They had said that there was nothing she could do—a society girl with a drawing room and hunting field equipment—and only the All-seeing and herself knew how near true it had proven.
All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.
For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.
A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy Spradling—to talk to her under an assumed name—and to lay to the bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills she had once loved so intensely—something of the man who was now a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.
There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and she would show herself as conquered.
Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the Forties.
Opposite the door, and across the street, she paused, holding herself hard in hand against a tidal sweeping of emotions, and as she stood there she saw the door open and Mrs. Ariton come out, followed by Happy. The two crossed the sidewalk to the curb and stepped into the great lady's limousine.
Anne still hesitated, then she shook her head and turned resolutely away. The car rolled forward and rounded a corner, and the one possible association with a part of Anne's old world was lost.
Anne herself went over to the avenue and climbed to the roof of a bus.
On the way downtown as the traffic crowded, the limousine and the omnibus passed and repassed each other. It was a frostily clear forenoon with Fifth Avenue sparkling like a string of jewel beads, and sometimes Anne could see Happy's face thrust out with wonderment written large upon its features. To her it was all new: this miracle of a city of millions. Her heart was fluttering to the first sight of that tide of men and motors; that crest-pluming of wealth and undertow of misery; that gaiety and tragedy that rolls in vigour and in poison along a mighty urban artery.
But Anne felt like a fragment of flotsam carried hopelessly on the current.
When the limousine had turned into a side street of dignified old houses, Anne rode on, and leaving the bus made her way on foot through meaner streets where the smell of garlic hung pervasive and the gutturals of Slavic speech came from bearded and beady eyed faces. She went through the East Side's warrens of congestion and poverty, slipping through crowds of shawled and haggling women who elbowed about push-carts.
Yet when she had time to retreat again to the sanctuary of her own small room, Anne felt that an element of augmented strength had come to her, as if she had caught a breath of the laurel bloom from Slag-face through the stenches and the jargons.
"If I can hold out," she told herself, "if I can only hold out, I'll have my self-respect!" After a moment she added, "She will probably see him soon, but she can't tell him she saw me—because she doesn't know it."
Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts. Except when the spring thaws carried a tawny flood up almost to the edge of his doorstep and the "tide" had right of way, that creek bed and the sandy lane angling across it constituted the junction of the Smoky Hollow Road and that debouching over to "The left hand fork of Nighway Creek." Roundabout it were streamlets with pools where, in season, the mountain trout leaped and darted in shimmering flashes, and to the store one summer noon came two hungry fishermen from the lowlands. They sat on cracker boxes, eating canned peaches and "Vienny" sausages, encouraging the keen-eyed old storekeeper to talk and plying him with questions as to what his coal royalties had run to on this tract and what on that, in the space of the past few years. With neither boast nor evasion, the old man answered them.
"But, heavens above, Uncle Billy," exclaimed one of the visitors—(for every man and child called him Uncle Billy—"An' I reckon," he said, "ther houn-dawgs would too, if so be they had ther gift of speech"). "Heavens above, if you go on making money like that you'll be able to sign a check for a million dollars before you end up!"
The storekeeper fished from the pocket of cotton overalls some crumbs of "natural leaf" to rub between his leathery palms, and thrust them greedily between his white-stubbled lips.
"I reckon, son," he answered drily as he once more shoved forward along the counter the tin of crackers, "ef so be thar was any sich-like need, I could back a bank-check fer thet much money terday."
His visitors sat up agaze, with "Vienny" sausages poised between tin-can and lip, dripping grease on their khaki-clad knees.
At last one of them inquired in a dazed voice, "But why don't you live like a rich man, Uncle Billy? Aren't you sick of this God-forsaken desolation?"
Uncle Billy leaned with his elbows on his counter and seemed to be giving the question judicial reflection. Finally he shook his head.
"A man's right apt ter weary of anything in due time, but I've always lived hyar. I wouldn't hardly hev no ease in my mind no-whars else, I reckon. I leaves all thet newfangled business ter my children an' gran'children and I follers in the track of my fore-parents my own self." He paused, then added with a note of defensive pride:
"Not thet I denies myself nothin' though. My old woman's got a brussels cyarpet on ther floor upsta'rs right now an' a pianner thet hit tuck four yoke of oxen ter team acrost ther mountings from ther railroad cars."
"Would she play it for us, Uncle Billy?"
"Wa'al she kain't jest ter say play hit, yit, but she aims ter git somebody ter l'arn her how some day—She l'arnt readin' an' writin' when she war past three score."
Back in Marlin Town—a town now boasting sidewalks of concrete and a new brick station, the fishermen saw the columned and porticoed mansions of the old man's sons—and their thoughts went back to the store with its bolts of calico, its harness, and above it the living quarters where these children had been born.
For the wealth of that county in coal had brought spurs of railroads bristling into pockets of the wilderness where there had hardly been "critter trails," and overnight fortunes had sprung into being. Moneyed interests that centered there would have made the young attorney, who was also the district's member in Congress, something more than a local representative, had he not chosen to represent the native holders and to stand as a buffer between their unsophistication and their would-be exploiters. But if Boone could set his name to no million-dollar checks or build himself no colonial mansions, more practice came to the office where his shingle hung than he and his two new associates could handle.
In other newly developed sections, Boone had seen the native exploited and embittered. It had been his care that when prosperity came into Marlin it should come as a blessing to the hill dwellers and not as a curse. To that end he had locked horns with some adroit and powerful adversaries, outriders of capital who would have been bandits had the way lain open. They had first laughed at him, then resolved to crush him and in the end sought to propitiate him. Finally they gave him his half of the road and shook their heads in wonderment because he chose the way of folly and refused to be made deviously rich.
To each new advance he had had one answer: "I belong to these people, gentlemen. They must be fairly dealt with."
And yet while these mighty transitions worked themselves into being, the alchemy of the Midas touch left life unchanged back of Cedar Mountain itself. The brooding range threw its cordon of peaks across the tide of development and turned it right and left. Not until the many fields lying virgin and accessible had been worked out, would capital need to wrestle with engineering assaults upon those sky-high barriers of flint.
