"Proposed forty thousand and ninety-six times,—And each time, but the last, she said, 'No.'
"Proposed forty thousand and ninety-six times,—And each time, but the last, she said, 'No.'
You see the whole virtue of that man lay in his pertinacity."
After a moment's silence he added, in a voice out of which had gone all facetiousness even while it lingered in the words themselves, "There are a thousand reasons, Anne, why I can't give you up. I've forgotten nine hundred and ninety-nine of them but I remember one. I love you utterly."
Her eyes met his with direct gravity.
"But why, Morgan?" she demanded with a candid directness. "I'm the opposite in type of every one else you cultivate or care for. I'm really not your sort of person at all, you know."
"Perhaps," he said, "it's because you are the most thoroughbred woman I know, and I want to be proud of my wife. Perhaps it's merely that you're you."
"Thank you," she said simply. "It's a pity, Morgan dear, that I can love you in every way except the one way. I wish you'd pick out a girl really suited to you."
"By the 'every way except the one way,'" he interposed, "you mean platonically?"
Anne nodded, and the man said, "Of course I know the reason. It's Boone."
"Yes." The admission was disarmingly frank. "It's Boone. I've just had a letter from him. He won his race for the legislature and now he's laying down his lines of campaign for the bigger prize of the congressional race next time."
Morgan's smile was innocent of grudge-bearing. "I know. I wired congratulations this morning. Of course his race was really won when he came out of the primaries victorious."
Anne reflected that in the old days Morgan would have spoken differently, and in a less generous spirit. To him a contest for a legislative seat from a rough hill district must appear almost trivial, and for the victor his personal rancour might have left no room for congratulation. He himself had, in a larger battle, just won more conspicuous prizes of reputation and power, and yet the heartiness of his tone as he spoke of Boone's little success was sincere and in no sense marred by any taint of the perfunctory.
"It was rather handsome of Boone to go back there and throw his hat into the ring," he continued gravely. "He might have harvested quicker and showier results here, but he wanted to be identified with his own people. God knows they need a Progressive, in that benighted hinterland."
Anne's eyes mirrored her gratification, but before she could give it expression the car stopped.
"What!" exclaimed Morgan; "are we here already?" He opened the door and helped her out, but as he stood on the sidewalk with his hat raised he added in a note of unalterable resolve:
"I don't want to persecute and pursue you, Anne, but the day will come—perhaps the forty thousand and ninety-sixth time of asking—when you'll say 'Yes.' Meanwhile I can wait—since I must. One thing I cannot and will not do; give you up."
"Good-bye," she smiled. "And thank you for the lift."
Morgan turned to the car again and said crisply to the driver: "Straight to the office. I sha'n't stop for lunch now."
Colonel Wallifarro stepped from the train at Marlin Town and turned up the collar of his heavy coat, while an edged and searching wind carried its chill through clothing and flesh and seemed to strike at the marrow of a man's bones.
The Colonel felt the dismal and bleak oppressiveness of a picture blotted from visual record by the reeking blackness of a winter dawn. A railway schedule apparently devised for purposes of human torture had deposited him in a sleeping town gloomed down on by sleeping mountains at the hour when mortal spirits are at their zero of vitality, and the train that had marooned him there wailed on its way like a strident banshee.
In his pocket was the telegram that had brought him. It had come from Larry Masters and had succeeded only in bewildering and alarming its recipient with words that explained nothing except that the sender stood in some desperate need of instant help. The words had startled Tom Wallifarro like a scream heard in a dark street.
He had responded in person and at once. Now Larry was not even at the station to meet him, so the Colonel turned and trudged forebodingly through the viscid slop of unpaved streets, churned by yesterday's feet of men and mules and oxen, toward that edge of the town where the mine superintendent had his bungalow.
Through the windows of the house when he drew near he caught the pallid glimmer of lamplight, but to his first rapping on the door there was no response. A vigorous repetition, which started echoes up and down the empty dark, brought at length a dull voice of summons, "Come in," and on turning the knob the visitor looked upon a man who sat at the centre of his room in apathetic collapse.
A kerosene lamp, guttering now to the inanition of spent fuel and wick, revealed a face of pasty pallor and eyes deep sunk in dark sockets. It was cold in the room, for on the hearth, where the fire had been long unmended, only a few expiring embers glinted in the gray of the ash bed.
Colonel Wallifarro's first impression was that the man who had called on him for help had turned meantime to the more immediate solace of alcohol, and that now he was whiskey sodden, but a second glance dispelled that conjecture. This torpidity was not born of drunkenness but despair.
"I'm here, Larry," said Colonel Wallifarro, as he fumbled with chilled fingers into a breast pocket and fished out a telegraph envelope. "I took it the case was urgent."
Aroused a little out of his stupefaction by the matter-of-fact steadiness of the voice, Masters came wearily to his feet. Through an open door which gave upon the sleeping-room, Colonel Wallifarro caught a glimpse of an untouched bed and knew that the other must have spent the night sitting here, wakeful yet forgetful of the hearth-fire that had sputtered to its death.
"I'm ruined, Tom," announced Larry Masters in an intonation which ran level and unmodulated, as though even the voice of the man had lost all flexibility, and having made that startling assertion the speaker sank again into his chair and his former inertness of posture.
To press with questions at the moment seemed useless, so the lawyer threw off his overcoat and knelt down to rekindle and replenish the fire.
When at last it was again blazing he found and poured whiskey, and at the end of ten minutes he prompted again, "I've come in answer to your summons, Larry. Hadn't you better try to tell me about it?"
The man nodded, and with an effort pulled himself somewhat together. "This time it's not only ruin but disgrace—prison, I expect."
"What have you done?"
"The fund. All of it. It's gone."
"The fund—gone? I don't understand." Colonel Wallifarro spoke with a forehead corrugated in bewilderment. "Begin at the start of the story. You forget that I haven't the remotest idea of what this is all about."
"The fund, I tell you," reiterated Masters stupidly. "Gone!"
"Gather yourself together, man. Drink that whiskey."
For once the glass had stood unregarded at the Englishman's elbow. Now he lifted it abstractedly to his lips, but this time he only sipped it and set it down. Then with an effort he rose and went to the hearth, where he stood with trembling hands outspread and limbs shivering before the rekindled blaze.
"I met Cantwell in Lexington.... We talked the matter over as to the final details.... The rest had been arranged, you see.... Finally he gave me the money ... in cash ... $20,000 it was."
"Twenty thousand—gone? Whose money?"
"The company's."
