was a measureless waste separating all she knew from another world. To him continental dimensions were reckoned in hours of commonplace railway journeying, but to her the “measured mile”270was both lengthwise and perpendicular, and when she passed old friends she fancied that she detected in their glances either pity for her desertion or the smirk of “I-told-you-so” malevolence.
It even crept to her ears that “some folks” spoke of her as “the widder Spurrier” and that Tassie Plumford had chuckled, “I reckon he’s done gone off an’ left her fer good an’ all this time. Folks says he’s fled away cl’ar acrost ther ocean-sea.”
Glory told herself that she had promised faith and that she was in no danger of faltering, but as the weeks lengthened into months and the months followed each other, her waiting became bitter.
In Berlin John Spurrier passed as a British subject, bearing British passports. That had been part of the careful plan to prevent discovery of what American interests he represented and it had proven effective. He had almost accomplished the difficult task of self-redemption, set him by the man whose confidence he had strained.
Then came the bolt out of heaven. The inconceivable suddenness of the war cloud belched and broke, but he remained confident that he would have a chance to finish up before the paralysis cramped bourse and exchange.
England would not come in, and he, the seeming British subject, would have safe conduct out of Germany.
Now he must get back. This would mean the soaring of oil prices, and along new lines the battle must be pitched back there at home, before it was too late.
So Spurrier finished his packing. He was going out271onto the streets to watch the upflame of the war spirit and to make railway reservations.
There was a knock at the door and the man opened it. Stiffly erect, stood a squad of military police and stiffly their lieutenant saluted.
“You are Herr John Spurrier?” he inquired.
The man nodded.
“It is, perhaps, in the nature of a formality, which you will be able to arrange,” said the officer. “But I am directed to place you under arrest. England is in the war. You are said to be a former soldier.”
272CHAPTER XX
Over the ragged lands that lay on the “nigh side” of Hemlock Mountain breathed a spirit of excitement and mighty hope. It had been two years since John Spurrier had left the field he had planned to develop, and in those years had come the transition of rebirth.
Along muddy streets the hogs still wallowed, but now they were deeply rutted by the teaming of ponderous oil gear, and one saw young men in pith helmets and pig-skin puttees; keen-faced engineers and oil prospectors drawn in by the challenge of wealth from the far trails of Mexico and the West. One heard the jargon of that single business and the new vocabulary of its devotees. “Wild-catters” following surface indications or hunches were testing and well-driving. Gushers rewarded some and “dry holes” and “dusters” disappointed others. Into the mediæval life of hills that had stood age-long unaltered and aloof came the infusion of hot-blooded enterprise, the eager questing after quick and miraculous wealth.
In Lexington and Winchester oil exchanges carried the activity of small bourses. In newspapers a new form of advertisement proclaimed itself.
Oil was king. Oil and its by-product, gasoline, that the armies needed and that the thousands of engines on the earth and in the air so greedily devoured.
But over on the far side of the ridge men only273fretted and chafed as yet. They had the oil under their feet, but for it there was no outlet. Like a land without a seaport, they looked over at neighbors growing rich while they themselves still “hurted fer needcessities.”
American Oil and Gas had locked them in while it milked the other cow. It had its needed charters for piping both fields, but a man who was either dead or somewhere across the world held the way barred in a stalemate of controlled rights of way.
Glory thought less about the wonderful things that were going forward than did others about her, because she had a broken heart. No letters came from Spurrier, and the faith that she struggled to hold high like a banner nailed to the masthead of her life, hung drooping. In the end her colors had been struck.
If John Spurrier returned in search of her now she would go into hiding from him, but it was most unlikely that he would return. He had married her on impulse and under a pressure of excitement. He had loved her passionately—but not with a strong enough fidelity to hold him true—and now she believed he had turned back again to his old idols. She was repudiated, and she ought to hate him with the bitterness of her mountain blood, yet in her heart’s core, though she would never forgive him and never return to him, she knew that she still loved him and would always love him.
She no longer feared that she would have hampered him in the society of his more finished world. She had visited Helen Merriwell and had come to know that other world for herself. She found that the gentle blood in her veins could claim its own274rights and respond graciously. Hers had been a submerged aristocracy, but it had come out of its chrysalis, bright-winged.
