As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away from a finished chapter.
The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears, usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for service.
Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.
Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies, and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.
McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the face of his youthful protégé began to lighten. Boone was as yet too young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut—and dual. Asa's "woman" must have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be wrung from its stinted productivity—and he must put behind him that ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.
One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house, knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.
But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sight of whose face McCalloway bent forward as though confronted by a spectre—and indeed the newcomer belonged to a world which he had renounced as finally as though it had been of another incarnation.
This visitor was lean and weather-beaten. His face was long and somewhat dour, but tanned brown, and instead of speaking he brought his hand to his temple with a smart salute. It was such a salute as bespoke a long life of soldiering and the second nature of military habit. The voice in which McCalloway greeted him was almost unrecognizable as his own, because it was both far away and strained.
"Sergeant!" he exclaimed; "what has brought you here?"
"The lad, sor'r," the other gravely reminded him. "I must speak with ye alone. 'Tis a verra private and a verra serious matter that brings me."
Boone had never heard so hard a note in his benefactor's voice as that which crept into his curt reply:
"It must needs be—to warrant your coming without permission, MacTavish."
They were just finishing their daylight supper, and the boy rose, pushing back his chair. Faithfully he regarded his pledge of respecting the other's privacy whenever he was not invited to share it, and instinctively he felt that this was no moment for his intrusion.
"I reckon I'll hev ter be farin' over thar ter see how Asa's woman's comin' on," he remarked casually, as he reached for the hat that lay at his feet. "Like es not she needs a gittin' of firewood erginst nightfall."
But the matter-of-fact tone and manner were on the surface. Boone secretly distrusted the few messages that came to his preceptor from the outside world. By such voices he might be called back again and hearken to the summons. Boone could not contemplate existence with both his idols ravished from his temple.
Now he closed the door behind him in so preoccupied a mood that he left his rifle standing against the wall forgotten and McCalloway remained standing by the table rather inflexible of posture and sternly inquisitorial of countenance.
"MacTavish," he said in sharply clipped syllables, "you are one of few—a very few—who know of my incognito and address. I have relied upon you implicitly to guard those secrets. I trust you can explain following me into what you must know was a retirement not to be trespassed upon without incurring my anger—my very serious anger."
Respectfully, but with a face full of eager resoluteness, the other saluted again.
"General," he said, "it's China—they need you there."
"Sergeant"—an angry light leaped in the steel-gray eyes—"if they want me in China some one whom I have trusted has betrayed my identity. No living soul there ever heard of Victor McCalloway,MisterMcCalloway, not General Anything, mind you!"
The newcomer crossed to the centre of the room, and his movements were quick and precise, as are those of the drill-ground.
"To every other man on earth ye may beMisterMcCalloway—but to me ye are my general. Before I'd betray any trust ye might place in me, sor'r, I'd cut off that hand at the wrist, as ye ken, sor'r, full well. I've told nae soul where ye wor'r. I've only said that I'd seek for ye."
"But in God's name how—?"
"If I may interrupt ye, sor'r, I am no longer Sergeant Major MacTavish; I'm a time-retired man at home, but when I wear a uniform now it's that of the army of the Manchu Emperor. They seek to reorganize their army along western lines. They want genius. They ken nothin' of ye save that one Victor McCalloway was once a British officer of high rank who served so close to Dinwiddie, that Dinwiddie's strategy is known to him.—Read this, sor'r, and ye'll understand more of the matter."
The General took the large, official-looking missive and stood for a moment with a drawn and concentrated brow before he slit its linen-lined covering.
The feel of the thing in his fingers brought to him a certain stirring and quickening of the pulses: such a restiveness as may come to the retired thoroughbred at the far-off sound of the paddock bugle, or to the spent war horse at the rolling of drums.
The heavy blue paper and the thick seal set into disquieting momentum an avalanche of memories. Active days which he had resolved to forget were conjured into rebirth as he handled this bulky envelope which proclaimed its officialdom. Even the daily papers came to him here with desultory lack of sequence. He knew in disjointed fashion how that same summer an anti-foreign revolt had broken out in Shantung and spread to Pechili. He had read that the Japanese Government had dispatched twenty thousand men to China. Later he had followed the all too meagre accounts of how the Allies had raced for Peking to relieve the besieged legations. The young Emperor's ambition to impress upon his realm the stamp of western civilization had made him, for two years, a virtual prisoner to the Empress Dowager and her reactionaries. Now in turn the Empress Dowager was in flight and, presumably, the Japanese, working in concert with agents of the captive Emperor and Prince Ching, were looking toward the future.—It would seem that they divined once more the opportunity to Occidentalize army and government. If so, it was the rising of a world tide which might well run to flood, and it offered him a man's work. At all events, this letter which caused his fingers to itch and tremble as they held it, came from high Japanese sources and it was addressed only "Excellency," without a name. The envelope itself was directed to "The Honourable Victor McCalloway."
For a long time he stood there immovable, looking at the paper, as great dreams marched before him. Organization, upbuilding—that was hismetier!
Seeing the rapt concentration of his brow and the hunger of his eyes, the former British sergeant spoke again with persuasive fervour:
"Go under any name ye like, sor'r; ye'll be prompt to give it glory! For many years I served under ye, General. For God's sake, let me take my commands from ye once again! Come out to China, sor'r, where they need a great soldier—and can keep silent!"
The hermit strode over and laid a hand on the shoulder of his visitor. Their eyes met and held. "Old comrade," said McCalloway, as the rust of huskiness creaked in his voice, "I know you for the truest steel that ever God put into the blade of a man's soul—but I must have time to think."
He crossed the room slowly and took up Dinwiddie's sword. Tenderly he drew the blade from the scabbard, and as he looked at it his eyes first glowed with fires of longing, then grew misty with the sadness of remembrance.
After that he laid the scabbard down and handled once more the sheets that had been in the envelope. He did not re-read the written sentences, but let his fingers move slowly along the smooth surface of the paper, while his pupils held as far-away a look as though they were seeing the land from which the communication had come.
But, after a little, McCalloway came out of that half-hypnotized absorption, and his eyes wandered about the room until finally they fell on the rifle that the mountain boy had forgotten to take away with him.
He knew Boone well enough to feel sure that he had not gone far without remembering. He was certain, too, that his young protégé would have returned for it before now had he not been inhibited by his deference for the elder's privacy.
Over there across the world was an army to be shaped, disciplined—but an army of alien blood, of yellow skins. Here was the less conspicuous task to which he had set his hand; the shaping of a single life, beset with hereditary dangers, into a worthy edifice of which the timbers and masonry were Anglo-Saxon and the pattern Americanism. He had too far committed himself to that architecture to turn back.