Colonel Wallifarro braced himself as he had braced himself against many other shocks. Patiently his legal capacity for bringing coherence out of obscurity led his dazed companion through the mazes of his torpor. Direct questioning found a trail of broken narrative and followed it with a hound's pertinacity, until the story rounded into some sort of shape.
Larry the visionary, with the plunger's mirage always teasing him through the arid conditions of a low salaried exile, had, it seemed, caught at the fringes of success—and slipped into disaster. Through years he had hoarded small savings out of his frugal income with the gambler's eagerness to have a "stake" against the swift passing of the golden opportunity. Finally he had thought that it had not all been in vain. His eye had appraised other fields where the coal ran out in sparse and attenuated veins but where the "sand blossom" spoke of oil. His hoardings had gone straightway into options, at prices based on farming valuations where farms were cheap.
It had remained then to enlist the interest of capital in taking up these many options and securing others, and that required a large sort of sum. Larry had gone to the directors of the company that employed him. He had haunted their offices and they had endured his obdurate besieging only because he was an efficient man cheaply employed, and, as such, entitled to one hare-brained eccentricity.
Columbus striving to raise money from a world convinced of the earth's flatness, with which to sail round a sphere, encountered a scepticism no more stolid, and yet in the end Masters had convinced them. The persuasion was accomplished only when other adventurers were beginning to clip coupons from just such enterprises in adjacent fields. When, to the monied men, "Masters' folly" became "Masters' discovery," the native landowners were growing as wary as ducks that have been decoyed, and dealing with them at a tempting profit required subterfuge. Besides the options already held there were more to be secured before the proposition was rounded into unity. Masters had therefore lined up, as his purchasing agents, men of native blood and apparently of no organized unity. Employing cash instead of checks bearing tell-tale signatures, they could still acquire at a song, and a poor song, too, large oil-bearing tracts virgin to the drill.
So, with his plan patiently built, like a house of cards that had often tumbled but which at last seemed steady, Masters had turned away from the Lexington interview with a black bag containing treasure enough to awaken all the old, long-prostrate dreams. A life tarnished with futility seemed on the bright verge of redemption. A share in the Eldorado would be his own, and after years of eating the bread of discontent his crushed pride could rise and stand erect, fuller nourished.
These grandiose prospects of the altered future called for celebration, very moderate, of course, because now above all other times he needed a dependable and clear brain. With the tingling of the alcohol in his arteries his dreams expanded—and he drank more.
Then he had been robbed.
"But how in God's name could it happen?" demanded the Colonel. "You were stopping overnight at the Phoenix. Didn't you put your money in the safe?"
Masters raised a pair of nerveless hands in a deprecatory gesture.
"I was drinking. I had certain memoranda in the same bag and I took it up to my room to run over some details—then he came and knocked at the door."
"Who came?"
"I don't know. He called me by name and seemed to be a man of means and cultivation. We drank and chatted together. It was in my bedroom in a city hotel, mind you. I didn't drink much.... The bag was locked ... the key was on the table by my hand.... Of course in some fashion he had learned of the money being turned over to me. How?"
The response was dry.
"I don't know. What happened?"
"God knows. I suppose it was some variation of the old device of knock-out drops or some sort of drug. I awoke sitting in my chair—very sick at my stomach—and had just time to make my train by rushing off without breakfast. I had been there all night. I glanced in the bag and seeing the packet there with the rubber bands around it right as rain, I failed to suspect. It was when I got here that I found it had been rifled."
"And the man?"
"I talked with the hotel by long distance. No one by the name he gave me had been registered there. The description meant nothing to them."
"Why," inquired the Colonel presently, "didn't you tell me of this plan of yours in advance—this enterprise?"
Masters shook his head. "You'd only have laughed at me like the rest. I was getting fed up on being laughed at. It gets on a man's nerves in time. For just once in my life I wanted to be the one who could say 'I told you so!'"
"What steps have you taken—toward catching the thief?"
The victim groaned. "Don't you see that I couldn't take any? To report to the police would be an admission to the company. The whole thing was trusted to my hands after much reluctance. Can't you see that my story would seem a bit thin?"
Masters' words ended with a gulp, and in his eyes was the stark terror of panic reacting after the comatose silence of lethargy.
Colonel Wallifarro's face, too, had become drawn and distrait. For a time he paced the floor up and down without a word, his hands tight held at his back and his head bowed low on his breast. As he walked, Masters, from his chair by the table, followed his movements with eyes that held no light except that of fear and wretchedness.
Finally the lawyer halted before the chair. His brow was drawn, but in face and attitude was the pronouncement of a decision reached. Tom Wallifarro had been wrestling with complex and intermingled elements of the problem as he walked. When he halted, the shifting perplexities had resolved and settled into determination.
"I've got to see you through this, Larry, and it's going to be a hard scratch. I suppose you think of me as wealthy. Most people do, but it's necessary to be frank with you. I have a very handsome practice, and I have for many years lived well up to that income—at times I've overstepped the boundary. I have my farm in Woodford and my house in town. I have a considerable insurance, and that about sums up my resources. I draw from the running channel of my law fees and it's a generous flow, but one I've never dammed providently into a reservoir of surplus. If I have to raise twenty thousand dollars off-hand, I shall have to borrow. Thank God my credit will stand it."
"But, Tom"—Masters broke chokingly off.
"Please don't try to thank me."
"Not perhaps for myself, but I happen to know that your means have supported not only your own family but my family as well."
"Larry,"—Colonel Wallifarro spoke in a harder tone than was customary with him—"your folly has been almost criminal ... but if it meant stripping myself to beggary I couldn't see Anne's father accused of a breach of trust. Even if I cared nothing for you, my boy, it would come to the same thing. I fancy I shall sell the farm."
"My God!" groaned Masters. "It's the apple of your eye, Tom."
Colonel Wallifarro fumbled for a cigar and lighted it, saying nothing for a time. When he spoke it was with an irrelevant change of topic.
"Not quite, Larry. The apple of my eye is a dream. If, before I die, I can trot a grandchild on my knee—a child with Morgan's will and Anne's fine-fibred sweetness—" he paused a moment and then gave a short laugh—"then I could contentedly strike my tent for the beyond."
"I'm afraid her heart—"
Colonel Wallifarro raised a hand in interruption.