Then one day something happened that turned Glory’s little personal world upside down and brought a readjustment of all its ideas.
Sim Colby owned a little patch of land beside his homestead place, over cross the mountain, and he was among those who became rich. He was not so rich as local repute declared him, but rich enough to set stirring the avarice of an erstwhile friend, who owned no land at all.
So ex-Private Severance came over to the deserter’s house with a scheme conceived in envy and born of greed. He was bent on blackmail.
When he first arrived, the talk ran along general lines, because “Blind Joe,” the fiddler, was at the house, and the real object of the visit was confidential. Blind Joe had also been an oil beneficiary, and he and Sim Colby had become partners in a fashion. During that relationship Blind Joe had told Sim some things that he told few others.
But when Joe left and the pipes were lighted Severance settled himself in a back-tilted chair and gazed reflectively at the crest of the timber line.
“You an’ me’s been partners for a right long spell, Bud Grant, ain’t we?”
Colby started. The use of that discarded name brought back the past with its ghosts of fear. He had almost forgotten that once he had been Bud Grant, and a deserter from the army. It was all part of a bygone and walled-in long ago. Though they were275quite alone he looked furtively about him and spoke in a lowered voice:
“Don’t call me by thet name. Thar ain’t no man but you knows erbout—what I used to be.”
“Thet’s what I’ve been studyin’ erbout. Nobody else but me.”
Severance sat silent for a while after that announcement, but there was a meaning smile on his lips, and Colby paled a shade whiter.
“Ireckon I kin trust ye; I always hev,” he declared with a specious confidence.
Severance nodded. “I was on guard duty an’ I suffered ye ter escape,” he went reminiscently on. “I knows thet ye kilt Captain Comyn, an’ I’ve done kept a close mouth all these years. Now ye’re a rich man an’ I’m a pore one. Hit looks like ter me ye owes me a debt an’ ye’d ought ter do a leetle something for me.”
So that was it! Colby knew that if he yielded at all, this man’s avarice and his importunities would feed on themselves increasingly and endlessly. Yet he dared not refuse, so he sought to temporize.
“I reckon thar’s right smart jestice in what ye says,” he conceded, “but I don’t know jest yit how I stands or how much money I’m wuth. Ye’ll have ter give me a leetle time ter find out.”
But when Severance mounted his mule and rode away, Sim Colby gave him only a short start and then hurried on foot through the hill tangles by a short cut that would intercept his visitor’s course.
He knew that Severance would have to ride through the same gorge in which Sim had waylaid Spurrier, and he meant to get there first, rifle-armed.
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It was sunset when, quite unsuspecting of danger, at least for the moment, Severance turned his mule into the gorge. He was felicitating himself, since without an acre of land or a drop of oil he had “declared himself in” on another’s wealth. His mule was a laggard in pace, and the rider did not urge him. He was content to amble.
Back of the rock walls of the great cleft, the woods lay hushed and dense in the closing shadows. An owl quavered softly, and the water among the ferns whispered. All else was quiet.
But from just a little way back, a figure hitched forward as it lay belly-down in the “laurel hell.” It sighted a rifle and pressed a finger.
The mule snorted and stopped dead with a flirt of ears and tail and with no word, without even a groan, the rider toppled sidewise and slid from the saddle.
The man back in the brush peered out. He noted how still the crumpled figure lay between the feet of the patient, mouse-colored beast, that switched at flies with its tail. It lay twisted almost double with one arm bent beneath its chest.
So Colby crept closer. It would be as well to haul the body back into the tangle where it would not be so soon discovered, and to start the beast along its way with a slap on the flank.
But just as the assassin stooped, Severance’s right hand darted out and, as it did so, there was a quick glint of blue steel, and three instantly successive reports.
Colby staggered backward with a sense of betrayal and a horrible realization of physical pain. His rifle dropped from a shattered hand and jets of blood broke277out through his rent clothing. Each of those three pistol balls had taken effect at a range so close that he had been powder-burned. He knew he was mortally hurt, and that the other would soon be dead if he was not so already.
Colby began crawling. He was mangled as if by an explosion, but instinct drove him. Twice he fainted and recovered dim consciousness and still dragged himself tediously along.
Glory was alone in her house. Her father, who had been living with her of late, had gone to the county seat overnight.