And with fidelity to history's ironic precedent, the man whose dream had been strong in a world of doubters stood by unbenefited, while others who had not known the nature of a vision reaped wealth. For Larry Masters had thrown his initial winnings into other speculative properties. He was the gambler who had won a large bet, and whose ambition straightway burns to "break the bank." He had bought land in his own right on a rising tide of values, and he had seen his own veins of coal narrow to nothing, until his engineers had "pulled the pillars" and abandoned the lodes. Finding himself ill omened and fallen on desert spots in a land of oases, he had closed his bungalow in disgust and taken a salaried position with an oil concern operating in Mexico.
Sometimes there comes into a Kentucky midsummer a strayed touch of autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.
On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.
He did not require the spell of that indefinable melancholy which lay along the hilltops to bring home to him a mood of sadness, because for two weeks he had been here alone with his thoughts. It had been his whim during that time to isolate himself completely, and to wear, as a man may wear old clothes or old shoes, the ease of solitude that makes no demands upon one's conventional self.
In Washington there was always the need of living before other eyes. Here he had not even ridden across the ridge for letters or papers.
At the moment, while the bees droned loudly about him and the mountains slept in their ancient impassivity, he held on his knees Victor McCalloway's tin dispatch box, and his eyes were deep with thoughts of bereavement.
The veteran had said that, on his death, Boone might turn the key of that battered receptacle and read the papers which would give him a full knowledge of the identity of his benefactor.
Once he had declared, half smilingly and half in earnest:
"I suppose that at any time you hear nothing of me for five years you may assume my death." It had been five years now, and more, since he had left the little world of his hermitage, and no word had come back to Boone.
The young man's heart was heavy with loneliness, and as he sat there alone, he ached to know the secret that had shadowed the life of the man to whom his devotion was almost an idolatry; the secret that had robbed of a name one whose past must have been both colourful and tragic.
In those five years since they had met, Boone had passed the milestones from the local to the national, and if he held the respect of his colleagues he owed it all to Victor McCalloway. They said that he was a man with a broad and national vision. That, too, if it were true, was a reflection of the soldier's teaching.
But if McCalloway were to be only a memory, Boone looked forward to a life almost beggared. There was that solitary strain in his nature which came perhaps of having attached himself too strongly to a few, all-important friends. Of these McCalloway had been the chief. A facetious fellow-member had given Boone a nickname out of Kipling in coatroom small-talk, and the title had stuck. "Wellver," said the representative, "is 'the cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him.'"
Now, if he were not to see his old preceptor again, he must indeed walk by himself.
With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been, and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.
The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had his friend played a part?
Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary exile—a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the war-eagles.
Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to him. He had seen—often—the warmth of affection like the softened glow of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and—on occasion—the keen, cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too, white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it had taken the battlefield to bring out.
And these he did not know.
He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought, undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.
Prince himself had been a historian, and yet Boone doubted whether he could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing. As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes. He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments, governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.
Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe that often it became adverse criticism.
Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.
Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.
For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodpecker rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the house again, unopened.
Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the sunlight he was thinking of her.
He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville had been an adventure, daring everything.
All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation.
Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud:
"It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!"
But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her.... You always will!"
Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast.
But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white.
Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands:
"Is it politics, Morgan?"
Wallifarro nodded.
"In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane."
"Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't follow you."
"My God, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, "don't you know?"
"Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks," smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days."
Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply:
"The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it—and yesterday England came in."
The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodpecker began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow butterflies.
Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"
Morgan shook his head. "Two weeks ago," he said, "the whole thing was a sheer impossibility.... Now anything is possible."
Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... "When that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of peace but belched from the mouths of guns—riding the gales of war."
"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."
Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another errand. What was it?"
Morgan, who had been seated, rose and paced the floor with his mouth tight drawn, and then stopping before his host, he broke out bluntly: "Once before, Boone, we talked abouther. Now we must do it again."
Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and with Morgan it was impossible.
"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed, and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour—I can't talk of her."
"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk of her?"
"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My God, man, don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them—and, if you do, don't waste time!"
For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command, had failed to learn anything of her or her circumstances.
"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some cabin in a frozen wilderness—without provisions, without even matches or an axe, and God knows what she found there!"
The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard Morgan again:
"Between us—somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what parted you—but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see her married to you—and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her. Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps shewouldn'thide from you—"
Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:
"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."
But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he had come.
One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed, and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned over for burial among the pauper dead.
Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him. In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires of candle-light.
As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to close the sluice gates of fear and hold his equilibrium by a self-hypnosis of arrested thought.
But words of newsprint broke through this factitious barrier. The "brown hair" of the reportorial description might be the same that McCalloway had called a disputed dominion along the border land of gold and brown. The "evidences of former beauty" might be an unappreciative appraisement ofher, badgered by misfortunes to her death.
Standing at last on the curb before the undertaker's establishment, Boone had to be reminded to pay his fare, because his attention dwelt with a morbid fascination on the gilt words, "Funeral Directors and Embalmers," etched on the black plate glass of the windows.
After an appreciable interval of struggle with panic, he drew himself together and went in through the open door, becoming instantly conscious of a subtle, chemical odour.
From his newspaper a man in broadly patterned green and lavender shirt-sleeves lifted his eyes without rising. On the desk beside him, however, ready at notice to convert him from the liveliness of colour which in private life he fancied to the sable formality of his art, stood celluloid cuffs and a made-up tie as black and sober as his caskets.
"I am an attorney," said Boone curtly. "I came to see if—" He broke off and, proffering the newspaper clipping, made a fresh beginning: "To see if I could identify her."
Then the proprietor rose and, not deeming it essential, for that occasion, to cover the fitful pattern of his shirt, led the way to the back of the place, nursing a cigar stump between his fingers. The heightened beating of Boone's temples was as though with small, insistent knuckles all his imprisoned emotions were rapping against his skull for liberation, and when the undertaker swung open one of several doors along a narrow and darkened hallway, he found himself halting like a frightened child. The motor centres of his nerves mutinied, so that it seemed a labour of Hercules to force his balking foot across the threshold, and when he saw that the room was too dark for recognition a gasp of relief broke from his tight-pressed lips as if in gratitude for even so momentary a reprieve.