"I know, Larry. Don't misunderstand me. It would have to be along the way of her happiness or not at all. I feel almost a paternal interest in Boone Wellver. But I've always believed that they'd grow apart with the years and she and Morgan would grow together. Anyhow it's my dream, and for a time yet I sha'n't let go my hold upon it." His tone changed and again he spoke as a lawyer weighing the inelastic force of facts. "But time is vital to you. These options must be taken up. There must be no suspicious delay. I'll catch the next train back to town and arrange to get money in your hands at once."
Boone had written to Anne after the election in a vein of satisfaction for a race won. "It is a small thing," he candidly confessed; "nothing more than a corporal's stripe to the man who covets the baton of a field marshal, but you know the light that leads me, dear Evening Star. You'll find me scrambling up the hillside toward you at least, even if, as they would say hereabouts, 'hit's a right-smart slavish upgoin'.'"
But with McCalloway, to whom he need not soften the edges of disclosure, he spoke of something else. His victory in primary and election seemed to demonstrate an augmented popularity, and yet he had become instinctively cognizant of a covert but bitter undertow of hatred against him: something unspoken and indefinable but existent and malign.
McCalloway paused with his supper coffee cup half way to his lips when Boone announced that conviction one evening, and eyed the other intently before he made an answer.
"I dare say," he hazarded at length, "that the old scars of the Carr-Gregory war have never entirely healed. The rancour may begin to smart afresh as your former enemies see your influence mounting."
But Boone shook his head.
"Of course, I've thought of that—but this is something else."
"Then, my boy, what is your conjecture?"
Boone's reply came slowly and thoughtfully.
"To you, sir, I can speak bluntly and without fear of being charged with timidity. Frankly, sir, I'm more than half expecting to be 'lay-wayed' some fine day as I ride along a tangled trail."
"I've had to take some chances in my time," asserted the soldier modestly, while his brows gathered in a frown, "but that is one form of danger that always sends a shiver down my spine; the attack that comes without warning." He broke off, then energetically added: "Ifyougive credence to such a possibility, it's not to be lightly dismissed. You must not ride alone, hereafter."
Boone laughed. "For five years old Parson Fletcher never went abroad without the escort of an armed bodyguard. He even built a stockade around his house, but they got him. Jim Garrard was shot to death while militiamen stood in a hollow square about him. Precautions of that sort don't succeed. They are only a public confession of fear, and in politics a man can't afford such an admission. All I can do is to be watchful."
"Have you a guess as to who the man is behind this enmity?"
Boone nodded as he rose and went to the mantel where the pipes and tobacco lay.
"Here and there of late I've heard a name mentioned that hasn't been much discussed for years—the name of a man who has been away."
McCalloway shot a keenly searching glance at his companion as he interrogatively prompted,
"You mean—?"
"I mean Saul Fulton. Yes."
Victor McCalloway went to the hearth and kicked a smoking log into the flame. He turned then with the sternly knit brows of deep abstraction and weighed his words before giving them utterance.
"You have need to remember, my boy," he began gravely at last, "how deep the tap-root of heredity strikes down even when the tree top stretches far up into the sky."
"Meaning—?"
"Meaning, my dear boy, that I can't forget the black hatred in your eyes one day in the woods when I wrestled with that vengeance fire smouldering deep in your nature. You haven't forgotten that afternoon, have you? The day when you promised that until you came of age you would put aside the conviction that Saul Fulton was your man to kill?"
"I haven't forgotten it, sir."
As Boone answered, the older man thought that, if something in the blue pupils stood for any meaning, he might also have added that neither had he entirely conquered the bitterness of that earlier time. Then Boone went on slowly:
"I kept my word, but you wouldn't have me go so far in turning the other cheek as to let him kill me—by his own hand or that of a hireling—would you?"
The gray eyes of the tall soldier held both sternness and reminiscence, but the reminiscence was all for something that brought a painful train of thought. Those were eyes that seemed looking back on smoking ruin, and that sought out of disastrous experience, to sound a warning. Into Boone's mind flashed a couplet:
"The Emperor there in his box of state, looked grave as though he had just then seenThe red flags fly from the city gates—where his eagles of bronze had been."
"The Emperor there in his box of state, looked grave as though he had just then seenThe red flags fly from the city gates—where his eagles of bronze had been."
At times, when McCalloway wore that cryptic expression, Boone burned with an eager curiosity to have the curtain lifted for him, and to be able to see just what life had once spelled for this extraordinary man. Now the veteran was speaking again with a carefully intoned voice:
"I would have you defend your life, aggressively and fully, but your honour no less jealously. I am no psychologist, but I have read that almost every man has some spot on his sanity that is like a blind spot on his eye. Into your blood, distilled through generations, came a spirit that made a veritable religion of vengeance. You have sought to modify that and to become an apostle of progress. Apparently you have succeeded."
He paused and cleared his throat, and Boone once more prompted him with an interrogative repetition:
"Apparently, sir?"
"Yes, apparently—because one hour of passion might blacken your future into ruin; char it into destruction. In God's name make no such mistake. If Saul Fulton seeks your life, as you suggest, he should pay for his plotting, and pay in full. But if, by the subconscious workings of that old hatred, you are placing the blame on Saul because Saul is the man that instinct seeks a pretext to kill, then let me implore you to search your soul before you act."
Boone made no response, but over the clear intelligence of his pleasing features went the cloud of that unforgettable thing that had been with him from childhood. It was the same cloud that had settled there when he had made shrill interruption in the courtroom where Asa Gregory's life was being sworn away.
Into McCalloway's voice leaped a fiery quality.
"You have come too far to fail, Boone," he declared. "I need make no protestations of loyalty to you. You know what your success means to me, but I know the price a man pays who has tasted ruin. I would save you from that if my counsel can avert it."
The young man came close and looked into the eyes that had guided him.
"If I ever make a mistake like that," he said, "it will not be because I have lacked warnings."
On the night when Larry Masters had sat until dawn by an unreplenished fire, the physical resistance of his body had ebbed to feebleness. Under the quenching chill of despair his pulse-beat had become as sluggish as the unfed blaze, and the days that followed had called for exertions which would have taxed greater reserves of vitality. They had been days of alternating blizzard and soggy thawing, and Larry Masters had been constantly in the saddle like a commander who seeks to remedy a break in his lines and must not pause to consider personal exposure. A cough wracked him, and shifting pains gnawed at his joints and chest as he rode the slippery roads. He shivered, and his teeth chattered when the sleet lashed his face, and when at last he turned away from the Lexington office where he had reported the matter in hand accomplished, he had need to keep himself studiously in hand because a tide of fever crept hotly along his arteries and blurred his senses into confusion.