The young woman sat in silence, and the sewing upon which she had been busied lay in her lap forgotten. In her eyes was the far-away look of one who eats out one’s heart in thoughts that can neither be solved nor banished.
Then she heard a faint call. It was hardly more than a gasped whisper, and as she rose, startled, and went to the door she saw striving to reach it a shape of terrible human wreckage.
Sim Colby’s clothes were almost torn from him and blood, dried brown, and blood freshly flowing, mingled their ugly smears upon him. His lips were livid and his face gray.
Glory ran to him with a horrified scream. She did not yet recognize him, and he gasped out a plea for whisky.
With the utmost effort of her young strength she got him in, and managed to straighten out the mutilated body with pillows under its head.
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But after a little the stimulant brought a slight reviving, and he talked in broken and disjointed phrases.
“Hit war Severance,” he mumbled. “I fought back—I reckon I kilt him, too.”
Glory gazed in bewildered alarm about the house. Brother Bud Hawkins was at Uncle Jimmy Litchfield’s place, and she must get medical help, though she feared that the wounded man would be dead before her return.
When she came back with the preacher, who also “healed human bodies some,” Colby was still alive but near his passing.
“Ef thar’s aught on your conscience, Sim,” said the old preacher gently, “hit’s time ter make yore peace with Almighty God, fer ye’re goin’ ter stand afore him in an hour more. Air ye ready ter face Him?”
The dying man looked up, and above the weakness and the suffering that filled his eyes, showed a dominating expression of terror. If ever a human being needed to be shriven he thought it was himself.
They had to bend close to catch his feeble syllables, as he said: “Git paper—write this down.”
The preacher obeyed, kneeling on the floor, and though the words were few, their utterance required dragging minutes, punctuated with breaks of silence and gasping.
“Hit warn’t John Spurrier—thet kilt Captain Comyn back tha’r in the Philippines.... I knows who done hit——” He broke off there, and the girl closed her hands over her face. “I sought ter kill Spurrier—but I warn’t with them—thet attackted him hyar—an’ wounded ther woman.”
Once more a long hiatus interrupted the recital and279then the mangled creature went on: “Hit was ther oil folks thet deevised thet murder scheme.”
The preacher was busily writing the record of this death-bed statement and Glory stood pale and distraught.
The words “oil people” were ringing in her ears. What connection could Spurrier have had with them: what enmity could they have had for him?
But out of the confusion of her thoughts another thing stood forth with the sudden glare of revelation. This man might die before he finished and if he could not tell all he knew, he must first tell that which would clear her husband’s name. Though that husband had turned his back on her, her duty to him in this matter must take precedence over the rest.
“Joe Givins—” began Colby once more in laborious syllables, but peremptorily the girl halted him.
“Never mind Joe Givins just now,” she commanded with as sharp a finality as though to her had been delegated the responsibility of his judgment. “You said you knew who killed Captain Comyn. Who was it?”
The eyes in the wounded and stricken face gazed up at her in mute appeal as a sinner might look at a father confessor, pleading that he be spared the bitterest dregs of his admission.
Glory read that glance and her own delicate features hardened. She leaned forward.
“I brought you in here and succored you,” she asserted with a sternness which she could not have commanded in her own behalf. “You’re going before Almighty God—and unless you answer that question280honestly—no prayers shall go with you for forgiveness.”
“Glory!” The name broke in shocked horror from the bearded lips of the preacher. “Glory, the mercy of God hain’t ter be interfered with by mortals. Ther man’s dying!”
Upon him the young woman wheeled with blazing eyes.
“God calls on his servants for justice to the living as well as mercy to the dying,” she declared. “Sim Colby, who killed Captain Comyn?”
“I done hit,” came the unwillingly wrung confession. “My real name’s Grant.... Severance aided me.... Thet’s why I sought to kill Spurrier. I deemed he war a huntin’ me down.”
“Now,” ordered the young woman, “what about Joe Givins?”
Again a long pause, then: “Blind Joe Givins—only he ain’t no blinder than me—read papers hyar—he diskivered thet Spurrier was atter oil rights—he tipped off ther oil folks—he war their spy all ther time—shammin’ ter be blind——” There the speaker struggled to breathe and let his head fall back with the utterance incomplete. Five minutes later he was dead.
