When the door had closed the woman dropped limply into a chair. Her pupils were distended and her fingers twisted in aimless gropings. After a while she looked about a little wildly for Boone Wellver. It was something to have his companionship during the hours of suspense—but the boy's chair, too, was empty. His rifle was missing from its corner.
She know now what had happened. Boone had slipped uninvited and secretly out into the night. He had said nothing, but he meant to follow the pair unseen, and if he found his hero threatened, there would be one armed follower at his back.
From the crib in one corner rose an uneasy whimper and Araminta went to soothe her baby at her breast.
When Boone surreptitiously slipped out of the house he had plunged recklessly into the thorn-tangle for a shorter cut than the two men would take: a road of precipitous peril but of moments saved.
If the possibility which Saul had admitted came to fruition and the guns started popping, the peril lay not in the course of subsequent minutes but at the pregnant instant when Asa Gregory's face was first seen in the door. It would be in that breathing-space that the issue would find settlement, and it would hang, hair-balanced, on the self-restraint of two men whose hard-held hatred might break bounds and overwhelm them as each thought of the father slain by violence. It would be a parlous moment when their eyes, full of stored-up and long-curbed rancour, first engaged and their hostile palms were required to meet and clasp.
Young as he was, Boone understood these matters. He knew how the resolve which each had undertaken might collapse into swift destruction as the hot tides rushed into their temples. If their mutual concession of manner was not balanced to exact nicety—if either Tom or Asa seemed to hold back and throw upon the other the brunt of the difficult conciliation by so much as a faltering stride—there would be chaos—and Boone meant to be there in time.
In this pocketed bit of wilderness, the incline had been built years ago, and it had been a challenge to Nature's mandate of isolation.
As the crow flew, the railroad that might afford an outlet to market was not so many miles away, but it might as well have been ten times as distant. Between lay a wall of hills interposing its grim prohibition with a timbered cornice lifted twenty-five hundred feet towards the sky and more than a day's journey separated those gaps where wheels could scale and cross. Long ago local and visionary enthusiasts had built a huge warehouse on a towering pinnacle with an incline of track dropping dizzily down from it to the creek far below. Its crazy little cars had been hauled up by a cable wound on a drum with the motive force of a straining donkey-engine. But so ambitious an enterprise had not survived the vicissitudes of hard times. Its simple machinery had rusted; its tracks ran askew with decay upon their warped underpinning of teetering struts.
Now the warehouse stood dry-rotting and unkempt, its spaces regularly tenanted only by the owl and bat. Through its unpatched roof one caught, at night, the peep of stars and its hulking sides leaned under the buffet of the winds which raced, screaming, around the shoulder of the mountain.
Towards this goal Boone was hurrying, forgetful now of any divided standards of thought, thinking only of the kinsman whom his boyhood had exalted with ardent hero-worship—and of that kinsman's danger. A rowelling pressure of haste drove him, while snares of trailing creepers, pitfalls blotted into darkness and the thickness of jungle-like undergrowth handicapped him with many stubborn difficulties.
Sometimes he fell and scrambled up again, bruised and growling but undiscouraged. Sometimes he forsook even the steep grade of the foot trail for shorter cut-offs where he pulled himself up semi-perpendicular walls of cliff, trusting to a hand-grip on hanging root or branch and a foothold on almost nothing.
But when he was still a long way off he saw a pale flare against the sky which he knew was a bonfire outside the warehouse, and by the brightening of that beacon from pallor to crimson glow he measured his progress.
Inside the building itself another battle against time was being fought: a battle to hold the attention of a crowd in the background of whose minds lurked the distrait suspense of waiting for a graver climax than that of oratorical peroration. About the interior blazed pine torches and occasional lanterns with tin reflectors. Even this unaccustomed effort at illumination failed to penetrate the obscurity of the corners or to carry its ragged brightness aloft into the rafters. Beyond the sooty formlessness of encroaching shadows one felt rather than saw the walls, with their rifts through which gusty draught caused the torches to flare and gutter, sending out the incense of their resin.
Between the Circuit Judge, before whom Asa must face trial and the County Judge, sat Basil Prince, the principal speaker of the evening, and his quiet eyes were missing nothing of the mediaevalism of the picture.
Yet one might have inferred from his tranquillity of expression that he had never addressed a gathering where the fitful glare of torches had not shone upon repeating rifles and coon skin caps: where the faces had not been set and grim as though keyed to an ordeal of fire and lead.
He was noting how every fresh arrival hesitated near the door and glanced about him. In that brief pause and scrutiny he recognized the purport of a division, for as each newcomer stepped to the left or the right of the centre aisle he thereby proclaimed himself a Carr or a Gregory—taking shrewd thought of clan-mobilization. Then as a low drone of talk went up from the body of the house and a restless shuffling of feet, the speaker and his reception committee could not escape the realization of an ugly tension; of an undertow of anxiety moving deep beneath the surface affectation of calm. A precarious spirit brooded there.
The Circuit Judge leaned over toward Prince, whispering nervously through a smile of courteous commonplace: "Maybe we've made a mistake to attempt it, General. They seem dangerously restless and tight-strung, and they've got to be so gripped that they'll forget everything but your words for a spell!" The speaker, in his abstraction, relapsed abruptly out of judicial dignity into mountain crudity of speech. "Hit's ergoin' ter be like holdin' back a flood tide with a splash-dam. Thank God ef any man kin do thet, I reckon hit's you."
The Louisville lawyer nodded, "I'll try, sir," was his brief response.
As the speaker of the moment dropped back, General Prince came to his feet and with him rose the Circuit Judge who was to introduce him. That prefatory address was brief, for the infection of restiveness was spreading and loosely held interests were gravitating to mischief.
Yet as General Prince stood quietly waiting, with his slender and elderly figure straight poised and his fine face, for all its intellectuality, remaining the steel-jawed face of a fighter, the shuffling feet quieted and straying glances came to focus. There was a commanding light in the unquailing eyes and these men who knew few celebrities from the world without, knew both his name and his record. They gazed steadfastly at him because, though he came now as a friend he had in another day come as a foe, and the weight of his inimical hand had come down to them through the mists of the past as word-of-mouth. In the days of the war between the States, the mountains had thrust their wedge of rock and granite-loyal Unionism through the vitals of Confederate territory. While the mobility of the gray forces were balked there to a heavy congestion, one command, bitterly hated and grudgingly admired, had seemed capable of defying mountain ranges and of laughing at torrents. Like a scathe that admitted no gainsaying, it came from nowhere, struck, without warning, and was gone again unpunished. Its name had been a metaphor for terror.
Morgan's Men! That brilliant organization of partisan raiders who slept in their saddles and smote Vulcan-like. The world knew of them and the Cumberlands had felt their blows. General Basil Prince had been one of their commanders. Now, a recognized authority on the use of cavalry, a lawyer of distinction, a life-long Democrat, he stood before Republicans pouring out the vials of his wrath upon the head of the man whom he charged with having betrayed and disrupted his own party and with attempting to yoke freedom into bondage.
Faces bent forward with eyes lighting into an altered mood, and the grimness which spelled danger relaxed grudgingly into attention.
The speaker did not underestimate his task. It was not enough to play the spell-binder for a definite period. He must unflaggingly hold them vassals to his voice until the entrance of Asa Gregory gave him pause.
Never had Basil Prince spoken with a more compelling force or a fierier power of invective, and his voice had rung like a bugle for perhaps three-quarters of an hour when in the shadowed darkness beyond the walls the figure of a boy halted, heavily panting.
Boone paused only for a little, testing the condition of his rifle's breech and bolt, recovering his spent breath. Then he slipped nearer and peered through the slit where a board had been broken away in the wall itself. Within he saw figures bending forward and intent—and his brow knit into furrows as he took in at a glance the division of the clans, each to its separate side of the house. They had come, Saul said, to bring peace out of dissension, but they had paradoxically arranged themselves in readiness for conflict.
Through a gaping door at the rear, of which he knew, and which lay as invisible as a rent in a black curtain, because the shadows held undisputed sway back there, the boy made a noiseless entrance. Up a ladder, for the rungs of which he had to feel blindly, he climbed to a perch on the cross-beams, under the eaves, and still he was as blanketed from view as a bat in an unlighted cavern. The only dim ghost of glow that went with him were two faint phosphorescent points where he had rubbed the sights of his rifle with the moistened heads of matches.
For the eloquence of the speaker, which would at another time have enthralled him, he had now no thought, because lying flattened on a great square-hewn timber, he was searching the crowd for the face of Tom Carr.
Soon he made it out below him, to his right, and slowly he trained his rifle upon the breast beneath the face.
That was all he had to do for the present—except to wait.
When Asa came in, if matters went badly and if Tom made a motion to his holster or a gesture to his minions, there would be one thing more, but it involved only the crooking of a finger which snuggled ready in the trigger-guard.
The boy's muscles were badly cramped up there as the minutes lengthened and multiplied. The timber was hard and the air chill, but he dared not invite discovery by free movement.
Then suddenly with a short and incisive sentence following on longer and more rounded phrases, the speaker fell silent. Boone could not properly appreciate the ready adroitness with which General Prince had clipped his oratory short without the seeming of a marred effect. He only knew that the voice spoke crisply and halted and that the speaker was reaching out his hand, with matter-of-fact gesture, toward the gourd in the water bucket on the table.
Instantly the shuffling of feet grated its signal of an awakening apprehension—an uneasiness which had been temporarily lulled. There was an instant, after that, of dead hush, and then a twisting of necks as all eyes went to the door.
The men on each side of the house drew a little closer and more compactly together, widening and emphasizing the line of the aisle between; becoming two distinct crowds where there had been one, loosely joined. Hands gestured instinctively toward guns laid by, and halted in cautious abeyance. Through the cobwebbed spaciousness and breathless quiet of the place sounded the ill-omened quaver of a barn owl.
In the door stood Asa Gregory, his hands hanging at his sides with a studied inertness as his eyes travelled slowly, appraisingly, about the place. His attitude and expression alike were schooled into passiveness, but as he saw another figure rise from just in front of the stage and stand in momentary irresolution, the muscles of his jaw hardened and into his eyes flashed a defiant gleam. His lids contracted to the narrowness of slits, as though struggling to shut out some sudden and insufferable glare. His chest heaved in a gasp-like breath and the hands which he sought to keep hanging, slowly closed and clenched as muscles tauten under an electric shock. Then, as if in obedience to impulses beyond volition, the right hand came upward toward the left armpit—where his pistol holster should have been.
At the sight of his enemy rising there before him, Asa Gregory had seen red, and the length of the aisle away, Tom Carr stood struggling with an identical transport of reeling self-control. Like a reflection in a mirror his face too blackened in sinister hatred and his hand too moved toward the empty holster.
The strained tableau held only for a breathing space, but it was long enough for acceptance as a signal. It was long enough to afford the orator of the evening a swift, photographic impression of flambeaux giving back the glint of drawn pistols to right and left of the aisle; of the ducking of timid heads; of a crowd holding a pose as tense and ready as runners set on their marks—yet breathlessly awaiting the overt signal.
It was long enough, too, for Boone Wellver, crouched in the rafters, to close one eye and sight his rifle on the back of Tom Carr—and to draw a shallow breath of nerve-tension and resolution as his finger balanced the trigger—a finger which sheer strain was perilously contracting.
In that same instant Asa Gregory and Tom Carr were brought back to themselves by the feel of emptiness where there should have been the bulge of concealed weapons—and by all the resolution for which that disarmament stood.
With a convulsive bracing of his shoulders, Gregory relaxed again, throwing out his arms wide of his body, and Carr echoed the peace gesture.
As his deep-held breath came with long exhalation from his chest, Asa walked steadily down the aisle—while Tom Carr went to meet him half way.
Standing face to face, the two enemies lifted stubbornly unwilling hands for the consummation of the peace-pact. Their palms touched and fell swiftly apart as though each had been scorched. Their faces were the stoic faces of two men undergoing a necessary torture. But the thing was done and the rafters rocked with an uproar of applause.
That clamour killed out a lesser sound, as the held breath in Boone Wellver's chest hissed out between teeth that suddenly fell to chattering. His body, for just a moment, shook so that he almost lost his balance on his precarious perch, as the flexed emotions that had keyed him to the point of homicide burst into relief like a released spring ... and with shaken but careful fingers he let down the cocked rifle hammer.
Then with a voice of smooth and quieting satisfaction the orator from Louisville raised his hands.
"I've just seen a big thing done," he said, "and now I move that you instruct your chairman to send a telegram of announcement to the next Governor of Kentucky."
He had to pause there until order could be restored out of a bedlam of yelling, laughing and handshaking. When there was a possibility of being heard again he held up a message which he had scribbled during that noisy interval. "I move you that you say this to our standard-bearer: 'Here in the hills of Marlin we have laid aside feudism to rescue our State from an even more dangerous thing. Here old enmities have been buried in an alliance against tyranny.'"
Boone had not recognized the face of Victor McCalloway in the audience, because that gentleman had been sitting quietly back in the shadows with the detachment of a looker-on among strangers, but now as the boy stood outside the door, he saw the Scot shaking hands with the speaker of the evening and heard him saying:
"General Prince, it has long been my ambition to meet you, Sir. I have soldiered a bit myself and I know your record. The committee has paid me the honour of permitting me to play your host for the night."
There was no moon and the heavens were like a high-hung curtain of purple-black plush, spangled with the glitter of cold stars. A breeze harping softly through the tree-tops carried a touch of frost, but Boone Wellver sat on a rounded hump of rock, well back from the road, with eyes that were wide and themselves starry under the spell of his reflections.
Since the coming of McCalloway Boone had been living in a world of fantasy. He had been seeing himself as no longer an ignorant lad, sleeping on a husk-pallet, in the cock-loft of a cabin, but as a personality of greater majesty and spaciousness of being. Tonight he had heard General Prince speak and under the fanning of oratory his dream-fires were hotly aglow. As he sat on the rock with the soft minstrelsy of the wind crooning overhead, a score of hearth-stone recitals came back to memory; all saga-like stories of the prowess of Morgan's men. It seemed that he could almost hear the strain of stirrup leathers and the creak of cavalry-gear; the drum-beat of many hoofs.
This great man who had ridden at the head of that command was even now on his way to Victor McCalloway's house and there he would remain until tomorrow morning. What marvellous stories those two veterans would furnish forth from their own treasuries of reminiscence!
Suddenly Boone rose with an abrupt but fixed resolve. "By Godelmighty!" he exclaimed. "I reckon I'll jest kinderly sa'anter over thar and stay all night, too. I'd love ter listen at 'em talk."
Here in the hills where the very meagreness makes a law of hospitality he had never heard of a traveller who asked a night's lodging being turned away. Yet when he arrived and lifted his hand to knock he hesitated for a space, gulping his heart out of his throat, suddenly stricken with the enormity of intruding himself, unbidden, upon such notable presences.
Then the door swung open, and the boy found himself stammering with a tongue that had become painfully and ineptly stiff:
"I've done got belated on ther highway—an' I'm leg-weary," he prevaricated. "I 'lowed mebby ye'd suffer me ter come in an' tarry till mornin'."
Over the preoccupation of McCalloway's face broke an amused smile, and he stepped aside, waving his hand inward with a gesture of welcome.
"General Prince, permit me to present my young friend, Boone Wellver," he announced, stifling the twinkle of his eyes, and speaking with ceremonial gravity. "He is a neighbour of mine—who tells me he has dropped in for the night."
The seated gentleman with the gray moustache and beard came to his feet, extending his hand, and under the overwhelming innovation of such courtesy, Boone was even more palpably and painfully abashed. But as vaguely comprehended etiquette, he recognized its importance and accordingly came forward with the stiffness of an automaton.
"Howdy," he said with a stupendous solemnity. "I've done heerd tell of ye right often, an' hit pleasures me ter strike hands with ye. Folks says ye used ter be one of ther greatest horse-thievin' raiders that ever drawed breath."
When the roar of General Prince's laughter subsided—a laughter for which Boone could see no reason, the boy drew a chair to the corner of the hearth and sat as one may sit in the wings of a theatre, his breath coming with the palpitation of simmering excitement. Soon the elders seemed to have forgotten him in the heated absorption of their debate. They were threshing over the campaigns of the war between the States and measuring the calibre of commanders as a backwoods man might estimate the girth and footage of timber.
Boone nursed contented knees between locked fingers while the debate waxed warm.
Not only were battles refought there in retrospect, with such illuminating vividness as seemed to dissolve the narrow walls into a panoramic breadth of smoking, thunderous fields, but motive and intent were developed back of the engagements.
Boone in the chimney corner sat mouse-quiet. He seemed to be rapturously floating through untried spaces on a magic carpet.
McCalloway replenished the fire from time to time, and though midnight came and passed, neither thought of sleep. It was as if men who had dwelt long in civilian inertia, were wassailing deep again in the heady wine of a martial past, and were not yet ready to set aside their goblets of memory.
The forgotten boy, electrically wakeful, huddled back, almost stifling his breath lest he should be remembered and sent to bed.
The speakers fell eventually into a silence which held long and was complete save for the light hiss and crackle of the logs, until Basil Prince's voice broke it with a low-pitched and musing interrogation. "I sometimes wonder whether the chemistry of a great war today would bring forth mightier or lesser reactions. Would the need call into evidence men of giant stature? Have we, in our time, greater potential geniuses than Grant and Lee?"
McCalloway shook his head. "I question it," he declared. "I question it most gravely. I am myself a retired soldier. I have met most of the European commanders of my day, I have campaigned with not a few. Several have demonstrated this or that element of greatness, but not one the sheer pre-eminence of genius."
"And yet—" General Prince rose abruptly from his chair, under the impulse of his engrossed interest. "And yet, there was quite recently, in the British Army, one figure that to my mind demonstrated true genius, sir,—positive and undeniable genius. Tragedy claimed him before his life rounded to fulfilment. Not the tragedy of the field—which is rather gold than black—but the unholy and—I must believe—the undeserved tragedy of unwarrantable slander. If General Hector Dinwiddie had not died by his own hand in Paris, two years ago, he would have compelled recognition—and history's grudging accolade. It is my belief, sir, that he was of that mighty handful—the military masters."
For a while, McCalloway offered neither assent nor denial. His eyes held, as if by some hypnotic influence in the coals, were like those of the crystal gazer who sees shadowy and troubling pictures, and even in the hearth-flare the usually high-colour of his Celtic cheeks appeared faded into a sort of parchment dulness. Such a tide of enthusiasm was sweeping the other along, though, that his host's detachment and taciturnity went unobserved.
"Dinwiddie was not the man to have been guilty of those things, which scandal whispered of him," persisted Prince, with such spirited animation as might have characterized him had he been confronting a jury box, summing up for the defence, "but he could not brook calumny." The speaker paused to shake his head sadly, and added, "So he made the mad mistake of self-destruction—and robbed Great Britain of her ablest and most brilliant officer."
"Perhaps," McCalloway suggested in a speculative and far-away voice, "perhaps he felt that his usefulness to his country was ended when his name was dragged into the mire."
"And in that he erred. Such a man would have emerged, clean-shriven, from the smirching of slander. His detractors would have stood damned by their own infamous falsity—had he only faced them out and given them the lie."
"Then you believe—in spite of the seemingly overpowering evidence which they produced against him—that the chargeswerefalse?"
McCalloway put the question slowly. "May I ask upon what you base your opinion? You know all they said of him: personal dishonesty and even ugly immorality?"
The one-time cavalry leader caught up the challenge of the question.
"Upon what do I base my opinion, sir? I base it upon all the experience of my life and all my conceptions of personal honour. For such a man as Dinwiddie had proven himself to be under a score of reliable tests, the thing was a sheer impossibility. It was a contradiction in the terms of nature. His was the soul of a Knight, sir! Such a man could not cheat and steal and delight in low vices."
"Yet," came the somewhat dubious observation, "even Arthur's table had its caitiff knights, if you remember."
The Kentuckian's exclamation was almost a snort. "Dinwiddie was no such renegade," he protested. "At least I can't believe it. Glance at his record, man! The son of an Edinburgh tradesman, who forced his way up from the ranks to pre-eminence. He did it, too, in an army where caste and birth defend their messes against invasion, and, as he came from the ranks to a commission, so he went on to the head. There must have been a greatness of soul there that could hardly care to wallow in viciousness." As Prince paused, a spasm of emotion twitched the lips of his host, and McCalloway's pipe died in fingers that clutched hard upon its stem.
But because McCalloway sat unmoving, making no comment of any sort, the Kentuckian continued. It was as though he must have his argument acknowledged.
"I can see the tradesman's son, Sir Hector Dinwiddie, D.S.O., K.C.B., Major General, Aide de Camp to the Queen, promising Britain another glorious name—but as God in heaven is my judge, I cannot see him soiling his character, or degrading the uniform he wore!"
A moment of dead silence hung heavily between the walls of the room. Boone Wellver saw Victor McCalloway pass an uncertain hand across his eyes, and move his lips without speech, and then he heard Prince demand almost impatiently,
"But you say you have served in the British Army. Surely you do not believe that he was guilty?"
McCalloway, called out of his detached quiet by a direct question, raised his head and nodded it in a fashion of heavy inertia.
"General Prince," he replied with an effort, "there are two reasons why I should be the last man alive to add a syllable of corroboration to the evil things that were said of Dinwiddie. I myself have been a soldier and am a civilian. You may guess that a man whose career has been active would not be living the petty life of a hermit if fortune had dealt kindly with him. The officer who has suffered from a warrantless disgrace—which he cannot disprove—is hardly the judge to condemn another similarly charged.
"That, sir, is one reason why I should not contradict your view."
McCalloway rose slowly from his chair and, after standing for a moment with shoulders that drooped from their military erectness, went with an inelastic step to the corner of the room and came back, carrying a sword.
"There is also another reason based on personal partiality," he added. "I knew him so well that after the world heard of his suicide—and after my own misfortunes forced me into retirement, I might often have hired my sword because of my familiarity with his military thought."
Boone Wellver saw the throat work spasmodically, and wondered what it all meant as the carefully schooled words went on again, with a gauged steadiness.
"I have admired your own record, General Prince. I owe you frankness, but I have chapters in my life which I cannot confide to you. Nevertheless, I am glad we have met. Look at that blade." He held out the sword. In the leap and flicker of the firelight Boone could catch the glint of a hilt that sent out the sparkle of jewelry and inlaid enamel. Slowly General Prince slid the sabre from the scabbard, and bent forward, studying an inscription upon the damascened steel itself. For a moment he held it reverently before him, then straightened up and his voice trembled with a note of mystified wonderment.
"But this—" he said incredulously, "this is Dinwiddie's sabre—presented by—"
McCalloway smiled stiffly, but he held up a hand as if entreating silence.
"Itishis sword," he answered, but dully and without ardour, "and, if it means anything to you—he knew the facts of my own life, both the open and the hidden—and he trusted me enough to leave that blade in my keeping."
"To me, you required no recommendation, sir," said Basil Prince slowly. "If youhadneeded it, this would be sufficient. You had the confidence, even the love it seems, of the greatest military genius of our age."
On the following morning, Boone made his farewells, reluctantly as one who has glimpsed magic and who sets his face again to dull realities.
The Southerner, who had laid down his sword when its cause was lost and the Celt who had sheathed his, when his name was tarnished, stood together in the crystal-clear air of the heights, looking down from a summit over crags and valleys that sparkled with the rime of frost.
Undulating like a succession of arrested waves, were the ramparts of the ridges stretching into immeasurable distances. They were almost leafless now, but they wrapped themselves in colour tones that touched them into purple and blue. They wore atmospheric veils, mist-woven, and sun-dyed into evanescent and delicate effects of colour, but the cardinal note which lay upon them, as an expression rests upon a human face, was their declaration of wildness; their primitive note of brooding aloofness.
"They are unchanged," declared General Prince in a low voice. "The west has gone under the plough. The prairies are fenced. Alaska even is won—. These hills alone stand unamended. Here at the very heart of our civilization is the last frontier, and the last home of the trail-blazer." His eyes glistened as he pointed to a wisp of smoke that rose in a cove far under them, straight and blue from its clay-daubed chimney.
"There burns the hearth fire of our contemporary ancestors, the stranded wagon voyagers who have changed no whit from the pioneers of two hundred years ago."
Victor McCalloway nodded gravely, and his companion went on.
"With one exception this range was the first to which the earth, in the travail of her youth, gave birth. Compared with the Appalachians, the Himalayas and the Alps are young things, new to life. On either side of where we stand a youthful civilization has grown up, but these ridges have frowned on, unaltered. Their people still live two centuries behind us."
McCalloway swept out his hands in a comprehensive gesture.
"When you leave this spot, sir, for your return, you travel not only some two hundred miles, but also from the infancy of Americanism to its present big-boyhood. Pardon me, if that term seems disrespectful," he hastened to add. "But it is so that I always think of your nation, as the big growing lad of the world family. Titanically strong, astonishingly vigorous of resource, but, as yet, hardly adult."
The Kentuckian, standing spare and erect, typical of that old South which has caught step with the present, yet which has not outgrown the gracious touch of a more courtly past, smiled thoughtfully while his younger companion, who had known the life of court and camp, in the elder hemisphere, puffed at his blackened pipe: "Adult or adolescent, we are altering fast, casting aside today the garments of yesterday," admitted Prince. "In my own youth a gentleman felt the call of honour to meet his personal enemy on the duelling field. I have, myself, answered that call. In my young manhood I donned the gray, with a crusader's ardent sincerity, to fight for the institution of human slavery. Today we think in different terms."
Upon them both had fallen a mood; the mood of gazing far backward and perhaps also of adventuring as far forward in the forecasting of human transition.
Such a spirit may come to men who have, in effect, stepped aside from the march of their own day, into an elder régime—a pioneer setting.
To Basil Prince, in the fore-shortening of retrospect, all the gradual amendments of life, as he had known them in their enactment, stood forth at once in a gigantic composition of contrasts; heroically pictured on a single canvas.
"Now," he reflected, "we hear the younger generation speak with a pitying indulgence of the archaic stodginess of mid-Victorian ideas—and, my God, sir, that was all only yesterday, and this mid-Victorian thought was revolutionary in its newness and its advancement! I can remember when it startled the world: when Tennyson was accounted a wild radical, and Darwin a voice savouring strongly of heresy."
McCalloway filled a fresh pipe. He sent out a cloud of tobacco smoke and set back his shoulders.
"In my belief, your radical poet said one true thing at least," he observed.
"... I doubt not through the ages, one increasing purpose runs.
"... I doubt not through the ages, one increasing purpose runs.
"That purpose lies towards the swallowing of the local, and the individualistic, the national even into the international. It lies toward the broadest federation of ideals that can exist in harmony." He paused there, and in the voice of one expecting contradiction, added: "And that end will not be attained in parliaments, but on the battlefield."
"The creed of Americanism," Prince reminded him, "rests on the pillars of non-interference with other states and of a minimum of meddling among our own."
"So far, yes," admitted the Scot, but his eyes held a stubborn light of argument. "Yet I predict that when the whole story of Americanism is written, it will be cast to a broader plot."
On General Prince's lips flickered a quiet smile.
"Is there a broader thing than independence?" he inquired, and the answer came back with a quick uptake.
"At least a bigger thing, sir. Breadth is only one dimension, after all. A larger concept, perhaps, comes by adding one syllable to your word and making it interdependence. Inexorably you must follow the human cycle and some day, sir, your country must stand with its elder brethren, grappled in the last crusade. Then only will the word Americanism be completely spelled."
The Kentuckian's eyes kindled responsively to the animation of his companion's words, his manner. It was a phase of this interesting man that he had not before seen, but his own response was gravely calm,
"I am thinking," he said whimsically, "that this wine-like air has gone to our heads. We are standing in a high place, dreaming large dreams."
The Scot nodded energetically.
"I dare say," he acceded. "After all a hermit is thrown back on dreaming for want of action." He broke off and when he spoke again it was with a trace of embarrassment, almost of shyness which brought a flush to his cheeks.
"I've been living here close to the life that was the infancy of your nation, and I've been imagining the wonder of a life that could start as did that of these hardy settlers and pass, in a single generation, along the stages that the country, itself, has marched to this day. It would mean birth in pioneer strength and simplicity, and fulfilment in the present and future. It would mean ten years lived in one!"
"It would have had to begin two centuries ago," Prince reminded him, "and to run, who can say, how far forward?"
Half diffidently, half stubbornly, McCalloway shook his head.
"You saw that boy last night who called you a 'great horse-thievin' raider'?" The gray eyes twinkled with reminiscence. "In every essential respect he is a lad of two hundred years ago. He is a pioneer boy, crude as pig-iron, unlettered and half barbaric. Yet his stuff is the raw material of which your people is made. It needs only fire, water, oil and work to convert pig-iron into tempered steel."
Prince looked into his companion's eyes and found them serious.
"You mean to try," he sceptically inquired, "to make the complete American out of that lad in whose veins flows the blood of the vendetta?"
"I told you that we hermits were dreamers," answered McCalloway. "I've never had a son of my own. I think it would be a pretty experiment, sir, to see how far this young back-woodsman could go."
Strange indeed would have seemed to any prying eye the occurrences within the walls of McCalloway's cabin on those many evenings which Boone Wellver spent there. But of what took place the boy breathed no word, despite the almost feverish eagerness that glowed constantly in his blue eyes. His natural taciturnity would have sealed his lips had he given the "furriner" no pledge of confidence, and even McCalloway never guessed how strict was the censorship of that promise as Boone construed its meaning. Inasmuch as he could not be sure just what details, out of the summary of their conversations, fell under the restrictive ban, he set upon the whole association a seal of Masonic silence. And Victor McCalloway, recognizing that dependable discretion, talked with a freedom which he would have permitted himself with few other companions.
Sometimes he read aloud from books whose pages were, to the young listener, gates swinging open upon gilded glimpses of chivalry, heroism and those thoughts which are not groundling but winged and splendid. Sometimes through the hills where the distances shimmered with an ashen ghost of brilliance, they tramped together, a peripatetic philosopher and his devoted disciple.
But strangest and most fantastical of all, were the hours they spent before McCalloway's hearth when the man threw off his coat and rolled his sleeves high over scarred forearms while the boy's eyes sparkled with anticipation. And at outside mention of these sessions, McCalloway himself might have reddened to the cheekbones, for then it was that the man produced improvised wooden swords and placed himself, feet wide apart and left hand elevated in the attitude of the fencer's salute. Facing him was a solemn, burning-eyed pupil and adversary of fifteen in a linsey-woolsey shirt and jeans overalls. The lad with his freckled face and his red-brown shock of hair made an absurd contrast with the gentleman whose sword play possessed the exquisite grace and deft elegance of a Parisian fencing master—but Boone had the astonishing swiftness of a panther cub, and a lightning play of wrist and agility of limb. How rapidly he was gaining mastery over his foil he could not, himself, realize because standing over against him was one of the best swords of Europe, but this enthusiasm, which was a very passion to learn, was also a thing of which he never spoke outside.
With winter came desolation. The sumac no longer flared vermilion and the flaming torches of the maples were quenched.
Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skies from its pallid dawn to its setting in a bed of inflamed and angry clouds.
And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another spirit came with it—equally grim.
The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater lengths—when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.
As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps, to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats asseverated that the "Bloody Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:
"How much do you need?"
Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.
In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty horsemen were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin Town.
That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as quietly as it had formed.
In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin fluctuated: the outcome wavered.
When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to make Boone his assistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road, it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.
He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being waged—he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky, pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the pawns.
Victor McCalloway smiled when Boone told him, in a voice shaken with emotion, that the day had come when he could go out and see the world.
Boone and Saul slept, that night, in a mining town with the glare of coke furnaces biting red holes through the surrounding blackness of the ridges.
To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and lofty. Here it seemed to lie prone. The very air tasted flat in his nostrils and, missing the screens of forested peaks, he felt a painful want of privacy—like a turtle deprived of its shell, or a man suddenly stripped naked.
Upon his ears a thousand sounds seemed to beat in tumult—and dissonance. Men no longer walked with a soundless footfall, or spoke in lowered voices.
In the county seat to which they brought their gaunt cattle, his bewilderment mounted almost to vertigo, for about the court house square were congregated men and beasts—all unfamiliar to the standards of his experience.
The native beef here was fat, corn-fed stock, and the hogs were rounder and squatter than the mast-nourished razor-backs he had known at home. The men, too, who bought and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in soft caution. Upon himself from time to time he felt amused glances, as though he, like his bony steers, stood branded to the eye with the ineradicable mark of something strayed in from a land of poverty.
But when eventually the cattle had been sold, Saul took him on to the capitol of the State, and there, on the twelfth of December, he stood, with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state house and gazed up at the platform upon which the choice of his own people was being inaugurated as Governor.
Boone was dazzled by the gold-laced uniforms of all the colonels on the retiring executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of the winter afternoon, his soul was all but satiated with the heady intoxication of full living.
On a brilliantly frosted morning, when the weed stalks by the roadside were crystal-rimmed, and the sky was an illimitable arch of blue sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth stone walls and well-kept fences. Yet for all his enthusiasm of admiration, a new sense of misgiving and vague trouble began to settle heavily at his heart.
No one, along the way, halted to "meet an' make their manners." Vehicles, drawn by horses that lifted their hocks and knees high, passed swiftly and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably obtruded itself upon realization. At home, where every man was poor, there had been no sense of inferiority, but here was a régime of disquieting contrasts.
When they at last turned through a gate with stone pillars, he caught sight of a long maple and oak-flanked avenue, and at its end a great brick house. Against the age-tempered façade stood out the trim of white paint and the dignity of tall, fluted columns. He marvelled that Saul Fulton had been able in so short a time to buy himself such a palace.
But while he still mulled over his wonderment in silence, Saul led him by a detour around the mansion and its ivory-white out-buildings, and continued through back pastures and fields, disfigured by black and sharp tobacco stubble. Boone followed past fodder-racks and pig-sties, until they brought up at a square, two-roomed house with blank, unpainted walls, set in a small yard as barren as those of the hills, but unrelieved by any background of laurel or forest. About this untempered starkness of habitation stretched empty fields, snow-patched and desolate, and the boy's face dropped as he heard his kinsman's announcement, "This hyar's whar I dwells at."
"Who—who dwells over yon at t'other house?" came Boone's rather timid query. "Ther huge brick one, with them big white poles runnin' up in front."
Saul laughed with a rasping note in his voice, "Hit b'longs ter Colonel Tom Wallifarro, ther lawyer, but he don't dwell thar hisself, save only now an' then."
Fulton paused, and his face took on the unpleasant churlishness of class hatred. "Ther whole kit and kaboodle of 'em will be hyar soon, though. They all comes back fer Christmas, an' holds dancin' parties, and carousin's, damn 'em!"
A seriously puzzled expression clouded the boy's eyes, and he asked simply, "Hain't ye friendly with 'em, Saul?"
"No," was the short rejoinder, "I hain't friendly with no rich lowlander that holds scorn fer an honest man jest because he's poor."
On subsequent occasions when Boone passed the "great house" it seemed almost as quiet as though it were totally untenanted, but with the approach of Christmas it awoke from its sleep of inactivity.
The young mountaineer was trudging along one day through a gracious woodland, which even, in the starkness of winter, hinted at the nobility that summer leafage must give to its parklike spaces. His way carried him close to the paddocks flanking the ample barns, and he could see that the house windows were ruddy from inner hearth fires, and decked with holly wreaths.
In the paddocks themselves were a dozen persons, all opulent of seeming, and what interested the passer-by, even more than the people, were the high-headed, gingerly stepping horses that were being led out by negro boys for their inspection.
In the group Boone recognized the man whom Asa had identified that day in Marlin as Mr. Masters, a "mine boss," and the gentleman who had come with him out of the mountain hotel. The boy surmised that this latter must be Colonel Tom Wallifarro himself, the owner of all these acres.
There was a small girl too, whom Masters called "daughter." Boone had for girls the fine disdain of his age, and this one he guessed to be some four or five years younger than himself. But she was unlike any other he had ever seen, and it puzzled him that so much attention should be squandered on a "gal-child," though he acknowledged to himself—"but she's plum purty." He went by with a casual glance and a high chin, but in his brain whirled many puzzling thoughts, springing from a first glimpse of wealth.
It was Christmas eve night, and General Basil Prince, who had hurriedly changed to evening dress after his arrival by a late train, halted for a moment at the stairhead to look down. On his distinguished face played a quiet smile. In these rapidly changing times, pride of lineage and deference for tradition were things less openly voiced than in other days which he could remember.
Probably that was as it should be, he reflected, yet an elderly fellow might enjoy the fragrance of old lavender or the bouquet of memory's vintage.
When he came here to the country house of his friend Wallifarro, it seemed to him that he stepped back into those days when gracious ceremonies held and dancers trod the measured figures of the minuet.
He wondered if in many places one could find just such another coterie of intimates as the little group of older men who gathered here: men who had been boyhood comrades in the Orphan Brigade, or Morgan's Cavalry: men who had, since the reconstruction, distinguished themselves in civilian life, weaving into a new pattern the regathered threads of fortune.
Gazing down upon the broad hall, with the parquetry of its floors cleared for dancing, Basil Prince warmed to a glow of pride in these people who were his people. Aristocracies had risen and tottered since history had kept its score, but here, surviving all change, remained a simple graciousness, and a stamina of great heartedness like that which royal breeding had instilled into those satin-coated horses out there in their barns; steadfastness of courage and a high spirit.
Holly and mistletoe festooned the doorways, logs roared on brass andirons, and silver-sconced candles glowed against an ivory softness of white wainscoting and the waxed darkness of mahogany. He loved it all; the simple uncrowded elegance; the chaste designs of silver, upon which the tempered lights found rebirth; the ripe age of the family portraits. It stood for a worthy part of America—a culture that had ripened in the early wilderness.
Morgan Wallifarro was home from Harvard for his first vacation, and as General Prince eyed the boy his brows puckered in the momentary ghost of a frown. This lad, alone of all the young folk in the laughing groups, struck him as one to whom he could not accord an unreserved approval—as one whose dress and manner grated ever so slightly with their marring suspicion of pose. But this, he told himself, was only the conceit of extreme youth. Morgan was named for his old chieftain of the partisan cavalry. He was Tom Wallifarro's boy, and if there was anything in blood he must ultimately develop into worthiness.
"He's the best stock in the world," mused the General. "He's like a fractious colt just now—but when he's had a bit of gruelling, he'll run true to form."
The fiddles swung into a Sousa march, and couples drifted out upon the floor. General Prince stood against the wall, teasing and delighting a small girl with short skirts and beribboned hair. It was Anne Masters, that bewitching child who in a few years more would have little leisure for gray-heads when the violins sang to waltz-time.
The music ran its course and stopped, as all music must, and the couples stood encoring. Some one, flushed with dancing, threw open the front door, and a chilly gust swept in from the night. Then quite suddenly General Prince heard Morgan Wallifarro's laugh break out over the hum of conversation.
"Well, in Heaven's name," satirically inquired that young gentleman, "what have we here?"
It was a strange picture for such a framing, yet into the eyes of General Prince flashed a quick indignant light and under his breath he muttered, "That young cub, Morgan! He disappoints me."
Seen across the sparkling shoulders and the filmy party gowns of the girls, beyond the black and white of the men's evening dress, was the parallelogram of the wide entrance-door, and centred on its threshold, against the night-curtain, bulked a figure which hesitated there in momentary indecision and grotesque inappropriateness.
It was a boy, whose long mop of red-brown hair was untrimmed and whose eyes were just now dazzled by the unaccustomed light and sparkle upon which they looked. His shirt was of blue cotton, his clothes patched and shoddy, but under a battery of amused glances he sensed a spirit of ridicule and stiffened like a ramrod. A drifting peal of laughter from somewhere brought his chin up, and a red tide flooded into his cheeks. The soft and dusty hat which he clasped in his hand was crumpled under the pressure of his tightening fingers.
Then Boone Wellver's voice carried audibly over the hall and into the rooms at the side.
"I heered tell thet thar war a dancin' party goin' forward hyar," he announced simply, "an' I 'lowed I'd jest as lieve as not fare over fer a spell."
Boone had intended no comedy effect. He spoke in decorous gravity, and he knew of no reason why an outburst of laughter should sweep the place as he finished. Prince caught an unidentified voice from his back. It was low pitched, but it fell on the silence that succeeded the laugh, and he feared that the boy must have caught it too.
"One of the tobacco-yaps from the back of the place, I expect."
At once General Prince stepped forward and laid his hand on Boone's shoulder. Under his palm he felt a tremor of anger and hurt pride, and he spoke clearly.
"This young gentleman," he said—and though his eyes were twinkling with a whimsical light, his voice carried entire and calculated gravity—"is a friend of mine, Mr. Boone Wellver of Marlin County. I've enjoyed the hospitality of his people." There was a puzzled pause, and the General, whose standing here was as secure as that of Petronius at Nero's court, continued.
"In the mountains when a party is given no invitations are issued. Word simply goes out as to time and location, and whoever cares to come—comes."
The explanation was meant for those inside, but the boy in the doorway caught from it a clarifying of matters for his own understanding as well. Obviously here one didnotcome without being bidden, and that left him in the mortifying attitude of a trespasser. It came with a flash of realization and chagrin.
He yearned to blot himself into the kindly void of the night behind him—yet that rude type of dignity which was bred in him forbade the humiliation of unexplained flight. Such a course would indeed stamp him as a "yap," and however shaggy and unkempt his appearance might be in this ensemble of silk and broadcloth he was as proud as Lucifer.
Heretofore a "dancing-party" had meant to him, shuffling brogans where shadows leaped with firelight and strings of fiddle and "dulcimore" quavered out the strains of "Turkey-in-the-straw" or "I've got a gal at the head of the hollow."
He had expected this to be different, but notsodifferent, and he had need to blink back tears of shame.
But, all the more for that, he drew himself straight and stiff and spoke resolutely, though his voice carried the suspicion of a tremor.
"I fear me I've done made a fool mistake an' I reckon I'll say farewell ter you-all, now."
Even then he did not wheel precipitately, under the urge of his anxiety to be gone, but paused with a forced deliberation, and, as he tarried, little Anne Masters stepped impulsively forward.
Anne had reigned with a captivating absolutism from her cradle on. Swift impulses and ready sympathies governed much of her conduct, and they governed her now.