When he could not rise from his bed in the bungalow to which he had returned, a message went to Louisville, and his wife, somewhat tight-lipped and silently resentful, yet with a stern sense of duty, made the uncomfortable journey to Marlin Town, accompanied by a trained nurse who would be very expensive. She tarried only until the doctor said that the crisis was over, and then leaving the nurse behind came back to Louisville, feeling that she had virtuously met a most annoying obligation.
To Masters, with a sorry company of memories, which, in delirium, took human shape and gibed at his self-esteem, the bedridden days were irksome. But one morning the sick man awoke from a restive and nightmarish sleep to a grateful impression of sunlight on window panes which had been gray and dripping. Then he realized that it was not, after all, only the sun, but that there was a presence in his room.
There sitting at his bedside, with eyes not austere but smiling and sympathy-brimming, was Anne, and when he sought to question her she laid a smooth hand on his lips and admonished: "Don't ask any questions now, Daddy. There's lots and lots of time for that. I've come to stay with you until you are well."
There would be some lonely weeks for the girl coming fresh from town, but they would not trouble her until the time arrived when Boone would have to go to Frankfort for the opening of the legislature, and there were ten days yet before that. Now he rode over every evening, and their voices and laughter drifted into the sick room where Larry Masters lay.
Anne had no suspicion that every night Victor McCalloway sat up waiting for Boone's return, for the most part forgetful of the book which lay on his knee, with a crooked finger marking the place. She did not guess the anxiety which kept his brows knit until the reassurance of footsteps at the door relaxed them, or that on more than one occasion the soldier even saddled his own horse and surreptitiously followed the lover with a cocked rifle balanced protectingly on his saddle pommel. Once though, when Boone had returned and was unsaddling, his lantern betrayed fresh sweat and saddle marks on McCalloway's horse. McCalloway lay on his cot but was not asleep, and the young man spoke sternly:
"If you're going to follow me as a bodyguard, sir, I sha'n't feel that I can ride over there any more—and while she's there—"
McCalloway had nodded his head.
"I understand," he responded. "You have my promise. I won't do it again. I grew a bit anxious about you, tonight."
Looking into the fine eyes that, for himself, knew no fear, the young man felt a sudden choke in his throat. He could only mutter, "God bless you, sir," and take himself off to bed.
One night, though, as Boone was leaving her house, Anne stood with him outside the door. He had taken her in his arms, and they ignored the sweep and snarl of the night wind in their lovers' preoccupation. Suddenly, as he held her, he bent his head, and her intuition recognized that he was listening with strained intentness to something more remote and faint than her own whispered words. In the abrupt tightening of his arm muscles there was the warning of one abruptly thrown on guard, and she whispered tensely, "What is it, Boone?"
After another moment of silence, he laughed.
"It's nothing at all, dear. I thought I heard a sound."
"What?"
He had not meant to give her any alarming hint of the caution which he must so vigilantly maintain, and now he had to dissemble. It came hard to him to lie, but she must be reassured.
"That colt I'm riding tonight doesn't always stand hitched. I thought I heard him pulling loose—and it's a long walk home."
"Go and look," she commanded. "If he's broken away, come back and spend the night here."
But a few minutes later he returned and said: "It's all right. I must have been mistaken."
When she had watched him start away and melt almost at once into the sooty darkness, it suddenly struck her as strange that he had come back and spoken in so guarded an undertone instead of calling from the hitching post. It might have been the lover's ready excuse for another good night, but Anne was vaguely troubled and remained standing on the doorstep shivering and listening.
The road itself was so dark that she could rather feel than see the closing in of the laurelled mountainsides, and as for the time of her waiting, it might have been two minutes or five. She could not tell. The wind was like a whispered growl, mounting now and again into a shrieking dissonance, and there was no other sound until, as if in violent answer to her fears, came the single report of a rifle immediately followed by the hoarser barking of a pistol.
Anne, acting with a speed that sacrificed nothing to the fluster of panic, turned back into the house, caught up the rifle that leaned near the door and an electric flash-torch from the table. Outside again, she found the road wet and rutty, and through the gust-driven clouds filtered no help from the stars, but remnants of snow along the edges of the way gave a low hint of visibility.
Several hundred yards brought her to an abrupt turning, and to her ears there came an uncertain sound as of something heavy being thrashed about in the mud. The girl's pupils, dilated now until the darkness was no longer so all-concealing, could make out a shapeless mass, and it seemed to her that the bulk—too large for a human body—stirred. Her finger was on the button of the torch, but an impulse of caution deterred her, and she left it unlighted. If Boone lay there wounded, her flash would make of him a clear target for any lurking assassin.
As she stood nerve-taut and with straining eyes, a furious indignation mounted in her. The vague shape that lay prone had become still now, and when she had almost stepped on it, she knew it for a fallen and riderless horse. It must be Boone's, because she would have heard the approach of another, but the man himself was nowhere in sight. So far as outward indications went, she was herself the only human thing within the range of her vision or the sound of her voice.
Her suspense stretched until her knees grew weak, and the wind, momentarily subsiding, left her in a stillness that was like bated breath. Then she felt a touch on her elbow, and a voice barely audible commanded, "Come back along the edge."
Under the reflex of that relief-wave her tight-keyed nerves threatened to collapse, but for a little longer she commanded them, and when the two stood again in her own yard, she wilted and lay limp in her lover's arms.
"Thank God, you are safe," she whispered. "What was it?"
He pressed her close and spoke reassuringly:
"It may have been that I was mistaken for another man," he said. "The most serious thing is that I'll have to walk home. My colt has been killed."
"And be assassinated on the way! No, you'll stay here!"
Boone thought of the veteran sitting by the hearth waiting for his return. He laughed.
"If I go through the woods all the way, I'll be safe enough. In the laurel it would take bloodhounds to find me, and Mr. McCalloway," he added somewhat lamely, "wasn't very well when I left."
Finally he succeeded in reassuring her. He was not apt, twice in one night, to get another fellow's medicine, and he would avoid the highway, but while he was fluent and persuasive for her comforting he could not deceive himself. He could not take false solace in the thought that his anonymous enemy's resolve, once registered, would die abornin' because of its initial thwarting. The night had confirmed his ugly suspicion that he was marked for death, and though he had escaped the first attack it was not likely to be the end of the story.
It was almost a relief to Anne when she stood on the platform of the dingy little station and waved her farewell to Boone, leaving for the state capitol and his new duties. Of course, as she turned back to the squalid vistas of the coal-mining town, a sinking loneliness assailed her heart, but for Boone's safety she felt a blessed and compensating security.