“Hit don’t seem ter me,” said Brother Hawkins a short time later, while Glory still stood in dazed and trance-like wonderment, “es ef what he said kin be true. Why ef hit be, John Spurrier was aimin’ ter plunder us hyar all ther time! He was counselin’ us ter sell out—an’ he was buyin’. I kain’t believe that.”
But Glory had drawn back to the wall of the room and into her eyes had come a new expression. The281expression of one who must tear aside a veil and know the truth, and who dreads what that truth may be.
She had said that justice, no less than mercy, was God’s command laid upon mortals. She had, almost by the extremity of withholding from Colby his hope of salvation until he spoke, won from him the declaration which would give back to John Spurrier an unsmirched name. Once Spurrier had said that was his strongest wish in life. But now justice called again: this time justice to her own people and perhaps it meant the unveiling of duplicity in the man she had married.
“Brother Hawkins,” she declared in a low but fervent voice, “if it’s not true, it’s a slander that I can’t let stand. If itistrue, I must undo the wrong he’s sought to do—if I can. Please wait.”
Then she was tearing at the bit of paneling that gave access to the secret cabinet, and poring over papers from a broken and rifled strong box.
There was the uncontrovertible record, clear writ, and at length her pale face came up resolutely.
“I don’t understand it all yet,” she told the preacher. “But he was buying. He bought everything that’s been sold this side the ridge. He was seeking to influence the legislature, too. I’ve got to talk to my father.”
It was the next night, when old Dyke Cappeze had ridden back from the county seat, that he sat under the lamp in the room where Sim Colby had died, and on the table before him were spread the papers that282had lain unread so long in John Spurrier’s secret cabinet.
Across from him sat Glory with her fingers spasmodically clutched and her eyes riveted on his face as he read and studied the documents, which at first he had been loath to inspect without the permission of their owner. He had been convinced, however, when Glory had told the story of the dying confession and had appealed to him for counsel.
“By what you tell me,” the old lawyer had summarized at the end of her recital, “you forced from this man his admission which cleared John Spurrier of the charge that’s been hanging over him. You set out to serve him and refused to be turned aside when Colby balked.... But that confession didn’t end there. It went on and besides clearing Jack in that respect it seems to have involved him in another way. You can’t use a part of a confession and discard the balance. Perhaps we can serve him as well as others best by going into the whole of the affair.”
So now Glory interrupted by no word or question, despite her anxiety to understand and her hoping against hope for a verdict which should leave John Spurrier clean of record.
But if she refrained from breaking in on the study that engrossed her father and wrinkled his parchment-like forehead, she could not help reading the expression of his eyes, the growing sternness and indignation of his stiffening lips—and of drawing the moral that when he spoke his words must be those of condemnation.
The strident song of the katydids came in through the windows and the moon dropped behind the hill283crests before Dyke Cappeze spoke, and Brother Hawkins, who was spending the night at that house, smoked alone on the porch, unwilling to intrude on the confidences that these two might wish to exchange.
Finally the lawyer folded the last paper and looked up.
“Do you want the whole truth, little gal?” he inquired bluntly. “How much do you still love this man?”
Glory flushed then paled.
“I guess,” she said and her words were very low and soft, “I’ll love him so long as I live—though I hate myself for doing it. He wearied of me and forgot me—but I can’t do likewise.”
Then her chin came up and her voice rang with a quiet finality.
“But I want the truth ... the whole truth without any softening.”
“Then as I see it, it’s simply this. A war was on between two groups of financiers. American Oil and Gas had held a monopoly and maintained a corrupt control in the legislature that stifled competition. That’s why the other oil boom failed. The second group was trying to slip up on these corruptionists and gain the control by a campaign of surprise. Jack Spurrier appears to have been the ambassador of that second group—and he seems to have failed.”
The wife nodded. Even yet she unconsciously held a brief for his defense.
“So far as you’ve gone,” she reminded her father, “you show him to have been what is commonly called a ‘practical business man’—but no worse than the men he fought.”
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Cappeze bowed his head gravely and his next words came reluctantly. “So far, yes. Of course he could have done none of the things he did had he not first won the confidence of those poor ignorant folk that are our neighbors and our friends. Of course it was because they believed in him and followed his counsel that they sold their birthrights to men with whom he pretended to have no connection—and yet who took their orders from him.”