"Stand right there," directed the matter-of-fact voice of his conductor; "I'll switch on the light."
Boone Wellver was trembling, with a chill dampness on his forehead and hair. He struggled against the powerful impulse to beg another minute of unconfirmed fear. Then the light flashed, and Boone started as an incoherent sound came from him which might have meant anything—the muscular expulsion of breath deep held and the relaxation of a cramped throat.
The girl, who lay there, was very slender, and the still features were delicately chiselled. She had been, as the clipping stated, in a fashion beautiful, but it was not Anne's beauty.
Perhaps the ivory whiteness and the wan thinness of the crossed hands were the attributes of death rather than of the living girl. Most of all he felt, with an awed appreciation, the serene and calm courage written on the lifeless features. He had tried to reassure himself in advance that it could not be Anne, because Anne's courage would not seek the coward's escape of self-destruction. Now he could no longer reconcile any idea of cowardice with that sweet tranquillity.
"She must of caught her lip in her teeth," the undertaker interrupted his reflections to inform him. "She took gas, you know, and sometimes just at the last there's a little struggle against it."
The Kentuckian nodded silently, and the proprietor went on: "I take it she's not the party you were looking for, then?"
"No." The response was brusque, and with a sudden craving for the outer air, Boone turned on his heel to go—but stopped again inside the threshold. "If relatives don't claim her," he said, "I want her to have a private burial. Arrange the details—and look to me for settlement."
In the office stood a little man, gray and poorly dressed, yet with that attempt at fashion that strives through shabbiness after at least an echo of smart effect.
"I have come to learn when this poor child is to be buried, gentlemen," he began, with that ready emotion which is easily stirred and runs to volubility. "I didn't know her until a few days ago, when she took a small room in the house where I board. She kept to herself, but her manner was sunny and gracious, and her refinement was a matter of comment among us. None of us suspected that she was contemplating—this! I passed her in the hallway the night before it happened, and she smiled at me."
Boone sat afterward in the dreary little mortuary chapel while a clergyman whom, the undertaker said, "came in in these cases," performed, with the perfunctoriness of routine, the services for the dead. Later, still with the gray little man at his side, the Kentuckian drove in the one cab that followed the hearse to a Brooklyn cemetery where Boone had paid for a grave. The little man, it seemed, had been a character actor and, from his own testimony, one of ability beyond the appreciation of a flippant present.
Their mission today recalled to his mind others of like nature, and as he talked of them, enlarging upon the piteous helplessness of young women whose gentle natures are unequipped for the predatory struggles of a city where one does not know one's next-door neighbour, Boone's anxieties grew heavier.
Those months of unavailing search stood always out luridly in his memory, and because his search was a thing that could accommodate itself to no rule except to follow faint trails into all sorts of places, he grew to an astonishing familiarity with parts at least of the town whose boast it is that no man knows it.
It was natural that he should take up his own quarters near Greenwich Village, where the fringes of the town's self-styled bohemia trail off from Washington Square. There, with all its eccentricities and absurdities, effort dwelt side by side with dilettante anarchy, and strugglers with definite goals brushed shoulders with the "brittle intellectuals that crack beneath a strain."
He grew to know some of the sincere workers of this AmericanQuartier Latinand some exponents of affectation-ridden cults who travesty life and the arts under creeds of pathetically shallow pretence.
But these things, though absorbed into observation were small, foreground details of Boone's life at that time. The motif of the picture was the vain search for Anne Masters, and the whole was drawn against the sombre and colossal background of the war itself. For in those epic months was fought the First Battle of the Marne. In them Hindenburg emerged from the obscurity of retirement to drive the Russian hordes back from East Prussia, and, most tragic of all, the flood was sweeping across Belgium.
If he could think little of other matters than the girl he loved and had come to seek, neither could the spirit that McCalloway had shaped ever quite escape a deep feeling of the war, like an incessant rolling of distant and sinister drums.
In the spring of 1916 the legations and embassies at Washington had their birds of passage. They were neither secretaries nor attachés in precise definition, yet men vouched for by their chiefs. Uniforms bloomed, and among the visitors were those who wore scars and decorations. To this category belonged the Russian Ivangoroff, and between him and Boone Wellver sprang up a friendship which, if not intimate, was certainly more than casual.
Ivangoroff was young, tall and electric with energy. Animation snapped and sparkled in his dark eyes; it broke into a score of expressive gestures that enlivened his words: it manifested itself in quick movements and a freshet flow of unflagging conversation.
It puzzled Boone that, though he was some sort of adjunct to the Russian Embassy, his gossip of intrigue at the Court of Petrograd should, on occasion, permit itself a seemingly unguarded candour.
One evening, as the two sat together at dinner, the Kentuckian made bold to suggest something of the sort, and his companion laughed with an infectious spontaneity that bared the flash of his white teeth.
"Even at the court itself talk is quite frank," he declared. "Every dinner party is a small cabal. What would you, with a German army hammering at our front and a German influence infecting those about the Tzarina?"
"But surely," expostulated the congressman, "you can't be serious. How can an enemy influence survive at a belligerent capital?"
Ivangoroff shrugged his shoulders.
"You call it incredible, yet because of that influence the greatest soldier in Europe was stripped of his powers as commander-in-chief and exiled to a nominal viceregency in the Caucasus."
Boone leaned forward, his attention challenged.
"You mean the Grand Duke Nicholas?"
"Yes. You ask how such things can be. I can reply only that they are."
The Russian raised his hands and let them fall in a gesture of one who expresses disgust for the unalterable.
"And yet what would you?" he demanded. "If a weak monarch is torn between a genuine love, almost an idolatry, for a stronger man, and a carefully fostered fear of him? If, while the soldier is in the field, there are those at home who every day are whispering into the anxious, imperial ear that his great kinsman will presently overshadow and replace him, what are the probabilities? With the Empress ruling her consort, and herself being ruled by a closet cabinet of women and monks, what else was possible than that the captain who was busy stemming the outer enemy should fall before the inner enemy?"
"And," mused Boone thoughtfully, "there were few who could not have been better spared."
"My friend," asserted the Russian, "the world does not yet appreciate the Grand Duke's measure. In retrospect history will devote some pages to his achievements. She will canonize the magnificent ability and the grim courage with which he fought on without support, without munitions, crying out for the metal which did not come, and vainly demanding the death of traitors at home whose failure to supply him was eating up his armies. She will celebrate an orderly retirement which under other leadership would have been a rout: the reluctant giving back of hosts that were interposing bare breasts to artillery. As for the Tzar's jealous fears—bah!"
The speaker paused to light a cigarette, and from it puffed nervous clouds of brown smoke through his nostrils.
"I was at the Moghileff headquarters," he resumed, "when the Tzar arrived to take into his own hands the duties that those stronger hands had held. What took place between the two Romanoffs, I cannot tell you. My place was not inside those doors ... but at the end I saw them both."
Again the narrative broke in a pause, and the bright, dark eyes of the Russian sobered into reflectiveness and pain.
"You have seen his pictures? Nicholas Nicholaivitch, I mean? Yes, of course; but they fail to give the adequate impression: the tall, gaunt power of the figure; the dauntless eagle pride of the eye and stern sadness of the mouth; the noble dignity of bearing! When the Tzar stood with him at the railway station bidding him farewell, it was the eyes of the monarch that held incertitude and tears. It was the Tzar who was shaken with the wish to undo what he had done, yet who lacked the resolution."
For a little while the two men sat over their coffee, and even the voluble animation of the Russian was stilled; then, as the talk drifted, chance guided it to the topic of army caste.
"Generally speaking, we are officers or men by heredity—yet anything can happen in Russia," declared Ivangoroff, "when a peasant monk can gain a hold like Rasputin's at court!" He paused, then laughed. "I even know of one man who came to the Grand Duke's headquarters in civilian garb—who was not a Russian—who was unknown. He secured an audience, and ten days later found him a member of the leader's personal staff—a confidant of the Commander-in-Chief!"
Boone raised his brows. It occurred to him that this highly entertaining companion might be more vivacious than authentic, and he murmured some expression of interest.
"Read your dispatches," said the Russian. "Occasionally you will find there the name of one General Makailoff. It is not a name you will have seen in our army matters before this war. True, one could look at this man and know that he was a soldier, yet he was a foreigner, and it was at a time when spy-ridden Russia distrusted every one. He went into the Commander-in-Chief's presence. He said something to the Commander-in-Chief, which no one else heard. He came out an officer on the staff."
With a sudden flash of deeper interest that made his words eager, Boone bent across the table. "Tell me," he demanded, "what was his appearance?"
"It interests you?" laughed Ivangoroff. "Naturally, because it has the essence of drama, has it not? He is tall and spare, with a florid face and gray temples. He is hard-bitten and leather-tanned, as a soldier should be, and in his eye, a gray-blue eye, dwells a quality which one does not find in common eyes."
"And when the Grand Duke went into his retirement in the Caucasus—what became of this other soldier?"
"That I cannot say. I fancy, judging from what I know of Nicholas Nicholaivitch, that he did not waste this man. I should hazard the guess that he passed him on to another commander—perhaps to Alexieff—perhaps to Brussilov."
"Do you know anything more about General Makailoff?" The Kentuckian sought to clothe his question in the casual tone of ordinary interest, but as he lighted a cigar his fingers held a tremour.
Ivangoroff shook his head.
"Of course there was mess-table talk—but that is always the gauziest myth. Perhaps you know the fable that is told in all European armies of the ghost general?"
"No, I've never heard it."
"The story runs that there is a certain man of extraordinary military genius—genius of the first class—who is not so much a soldier of fortune as a super-soldier. In peace times no army knows him. No government owns him. He disappears as does the storm petrel when the sea is quiet. But when the tempest breaks and the need arises for a leader beyond small leaders—then, under a new name each time, this ghost-commander reappears. You see, they make the story a good one. Mess tables have embellished and elaborated it with much retelling over their wine glasses. It is even said that the mystery man fights on the righteous side and brings victory." The Russian lighted a fresh cigarette and naïvely observed, "When we fought Japan, however, he was reported to be against us, guiding the hand of Kuroki. When Savoff defeated the Turks, it was rumoured that he sat in the Bulgar's councils. Now"—Ivangoroff laughed—"now it is whispered in Petrograd and Moscow that he laid his sword at the service of the Grand Duke Nicholas and stands shoulder to shoulder with the men he fought in Manchuria."
Theraconteurglanced at his wrist watch and rose hastily.
"I have overstayed my time," he declared. "It is hard for me to leave one who suffers me to talk—even when I talk of moonshine gossip like this."
But when he had gone, Boone sat for a long while unmoving, and before he went to his bed that night he had resolved, so soon as his duties freed him long enough, to undertake a journey to Russia.
The snow that had lain along the Appalachian slopes had felt the first breath of thawing breezes in March, 1917. Here and there, in a sun-touched hollow, dry twigs grew less brittle and the hint of buds gave timid forecasting of spring. The roads were deep in red mud and black mud, and men in ill-lighted cabins looked to crowbar and pike-pole and made ready for the swelling of the "spring tide" that should heft their rafted logs on its shoulders of water to the markets of a flattened world.
In the log house which Victor McCalloway had built, Boone Wellver was making his final preparations to go to Washington again—and, after that, if God willed, to Russia. Upon his wall calendar once more a date was marked; the date of a call, come at last, for which through two years his spirit had fretted.
The President had sent his summons for Congress to gather in extraordinary session, and that order, given first for April the sixteenth, had been advanced to April the second. That could carry one meaning only—that at last the fiction of a national aloofness was to be cast aside as a garment unworthy of its wearer; that at last the nation was to take her place at Armageddon!
Ahead lay action; the only medicine for a deep-rooted sorrow which, after a grim clinging to the fringe of hope, had begun to admit despair.
For almost three years Boone had divided himself between his work and his search for Anne, and his mission had come to seem as far from attainment as that of the seekers of the Holy Grail. Now he was to be one of those whose voices should speak for the nation in its declaration of war.
That would not be enough. It would be only a beginning of his self-required service, but since the well-springs of sentiment were deeper in his nature than he realized, it was important to him that he, the pioneer type of American, should join with his modern brethren in committing his country to her forward stride across the Atlantic.
The sun was setting over the "Kaintuck' Ridges" in a blazing glory of wine red and violet, and his imagination flamed responsively until it saw in the bristle of crest pine and spruce, the silhouette of lance-bearing legions marching eastward.
Already his trunk had gone in a neighbour's "jolt wagon," and the horse that he was to ride across Cedar Mountain was saddled. Other respondents to that call might motor to their trains. He must make the beginning of his journey on horseback, with his most immediate needs packed in saddle bags—as Jefferson had done before him.
Boone paused at the door of the house, where already the fire had been quenched and the windows barred. Now he turned the key in the lock and went slowly to the barn, but even when he had led out his mare and stood at the stirrup, something held him there with the spell of memory.
He was not coming back here until he had fulfilled the resolve long ago made—and since in these days overseas journeys were less simple than in other times, he could not be sure of coming back at all. So with his bridle rein over his forearm, he stood for a while with the picture of the log cabin and the sunset in his eyes.
Then he mounted and rode slowly away.
In a few days he was to hear the earnest voice of the President sounding over the sober faces of his gathered colleagues: "Gentlemen of the Congress:—I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making."
Though he came bearing no official mission, because he was a member of the American Congress and because the United States Ambassador had exerted himself to that end, Boone Wellver found it possible to leave revolutionary Petrograd and make his way to the front where, after a year of successful offensive, the armies of Brussilov lay drugged with the insidious poison of anarchy.
Already, "Order Number One to Army" had with a pen-stroke abolished all the requirements of discipline and all the striking power of unity.
The marvel was that the heart of the organization had not at once stopped beating—but old traditions still held the fragments loosely cemented, and the resolute hand of Brussilov still grasped and steadied the brittle material left to him in the face of the enemy and disaster.
If guns still thundered on the eastern front, the men who had for a year been launching successful assaults knew that their voices were hollow. If his army groups still maintained a zone of activity between themselves and the foe, he knew that it was only a screen behind which he sought to shield the evaporating powers of his forces.
Yet even in these days the commander adhered to his custom and received the correspondents, and when Boone came to his headquarters with the credentials that had passed him that far, he was turned over to an intelligence officer, whose instructions were to serve him in every way compatible with military expediency until the general could grant him an audience.
He had been motored through a timber-patched country of waving wheat fields and had listened to the deep voices of the guns. He had been taken into the trenches where he read the spirit of decay in sullen eyes that had once been stolidly impassive or cheerfully childlike. He had seen the "little and terrible keyholes of heaven and hell" through which one looks, both sickened and exalted, upon modern warfare.
In his mind, still unassimilated, were countless impressions, gruesome and inspiring, petty and magnificent, appalling and ennobling; impressions of broken men and broken villages, of pock-marked country and unbruised valour. As the battered military car, mud-brown over its gray, wallowed back from the front lines, he seemed to be leaving the war behind him, though he knew that he was approaching the nerve centre from which emanated the impulses which forged and wrought the purposes of the Inferno.
Finally in a village less hideously war-spoiled than its fellows, and in a small but tidy room of what had been the inn, he awaited the pleasure of the Commander.
Of his conductor along the front he had put questions as to General Makailoff. Yes, the officer, of course, knew of the General, but where he was now he could not say.
The General was a wheel in the mechanism of Brussilov's staff—and that directing force was remote from the lives of lower grade officers. It belonged to the part of the temple which lay behind the veil. Even in attempted description of the man, the intelligence officer grew vague, and Boone did not press him for a greater explicitness. That military reticence that no civilian could justly appraise might be parent to the officer's indefinite responses, and, if so, its covertness must be respected.
So in the room of the Russian inn the man from the Cumberlands waited, and at length, when he opened his door in response to a light rap, he saw an officer in a major's uniform, who saluted smartly and announced in excellent English,
"General Brussilov will receive you now, sir."
Again a battered military car lurched through village streets darkening to twilight, and brought up before a plain two-storied house, whose walls, though shell marked, stood upright.
Into a whitewashed room, littered with map-strewn tables, and empty until they entered it, Boone was ushered and left alone.
A lamp upon a crude table stood as yet unkindled, and only candles in two tall sticks on a wall-shelf gave a yellow effect against which the shadows stirred cloudily.
Even the whitewashed walls were the gray yellow of putty in that feeble light, and Boone turned his eyes toward the brighter spot of the door, giving upon another room, where operators sat at switchboards and where were mingled the buzz of voices, the tramp of booted feet, the clink of spurs and accoutrements, into a tempered babel as restlessly constant as surf on rocks.
That door was a kaleidoscopic patch of changing colour, and Boone watched it with a sense of confused unreality until a second opened, letting in a draught under which the candles wavered and grew more dim, and a spare figure entered through it, clad in a field uniform which had seen heavy wear, and holding between the tapering fingers of the left hand a freshly lighted cigarette.
Boone had a realization in that first moment of a shadowy shape in a semi-obscurity, yet out of the dimness, as though they were brightly painted on a dark canvas, stood clear—or so it seemed to him—the features of the man and the cross of St. George on his breast.
Alexieff Brussilov closed the door behind him and inclined his head in something less casual than a nod and less formal than a bow, and the flames of the candles rose and steadied as if standing at attention. In all of Boone's subsequent remembrance of that meeting, it was difficult for him to unravel the fact from the play of an imagination, more fitful just then than the candle glimmer, or to dissociate from the impressions of that moment all that he had known before or learned afterwards of this man, whose feats of arms he had heard so widely acclaimed.
Even when the General's voice had broken the silence and they had exchanged commonplaces, a surge of influences quite apart from his words seemed to emanate from the erect figure and the stern eyes, as electric waves flow out from an induction coil.
Boone questioned himself sternly afterwards and could never answer his own questioning as to whether he actually felt at that time or only realized in retrospect the strong impression of doom and heartbreak in Brussilov's eyes. His story was not yet ended, but he must have known its end. He was yet to be commander-in-chief for two months of futile struggle with crumbling armies, succeeding Alexieff, and being himself supplanted by Korniloff. He was even to essay one more offensive—yet his inner vision must already recognize the writing on the wall. He must have seen the black smudge-smoke of disaster stifling the clean fire of his achievement.
But Boone knew that the time granted him out of those hours of stress must not be abused, and as shortly as possible he told the General with full candour why he had come, and ended by asking that he be presented to General Makailoff and be allowed to see his face. If in Ivangoroff's story there had been even a germ of truth, this man of mysterious advent into the Russian army might well look to his superiors to protect his secret.
So Boone made it unmistakably clear that his eagerness was that of a foster son, and he felt that his testimony needed no corroboration, because under the searching severity of the eyes which held his own, as he talked, any falsity must break into betrayal as manifest as a flaw in crystal.
When he had finished, Brussilov did not at once reply, and Boone thought that back of the mask of reserve stirred a shadowing of strong emotion. At last the General spoke evenly, almost stiffly:
"As to General Makailoff's former record, I have practically no knowledge. He came to me from the Grand Duke Nicholas. Naturally I required nothing more. Of my own knowledge I can declare him a soldier with few peers in Europe."
"Then I may have the honour of being presented, sir? I may see his face? If he is the man I have come to learn of, he will welcome me, I think. If not, I shall pay my respects and rest under a deep obligation to you."
The eager thrill of the civilian's voice was unmistakable, and for a moment the soldier stood looking into the face of his visitor, seeming himself uncertain of his answer. But it was only the words of its couching that troubled him, and presently Brussilov raised a hand and let it fall while his reply came in few syllables and blunt directness:
"Makailoff is dead."
"Dead!" Boone echoed the word with a gasp. Only now did he realize how strongly the hopes stirred to rebirth by Ivangoroff's fantastic narrative had laid hold upon him and what power of shock lay in thisdénouement. Then he heard again the voice of Russia's second in command:
"It is incredibly strange that you should have come just now—if indeed he is the man you seek. Thirty-six hours since you might have talked with him." The General broke off and began afresh with an undertone of savage protest in his voice: "In these late days when troops may ballot and wrangle as to whether they will advance or retire, we must squander our most indispensable. It is only by precept and example that we can hope to hold them. Makailoff was such a sacrifice. He fell yesterday in a position as far forward as that of any colonel or major of the line. Had I been left a free hand, I could have enforced obedience more cheaply—with machine guns!"
He broke off and raised the forgotten cigarette to his lips, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, while Boone Wellver steadied himself with an effort.
"You must make allowances for my impatience, sir," he implored. "The suspense of uncertainty is hard. May I know at once?"
Brussilov bowed, and the falcon eyes moderated with the abruptness of a transformation. "He lies only a few versts from this spot. Tonight we bury him and fire his last salute.... You shall go with me.... I am waiting now for—a gentleman, who knew him even better than I. I cannot say who was more devoted to him, for that, I think, would be impossible."
An aide entered, saluted, handed his chief a paper, and went out again. To Boone it seemed the irritating interruption of an automaton, in boots of clicking heels that moved on hinges and pivots, but it served to bring back to the General's attitude and bearing that impersonal and aloof concentration which for the moment had been lost. Again his eyes were windows of drawn shades, and as he studied the communication in his hand, the civilian remembered that, though comrades fell, the task went on, and its director could not be deflected.
Beyond the door the noise of the switchboard operators and the tramp of heavy feet coming and going sounded monotonously through the silence, and then a second officer entered, saluted, as though he were twin automaton to the first, and spoke in Russian.
"You will excuse me for a moment," said the General. "The gentleman of whom I spoke has arrived."
He left the room, and Boone remained standing, his gaze wandering, but his brain singularly numb and inoperative, like stiff machinery, until he heard footsteps again, and with a conscious effort shook off his heaviness of torpor. Then quite instinctively his civilian attitude altered into something like the soldier's attention, as General Brussilov re-entered with another figure, wrapped to the chin in a heavy motor coat. The newcomer was not in uniform, yet Boone felt the creep along his scalp of an electric and dramatic thrill because the giant height of lean stature, the calmly indomitable bearing and the indescribable stamp of greatness proclaimed the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaivitch; the man from whose sure grasp the supreme command had been filched by a jealous weakling; the man who might have saved Russia.
He was a gray old eagle, whose mighty talons had been clipped and whose strong pinions had been broken, but the eagle light was in the iris still and the eagle power in its glance.
The Kentuckian's thoughts flashed back to the night when life had first begun to take on colour before his visioning. Then McCalloway and Prince had named the pitifully few great soldiers of the present, peers of those who had passed to Valhalla. Were it tonight instead of almost two decades ago, they must have named this man among the mighty few.
Boone found himself bowing, then he heard the deep voice of the tall gentleman saying, "General Brussilov has told me. Let us go at once."
Under a sky banked with clouds the car which they entered felt its way along a broken road. Its lights glared on dark masses that leaped out of the blackness and became lines of exhausted men stumbling rearward, or carts of wounded bumping toward relief. The throats of the guns bellowed with a nearer roar, and eventually they halted at another headquarters and silently passed between saluting officers into a bare room where candles burned dimly at the head of a coffin and Cossacks stood at attention, guarding the dead.
At a low-voiced word from Brussilov the place emptied, save for the three who looked down on the casket, closed but not yet fastened. Then, as Boone drank in his breath deeply with a steadying inhalation, the General lifted the covering and raised his eyes interrogatively toward the American.
Boone's lips stirred at first, without sound, then moved again as he said quietly: "It is he."
With the last monosyllable, answering to a command of reverence and awe and stricken grief, he dropped to his knees and knelt beside the casket, and when at length he looked up—and rose gropingly—the picture of two elderly soldiers, standing stiff and tight-lipped, stamped itself ineradicably on his brain. He found himself a minute later fumbling in a pocket and bringing out a small object from which with slow and tremulous fingers he removed the tissue paper wrapping.
His eyes turned first toward the Grand Duke, then toward the General, in a mute appeal for counsel in a matter of fitness.
"This is his," he said, with awkward pauses between his word groups; "he won it in Manchuria.... May I pin it on his breast?"
"The Japanese decoration of the Rising Sun," said the Grand Duke, gravely and acquiescently bowing his head. "Why not?"
Then, turning back his heavy civilian coat, his fingers sought the spot where should have been the Cross of St. George, and came away empty.
"I had forgotten," he observed drily, "I no longer wear a uniform—nor have I any longer the authority. You, Brussilov—with you it is different."
So the man who still held precarious reins over a runaway army detached the clasp of his ornament and pinned the two side by side on the unstirring breast of the dead man; the emblem of honour he had gained in war on Russia and that which rewarded the giving of his life to Russia.
The Grand Duke turned his gaze on Boone Wellver. "Brussilov tells me that this man was as a father to you ... that you had his permission, when he was dead, to inspect papers revealing his true identity.... Is that true?"
"It is true, sir," came the low reply.
"Then on my own responsibility I am going to share that secret with General Brussilov—implicitly trusting his discretion. He"—the tall Romanoff indicated with a gesture the body of the man who lay dead—"he told me, when he came to me. He was one of the world's greatest soldiers. Once before a casket, draped with flags and supposedly containing his body, was borne to the grave on a gun caisson—and a court paid tribute." The Grand Duke paused and spoke again in the manner of one challenging contradiction. "But he was not buried. He had not died except to the eyes of the world which was his right. His name was Hector Dinwiddie."
For a little while no one spoke, and at last Brussilov, with a reverent hand, lowered the plate over the white face. "Come, gentlemen," he said, with a brusque masking of agitation, "the burial detachment is ready."
With the half-realized familiarity of unplaced features, one face besides that of his two distinguished companions, declared its existence to Boone Wellver out of all the faces that set the stage that night. When they had entered the room where the body lay and the soldiers had turned and clanked out, they had been as devoid of personal entities as links in a chain—except one.
An officer, though seen only through half shadow, had worn a stamp of grief on eyes and a mouth which the Kentuckian did not seem to be seeing for the first time.
Again under the night skies by the open grave, when the lanterns burned yellow and the white shaft of an automobile lamp bit out a hard band of glare, the figures of the burial party might have been effigies, but once more the tight-drawn figure of that spare officer declared itself human because only something human could, without word or motion, convey such a declaration of suffering.
It was he who gave the orders, and as Boone watched the firing squad step forward—gaunt, shadow shapes in silhouette—to fire the last salute, he saw the details with a dazed and blunted gaze.
The sharp order which brought the pieces to shoulder; the other sharp order, and the clean-tongued reports, single in unison but multiple in their crimson jets—somehow these took a less biting hold on his memory than the hint of the break in the officer's voice or the empty click of the back-thrown breech-blocks and the light clatter of empty and falling cartridge shells from the chambers.
It was over, and back in his bare inn room Boone sat in a heavy dulness, alone once more, when a rap sounded on the door.
"You are Mr. Boone Wellver, sor'r, are ye not? I heard them call ye so."
With the Scotch rolling of the r's, a flood of memory came back to the Kentuckian. This was the messenger who so long ago had come to the mountain cabin, seeking to lure his preceptor out of his hermitage, to China. The years had drawn him leaner and battered him, and his insignia proclaimed him a major, but his beard and uniform had not Russianized him.
"Major McTavish!" exclaimed the younger man, and across the older face passed a momentary surprise, too trivial to endure long against the head currents of graver emotion. "Yes, I am Boone Wellver. I was his foster-son."
The veteran of forty years of soldiering stood stiff for a little while and embarrassed. His undemonstrative nature was, just now, an ice-flow racked by a warm and unaccustomed freshet, and his straight lip-line twisted up, down, and up again under his effort.
"I have a message for ye, sor'r. He did not die at once—and I was with him from the moment he was struck."
Boone closed the door and turned eagerly. He had been hungry for a word—for a reassurance that in these last busy years this gallant gentleman had remembered him; yet now he put another matter ahead of that.
"But tell me first, sir, of his death," he begged. "I have heard little of that."
"It was as he would have had it." The soldier spoke brusquely, as if jealous of his superior's military devotion and in a monotone because his voice needed guarding. "He fell under fire, holding steady a shaken command."
"Was there—much suffering?"
"There was fever, sor'r, and he was out of his head at the end." The officer reached into his tunic and brought out a pencil-scribbled paper. "He had me write this for him. 'Tis to you."
Boone took the note in tremulous fingers and spread it close to the lamp. While he read, the other stood stiff, but his breathing, with a catch like the ghost of an inhibited sob, was audible.
"My dear boy," ran the message, "McTavish writes this for me. I have fallen at last in what I believe to be a fight for God's cause on earth. That is well. I go now to report to the Great Commander-in-Chief, before whom mere appearances do not damn a man if he go clean-hearted. Russia will collapse and the cause will depend upon your own country—a country no longer aloof, thank God."But, my dear boy, my thoughts that have been with you so long, turn to you at the end. You filled with affection and pride an emptiness that would have starved my soul. When I think of your country, I think of you as an embodiment of its intrepid youth and strength. Can I say more? God keep you. I—"
"My dear boy," ran the message, "McTavish writes this for me. I have fallen at last in what I believe to be a fight for God's cause on earth. That is well. I go now to report to the Great Commander-in-Chief, before whom mere appearances do not damn a man if he go clean-hearted. Russia will collapse and the cause will depend upon your own country—a country no longer aloof, thank God.