Her father's recovery was slow and his convalescence tedious, and Anne's diversion came in tramping the frost-sparkling hills and planning the future that seemed as far away and dream-vague as the smoky mists on the horizon rim.
One morning as she walked briskly beyond the town she encountered an old man who, after the simple and kindly custom of the hills, "stopped and made his manners."
"Howdy, ma'am," he began. "Hit's a tol'able keen an' nippy mornin', hain't hit?"
"Keen but fine," she smilingly replied, as her eyes lit with interest for so pronounced a type. Had she seen him on the stage as representing his people, she would have called the make-up a gross exaggeration. He was tall and loose-jointed, and his long hair and beard fell in barbaric raggedness about a face seamed with deep lines. But his eyes were shrewd and bold, and he carried himself with a sort of innate dignity despite the threadbare poorness of patched trousers and hickory shirt, and he tramped the snowy hills coatless with ankles innocent of socks. The long hickory with which he tapped the ground as he walked might have been the staff of a biblical pilgrim, and they chatted affably until he reached the question inevitable in all wayside meetings among hillmen.
"My name's Cyrus Spradling, ma'am. What mout your'n be?"
"Anne Masters," she told him. "My father is the superintendent of the coal mine here."
She was unprepared for the sudden and baleful transformation of face and manner that swept over him with the announcement. A moment before he had been affable, and her own eyes had sparkled delightedly at the mother-wit of his observations and the quaint idiom and metaphor of his speech. Now, in an instant, he stiffened into affronted rigidity, and made no effort to conceal the black, almost malignant, wave of hostility that usurped the recent mildness of his eyes.
"Ye're ther same one that used ter be Boone Wellver's gal," he declared scornfully; and the girl, accustomed to local idiosyncrasies, flushed less at the direct personality of the statement than at the accusing note of its delivery.
"Used to be?" The question was the only response that for the instant of surprise came to her mind.
Cyrus Spradling spat on the ground as his staff beat a tattoo.
"Wa'al, thet war y'ars back, an' ye hain't nuver wedded with him yit." The old man stood there actually trembling with a rage induced by something at which she had no means of guessing.
She, too, drew herself up with a sudden stiffness and would have turned away, but he was prompter.
"Hit 'pears like no woman won't hev him! I reckon I don't blame 'em none, nuther. I disgusts ther feller my own self," and before she could gather any key to the extraordinary incident, he had gone trudging on, mumbling the while into his unshaven beard.
Anne walked perplexedly homeward, and out of it all she could winnow only one kernel of comprehensible detail. Obviously she had met an enemy of Boone's, and yet she had heard Mr. McCalloway speak with warmth of the neighbourly kindness of Cyrus Spradling.
When she entered the house her father was sitting before the hearth, somewhat emaciated after his tedious convalescence, and his eyes followed her with a wistful dependence as she measured his medicine and rearranged the pillows at his back.
When, finally, she, too, drew a chair close to the blaze, the man said seriously:
"When your mother was your age, Anne, you had been born."
To this statistical announcement, the obvious response being denied by kindness, she made no answer. Perhaps she could not help reflecting had her mother been more deliberate, many years of discontent might have been escaped.
"My family has little to thank me for," observed Masters at last, with a candour that the daughter found embarrassing. "Conversely, I dare say, I have little claim to expect much—and yet even life's derelicts are subject to human emotions."
"For instance, Daddy?"
"Tom Wallifarro stands pretty close to his allotment of three score and ten," came the thoughtful answer. "Neither your mother nor I is exactly young. It would be a comfort to think of you as settled, with your own life plans drawn and arranged."
The girl smiled up at him from her low chair. "Daddy," she said softly, "you know what I'm waiting for. You're the one person of my own blood that I can take into full confidence, because you're the only one who doesn't think of my life as a piece of cloth to be cut and fitted to Morgan's measure, whether it suits me or not. You've never said much, but I've known you were on my side."
For the first time in her memory her father was not immediately responsive. His hand falling on her bright head rested there with a dubious touch, and his eyes were irresolutely clouded.
"I wonder, dear," he said slowly, "whether, after all, I don't agree with the others—in part, at least. All my life I've been an insurgent, scorning the caution of the provident, and paying a beastly stiff price for my mutiny against smugly accepted rules of the game."
"A woman has only one life to share," she answered firmly. "It's not exactly insurgency to insist on loving the man."
After a little he inquired, "Youarefond of Morgan, though, aren't you? If there were no Boone Wellver, for instance, you might even love him, mightn't you?"
"There is a Boone, though." She spoke quietly but with a finality that seemed to close the doors upon discussion, and a silence followed.
Finally, however, Larry Masters cleared his throat in an embarrassed fashion. "I spoke a while back of wanting to see you protected in the shelter of a home. Since we've embarked on the subject, I'm going to tell you something more. A certain truth has been carefully withheld from you, and I believe you ought to know it."
"What truth?" Her eyes widened a little, and the man shifted his position uneasily.
"The true realization of how deeply we all stand in Tom Wallifarro's debt," he made blunt response.
"I've always known," she hastily declared, "that he's been a fairy godfather, and given me things—luxurious things—that mother's income couldn't run to."
Larry Masters laughed with a shade of bitterness.
"Your mother has never had any income, Anne. As for myself, there's never been a time since you were a baby when I could make buckle and tongue meet. That's the whole ugly truth. House-rent, clothes, food, education, everything, necessities as well as comforts, livelihood as well as luxuries—the whole lot and parcel have come to my wife and my daughter from the generous hand of Tom Wallifarro. But for that, God knows what their lives would have been."
Anne Masters rose and stood unsteadily on the rag rug before the stone flaggings of the hearth.
"You mean ... that we ... have ... been actual dependents on his kindness—that we've just been ... charity ... parasites?"
The girl's hands came to her bosom and a shiver ran through her. The warm flood of colour left her cheeks, and her eyes were deep with chagrined amazement.
The man did not answer the questions, and she went on with another:
"Do you mean ... for I must know ... that we've lived as we have on nothing but ... generous charity?... That he's been paying all these years what it cost ... to raise me properly ... for his son?"
"Hold on, Anne—" The convalescent raised an admonitory hand. "There's danger of doing people who love you a grave injustice. Tom Wallifarro would go to his grave with his lips sealed, though torture were used to open them, before he would seek to coerce you or make you unhappy. If you've never been told the facts, it was because he preferred that there should be no burdensome sense of obligation."
"But always," Anne insisted faintly, as though oppressed by poignant physical pain, "he has done these things ... with the one ... idea ... that I was to be ... his son's wife."
"I should rather say," quietly amended Larry Masters, "with that dream and hope."
"And, Mother," she asked, in a strangely strained voice, "Mother has assured him that ... when the time comes ... she could ... deliver the goods?"
Larry had seen Anne in childhood transports of passion, but never before cold and white in such a stillness of wrath as that which transformed her now. Her eyes made him feel the accomplice in some monstrous traffic upon his daughter's womanhood, and it was difficult to remain complacent under her cross-examining.
"Your mother has had the same dream and hope. If the marriage was not repugnant to you, I dare say it would take cavilling to criticize it."
"You don't see, then ..."—the girl felt suddenly faint and dizzy as she moved a little to the side and leaned inertly against the wall—"you don't see that the very chivalry of Uncle Tom's conduct ... enslaves me a ... hundred times ... more strongly ... than a cruder effort to force me? You don't see that ... he's paid for me ... and that if Boone came today ... with a marriage license ... I couldn't marry him ... without feeling that I must buy ... myself back first?"
"That, of course, my dear, is a morbid and distorted view."
"Is it? Haven't I eaten the food and worn out the clothes and acquired the education that were all only items of an investment for Morgan's future? Haven't I used these payments made on that investment only to take them away from him and give them to some one else? I haven't even been given the chance of protest against these chains of damnable kindness."
"You seem, my dear, to have given your heart to Boone, and that settles it, I suppose. I might wish it otherwise—Tom and your mother may still cling to the other hope, but—"
"You say I've given my heart to Boone," she interrupted fiercely, "but I find that it wasn't mine to give. I find that I wasn't a free agent. I had already been mortgaged and remortgaged for things not only used by me but by my mother, and—" She paused, and Masters added with a twisted smile of chagrin,
"Yes—and your father."
"But how about Boone?" she demanded. "What of the debt owed to him? Did they have the right to barter off his happiness as well as mine?"
"Tom Wallifarro," her father gravely reminded her, "has been a benefactor to Boone. Tom Wallifarro has not complained. Moreover, the wounds of youth are not quite so fatal as they seem when one suffers them. If they were, few men would live to middle-age. I dare say Boone would survive even if he lost you."
Anne's brain was dizzy and stunned. Mortification and wretchedness were blurring the focus of her vision, and this suggestion that after all she was exaggerating her importance in Boone Wellver's life seemed the dictum she could not allow to pass unchallenged. With an instinctive lashing out of her hot emotions she pitched the battle on that single issue, an issue which seemed to determine whether after all she was fighting in fairness and clean conscience for independence, or only clinging to a selfishness that trod toward its gratification on the happiness of others.
"Prove that to me," she retorted in the same cold fury. "Prove that he doesn't need me and that I'm thinking only of myself, and I'll marry anybody you say. I'll obediently deliver myself over and say, 'Here's your marriageable asset. Do what you like with it.'"
Her words had not been torrential, but glacially cold and hard under the congealing pressure of indignation, but now the tone broke into something like a sob, as she declared:
"Boone has had only one girl in his life. His whole scheme has been built about me. Show me that a love like that is only a whim, and I'll agree that this chattel idea of marriage is as good as any other, and I'll submit to it."
Swiftly Larry Masters repressed a smile. Anne, he reflected, did not realize how often that refurbished fiction has been retailed as an axiom by young hearts in equinox.
"Why did you smile, Father?" she demanded militantly, and he shook his heed.
"I was only reflecting," he assured her, "that every girl thinks that of every man she loves."
"Do you know of anything to disprove it in the present case?"
"Since you ask," he made hesitant reply, "I did hear some unsubstantiated rumours hereabouts that he had proposed and been rejected by a mountain girl—Cyrus Spradling's daughter."
Cyrus Spradling's daughter! At the name, Anne saw again the lank mountaineer of the loose joints and the uncombed hair, who this morning had parted from her mumbling maledictions against Boone.
He had been a mystery then. Now his name falling into the conversation like a shell that has found its range, had the demoralizing force of an explosion. Her belief was no weathervane to veer lightly, but the bruise on her heart was sensitive even to the touch of a breeze, and it was freshly sore.
"Who—ever told you that," she asseverated in slow syllables, "was a liar. I'd gamble my life on it." Then having made her confession of faith in those staunch terms, she illogically demanded, "When was this alleged affair?"
"Just after he finished college, I believe. I can't be quite sure."
"At that time," said Anne Masters, "and before that, and after that, Boone loved me. It was no divided or vacillating love. I'm so sure of him that I'm perfectly willing to stake everything on it. I'm willing, if I'm wrong, even to pay off my mortgage!"
"Since you take that view," said her father, "I'm sorry to have repeated the story. I hadn't regarded it as so damning, myself. Young men sometimes love more than once without forfeiting all human respect. You might ask Boone about it? I don't fancy he'd lie to you."
"I will ask him," she vehemently declared, "and if there's any atom of truth in it—and I know there isn't—I don't care whom I marry or what happens afterwards! As to Uncle Tom, I don't think I can go on another day being his charity child."
"If you don't, you'll break his heart," her father told her, in a voice of urgent persuasiveness. "For the present, at least, you must regard what I've told you as Masonically confidential."
"Why?"
"Because he would see himself as having hurt you where he sought only to be a loving magician with a wand of kindness, and I'm not the man to injure him like that." He hesitated, and the climax of his statement came with explosive suddenness. "Good God, Anne, he's just saved me from disgrace."
Then came the story of Colonel Wallifarro's latest benefaction, and at the end of it the girl pressed her hands to temples that were hot.
"I think," she said falteringly, "I'll go out for a while where the air is fresher. It's very close in here."
The door closed silently, almost stealthily, behind her, and Masters thought she walked with the noiseless care of one moving in a chamber of death.
Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old conductor who always stopped and chatted with her, after a glance at her expression, punched her ticket and passed on. Something was not well with her, he reflected.
To this girl, the joyous sense of freedom had been the essence of life, and now she was going home with the feeling of one who has passed under a yoke. It was as if henceforth she were to know the sea which she had adventurously sailed in liberty only from the chained oar bench of the galley slave. She felt humiliated and utterly miserable, and perhaps, worst of all, she was oppressed by an unrelieved realization of her own futility. Beside the competence of the young woman who took dictation at Morgan's desk, her own social accomplishments appeared for the first time summoned for comparison, and the parallel left her branded in her own mind as an economic parasite. Marriage was the one way in which a woman of her sort could finance her life, and the only marriage which for her would be a fulfilment and not a travesty—itself requiring financing—lay remote.
Anne repressed the first indignant impulse to write to Boone of the unjustifiable charge against him to which she had been forced to listen. There at the capital he was adjusting himself to new duties and settling his shoulders into an unaccustomed harness. She knew that he took these things seriously since he meant to use their opportunities as stepping-stones to broader achievement, and a letter on such a subject would seem hysterical and wanting in faith, when perhaps he was most depending on that faith. Now she told herself that except for having unalterably committed herself to that course with foolish emphasis, she would not even speak incidentally to Boone of the matter. She assured herself that already she knew the answer and needed no further evidence—but a pledge was a pledge, and she must have the reply to take from his lips to her father.
Yet in the weeks which intervened before that opportunity arrived, the repudiated matter rankled like a poison, which abates none of its malignity because its victim has pasted an innocuous label on the bottle.
So one day, while Anne was being tortured in spirit and was telling herself that she was serenely untroubled, Boone was at the school where Happy Spradling had for some years been a member of the teaching staff.
His eyes were glowing with appreciation as he went about the place, recognizing the magic that had grown there. It had woven its spell out of the dauntless resolution of a little coterie of women who, like unostentatious vestals, had kindled and fed here, where it meant everything, the fire of education and wholesomeness. Surrounded by a hinterland where sloven illiteracy fostered lawlessness, that fire burned in houses that stood up as monuments both of practical utility and surprising beauty. Its light was reflected in keen young faces hungry for education and smiling young eyes in which Boone read the presage of a new future for his people.
Women had done this thing: women for the most part from the Bluegrass who had surrendered ease and chosen effort: women who, out of a volunteer greatness of spirit, elected to "wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild."
Boone drew a long breath of silent tribute and homage. It pleased him to think, too, that not all of the magic-makers came from beyond the hills. Happy was one of them. In these years she had developed until one might not have guessed that she, too, had not come from the source of a gentler rearing. She had met the representative of her district as an old friend, but in no glance or inflection was there a hint that between them lay any buried memory.
"They sent for you to come here," the girl told him, as she showed him over the redeemed grounds, "because we want your help. They didn't know that we were old friends, and I didn't mention it. You see what we are trying to do here, but we need roads. A country without highways is a house without windows. That is where you can help us. We're very poor, you know."
"You're making the country very rich," he answered gravely, and he returned to Frankfort with the affairs of that school near his heart.
That week-end he went to Louisville, and as he sat at Anne's right at a dinner party a mood of romanticism laid its glamour upon his thoughts. Tonight he could seem to step back across the years and stand looking into the hungry, discontented eyes of a boy in hodden-gray perched on the topmost rail of a rotting fence. It seemed incredible that that boy had been himself. To that boy, all life except the hard realities of a pioneer people had been an untried thing of formless dream tissue.
And tonight he sat here! In many respects it was just such a table and just such a company as everywhere reflected the niceties of civilized society, yet in the little intimate things it was distinctive.
In the voices, the colloquialisms—the very colour of thought—spoke the spirit of the South—not the Old South, perhaps, yet the offspring of a mother who had passed on much of herself.
From the log cabin to this dinner seemed to him the measure of his progress thus far. It was as though with seven-league boots he had crossed the centuries!
Behind him lay a boyhood that belonged to the little sectionalism of the backwoods settlement. Here was the widening circle of the life evolved out of it, yet still a circle of sectionalism. What lay beyond?
In his imagination the young Kentuckian saw the dome of the capitol at Washington, the nerve centre of the nation, where functioned the broad affairs of statecraft. Above the dome an afterglow hung in the sky, and in it shone a single star—the evening star. That, of course, was a long way off, yet from Louisville to Washington seemed a shorter and smoother road than from the laurel thickets to Louisville. Youth was his, and a resolution forged and tempered. Ambition was his, and the incentive of a beacon whose light he renewed whenever he looked into the violet eyes that were not far from his own.
The race would not, of course, be easy. There would be the heart-testing smother of effort before the prize was won, but the future lay open, and he coveted no victory of unwrung withers and unwearied lungs.
Thank God, the one thing without which he must fail was surely his: the loyalty of the woman he loved.
Anne had been unusually quiet and grave this evening, but he had arrived on a late train and had as yet had no opportunity for talk with her alone. That would come later.
When he had driven home with her, he followed her into the old parlour, with its ripe portraits from the brush of Jouett, and the cheery blaze of its open fire. With her opera cloak thrown across his arm, he watched her go over and stand on the hearth, while the firelight played on the ivory whiteness and the satin softness of her neck and shoulders, and made a nimbus about her bright hair.
"You're not wearing your string of pearls tonight," he smiled; and she smiled, too, but not happily.
"No," she said. "I thought I wouldn't."
She did not add that she had not worn them because they were the gift of Colonel Wallifarro and seemed to her an emblem of bondage.
All that she would tell him in a few minutes, but first she had an awkward question to ask which had hung over her all evening as the threat of bedtime punishment hangs over a child. Now she meant to dispose of that quickly and categorically and have it done with. She felt shamed, as his frank eyes met hers, to broach an inquiry that seemed so nearly an insult to his allegiance. But she stood pledged and she had planned the matter in just one fashion. There would be the question and the negative reply, then the ghost would be laid.
That there could be any other answer than "No," however modified or justified by circumstance, had not entered into her premises of thought as conceivable. The general who, no matter how flawless his plan-in-chief, has arranged no alternative strategy, is a commander doomed. Anne had admitted in advance no substitute for absolute denial.
Now she turned and spoke gently:
"Before we talk of anything else, dear, there's a question I must ask you, and you must answer it in one word—yes, or no. You'll want to say more, and afterwards you may—but not at first." She paused, and a note of apology crept into the voice that went on again: "I feel disloyal even to ask it, but it's a thing I'm pledged to do, and I'll explain the reason afterwards."
Boone smiled with the confidence of a man for whom the witness stand holds no terror.
"Ask it, dearest."
"Did you ... ever"—she faltered a moment, then went hurriedly on, as if racing against a failure of resolve—"ask ... any other girl ... to marry you?"
The smile was struck from his face in an instant, leaving his eyes pained and his lips straight and tight, and her gaze, fixed on his, read the swift change of expression and responded with a sudden terror in her own pupils.
"I was never ... in love with any one...!"
"One word!" Her interruption came in a tone he had never heard her use before. It was so quiet that it carried with it a chill like that of death. "Yes or no."