“Then,” Glory started, halted and leaned forward with her hands against her breast and her utterance was the monotone of a voice forced to a hard question: “Then what I feared was true? He lived among us and made friends of us—only to rob us?”
“If by ‘us’ you mean the mountain people, I fear me that’s precisely what he did. I can see no other explanation. Which ever of these two groups won meant to exploit and plunder us.”
For a little she made no answer, but the delicate color of her cheeks was gone to an ivory whiteness and the violet eyes were hardening.
“Perhaps we oughtn’t to judge him too harshly for these things,” said the father comfortingly. “The scroll of my bitterness against him is already heavy enough and to spare. He has broken your heart and that’s enough for me. As to the rest there are many so-called honorable gentlemen who are no more scrupulous. We demand clean conduct here in these hills,” a fierce bitterness came into his words, “but then we are ignorant, backwoods folk! There are many intricate ins and outs to this business and I don’t presume to speak with absolute conclusiveness yet.”
Outside the katydids sang their prophecies of frost285to come and an owl hooted. Glory Spurrier sat staring ahead of her and at last she said aloud, in that tone which one uses when a thought finds expression, unconscious that it has been vocal: “So he won our faith—with his clear eyes and his honest smile—only to swindle and rob us!”
“My God, if I were a younger man,” broke out the father passionately, rising from his chair and clenching the damaging papers in his talon-like fingers, “I’d learn the oil game. I’d take this information and use it against both their gangs—and I believe I could force them both to their knees.”
He paused and the momentary fire died out of his eyes.
“I’m too old a dog for new tricks though,” he added dejectedly, “and there’s no one else to do it.”
“How could it be done?” demanded Glory rousing herself from her trance. “Between them they hold all the power, don’t they?”
“As far as I can make out,” Cappeze explained with the interest of the legalistic mind for tackling an abstruse problem, “Spurrier had completed his arch as to one of his two purposes—all except its keystone. He had yet to gain a passage way through Brother Hawkins’ land. With that he would have held the completed right-of-way—and it’s the only one. The other gang of pirates hold the ability to get a charter but no right of way over which to use it. Now the man who could deliver Brother Hawkins’ concession would have a key. He could force Spurrier’s crowd to agree to almost anything, and with Spurrier’s crowd he could wring a compromise from the others. Bud Hawkins is like the delegate at a convention286who can break a deadlock. God knows I’d love to tackle it—but it’s too late for me.”
Glory had come to her feet, and stood an incarnation of combat.
“It’s not too late for me,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m too crude to go into John Spurrier’s world of cultivated people but I’m shrewd enough to go into his world of business!”
“You!” exclaimed the father in astonishment, then after a moment an eager light slowly dawned in his eyes and he broke out vehemently: “By God in Heaven, girl, I believe you’re the man for the job!”
“Call Brother Hawkins in,” commanded Glory. “We need his help.”
Before he reached the door old Cappeze turned on his heel.
“Glory,” he said, “we’ve need to move out of this house and go back to my place. Here we’re dwelling under a dishonest roof.”
“I’m going to leave it,” she responded quickly, “but I’m going farther away than that. I’m going to study oil and I’m going to do it in the Bluegrass lowlands.”
287CHAPTER XXI
John Spurrier stepped from the train at Carnettsville into a life that had been revolutionized. At last he had succeeded in leaving his German exile. His own country was in the war but he, with the equipment of a soldier, bore a dishonored name, which would bar him from a commission. Here he found the development of his dreams realized, but by other hands than his own.
Above all, he must see Glory. He had cabled her and written her, so she would be expecting him. Now he gazed about streets through which teemed the new activity.
Here was the thing he had seen in his dreams when he stood on wooded hills and thought in the terms of the future. Here it stood vivid and actual before the eyes that had visioned it.
With a groan he turned into the road homeward on a hired horse. He still meant to fight, and unless the Bud Hawkins property had escaped him, he would still have to be accounted with—but great prizes had slipped away.
At the gate of his house, his heart rose into his throat. The power of his emotion almost stifled him. Never had his love for Glory flickered. Never had he thought or dreamed of anything else or any one else so dearly and so constantly as of her.