Slowly he shook his head. The struggle had been sharp, but the decision was final.
"No, MacTavish, old comrade and old friend," he said very seriously; "no; I've withdrawn from all that. I'll not deny that my hand sometimes aches for a grip on a sabre-hilt, and my ears are hungry for a bugle—but that's all past. Go out and make an army there, if you can, but I stay here. I needs must stay."
One day McCalloway received a paper, several days old, that contained a piece of news which he was anxious for Boone to see at once, and he straightway set out to find the boy.
Araminta greeted him at the door of the Gregory cabin with apathetic eyes. "Booney's done gone out with his rifle-gun atter squirrels," she said. "I heered him shoot up on ther mountainside thar, not five minutes back."
Before he followed the boy, McCalloway read to her and construed the item in the paper, and for the first time in many weeks the hard wretchedness of her heart softened to tears and a faint ray of hope stole through her misery.
McCalloway began climbing the hillside, searching the thickets for the boy, and at last he saw him while he himself remained unseen. Boone was standing with his gaze turned toward Louisville—and its jail—two hundred and more miles distant. His face was like that of a fanatic in a religious trance, and his right hand gripped his rifle so tightly that the knuckles showed out white splotched against the tanned flesh.
"I failed ye, Asa," came the self-accusing voice in a tight-throated strain. "I bust out and got sent outen ther co'te room, when ye needed me in thar ter give ye countenance, but God knows I hain't fergot ye." He paused there, and his chest heaved convulsively. "An' God, He knows, too, I aims ter avenge ye," he ended up, with a dedication of savage sincerity, while his gaze still seemed to be piercing the hills toward the city where his kinsman lay condemned.
McCalloway came forward then, and while he talked, Boone listened with attentive patience, but an obdurate face.
The man sought to exact a promise that until he was twenty-one, Boone should "hold his hand" so far as Saul Fulton was concerned. Given those plastic years, he could hope to wean the lad gradually away from the tigerish and unforgiving ferocity of his blood, but Boone could only shake his head, unable either to argue or to yield.
Then McCalloway sketched the seemingly irrelevant narrative of what had occurred in China; of the peril of the legations. He talked of an emperor, captive to court intrigue, and slowly the lad's eyes, which had been until now too preoccupied with his own wormwood to think of other matters, began to liven into interest.
"But thet's all plumb acrost ther world from hyar, though," he asserted in a pause, as though he begrudged the arresting of his attention. "What's hit got ter do with me—an' Asa?"
General McCalloway cleared his throat. It came hard for him to talk of himself and of a sacrifice made for another.
"It has this to do with you, my boy," he announced bluntly: "I have been offered a soldier's job over there. I have been invited to aid in work that would help to stabilize China—and I have refused."
Boone Wellver's lips parted in amazement.
"Refused," he gasped. "Fer God's sake, what made ye do hit!"
"Because of you," was the sober response. "I thought you needed me, and I thought you were worth standing by."
"Fer me!" The lad was trembling again, but this time not with anger. "I reckon I'll be powerful beholden ter ye, all my life, fer thet—but ye hedn't ought ter hev done hit. They needs ye over thar, too—an' thar's monstrous numbers of 'em, from what ye narrates."
"I know it, Boone," McCalloway spoke earnestly. "I've centred some very ambitious dreams about your future. The time is hardly ripe to explain them—but you have a great opportunity—unless you throw it away in vengeful fury. If you won't trust me to guide you—until you come of age, at least—I had much better have gone to China."
The boy turned away, and in his set face McCalloway could read that for him this was an actual moment of Gethsemane. Through his nature as over a hotly embattled field surged contrary and warring emotions—and between them he was cruelly buffeted.
"God knows I'm wishful," he broke out at length. "An' God knows, atter what ye've jest told me, I hain't got no license ter deny ye nothin' ye asks—but—" The end of his sentence came like a sob. "But ye wouldn't ask me ter be disloyal ter my own kith an' kin, would ye?"
"No—but I would ask you to have a higher loyalty."
Boone stood trembling like an ague victim. It was no light matter for him to give so binding a pledge.
"No Gregory ner no Wellver hain't nuver died on ther gallows tree yit," he faltered. "Thar's two things I'd done swore ter do. One of 'em was ter git Saul. I reckon, though, thet could wait."
"What is the other thing?"
"Thet afore they hangs him—some fashion or other—I've got ter git a gun in thar ter Asa ... so he kin kill hisself. Hit hain't fitten thet he should die by a rope like a common feller!"
The emotion-laden voice became almost shrill. "Even ther Carrs an' Blairs don'thang. They come nigh ter hangin' one oncet, but a kinsman saved him."
"How?" inquired McCalloway, and the boy responded gravely:
"He lay up on ther hillside an' shot his uncle ter death as they was takin' him from the jail-house ter ther gallows."
Truly, reflected the soldier, he was modelling with grim and stiff clay, but he only said:
"Promise me that, as to Saul, you will wait—until you are twenty-one."
Boone did not reply for five full minutes, but at the end of that time he nodded his head. "I kain't deny ye nothin', atter what ye've done fer me," he assented briefly.
Then McCalloway read from the paper his scrap of encouragement. The Court of Appeals had granted the Secretary of State a rehearing.
"But thet hain't Asa," objected the boy. "I don't keer nothin' erbout thet feller."
McCalloway smiled.
"It's a similar case, tried by the same court, and involving the same principles. It indicates that Asa will have a new trial, too."
"Ef he comes cl'ar," announced Boone, with the suddenly rocketing spirits of boyhood, "I reckon Asa kin handle his own affairs."
McCalloway had set himself to preparing Boone within a year from that fall for entrance into the state university. There was but a faint background of prior attainment against which to paint many things, but there was an avidly acquisitive pupil, a tireless teacher, and an intensive plan of education.
Gregory was still in the Louisville jail—where, indeed, a half dozen other years were yet to find him. The Secretary of State had come through his second trial with a second conviction, and had once more been granted a rehearing.
Saul Fulton, the star witness in Asa's trial, had disappeared, and report had it that he had gone to South America—but the record of his former testimony remained fixed in the stenographer's notes and was fully available for later use—so that his going lifted no shadow from Asa's future.
"I reckon they squshed ther indictment ergin him," Boone commented bitterly to McCalloway, "an' paid him off with some of thet thar blood money."
He paused and then went on, holding his finger between the pages of the book he was studying. "He's done fared a long way off—but, some day he'll fare back again. I stands full pledged—twell I comes of age, an' I aims ter keep my word. Atter thet, I hain't makin' no brash promises. Ther hate in my heart, hit don't seem ter slacken none. I mistrusts hit won't—never."
But if the festering grievance did not "slacken," at least it seemed just now partly submerged in the great adventure of going down to the world below and becoming a collegian.
He went early in the autumn when he was seventeen, and McCalloway, who accompanied and matriculated him, came away smiling. He had felt as though he were leading a wolf-cub into a kennel of blooded hounds. But when he had watched the self-poise with which his registrant bore himself and how quickly amused smiles faded away under his level gaze, he left with a reassured confidence.
When the days began to grow crisp the uncouth scholar saw for the first time the lads in leather and moleskin tackling and punting out on the campus—in the early try-outs of the season's football practice. He looked on at first with a somewhat satirical detachment, but when the scrimmages took on the guise of actual ferocity his interest altered from tepid disapproval for "sich foolery" to a realization that it was "no gal's play-party."
Several afternoons later Boone shyly intercepted the coach as he led out the practice squads.
"Does thet thar football business belong ter a club—er somethin'," he inquired, "er kin any feller git inter hit?"
The coach looked at the roughly dressed lad with the unruly hair, who talked in barbaric phrases—and his practised eye took in the sinewy strength of the well-muscled body. He appraised the power of the broad shoulders, and the slim, agile lines of waist and legs, and gave him a chance.
From the beginning it was evident that Boone Wellver would make the scrub team. He was a tornado from the instant the ball was snapped—"an injia rubber idjit on a spree," and yet this mystifying wolf-cub from the hills came back to the coach in less than a week with an almost sullen face and announced shortly:
"I hain't goin' ter play no more football, I aims ter quit hit."
"Quit it! Why?"
"I've been studyin' hit over," the retiring candidate explained gloomily. "A man thet hain't no blood kin ter me is payin' what hit costs ter send me hyar. I hain't hardly nothin' but a charity feller, nohow—an' until he says hit's all right, I don't aim ter spend ther time he's payin' fer out hyar playin' fool games—albeit I likes hit."
At the solemness and the unconscious self-righteousness of the tone, a laugh went up, and Boone turned with a straight-lined mouth to meet the derisive outburst.
"But I'm out here now, though," he added pointedly, lowering his head as does a bull about to charge, "an' I kin stay a leetle longer. If any of you fellers, or ther whole damn passel of ye, thinks I'm quittin' because I'm timorous, I'd be right glad ter take ye on hyar an' now—fist an' skull."
There was no acceptance of the invitation, and Boone, turning, with his shoulders straight, marched away.
But when McCalloway read his letter, he promptly responded:
"A razor is made to shave with—. Its purpose is work and only work. Still, if it isn't honed and stropped it loses its edge. It's hardly fair to regard as wasted the time spent on keeping that edge keen. I want you to get the most out of college, and that doesn't mean only what you get out of the books. If I were you, I'd play football and play it hard."
Boone went down the stairs, four steps at a time. He could hear the coach's whistle out on the campus and he came like a hound to the chase. "Hi, thar!" he yelled, "kin I git back in thet outfit?He'lows hit's all right fer me ter play."
Back in the hills Victor McCalloway was more than a little lonely. He began to realize how deeply this boy—at first almost a waif—had stolen into the affections of his detached life. Once or twice he went to Lexington to see how his protégé progressed, and he had several brief visits from General Prince and more than several from Larry Masters. After what seemed a very long while indeed, Boone came home for his first summer vacation.
Araminta Gregory had a brother at her farm now, so the boy went direct to the house of Victor McCalloway, which was henceforth to be his home.
Happy Spradling, whose father had overseen the raising of Victor McCalloway's house, was only two years younger than Boone. When he had gone away, a lad of seventeen, he had been untroubled by thoughts of girls, and she had certainly wasted no meditation upon him.
But the Boone who came back was not quite the same boy who had gone away. He was still roughly dressed, judged by exacting standards, but corduroy had supplanted his old jeans, and he returned with a much developed figure and an improved bearing.
Now one afternoon Happy Spradling stood with a pail, by a "spring-branch" of crystal water, as Boone came by and halted. She, too, had been to one of those settlement schools that were just beginning to introduce new standards in the hills, and her homecoming to unrelieved crudities was not an unmixed pleasure. Certain it is that the slim girl in her calico gown was blessed with a fresh and vigorous beauty. Her sloe-brown eyes were heavy lashed, and her skin was blossom clear. Dark hair crowned her well-poised head in heavy masses—and the boy was surprised because he had not remembered her as so lovely.
"Ye look right sensibly like a picture outen ther Bible of Rebekkah at the well," he banteringly announced, and the girl flushed.
"Ye ain't quite so uncurried of guise as ye used to be your own self, Boone," she generously acceded, and they both laughed.
They talked on for a while, and before Boone started away the girl invited shyly, with lids that drooped, "Come over sometime, Boone, an' tell me all about the college."
But it happened that the next day he went, with a note from McCalloway, to the home of Larry Masters, the "mine boss," at the edge of Marlin Town, and there fate ambushed him in the person of the girl who had asked him to dance at the Christmas party.
Anne Masters came to the door in response to the boy's knock, and when he had seen her he stood hesitant with his eyes fixed upon her until her cheeks flushed, while he forgot the note he had brought for her father.
Anne herself did not recognize him at first, for Boone stood close to six feet now, and although he would always be, in a fashion, careless of dress, he would never again be the sloven, as were the kinsmen about him. His corduroy breeches, flannel shirt and boots that laced halfway up the calf, all seemed a part of himself, like a falcon's plumage. But what the girl noticed first, since she was both young and impressionable, was the crisp curl of his red brown hair and the direct fearlessness of his sky-blue eyes.
"I reckon ye don't remember me," he hazarded, by way of introduction; and she shook her head.
"Have I seen you before?" she inquired, and Boone found it difficult to talk to her because he was so busy looking at her. There had been girls as well as boys at the state university, but among them had been none like Anne Masters. Boone was to learn from a broader experience that there were few like her—anywhere. Even now when she was a bud not yet blossomed, she had that indescribable fairy god-mother's gift to which no analyst can fit a formula—the charm which lays its spell upon others and the gift of individuality.
"You've seed me—seen me, I mean—before. But it's right natcher'l fer ye to fergit it, because it was a long spell back. You gave me the first Christmas gift I ever got in my life—a piece of plum cake. Do you remember me now?"
The light of recollection broke over her face, illuminating it—and Anne Masters had those eyes that actually sparkle within—the dancing eyes that are much rarer than the phrase.
"Of course I remember you! I've thought about you—lots. I've always called you the 'fruit-cake boy.'" Suddenly her laugh rippled out in a lilting merriment. "Don't you remember when you challenged Morgan with the fencing foils?"
"Oh," exclaimed Boone, flushing, "I'd plumb disremembered that."
It was June, with days of diamond weather and the bloom still upon wild rose and rhododendron. Anne looked away beyond the boy's head to the tallest crest of the many that ringed the town. Suddenly she demanded: "Have you ever been up there—at the tip-top of that mountain?"
He nodded his head, and she at once commanded: "I want you to show me the way up there—I want to go up and climb to the top of that tree that you can see from here, the one that stands up higher than all the others."
Boone shook his head soberly. "It's a right hazardous undertakin' fer anybody thet isn't used to scalin' clifts," he objected. "Why do you want to go up there to the top of old Slag-face?"
Her expression had clouded to autocratic displeasure at his failure of immediate assent, but only for an instant; then her eyes altered again from coercive frown to irresistible smile.
"Why?" she exclaimed. "Why does a bird want to fly? Up there at the top of that tree you'd be almost in the sky. You'd be looking down on everything but the clouds themselves. When I was a little girl—" she announced suddenly, "they had a hard time persuading me that Icouldn'tfly. They had to keep watching me, because I'd climb up on things and try to fly down."
"Have you plumb outgrown that idee?" he inquired, somewhat drily. "Because I'm not cravin' to help you fly offen that mountain top."
Her laugh rippled out like bird notes as she replied with large scorn of fourteen years: "Thatwas when I was a child."
After a moment she added appealingly: "The last time I saw you, General Prince said that when I came to these hills, you'd be 'charitable' to me."
"I aims to be," he asserted stoutly, "but it wouldn't skeercely be charitable to be the cause of your breakin' an arm or"—he paused an instant before adding with sedateness—"or a limb."
But Anne had her way. She always had her way, and some days later they looked down on an outspread world from the crest of Slag-face. Boone had not been long in discovering that this slender girl was driven by a dauntless spirit that made of physical courage a positive fetish, so he had pretended weariness himself from time to time and demanded a breathing spell.
The sky overhead was splendidly soft and blue, broken by tumbling cloud masses, which, it seemed, one could almost reach out and touch.
From the foreground where they sat flushed and resting, with moss and rock and woodland about them, the prospect went off into distances where mountain shadows fell across valleys, and other ridges were ranked row on row. Still more remote was the vagueness of the horizon whose misty violet merged with the robin's-egg blue of the sky.
The girl stood, leaning against the tree, and her violet eyes were full of imaginative light.
Through lids half closed the boy looked at her. She was an exponent of that world of which he had dreamed. He thought of the hall where he had first seen her; of the silk and broadcloth, of the mahogany and silver; of the whole setting which was home to her, and to him a place into which he had come as a trespasser in homespun.
Into the tempering of the crude ore came a new element. Asa Gregory had been the fire, and so far Victor McCalloway had been the water. Now, came the third factor of life's process—the oil; for there and then on the hilltop he had fallen in love, and it was not until he was riding home in the starlight that he stopped to consider the chances of disaster.
It had been a wonderful day, accepted without questioning; but now he drew his horse suddenly to a stop and took his hat from his head. For a time he sat there in his saddle, as unmoving as though he and the beast he rode were inanimate parts of an equestrian group; the statue of a pioneer lad rough-mounted.
His face stiffened painfully, and he licked his lips. Finally he said to the dark woods where the whippoorwills were calling and the fireflies flickering:
"Great God! I mout jest as well fall in love with a star up thar in heaven." Something like a groan escaped him, and after a while he gathered up his reins. Again he spoke, but in a dull voice:
"I'll quit afore I get in too far. Tomorrow night I'll go over thar and 'set up' with Happy Spradling."
He remembered how they had laughed at him at college when, quite naturally, he had used that term, "settin' up with a gal," to express the idea of courtship. Now he laughed himself, but bitterly. That was what his own people called it, and, after all, it was better to remember that he was of his own people.
The next night Boone kept his word. He brushed his clothes and did what he could with the unruly crispness of his hair, and then he set out for the log house of Cyrus Spradling on the headwaters of Snag Ridge.
He was not going on this, his first formal visit to a girl, with such leaping pulses as might have been expected. He was following out an almost grim determination quite devoid of eagerness. Having lost his heart to royalty, he was now bent on forcing himself back into a society where he had a right to be.
He had not slept much that night after the excursion to Slag-face, and what sleep he had had, had been troubled by dreams in which Anne had stood smiling down on him from the mountain top, while he looked up from a deep gorge where the shadows lay black. He was driven by a mad sense of necessity to climb up and stand beside her—but always he slid back, or fell from narrow ledges, until he was bruised, bleeding—and unsuccessful. He woke up panting, and afterward dreamed the same thing over. And every time he fell he found Happy waiting in the gorge and saying, "Why don't ye stay here with me? You don't have to climb after me—and I'm a right pretty gal." Always too he answered, in the words that Anne had used, "Why do I want to go up there? Up there you'd be looking down on everything but the clouds themselves"—and he would begin climbing once more, clutching with raw fingers upon frail and slippery supports.
All day he had argued with himself, and being young and unversed in such problems he told himself that the only way to halt this runaway thing within himself that led to no hope was to set his heart upon something which lay in reach. His inexperience told him that Happy liked him; that she was a nice girl trying to better her condition in life as he was himself trying, and he meant to commandeer his own heart and lay it at her feet. It was, of course, an absurd and impossible thing to undertake, but this he must learn for himself.
As Boone reached the house, old man Spradling sat on his porch in the twilight with his cob pipe between his teeth. Cyrus remained what his "fore-parents" had been before him, a rough-hewn man of undeviating honesty and of an innate kindliness that showed out only in deeds and not at all in demonstrativeness.
Just now he wore an expression of countenance that was somewhat glum as he watched the lingering afterglow which edged the western crests of the "Kaintuck' Ridges" with pale amber.
"Set ye a cheer, Booney," he invited, with a brief nod. "I reckon ye didn't skeercely fare over hyar ter set an' talk with me, but ther gal hain't quite through holpin' her mammy with the dish-washin' yit—an' I wants ter put some questions ter ye afore she comes out."
The lad drew a hickory-withed chair forward and sat down, laying his hat on the floor at his feet.
"Ye've done been off ter college, son," began old Cyrus reflectively, as he bit on his pipe stem and judicially nodded his head.
"I've always countenanced book-lore myself, even when folks hes faulted me fer hit. I've contended thet ther times change an' what was good enough fer ther parents hain't, of needcessity, good enough fer ther young ones. 'Peared like, ter me, a body kinderly hes a better chanst ter be godly ef he hain't benighted."
"I reckon there ain't no two ways about that proposition," agreed the boy eagerly. "Hit just stands ter reason."
"An yit, hyar latterly," suggested the mountaineer dubiously, "I've done commenced ter misdoubt ef I've been right, atter all. Thet's what I wanted ter question ye about. My woman an' me, we sent Happy off ter thet new school in Leslie—an' since she's come home I misdoubts ef her name fits her es well es hit did afore she went over thar. She used ter sing like a bird all day—an' now she don't."
"I don't see how knowin' something can make a body unhappy," protested Boone.
Cyrus Spradling studied him with a keen, but not unkindly, fixedness of gaze.
"Ye don't, don't ye? Wa'al, let me norrate ye a leetle parable. Suppose you an' me hes done been pore folks livin' in a small dwellin'-house. We've done been plum content, because we hain't never knowed nothing better. But suppose one of us goes a'visitin' ter rich kin-folks—an' t'other one stays home." He paused there to rekindle his pipe, and the voice of his resumed "parable" was troubled.
"Ther one thet's been away hes done took up notions of wealth that he kain't nuver hope ter satisfy. The mean cabin seems a heap meaner when he comes back ter hit—but ther other pore damn fool—he's still happy an' contented because he don't know no better."
"I reckon," laughed the young visitor, "if the feller that had gone away was anything but the disablest body in the world, he'd set about improving the house he had to dwell in."
"I hope ter God ye're right, Booney. Hit's been a mighty sober thing fer me ter ponder over, though—whether I was helpin' my gal or hurtin' her."
Boone was smitten with a sense of guilt. He felt that he ought to make confession that he had come here tonight because he had already recognized a new flame in his heart, and a flame which the voice of sanity and wisdom told him he must quench: that he was here because discontent had driven him. But his voice was firm as he made some commonplace reply, and Cyrus nodded his satisfaction. "Mebby if thar's a few boys like thet, growin' up hyarabouts, ther few gals thet gits larnin' won't be foredoomed ter lead lonesome lives, atter all."
The moonlight was beginning to convert the dulness of twilight into a nocturne of soft and tempered beauty.
Boone felt suddenly appalled, as if the father had given him parental recognition and approval, and laid upon him an obligation. He wanted to rise and frame some excuse for immediate flight, but it was of course too late for that.
The evening star came up over the dark contours of the ridge. It shone soft and lustrous in the sky, where other stars would soon add their myriad points of light, but however many others might fill the heavens there would still be only one evening star—and Boone, as he waited for one girl, fell to thinking of the other with whom he had climbed Slag-face yesterday; the girl who had set fire to his young imagination.
Then Happy came out of the door and soon after the father went in. "Thar hain't no place fer an ign'rant old feller like me, out hyar amongst ther young an' wise," he chuckled as he left them. "I reckon ye aims ter talk algebry an' sich-like."
The mountains were great upward sweeps of velvet darkness. Down in the slopes, where the moonlight fell, was a bath of silver and shadows, not dead and inky but blue and living, but Happy Spradling, keyed to the emotional influences of that June evening, found herself labouring with a distrait and unresponsive visitor, who made an early excuse for departure.
Beyond the goal of getting through college in three years, Boone had planned his future but vaguely. He might seek election to the Legislature, when he came of qualifying age, and strive upwards from that beginning toward Congress and the larger rewards of a political life. For such a career the law was a necessary preparation, so while he was still in college he began its reading.
Whenever he went home from the university he saw Happy, and in the tacit fashion of simple souls their neighbourhood fell to speaking of "Boone and Happy," as though the linking of their names was natural and logical, and in local gossip it was almost as though they were betrothed.
Happy had other suitors, more than a few of them indeed, drawn to the Spradling house by her beauty. Along those neighbourhood creeks, from the trickles where they "headed up" to the mouths where they emptied, there were few girls who could hope to compete with her loveliness of sloe-eyes, dusky hair and slender grace of body. But the old wives shook their heads, saying, "Happy Spradling wouldn't hurt a fly—but jest ther same she's breakin' hearts right an' left because she's mortgaged ter Boone Wellver—an' she's jest a'waitin' fer him."
Old Cyrus already looked on him as a son—and Boone spoke as little of Anne Masters as he would have spoken of the things sealed in Masonic secrecy.
Happy's school was one which arranged its terms and vacations in accordance with local exigencies. Crop planting and gathering had the right of way over text-books, and so it happened that when Anne was at Marlin Town, Happy was usually at school—and their ways did not cross.
Yet each summer, too, as a man may go from the provinces to court and yet not delude himself with the hallucination that he is a courtier, Boone went over to Marlin Town. For every summer Anne Masters came for a few weeks to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life.
During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern, woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her.
She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he shook his head.
"It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at night—of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he did not tell her.
One day in the spring of the year when Anne was sixteen, Mrs. Larry Masters dropped into the office of her kinsman, Tom Wallifarro, to talk over some small matter of business. It was one of the regrets of the lady's life—a life somewhat touched and frost-bitten by bitterness—that all of her business was small. It was, however, one of her compensations that this gentleman gave to her petty affairs as much care and consideration as to the major features of his large practice.
"My dear," observed the Colonel irrelevantly as he looked at the weary eyes of the woman who had in her day been an almost famous beauty, "you seem worried. You are altogether too young to let lines creep into your face."
Mrs. Masters laughed mirthlessly.
"I have a daughter growing up. I am ambitious for her. She has charm, grace, breeding—and she's the poor member of a rich family. Such things bring wrinkles around maternal eyes, Cousin Tom."
"Happily she lives in Kentucky," the lawyer reminded his visitor. "We are yet provincial enough to think something of blood, even when it's not gilded with money."
"Yes, thank God—and thanks to you, she has had educational advantages. If Larry had only had business sense—but I can't talk patiently about Larry."
"No—I wish you could bring yourself to think of him more indulgently, but—" Colonel Tom knew the fruitlessness of that line of counsel, so he brushed lightly by to other topics. "But that isn't what I wanted to talk about. I think Morgan ought to travel abroad for several months, don't you?"
Mrs. Masters sighed. There was a thought in her mind which had long been there. If Morgan and Anne could be brought to a fancy for each other, her problem in life would be settled. The girl would no longer be a charity child. But what she said was an amendment to the original thought. "Isn't he a bit inexperienced—and headstrong yet, to be turned loose alone in Europe?"
The Colonel's eyes twinkled. "I mean to have a check-rein on him."
"What fashion of check-rein, Cousin Tom?"
"I thought," said the lawyer off-handedly, since he always surrounded his beneficences with a show of the casual, "that it would be a good thing for Anne too. Now if you and she and Morgan made a European trip together, the responsibility of two ladies on his hands would steady the young scapegrace."
Mrs. Masters almost gasped in her effort to control her delighted astonishment. Morgan had always thought of Anne as a "kid" to be teased and badgered, and of himself as a very finished and mature young gentleman. Now they would see each other in a new guise. Their eyes might be opened. In short, the possibilities were immense.
"Your goodness to us—" she began feelingly, but the Colonel cleared his throat and raised a hand in defence against the embarrassment of verbal gratitude.
A month later the three sat in thesalle-a-mangerof the Elysée Palace Hotel, by a window that commanded a view of the Arc de Triomphe, and many things had happened. Among them was the surprising discovery by the young man, that while few eyes seemed concerned with him, many turned toward Anne, and having turned, lingered.
Only last night they had been to a dance, and Anne had been so occupied with uniforms that she had found no time to waltz with him—though he was sure that he danced circles about these stiff-kneed gentry with petty titles.
Now over thepetit déjeunerhe took his young and inconsiderate cousin to task.
"Last night, Anne, I camped on your trail all evening, and you couldn't manage to slip me in one dance. Nothing would do but goggling Britishers and smirking frog-eaters. I'm getting jolly well fed up with these foreigners."
Anne lifted her brows, but her eyes sparkled mischief.
"Oh, Morgan, I can dance with you any time," she assured him. "You're just kin-folks. Is it because you're 'jolly well fed up' with foreigners that you like to ape English slang?"
The young man blushed hotly, but he chose to ignore the question with which she had capped her response. Inasmuch as it was a fair hit, he had need to ignore it, but his eyes snapped with furious indignation. "Anne, I don't understand you," he announced in a carefully schooled voice. "You can play with absurd little dignitaries, or with mountain illiterates—anything abnormal—but for your own blood—" He paused there a moment, searching his abundant and sophomoric vocabulary for the exact combination of withering words; and, while he hesitated, she interrupted in a tone which was both quiet and ominous:
"Let's take up one thing at a time, Morgan. Just who is the illiterate in the mountains?"
"You know as well as I do—Boone Wellver."
"Boone Wellver. I thought so. At all events, he's a man, even if he's not quite twenty-one yet."
"A man: that is to say, a specimen of thegenus homo. So is the fellow that brought in the eggs just now. So is the chap that drives the taxi." The young aristocrat shrugged his shoulders and snapped his fingers in excellent imitation of Gallic expressiveness; then as Anne's twinkle reminded him of his being "jolly well fed up with foreigners," the change in his tone became as abrupt as the break in a boy's altering voice, and he added: "The point is that he's hardly a gentleman. I commend his ambition—but there's something in birth as well. Unless you attach some importance to the elegances and nuances of life, you are only a member of the mob."
"The elegances of life—as, for instance"—the dancing sparkle stole mischievously back into the blue eyes and the voice took on a purring softness—"as, for instance, the handling of the small sword—or fencing foil?"
Morgan rose petulantly from the table and pushed back his chair. "If you ladies will excuse me," he announced with superdignity, "I will leave you for a while to your own devices."
Anne's laughter pursued him in exit with an echo of musical mockery.
But that evening Mrs. Larry Masters posted a letter to Colonel Tom Wallifarro.
"Morgan has discovered Anne!" she said in part. "He has been too close to her until now to realize her attractiveness; but she has been noticed by other men, and at last Morgan is awake. They have quarrelled, and next to making love that's the most significant of developments. My dear kinsman and benefactor, you know what our mutual hope has been, and I think its fulfilment is not so far away! Tonight when I sipped my claret at dinner I drank a silent toast, 'To my girl and your boy.'"
While Mrs. Masters was writing that note, her daughter was sitting at another desk in the same room, and her letter was addressed to a post-office back of Cedar Mountain.
When Boone received that second missive, he turned the envelope over in his hand and gazed at it for a long while. Even then he did not open it until he sat alone in a place where the forests were silent, save for the call of a blue-jay and the diligent rapping of a "cock of the woods" who was sapping and mining for grubs.
The boy held between thumb and forefinger an envelope of a sort he had never seen before, of thin outer paper over a dark coloured lining. In one corner was a stamp of the French Republic, and there in writing that had crossed the sea was his name and address.
"She found time to write to me," he said rapturously to himself, and then dropping intentionally and whimsically into his old, childhood speech he added, nodding his head sagely to a pert squirrel that frisked its tail near by, "She's done writ me a letter cl'ar from t'other world."
It was that same summer, when Anne had gone to Europe, that Boone came back from college, very serious and taciturn, and McCalloway was prompt to guess the reason.
"You went down to Louisville, didn't you?" he inquired, as the two sat by the doorstep on the day of the boy's return, and Boone nodded.
The man did not nag him with questions. His seasoned wisdom contented itself with smoking on in silence, and after a little the lad jerked his head.
"I reckon you know what took me there—sir."
The final word came in afterthought. No mountaineer says "sir," by habit.
A part of that stubborn independence which is at once the virtue and the fault of the race balks at even such small measure of implied deference, but Boone had noticed that "down below," where courtesy flowers into graciousness, the form of address was general.
McCalloway responded slowly.
"Yes, I can guess your errand there. How is he?"
The boy's eyes gazed off across the slopes through contracted lids, and his voice came in deliberate but repressed tenseness.
"I hunted up Colonel Wallifarro's office and he went over there with me.... I reckon, except for that, they wouldn't have let me see him."
He paused, and the man thoughtfully observed, "No, I fancy not."
"You go into that jail-house through a stone door, and there's a rough-lookin' feller settin'—I mean sitting—there in front of another door made of iron gratin's as thick as crowbars.... The place don't smell good."
"Isn't it well kept?" inquired McCalloway in some surprise, and the boy hastily explained.
"I don't mean that it plum stinks. I reckon it's as clean as a jail can be, but the air is stale—even out on the street that lowland air is flat.... It don't taste right in a man's throat.... Asa was reared up here in these free hills. He's like a caged hawk down there."
The soldier nodded sympathetically.
"Did he—seem well?"
"He hasn't sickened none ... but his face used to be right colourful.... Now it's pale ... and sort of gray-like.... Of course a turnkey went along with us, and we didn't talk with him by himself.... I reckon he didn't say none of the things he craved most to say.... He was right silent-like."
The boy broke off, and for a while the two sat in silence. When Boone took up the thread of his narrative again, there was something like a catch in his throat.
"They were pretty polite to us there.... They showed us all over the place ... they even took us to the death row.... There was a nigger in there that was goin' ter be hung next morning at daybreak.... I reckon he's dead now.... A feller kept walkin' back and forth in front of that cell ... and an electric light was burnin' there full bright.... That nigger, neither night ner day ... could ever git away from that light.... They were afraid he might seek ter kill hisself.... He come ter the bars an' said, 'Howdy, white folks,' ... an' then he went back an' sat down on the ledge that he sleeps on."
The recital, painfully punctuated with its frequent pauses, halted there. It was a matter of several minutes before it began again. Now the voice was laboured, as if the speaker were panting for breath, and the careful pronunciation relapsed wildly into the older and ruder forms of solecism.
"They tuck us out an' ... showed us the cement yard ... whar the gallows stood.... It was painted a sort of brownish red.... It put me in mind of dried blood. The nigger could hear the hammers whilest they set the thing up.... Asa could hear 'em too.... Asa hed done seed ther scaffold hisself ... through the winder-bars when ... he exercised ... in the corrider.... But when I looked at the nigger thet's dead by now ... seemed like it was Asa I saw ... with thet lamp glarin' in on him, daylight and night time alike...." The voice leaped into a soblike vehemence. "Thet's what Judas money dogged him to! Seemed like ... I couldn't endure it!"
So if the time ever came when Boone stood face to face with Saul Fulton, it would, for all the amendment of his new life, be a moment of desperate crisis. The pig iron of his half-savage beginning had been made malleable and held promise of tempered and flexible steel—but the metal was still feudist ore. McCalloway comforted himself with the reflection that Saul was not likely to return, but did not delude himself into forgetting that strange perversity which seems to draw the mountaineer inevitably back to his crags and woods, even in the face of innumerable perils. Some day Saul might attempt to slip back, and Boone would almost inevitably hear of his coming. Then for a day or an hour, the lad might relapse into his old self, even to the forgetting of his pledge. Such an inconsidered day or an hour would be enough to wreck his life.
Carefully and adroitly, therefore, McCalloway played upon the softer strings of life, and sometimes, to that end, he opened a hitherto closed door upon the events of his own life, and let his protégé look in on glimpses that were sacredly guarded from other eyes.
One summer night, for example, Boone laid down a book and said suddenly, "It tells here about a fellow winning the Star of India and the Victoria Cross. I'd love to see one of those medals."
Silently McCalloway rose and went over to the folding desk, to come back with his battered dispatch box. He unlocked it and laid out before the boy not one decoration, but several. The ribbons were somewhat faded now, and the metal tarnished; but Boone bent forward, and his face glowed with the exaltation of one admitted to precincts that are sacrosanct. For a long while he studied the maltese cross with its lion-surmounted crown and its supporting bar chased with rose leaves; the cross that bears the Queen's name, for which men brave death. Beside it lay the oval, showing Victoria's profile, and the gilt inscription on a blue enamelled margin: "Heaven's Light Our Guide." A star caught it to its white-edged blue riband—and that was the coveted Star of India.
Here before his eyes—eyes that burned eagerly—were the priceless trifles that he had never hoped to see. The modest gentleman who had, for his sake, relinquished fresh honours in China, had won them, and until now had never spoken of them, but Boone knew that they are not lightly gained—and that in no way can they be bought.
A sudden and unaccountable mistiness blurred his sight.
"I'm obliged to you, sir," he said seriously. "I know you don't often show them."
He had meant to say nothing more than that, but youth's questioning urge mastered his resolution, so that he put an interrogation very slowly, half fearing it might seem an impertinence.
"You told me once, sir, that I might ask whatever questions I liked—and that you would refuse to answer whenyoufelt like it. I'm going to ask one now—but I reckon I oughtn't to." Again there was a diffident pause, but the sincere blue eyes were unwaveringly steady as they met the gray ones.
"Do you reckon, sir, the day will ever come—when I can know the real name—of the man I owe—pretty nigh everything to?"
McCalloway blinked his eyes, which this cub of a boy had a way of tricking into unsoldierly emotion, and resolutely set his features into immobility.
"No, sir; I'm afraid not," he answered with a gruffness that in no way deceived his questioner. "McCalloway is as good a name as any—I'm afraid, at all events, it will have to serve to the end."
Slowly and gravely the lad nodded his head. "All right, sir," he declared. "It was just curiosity, anyhow. The name I know you by is good enough for me."
But McCalloway was disquietingly moved. He rose and replaced the dispatch box on its shelf, and after that paced the room for a few moments with quick, restive strides. Then his voice came with an impulsive suddenness. "There's a paper in that dispatch box ... that would answer your question, Boone," he said. "I tell you because I want you to realize how entirely I trust you. It's the secret chamber of my Bluebeard establishment. While I live it must remain locked."
After a moment he added, "If I should die ... and you still want to know—then you may open the box ... but even then what you learn is for yourself alone, and I want that you shall destroy all those documents and whisper no word whatever of their contents to any living soul."
"I promise, sir," declared the boy, "on my honour."
When August had brought the yellow masses of the golden-rod and the rusty purple of the ironweed; when the thistles were no longer a sting to the touch but down drifting along the lightest breeze, two horses stopped at McCalloway's fence, and a girl's voice called out, "Can we come in?"
Boone had not known that Anne Masters was back on this side of the Atlantic, nor had he ventured to hope that she would find time to come up here into the hills before the summer ended, but the voice had brought him out to the stile, as swiftly as a cry for help could have done. Now he stood, looking up at her as she sat in her saddle, with a blaze of worship in his blue eyes that went far to undo all the self-restraint with which he had so studiously hedged about his speech and manner. Surprise has undone many wary generals. So his eyes made love to her, even while his lips remained guarded of utterance.
"I didn't have any idea that you were on this side of the world," he declared. "It's just plum taken my breath away from me to see you sitting right there on that horse."
Larry Masters had dismounted and was hitching his mule. Now he turned to inquire, "Where's Mr. McCalloway?"
The boy had momentarily forgotten the existence of his patron. He had forgotten all things but one, and now he laughed with guilty realization.
"I reckon I'll have to ask your pardon, sir. I was so astonished that I forgot to tell you he wasn't here. He's gone fishing—and I'm afraid he won't be back before sundown."
"Well, we've ridden across the mountain and we're tired. If you don't mind we'll wait for him."
Anne reached down into her saddle bags and produced a small, neatly wrapped package.
"I brought you a present," she announced with a sudden diffidence, and Boone remembered how once before, as he stood by a fence, she had spoken almost the same words. Then, too, she had been looking down on him from the superior position of one mounted. He wondered if she remembered, and in excellent mimicry of his old boyish awkwardness he said, "Thet war right charitable of ye.... Hit's ther fust present I ever got—from acrost ther ocean-sea."
Anne's laugh rippled out, and she followed suit—quoting herself from the memory of other years:
"Oh, no, it isn't that at all. Please don't think it's charity." Then she slid down and watched him as he unwrapped and investigated his gift; a miniature bust of Bonaparte, the Conqueror, in Parian marble. The light August breeze stirred the curls against her cheeks with a delicate play—but they stirred against the boy's heart with the power of lightning and tornado.
Anne was at her father's house for several weeks, and scarcely a day of that time did her vassal fail to ride across the mountain, but those hours squandered together were fleet of wing. McCalloway smiled observantly and held his counsel. The charm and gaiety of Anne's bright personality would do more to dispel the menace of gloom from the dark corners of the boy's nature, where tendencies of melancholy lurked, than all his own efforts and wisdom. Later there would come an aftermath of bitter heartache, for between them lay the fortified frontier which separates red blood and blue; the demarcation of the contrary codes of Jubal and Tubal Cain, but at that thought the soldier shrugged his shoulders with a ripe philosophy. Just now the girl's influence was precisely what the lad needed. Later, when perhaps he needed something else, he would take his punishment with decent courage, and even the punishment would do him good. A blade is not forged and tempered without being pounded between anvil and sledge—and if Boone could not stand it—then Boone could not realize the dreams which McCalloway built for his future.
The wisdom of middle-age can treat, as ephemeral, disasters in which first love can contemplate only incurable scars. Boone himself regarded the golden present as an era for which the whole future must pay with unrelieved levies of black despair.
It was chiefly as he rode home at night that he faced this death's-head future with young lips stiffening and eyes narrowed. In the morning sunlight, or through woods that sobbed with rain, he went buoyant, because then he was going toward her, and whatever the indefinite future held in store, he had that day assured with all its richness.
None-the-less, Boone played the game as he saw it, with the guiding instincts of a gentleman. Because it was all a wonderful dream, doomed to an eventual awakening, he sealed his lips against love-making.
Anne was taking him for granted, he reasoned. He had simply become a local necessity to a bright nature, overflowing with vital and companionable impulses.
As vassal he gladly and proudly offered himself, and as vassal she frankly and without analysis accepted him. Should he let slip the check upon his control, and go to mooning about love, instead of meeting her laughter with his laughter and her jest with his jest, she would send him away into a deserved exile.
On the day before Anne was to leave they were on the great pinnacle rock above Slag-face, and by now Boone had come to regard that as the lofty shrine where he had discovered love. Afterwards it would stand through the years as a spot of hallowed memories.
Anne had been talking with vivacious enthusiasm of the things she had seen abroad, and Boone had followed her with rapt attentiveness. She had a natural gift for vivid description, and he had seemed to stand with her, by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum, and to look out with her from the top of Cheops' pyramid over the sands of Ghizeh and the ribbon of the Nile.
But at last they had fallen silent, and with something like a sigh the girl said, "Tomorrow I go back to Louisville."
He had forgotten that for the moment, and he flinched at the reminder, but his only reply was, "And in a few days I've got to go back to Lexington. I always miss the hills down there."
Her violet eyes challenged him with full directness, "Won't you miss—anything else?"
Boone, who was looking at her, closed his eyes. He was sure that they would betray him, and when he ventured to open them again he had prudently averted his gaze. But though he looked elsewhere, he still saw her. He saw the hair that had enmeshed his heart like a snare, saw the eyes that held an inner sparkle—which was for him an altar fire.
"I'm not the sort of feller that can help missing his friends," he guardedly said, but his tongue felt dry and unwieldy.
Usually people were not so niggardly as that with their compliments to Anne, and as she held a half-piqued silence Boone knew that she was offended, so his next question came with a stammering incertitude.
"Youarea friend of mine, aren't you?"
She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain.
Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness was by nature alien.
"Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like that?"
Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominant disappointment.
"I mean, Boone Wellver, that I don't know how to take you. Sometimes I think you really like me—lots. Not just lumped in with everybody that you can manage to call a friend. I have no use for lukewarm friendships—I'd rather have none at all. You seem to be in deadly fear of spoiling me with your lordly favour."
The boy stood before her with a face that had grown ashen. It seemed incredible to him that she could so misconstrue his attitude; an attitude based on hard and studied self-control.
"You think that, do you?" he inquired in a low voice, almost fierce in its intensity. "Do you think I'm fool enough not to take thankfully what I can get, without crying for the moon?"
"What has the moon to do with it?" she demanded.
But the vow of silence which Boone had taken with the grave solemnity of a Trappist monk was no longer a dependable bulwark. The dam had broken.
"Just this," he said soberly. "You're as far out of my reach as the moon itself. You say I seem afraid to tell you that I really like you. Iamafraid. I'm so mortally afraid that I'd sworn I'd never tell you.... God knows that I couldn't start talking about that without saying the whole of it. I can't say I like you because I don't like you—I love you—I love you like—" The rapid flood of words broke off in abrupt silence. Then the boy raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of despair. "There isn't anything in the world to liken it to," he declared.
Anne's eyes had widened in astonishment. She said nothing at all, and Boone waited, steeling himself against the expected sentence of exile. Nothing less than banishment, he had always told himself, could be the penalty of such an outburst.
"Now," he continued in a bitter desperation, "I've done what I said I'd never do. I've foresworn myself and told you that I love you. I might as well finish ... because I reckon I can guess whatyou'llsay presently. From the first day when you came here, I've been in love with you.... I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck' Ridges that I haven't looked at it ... and thought of it as your own star.... I've never seen it either that I haven't said to myself, 'You might as well love that star,' and I've tried just to live from hour to hour when I was with you and not think about the day when you'd be gone away."
Anne still stood with wide and questioning eyes, but no anger had come into them yet. Her voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you think of me that way, Boone? Why am I—so far—out of reach?"
"Why!"—his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West, and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry rotted."
As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last question he had read the reserve of controlled anger—such as a just judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he braced himself and tried not to look at her—but he felt that the length of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade cruel—unintentionally so, of course.
The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious.
At last she spoke.
"You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her surprising pronunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a spirit—and courage."
"But, Anne—"
"I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges—whether they're two hundred years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into a kitchen door at court—so he came in through the front way with a triumphal arch built over it.Heknocked down barriers, and got what he wanted."
"Then—" his voice rang out suddenly—"then if I can ever get up to where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?"
She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll be a man—that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."
"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the hills. I'll missyou—like—all hell—because I love you like that."
They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost children and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or circumstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling, whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she had returned his first kiss.