Boone felt a cold moisture on his hands and temples. A matter easy to explain had, of a sudden, become inexplicable. Looking back over lapsed years, all the quixotic urging of a false sense of justice had gone out of conduct which had then seemed so mandatory. The inescapable obligation to which he had responded seemed empty and twisted now. He could see only that he had insulted Happy with a half offer and been false to his avowed love of Anne and to his duty to himself.
That, at the time, he had been groping toward a callow and half-baked conception of honour failed now to extenuate his blunder, and if he himself could no longer understand it, how could he hope to make her do so?
His voice came in a dull monotone.
"Yes," he said, "I did. May I explain?"
In the credo of this girl's life fairness and generosity were twin cornerstones, and condemnation without hearing was an abhorrent and mean injustice. But the unadmitted poison of an accusation fought in secret had been insidiously undermining her sanity on the one central theme of her life, and Boone's affirmative had seemed to sever with a shock of complete surprise the anchor cable of her faith.
"No," she said, and for once it might have been the acid-marred voice of her mother, "that's all I need to know."
"But, Anne"—Boone took an impulsive step toward her and sought to speak sanely, while he held off the sense of chaos under which his brain staggered—"but, Anne, after all these years, you can't throw overboard your faith in me without giving me a chance to be heard."
She laughed bitterly, and of course that was hysteria, but to the man it seemed only derision.
"Until three minutes ago," she said, "I would have staked my life on my faith in you ... I did just about do it.... Now, I'm afraid ... there isn't any left ... to throw away."
"If you ever had any," he declared—and he, too, spoke under a stress that gave an unaccustomed hardness to his voice, "there should be some still. The answer you held me to answers nothing. It gives no reason—no explanation."
"The reasons ... don't count for much. Yes means yes. It means years of deceit and lies to me.... Good-bye."
Boone Wellver turned and walked to the door. His eyes, fixed ahead, saw nothing. As he went, he collided with a table and paused, looking at it with a dazed sense of injury. On the threshold he halted to speak in a voice which was queer and uncommanded.
"You are sending me away," he said, "without a chance. I still have faith in you ... unless it's a false faith, you'll send for me to come back ... and give me that chance.... Until you do, I won't ask it ... or try to see you."
The girl stood looking past him in a sort of trance. "Good-bye," she repeated, and he took up his coat and hat and went out.
For a little while after he had gone Anne Masters remained staring with a stunned and transfixed immobility at the empty frame of the door through which he had gone; a frame it seemed to her out of which had suddenly been torn the picture of her life, leaving a tattered canvas. She shivered violently; then she, too, started toward the door, swayed unsteadily, and fell insensible.
A measure before the lower house of the General Assembly had split it so evenly that when the roll call came on the vote, a deadlock was predicted and one absentee might bring defeat to his cause. After each adjournment noses were jealously counted, and the falling gavel, calling each session to order, found Boone in his seat with a face that sought to mask its misery behind a stony expressionlessness. It was a deadly sober face with eyes that wandered often into abstraction, so that men who had seen it heretofore ready of smile commented on the change, yet hesitated to question one so palpably aloof.
In these days it was hard for Boone to see, with his single purpose shattered, the reason or value of any purpose, yet habit held him to his routine duties with an overserious and humourless inflexibility.
After the first dull wretchedness of the night when he and Anne had parted, he had laid hold upon a hope which had not endured. He had told himself with the persistence of a refrain that the girl who had that night condemned him out of hand was a girl temporarily bereft of reasoning balance by a tide of heartache and a tempest of anger. The mail would soon bring him a note announcing the restoration of the woman he loved to her own gracious fairness and serene self-recovery. He could not, without losing his whole grip on life, bring himself to the admission that the passion of a wild, ungenerous moment would endure. Indeed, the thought of what she must have suffered—what she must still be suffering—so to carry her and hold her outside her whole orbit of being, tortured him as much as his own personal loss and grief.
But no word had come. That wild, hurried interview had moved with such torrential haste and violence to its culmination of breached understanding that there had been no time for stemming it with moderation or explained circumstances.
She had not had the chance to tell him of the disclosures her father had made, or of the sense of bondage that had weighed upon her until the colour of her thought had lost its clarity and become bewilderingly turgid. She had not been able to let the light into the festering brooding that had subconsciously poisoned her mind. A single idea had carried all else with it as a flood carries wreckage. For years she had stood out for Boone. A time had come when he had been charged with absolute duplicity toward her, and she had scornfully wagered her life on his fealty and submitted the whole vital matter to one question. His answer had been a confession.
There had been no years of intermittent association when he could logically or decently have entertained another love affair. From the first day of his avowed allegiance until now there had been no break in his protestations. Therefore, the word "yes" or "no" contained all the answer there could be to the question of his loyalty, and the word which shattered the whole dream came from his own lips.
One day, as Boone was leaving his hotel room for the state house, two letters were handed him, and his heart leaped into drum-beat. One was addressed in her hand, and that one he thrust into his pocket, as one saves the best to read last.
The other was an invitation from Colonel Wallifarro: an engraved blank filled in with a name and date. In a secluded corner of the hard-frozen, state house grounds he sat on a bench to read the note from Anne, but when he had torn the envelope and glanced at the sheet the light went out of his eyes and his bronzed cheeks became suddenly drawn.
"I thought you might like to know," she said. "The invitation from Uncle Tom looks innocent enough, but I don't think you'd enjoy the party. It's given to announce my engagement to Morgan."
Boone sat there dazed, while in the icy air his breath floated cloudlike before his lips.
Eventually he awoke to some realization of the passage of time, and looked at his watch. It was past the hour for the roll-call on the bill which his absence might deliver into the hands of the enemy, the cause for which he and his colleagues had been fighting.
He came with an effort to his feet and went heavily through the corridor and into the chamber. At the door, where he leaned against the casing, he heard the clerk of the house calling the roll, and the staccato "Ayes" and "Noes" of the responses. Already the alphabetical sequence had progressed to the U's, and soon his own name would follow. Then it came, and at first his stiff tongue could not answer. He was licking his lips and his throat worked with some spasmodic reflex. Finally he heard a strained and unnatural voice, which he could hardly recognize as his own, answering "No."
Heads turned toward him at the queer sound, and from somewhere rose a twittering of laughter. That was perhaps natural enough, for to the casual and uncomprehending eye he made a spectacle both sorry and ludicrous—this usually self-contained young man who now stood stammering and disordered of guise, like a fellow not wholly recovered from a night-long debauch.