He stood at the fence with half-closed eyes for a288moment, steadying himself against the surges of up-welling emotion, then, raising his eyes, he saw that the windows and the door were nailed up. The chimney stood dead and smokeless.
Panic clutched at his throat as with a physical grasp. Before him trooped a hundred associations unaccountably dear. They were all memories of little things, mostly foolish little things that went into the sacred intimacy of his life with Glory.
Now there was no Glory there.
He rode at the best speed left in his tired horse over to old Cappeze’s house, and, as he dismounted, saw the lawyer, greatly aged and broken, standing in the door.
One glance at that face confirmed all the fears with which he had been battling. It was a face as stern as those on the frieze of the prophets. In it there was no ghost of the old welcome, no hope of any relenting. This old man saw in him an enemy.
“Where is Glory?” demanded Spurrier as he hurried up to the doorstep, and the other looked accusingly back into his eyes and answered in cold and bitterly clipped syllables.
“Wherever she is, sir, it’s her wish to be there alone.” Suddenly the old eyes flamed and the old voice rose thin and passionate. “If I burned in hell for it to the end of eternity, I would give you no other word of her.”
“She—she is not dead, then?”
“No—but dead to you.”
“Mr. Cappeze,” said Spurrier steadily, “are you sure that I may not have explanations that may change her view of me?”
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“We know,” said the lawyer in a voice out of which the passion had passed, but which had the dead quality of an opinion inflexibly solidified, “that since your marriage, you never made her the companion of any hour that was not a backwoods hour. We know that you never told us the truth about yourself or your enterprises—that you came to us as a friend, won our confidence, and sought to exploit us. Your record is one of lies and unfaithfulness, and we have cast you out. That is her decision and with me her wish is sacred.”
The returned exile stood meeting the relentless eyes of the old man who had been his first friend in these hills and for a few moments he did not trust himself to speak.
The shock of those shuttered windows and that blankly staring front at the house where he had looked for welcome; the collapse of all the dreams that had sustained him while a prisoner in an internment camp and a refugee hounded across the German border were visiting upon him a prostration that left him trembling and shaken.
Finally he commanded his voice.
“To me, too, her wish is sacred—but not until I hear it from her own lips. She alone has the right to condemn me and not even she until I have made my plea to her. Great God, man, my silence hasn’t been voluntary. I’ve been cut off in a Hun prison-camp. I’ve kept life in me only because I could dream of her and because though it was easier to die, I couldn’t die without seeing her and explaining.”
“It was from her own lips that I took my orders,” came the unmoved response. “Those orders were290that through me you should learn nothing. You had the friendship of every man here until you abused it—now I think you’ll encounter no sympathy. I told you once how the wolf-bitch would feel toward the man who robbed her of her young. You chose to disregard my warning—and I’ll ask you to leave my house.”
John Spurrier bowed his head. He had lost her! If that were her final conclusion, he could hardly seek to dissuade her. At least he could lose the final happiness out of his life—from which so much else had already been lost—as a gentleman should lose.
And he knew that however old Cappeze might feel, he would not lie. If he said that was Glory’s deliberately formed decision, that statement must be accepted as true.
“I have never loved any one else,” said Spurrier slowly. “I shall never love any one else. I have been faithful despite appearances. The rest of your charges are true, and I make no denial. I gambled about as fairly as most men gamble. That is all.”
A stiffening pride, made flinty by the old man’s hostility, shut into silence some things that Spurrier might have said. He scorned the seeming of whine that might have lain in explanations, even though the explanations should lighten the shadow of his old friend’s disapproval. He offered no extenuation and breathed nothing of the changes that had been wrought in himself by the tedious alchemy of time and reflection.
He had begun under the spur of greedy ambition, but changes had been wrought in him by Glory’s love.
He was still ambitious, but in a different way. He291wanted to salvage something for the equitable beneficiaries. He wanted to stand, not among the predatory millionaires, but to be his own man, with a clean name and solvent.
Before he could attain that condition he must render unto Harrison the things that were Harrison’s and wipe out his own tremendous liabilities—but his heart was in the hills.
John Spurrier went slowly and heavy heartedly back to the house which he had refashioned for his bride; the house that had become to him a shrine to all the dear, lost things of life.