"But, my dear boy, my thoughts that have been with you so long, turn to you at the end. You filled with affection and pride an emptiness that would have starved my soul. When I think of your country, I think of you as an embodiment of its intrepid youth and strength. Can I say more? God keep you. I—"
It broke off there, and Boone raised his eyes to the Major, who, divining that the glance was an inquiry, said shortly, "He gave out there, sor'r. The fever took him. What you have read required half an hour to give me—between breaths, as it were."
"You say he was delirious—after that?"
The other nodded.
"He spoke your name—and another."
"Whose?" Boone whispered the question.
"A man named Prince. Some General Prince, of whom I never heard. He fancied that this man came from God to fetch him, sor'r. It was part of the lightheadedness."
"Can you recall his words?"
"I was holding his hand. He pressed mine a bit and said very faintly, 'Good-bye, Sergeant.'—'Twas so he remembered me from other times.—'Tell Boone good-bye. General Prince has come for me.'"
The narrator broke off, and Boone refrained from hastening him. Finally McTavish resumed:
"He said, 'General Prince has come. Don't ye hear him, McTavish? He says, "The Commander-in-Chief sends His compliments, and you will report to Him, in person."'—That was all, sor'r. I thought at the time he meant Brussilov, but I comprehend now that it was of God he spoke."
"I see," responded Boone huskily. "I thank you."
In Cincinnati, loyal to the core, yet Germanic enough of feature and accent to render him inconspicuous, a fair-haired Bavarian with borrowed naturalization papers pursued an avocation which merited the attention of a firing squad. One day in a boarding house of excellent repute, not far from Eden Park, a stranger called to see him, whose dark hair fell in a forelock over a face of sardonic cast.
This pair strolled out through the wooded acclivities of the park which looks down over the city and, between blossoming redbud trees, found a spot favourably secluded for their interview.
"I still don't see," admitted the sallow stranger in a dubious voice, "what it's going to profit your Kaiser to preach draft resistance down there in the hills. I'm not contending that they don't hate to have the Government say, 'You must,' yet on the other hand, they don't hang back on soldiering. What's the bright idea?"
The German lifted his straw-coloured brows indulgently.
"You Americans have no thoroughness. You cannot grasp the detail because you are too impatient of small matters. One does not seek to administer a cumulative poison with a single dosage. The German mind considers each contributing element—and of the small things are born the large. I sketch for you a picture: your mountaineer in resistance; the southern negro stirred to sullenness; the reservation Indian made restive—all small problems in themselves, perhaps, but taken together making a sabotage of human machinery that destroys your unity. At all events, we are paying those whom we employ. We can afford to be liberal since in the end the foe will foot the bill."
Saul Fulton shrugged his shoulders. "All right, Gehr—"
"Not Gehr," the other irritably interrupted him. "That was my name when we met in South America. It is not the name on my papers. Schultz, it is. Please do not forget again."
"Schultz, then.... I'm willing to take my share of this wasted coin, but I can't work in my home county. I tried going back there once and it was enough."
"You know other mountain sections, though—and in your native county you can influence lieutenants?"
"Yes, I reckon maybe I can do that, all right."
Saul Fulton, to whom intrigue was as the breath of life, had again undertaken to earn the Iscariot wage, and he worked as covertly as if he had lain hidden in the laurel thickets.
The result of his efforts was that in one county, not his own, a handful of desperadoes listened greedily to his teachings, and in his own a single man—or boy—of whom it was said that he "was pizen mean an' held a grudge ergin all creation."
Save for that, he gained no disciples, and if, when the registration day came, only one quarter of the men of military age went to enroll themselves, it was because already, through the channels of recruiting offices, the other three-fourths had flowed into the khaki-brown reservoirs of the army. It is history now how the "feud counties" responded; how in two of them not a single man claimed exemption; how in one only two souls waited for the draft.
But Marlin County had her shameful exception in young "Dog" Burtree, who lived alone in a log shack at the head of Pigeonroost Creek.
One Saturday night young Dog drank white whiskey at a blind tiger, and it was reported of him that, in the Holly Hill barber shop, he "made the brag thet he hedn't registered, an' didn't aim ter register." Those who were present reported his manifesto with admirable promptness to the local draft board, and the scandal winged its way along the creek-beds.
Dog may have been drunk beyond remembrance that evening, for when neighbours with faces set in lines of patriarchal sternness rode to his door demanding the truth, he turned putty pale and swore that he had been libelled, and would make his detractors eat their calumnies.
It was on the next Saturday night and in the same barber shop, with much the same group of loiterers present, that the ensuing act was staged.
The shabby little place, lighted by lamps with tin reflectors, was full of pipe smoke and talk that evening, when some one, looking up from a tilted chair, saw a figure in the door.
A startled silence fell and lasted, though not for long—because the eyes of the face that looked in were blood-shot and the lips twisted to an ugly snarl.
Except for its malevolence of expression it was not a repulsive face, though its lower jaw was overly prominent. Its eyes were amber spots beneath heavy brows, and under the back-thrust, felt hat a heavy mass of chestnut hair bushed in curls about the temples. The lips were brightly red like a girl's, but over the whole countenance now lay a spirit both desperate and wicked.
Dog appreciated that what he did must be speedily done, and before the pause broke; before the startled accusers had realised the mission that had brought him his pistol had leaped from its holster; had, several times, risen and fallen in the grasp of a hand hinged on a steady wrist, and had barked each time its muzzle fell level.
Wreaths of smoke and the acrid smell of burnt powder drifted through the barber shop, and four bodies lay on the puncheon floor—of whom two were already dead.
Swiftly the night took Dog Burtree to itself, and almost as swiftly a posse was on the trail, with Joe Gregory, now high sheriff of Marlin County, riding a blood-sweat out of his black colt to assume command of the man-hunt.
The quarry circled over a wide arc of broken fastnesses and went to earth in an abandoned cabin thickly timbered about, and shielded back of huge boulders. There he barred the door and barked out his defiant challenge, "Come in an' git me!"
The cordon closed about the house and awaited the light of day. Until hunger and thirst conquered him, the few casualties were all of the refugee's making, but after two nights and a day of siege, a white rag appeared through a chink on the end of a ramrod.