"This ismyparty," she declared. "Uncle Tom told me so at dinner, and I specially invite you to come in." She spoke with the haste of one wishing to forestall the possible thwarting of elderly objection, and ended with a dancing-school curtsey before the boy in hodden gray. Then the music started up again, and she added, "If you like, I'll give you this waltz."
But Boone Wellver only shifted from one uneasy foot to the other, fingering his hat brim and blinking owlishly. "I'm obleeged ter ye," he stammered with a sudden access of awkwardness, "but I hain't never run a set in my life. My folks don't hold hit ter be godly. I jest came ter kinderly look on."
"Anne, dear," translated Basil Prince, "in the mountains they know only the square dances. Isn't that correct?" The boy nodded his head.
"Thet's what I aimed ter say," he corroborated. "An' I'm beholden ter ye, little gal, none-the-less."
"And now, come with me, Boone," suggested the old soldier, diplomatically steering the unbidden guest across the hall and into the library where over their cigars and their politics sat the circle of devoted veterans.
Colonel Tom Wallifarro was standing before the fire with his hands clasped at his back. "I had hoped against hope," he was indignantly asserting, "that when the man's own hand-made triumvirate denied him endorsement, he would end his reign of terror and acknowledge defeat."
"A knowledge of the candidate should have sufficed to refute that idea," came the musical voice of a gentleman, whose snow-white hair was like a shock of spun silver.
"I was in Frankfort some days ago when Mr. Goebel sat there in conference with his favoured lieutenants. It was reported that he declared himself indifferent as to the outcome, but that he would abide by the decision of his party whips. The reporters were besieging those closed doors, and at the end you all know what verdict went over the wires: 'Being a loyal Democrat I shall obey the mandate of my party—and make a contest before the legislature for the office of governor, to which I was legally elected.'"
Just then Basil Prince came forward, leading his protégé. Possibly a wink passed over Boone Wellver's head. At all events the circle of gentlemen rose and shook hands as sedately as though they had been awaiting him—and Boone, hearing the titles, colonel, senator, governor, was enthralled beyond measure.
A half hour later, Morgan Wallifarro burst tempestuously in, carrying a large package, and wearing an expression of excited enthusiasm.
"General," he exclaimed, "I have disobeyed orders and opened one Christmas gift before tomorrow. I suspected what it was, sir—and I couldn't wait."
Forgetful of the pretty girls in the rooms beyond, he ripped open the parcel and laid on the centre table a pair of beautifully chased and engraved fencing foils, and the masks that went with them.
"I simply had to come in and thank you at once, sir," he added delightedly. "Father, bend that blade and feel the temper! Look at the engraving too! My monogram is on the guard."
While his elders looked indulgently on, the lad made a pass or two at an imagined adversary, and then he laughed again.
"By George, I wish I had one of the fencing-class fellows here now."
Boone bent forward in his chair, his eyes eagerly fixed on the glittering beauty of the slender, rubber-tipped blades. His lips parted to speak, but closed again without sound, while Morgan lunged and parried at nothing on the hearth-rug. "'We're the cadets of Gascogny,'" the son of the house quoted lightly. "'At the envoy's end I touch.'" Then regretfully he added, "I wish there was some one to have a go with. Are there any challengers, gentlemen?"
The boy in hodden-gray slipped from his chair.
"I reckon ef ye're honin' fer a little sward-fightin' I'll aim ter convenience ye," he quietly invited.
For an instant Morgan gazed at him in silence. Without discourtesy, it was difficult to reply to such an absurd invitation, and even the older men felt their reserve of dignity taxed with the repression of mirth as they contemplated the volunteer.
"I'm sorry," apologized Morgan, when the silence had become oppressive, "but these foils are delicate things. For all their temper, they snap like glass in hands that aren't accustomed to them. It takes a bit of practice, you see."
The note of condescension stung Boone painfully and his eyes narrowed. "All right. Hev hit yore own way," he replied curtly. "I thought ye wanted some sward-practice."
With a sudden flash of memory there came back to Basil Prince's mind the picture of Victor McCalloway's cabin and Dinwiddie's sword—and, with the memory, an idea. "Morgan," he suavely suggested, "your challenge was general, as I understood it, and I don't see how you can gracefully decline. If a blade breaks, I'll see that it's replaced."
The young college man could hesitate no longer, though he felt that he was being forced into a ludicrous position, as he bowed his unwilling acquiescence.
But when the two adversaries took their places where the furniture had been hastily cleared away, the men widened their eyes and bent forward absorbed. The mountain lad had suddenly shed his grotesqueness. He dropped his blade and lifted it in salute, not like a bumpkin but with the finished grace of familiarity—the sweeping confidence of perfect ease. As he stepped back, saying "On guard," his left hand came up at balance and his poise was as light as though he had been reared in the classroom of a fencing-school.
Morgan went into that contest with the disadvantage of utter astonishment. He had received some expensive instruction and was on the way toward becoming a skilled hand with the rapier, but the "tobacco yap" had been schooled by one of the first swords of Europe.
At the first sharp ring of steel on steel one or two persons materialized in the library door, and they were speedily augmented by fresh arrivals, until the circle of bare-shouldered girls and attendant cavaliers pressed close on the area of combat. Backward and forward, warily circling with a delicate and musical clatter of engaging steel between them, went the lad in broadcloth and the boy in homespun.
It was, at best, unequal, but Morgan gave the most that he had, and against a lesser skill he would have acquitted himself with credit.
After a little there came a lunge, a hilt pressed to lower blade, a swift twist of a wrist, and young Wallifarro's foil flew clear of his hand and clattered to the floor. He had been cleanly disarmed.
Boone drew the mask from his tousled head and shuffled his feet. That awkwardness which had been so absent from his moments of action descended upon him afresh as he awoke to the many watching eyes. Morgan held out a hand, which was diffidently received, and acknowledged frankly, "You're much the better man—but where in Heaven's name did you learn to fence like that?"
The mountain boy flushed, suddenly realizing that this too was a matter included in his pledge of confidence to Victor McCalloway.
"Oh," he evasively responded, "I jest kinderly picked hit up—hyar an' thar as I went along."
As soon as possible after that, Boone made his escape, and it was characteristic of his close-mouthed self-containment that at Saul Fulton's cabin he said nothing as to where he had spent his Christmas eve.