The sun fell in mottled luminousness across its face of tempered gray and from the orchard where the lush grass grew knee-high came the cheery whistle of a Bob-white.
At the sound the man groaned with a wrench of his heart and throat, and his thoughts raced back to that day when the same note had come from the voices of hidden assassins and when Glory had exposed her breast to rifle-fire to send out the pigeon with its call for help.
The splendid oak that had shaded their stile had grown broader of girth and more majestic in the spread of its head-growth since he had stood here before, and in the flower beds, in which Glory had delighted, a few forlorn survivors, sprung up as volunteers from neglected roots, struggled through a choke of dusty weeds.
The man looked about the empty yard and his breath came like that of a torture victim on the rack. The desolation and ache of a life deprived of all that292made it sweet struck in upon him with a blight beside which his prison loneliness had been nothing.
“If she knew the whole truth—instead of only half the truth,” he groaned, “she might forgive me.”
He ripped the padlock from the door and let himself in. He flung wide a shutter and let the afternoon sun flood the room, and once inside a score of little things worked the magic of memory upon him and tore afresh every wound that was festering.
There hung the landscapes that he and she had loved and as he looked at them her voice seemed to sound again in his ears like forgotten music. From somewhere came the heavy fragrance of honeysuckle and old nights with her in the moonlight rushed back upon him.
Then he saw an apron on a peg—hanging limp and empty, and again he saw her in it. He went and opened a drawer in which his own clothes had been kept—and there neatly folded by her hand were things of his.
John Spurrier, whose iron nerve had once been café talk in the Orient, sat down on a quilted bed and tearless sobs racked him.
“No,” he said to himself at last. “No, if she wants her freedom I can’t pursue her. I’ve hurt her enough—and God knows I’m punished enough.”
Unless he were tamely to surrender to the despair that beset him, John Spurrier had one other thing to do before he left the hills. He must come to such an agreement with Bud Hawkins as would give him a right of way over that single tract and complete his chain of holdings. Thus fortified the field beyond the ridge would be safe against invasion by his enemies293and even the other field would have readier outlet to market by that route. In the Hawkins property lay the keystone of the arch. With it the position was impregnable. Without it all the rest fell apart like an inarticulated skeleton.
It happened that Spurrier met Hawkins as he went away from his lonely house, and forcing his own miseries into the background, he sought to become the business man once more. He began with a frank statement of the facts and offered fair and substantial terms of trade.
Both because his affection for the old preacher would have tolerated nothing less and because it would have been folly now to play the cheaper game, he spoke in the terms of generosity.
But to his surprise and discomfiture, Brother Hawkins shook a stubborn head.
“Thar ain’t skeercely no power on ’arth, Mr. Spurrier,” he declared, “thet could fo’ce me inter doin’ no business with ye.”
“But, Brother Hawkins,” argued the opportunity hound, “you are cutting your own throat. You and I standing together are invincible. Separate, we are lost. I’m almost willing to let you name the terms of agreement—to write the contract for yourself.”
“I’ve done been pore a right long while already,” the preacher reminded him as his eyes kindled with the zealot’s fire. “Long afore my day Jesus Christ was pore an’ ther Apostle Paul, an’ other righteous men. I ain’t skeered ter go on in likewise ter what I’ve always done.” He paused and laid a kindly hand on the shoulder of the man who offered him wealth.
“I ain’t seekin’ ter fault ye unduly, John Spurrier.294Mebby ye’ve done follered yore lights—but we don’t see with no common eye, ner no mutual disc’arnment. Ye’ve done misled folk thet swore by ye, ef I sees hit a’right. Now ye offers me wealth, much ther same as Satan offered hit ter Jesus on a high place, an’ we kain’t trade—no more then what they could trade.”
The old preacher’s attitude held the trace of kindliness that sought to drape reproof in gentleness and to him, as had been impossible with Cappeze, Spurrier poured out his confidence. At the outset, he confessed, he had deliberately dedicated himself to the development of wealth for himself and his employers, with no thought of others. Later, in a fight between wary capitalists where vigilance had to be met with vigilance, the seal of secrecy had been imperative. Frankness with the mountain men would have been a warning to his enemies. Now, however, his sense of responsibility was awake. Now he wanted to win back his status of confidence in this land where he had known his only home. Now what weight he had left to throw into the scales would be righteously thrown. Even yet he must move with strict, guarded secrecy.
But the old circuit rider shook his head.
“Hit’s too late, now, ter rouse faith in me, John,” he reiterated. “Albeit I’d love ter credit ye, ef so-be I could. What’s come ter pass kain’t be washed out with words.” He paused before he added the simple edict against which there was no arguing.
“Mebby I mout stand convinced even yit ef I didn’t know thet ther devil was urgin’ me on with prospects of riches.”
One thing remained to him; the pride that should295stiffen him in the presence of his accusers and judges. When he went into the eclipse of ruin, at least he would go with unflinching gallantry.
And it was in that mood that Spurrier reached his club in New York and prepared himself for the ordeal of the next day’s interview.
He had wired Harrison of his coming, but not of his hopelessness, and when his telephone jangled and he heard the voice of the financier, he recognized in it an undercurrent of exasperation, which carried omen of a difficult interview.
“That you, Spurrier? This is Harrison. Be at my office at eleven to-morrow morning. Perhaps you can construe certain riddles.”
“Of what nature, sir?”
“Of a nature that won’t bear full discussion over the wire. We have had an anonymous letter from some mysterious person who claims to come with the situation in a sling. It may be a crank whom we’ll have to throw out—or some one we dare not ignore. At all events, it’s up to you to dispose of him. He’s in your province. If you fail, we lose out and, as I said once before, you go to the scrap heap.”
Spurrier hung up the phone and sat in a nerveless trepidation which was new and foreign to his nature. This interview of to-morrow morning would call for the tallest bluffing he had ever attempted, and the chances would, perhaps, turn on hair-trigger elements of personal force.
He must depend on his coolness, audacity, and adroitness to win a decision, and, except by guesswork, he could not hope to formulate in advance the terrain296of battle or the nature of counter-attack with which he must meet his adversary.
That evening he strolled along Broadway and found himself yielding to a dangerous and whimsical mood. He wondered how many other men outwardly as self-assured and prosperous as himself were covertly confessing suicide as one of to-morrow’s probabilities.
Over Longacre Square the incandescent billboards flamed and flared. The darning-wool kitten disported itself with mechanical abandon. The woman who advertised a well-known corset and the man who exploited a brand of underwear brilliantly made and unmade their toilets far above the sidewalk level. Motors shrieked and droned and crowds drifted.
Before a moving-picture theater, his introspective eye was momentarily challenged by a gaudy three-sheet. The poster proclaimed a popular screen star in a “fight fuller of punch than that of ‘The Wreckers.’”
What caused Spurrier to pause was the composition of the picture—and the mental comparison which it evoked. A man crouched behind a heavy table, overthrown for a barricade—as he had once done.
Fallen enemies lay on the floor of a crude Western cabin. Others still stood, and fought with flashing guns and faces “registering” desperation, frenzy, and maniac fury. The hero only, though alone and outnumbered, was grimly calm. The stress of that inferno had not interfered with the theatric pose of head and shoulders—the grace and effect of gesture that was conveyed in the two hands wielding two smoking pistols.
Spurrier smiled. It occurred to him that had a director297stood by while he himself had knelt behind a table he would have bawled out many amendments which fact had overlooked. Apparently he and his attackers had, by these exacting standards of art, missed the drama of the situation.
Over him swept a fresh flood of memory, and it brought a cold and nervous dampness to his temples. Again he saw Glory rising at the broken window with a pigeon to release—and a life to sacrifice, if need be. On her face had been no theatric expression which would have warranted a close-up.
Spurrier hastened on, turning into a side street where he could put the glare at his back and find a more mercifully dark way.
He was seeing, instead of dark house fronts, the tops of pine trees etched against an afterglow, and Glory standing silhouetted against a hilltop. Above the grind of the elevated and the traffic, he was hearing her voice in thrushlike song, happy because he loved her.
The agony of loss overwhelmed him, and he actually longed, as for a better thing, for that moment to come back when behind an overturned table he had endured the suspense which death had promised to end in an instant filled and paid for with revenge.
Then through his disturbed brain once more flashed lines of verse: