The transforming touch of a razor, a studied amendment of manner and apparel, and the passing of ten years: these are things which can work an effective disguise for an Enoch Arden returned to village streets that knew him long ago. Quietly dressed in clothes that were neither good enough nor mean enough to arrest the passing eye, a middle-aged man dropped from the evening train onto the cinder platform at Marlin Town.
Shrewd winds whipped in through icicled ravines, and the new arrival fresh from equatorial latitudes shivered under their sting.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled about him. For so long his memory had softened the uneven contours and colours of this town with the illusory qualities of homesickness that now its tawdry actuality brought something of a shock. It was all raw and comfortless, and as the newcomer looked up at the forbidding summits he snarled to himself, "They ain't a patch on the Andes."
Across from the old brick court house, with its dilapidated cupola and its indefinable air of the mediaeval, sat the general store, proclaimed in a sign of crippled lettering, "The Big Emporium." Tom Carr's nephews directed this centre of industry and, from a grimy "office" above stairs, Tom Carr directed his nephews. Until recent days he had also directed, with a dictator's fiat power, most of the affairs of the countryside. From that second-story room, the Gregories would have declared with conviction Tom's father had "hired" Asa's father killed. It was in its unadorned fashion a place of crumbling traditions.
Sitting there of late, Tom had done some unvarnished thinking anent the expanding influence of young Boone Wellver.
He was sitting there now in the light and reek of a smoky lamp, by a stove that was red-hot with no window open, and he was alone. He heard the wooden stairs creaking under the ascending tread of stranger feet, for to his acute ears footsteps were as individual as voices, and his head inclined expectantly. Tom was waiting there for a man who had written him a letter.
There followed a rap on the panels, and in response to his growled permission the door opened and closed almost without sound, showing inside the threshold a man clean shaven and inconspicuously dressed.
"Howdy, Saul," welcomed the seated baron of diminished powers. "I'd call hit a right boldacious thing ter do—comin' back hyar—if I stood in yore shoes."
Into the furtive eyes of the visitor came a shallow flash of bravado.
"Who's to hinder me, Tom?"
"Young Boone Wellver's got ter be a right huge power in these parts here of late. He don't love ye none lavish, ef what folks norrates be true."
Saul seated himself, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I've had run-ins with worse men than him," he declared, "and I'm still on the hoof."
"On the hoof an' fattenin', I should say," graciously acceded the leader of the Carrs. "Ye've got a corn-fed look about ye, Saul."
"I stayed away from home," continued Fulton, "so long as it was to my profit to be elsewheres. Now it suits me to come back, and there isn't room enough here for both me an' him."
The elderly feudist surveyed his visitor with a cool shrewdness, and after a long pause he remarked drily: "Ef so be, Boone Wellver was called ter his reward, Saul, I wouldn't hardly buy me no mournin' clothes, but for my own self I don't dast break ther truce. Howsomever, when a feller hits at a snake he had ought tergithit. Thet feller thet ye hired ter lay-way him hyar of late didn't seem ter enjoy no master luck."
"All he needed was a little overseein'," retorted Saul blandly. "That's why I'm here now. I've got to lay low for a while because there's still the little matter of an indictment outstandin' but the same man stands in your light and mine—we ought to be able to do some business together."
"Things have changed a mighty heap," demurred Tom uneasily, but Saul laughed.
"Let's change them back, then," he responded.
The plotting of a murder is erroneously presumed by the unpracticed to be an affair of hushed voices and deeply closeted conspirators. Between these two craftsmen it was discussed in the calm hard-headedness of severe practicality. To Saul, who had been long an absentee, Tom Carr's intimate familiarity with current conditions proved a bureau of vital statistics. To Tom, who saw in Boone a dangerous trouble-maker and who yet hesitated to make a feud-killing of the matter, the hand of a volunteer was welcome, and so, as they talked, a community of interests developed. Tom was to provide Saul with an inconspicuous refuge, and Saul was to do the rest. A few others whose active participation was needed were to be taken into confidence, but the secret was to be held in close-guarded circle.
It is said that no other bitterness can be so saturated as that of the apostate, and Saul brought into Tom's presence one day a boyish fellow whose blood was Gregory blood but whose one strong emotion seemed to be hatred of his own breed. He had been selected by the intriguer as the man to take in hand and carry to success the assassination of Boone Wellver.
Into Tom's office slouched "Little" Jim Bartleton by the front way, and into it, by back stairs, came Saul at the same time.
Until a short time back no one had thought much about Little Jim. He had not been a positive personality until recently, when he had taken to drink and developed a mean streak. Always he had been fearless, but that elicited no comment in a land where cowards are few. His most recent friendships had all been among the Carrs, and no insult to his own people had been uttered in his hearing which he had not capped with one more scathing.
Just where his grievance lay had been his own secret. For Saul's purpose, it sufficed that it existed and was dominant.
"Son," questioned Tom Carr in his suave voice, "I see plenty of reasons why a feller should disgust Boone Wellver, but he's yore kin. Why does ye hate him so?"
The answer came, prefaced with a string of oaths:
"I hain't nuver named this hyar ter nairy man afore now, but I aimed ter wed an', ter git me money enough, I sot me up a small still-house nigh ter whar he dwells at."
Spurts of hatred shot out of the speaker's dark eyes; eyes which in kindlier moods were lighted by intelligence.
"Ef I'd been left alone I could of got me enough money ter do what I wanted ter do ... ther gal was ready ter hev me. But, damn his law-an'-order, hypocritical piety! he hed ter nose out my still an' warn me thet without I quit he'd tip me off ter ther revenuer."
"Some folks," put in Tom, "moutn't even hev warned ye."
"Thet's jest ther p'int," panted the boy. "He told ther revenuer fust-off an' then warned me atterwards. Ef hit hedn't of been fer a right gay piece of luck, ther raiders would of come afore I got ther still hid away—an' I'd be sulterin' in jail right now. I've done swore ter kill him."
"An' ther gal, son," prompted Tom gently.
The black face went even blacker.
"I reckon," he said savagely, "she don't aim ter wait fer me no longer. I owes thet ter Boone Wellver, too."
"An' so ye're willin'—?"
"Plumb willin' an' anxious! I've done held my counsel. He don't suspicion how I feels.... I knows every path an' by-way over thar. I knows every step he takes when he's at home. Thar hain't no fashion I could fail."
"An' ye knows, too, how ter keep yore mouth shut?"
"I hain't nuver told nuthin' yit."
The two conspirators looked at each other and nodded. Here was an agent who could move without suspicion and act out of his own ardour of hatred. Decidedly he was a discovery.
So the hireling was instructed and given a leave of absence to go and "set up with ther gal in Leslie County." But he did not go to Leslie County. He went, instead, by a roundabout road to the state capital, and one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.
When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.
Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."
Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals. To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying calm—and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's strong note.
This misfortune, be assured himself, at least exhausted the possibilities of perverse circumstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of tricks were empty now!
Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.
Tonight he wanted the hills—not calm and star-lit, but rocking to hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.
Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him, and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering brain-nerves like the merciless lashing of an invisible scourge. He tried to analyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself, but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the only assuagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again—to lash out and punish some one for his hurting.
The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star. Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his star.
But her world—to which he had climbed with a dominant ambition—that was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.
The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leadership as animates the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who smokes the pipe of sane counsel.
Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the reach of his blow.
Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must combat and overcome.
"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a man, "I've been as deep down in hell today as a man can go." Then he started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim Bartleton of Marlin Town.
"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."
Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little" Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.
The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby. Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He sat upright in his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land."
The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room.
"Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name."
The officer, bethinking himself of political satellites who sometimes make a virtue of mystery, smiled as he directed: "Bring him in here, Tom. It's cold in the parlour."
Into the library came Boone, and stood silent until the negro had closed the door upon his exit; then he nodded curtly. There was an air of suppressed wildness in his eyes and a pallour under the bronze of his cheeks, upon which the attorney, as he offered a chair, made no comment.
"I'm here," announced the visitor with a brusque pointedness, "to give you information upon which it is your duty to act."
There was an unintended rasp of challenge in the manner, and under it the official's lips compressed themselves. Boone in his overwrought state felt that he must make haste, while he yet held himself in hand, and the attorney, believing his visitor to be ill, curbed his own temper.
"Let's have the information," he suggested. "Then I'll be in a better position to construe my own duty."
"Presumably you wish to punish all those guilty of the conspiracy that ended in Senator Goebel's death," went on the mountain man in a hard voice. "I say presumably, because the Commonwealth has heretofore appeared to discriminate among the accused."
The attorney bridled. "As to Governor Goebel's death," he asserted heatedly, and in the very employment of the widely different titles the two men proclaimed their antithesis of political creed and opinion, "my record speaks for itself. My sincerity needs no defence."
"That you can prove. Saul Fulton is under indictment in your court. He forfeited his bond and went to South America with or without your knowledge. He has come back, and I am prepared to direct your deputy sheriff to his hiding place. If he got away without your knowledge you ought to be glad to have this news. If you winked at his going, I mean to put you on record."
Boone Wellver had not seated himself. He still stood, with a stony face out of which the eyes burned unnaturally, and the Commonwealth's attorney took a step forward, his own cheeks grown livid with anger, so that the two men stood close and eye-to-eye.
"In this fashion I permit no man to address me," said the prosecutor, with his voice hard-schooled to evenness. "You have come to my house to insult me, and I order you to leave it."
For a moment Boone remained motionless. Between him and the man across from him swam spots of red; then words came with a coldly affronting yet quiet ferocity:
"I am not surprised, but I've done what decency demanded. I ... gave you your chance ... and you repudiated it ... like the charlatan you are. This man shall die ... but it was your duty and your right ... to know first."
He turned on his heel and opened the door, and the man in the smoking jacket gazed after him in amazement. Evidently, the truculent visitor was not himself, and there was no virtue in quarrelling with a temporary madman. Boone knew only that he had invoked the law and the law had rebuffed him. He could not see that his reception, however just his mission, was inevitable since he had invited it with insult.
Back at his room he found another guest awaiting him. It was Joe Gregory, who had also come from the hills. Boone had reached that point at which surprise ends, and to this man, who was a kinsman and a deputy sheriff in Marlin County, he gave as cursory a greeting as though he had come only from the next street.
But Joe's grave face, in which character and sense spoke from every strongly drawn lineament, was disturbed, and he went without preamble to his point. Down there in the hills trouble was brewing, and among both Gregories and Carrs a restive feeling stirred. Fellows walked with chips on their shoulders as though each side were seeking to invite from the other some overt act of truce-breaking. Joe had sought to analyze the causes of this seemingly chance rebirth of long-quiet animosities. He had learned of Saul's return, but Saul was lying low and most men did not know of his presence. It must be, then, that from his hiding place that intriguer was inciting a spirit of truculence in the Carrs to which the Gregories were automatically responding. If that went on it meant the breaking out of the "war" afresh—and a renewal of bloodshed. The bearer of tidings ended his narrative with an appeal based on strong trust.
"Boone, thar's jest one man kin quiet our boys down and stop 'em short of mortal mischief, I reckon. They all trustsyou."
"Will they all follow me?"
"Straight inter hell, they will!"
"And yet you think"—Boone looked full into the direct eyes of the other with a glint of challenge in his own—"yet you think I ought to quiet them instead of leading them?"
"Leading them which way, Boone? Whatever ther rest aims at, you an' me, we stan's fer law and peace, don't we? That's what you've always drilled into me, like gospel."
To his astonishment Joe had, for answer, a mirthless, almost derisive, laugh—a laugh that was barked.
"So far we've stood for that, and what have we gained?" Boone's mood, which had been all day seething like the imprisoned fire-flood of a volcano, burst now in lava-flow through the ruptured crater of repression. "Asa abided by the law seven years and more ago—didn't he? Well, he's rotted in a cell ever since! Saul Fulton played with the law and the law played with him and paid him Judas money and made him rich! You say they'll follow me. Then, before God in heaven, I'll lead them to a cleansing by fire! When we finish the job, those murderers and perjurers will be done for once and for all!"
"And you," the deputy sheriff reminded him soberly, "you'll be plumb ruint."
"I'm ruined now."
It was not a handsome room in which the two men stood, and Boone had taken it with a provident eye to its cheapness, but it was in a hotel stone-built in the times of long ago, and from the days of Henry Clay and John C. Breckinridge to the time when Goebel died there history had had birth between those heavy walls.
In the cheaply furnished bedroom whose paper was faded, the observant eyes of Joe Gregory had caught one detail that struck his simple interest, even in the surge of weightier tides.
A massive silver photograph frame lay face downward on the table as though it had been inadvertently over-turned.
Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the mysterious words, "I'm ruined now," filled out with meaning as a sagging and formless sail rounds into shape under the livening breath of wind.
He, too, had in those few moments seen an idol at least totter on its pedestal. He had been a hill boy famishing for advancement, and before his eyes Boone Wellver, distantly his relative, had been an exemplar. Now Boone was in some unaccountable vortex and talking wildly of inciting men who needed to be calmed. Into Joe Gregory's mind flashed an instinct of resentment against Anne Masters, whom he had often seen there in the hills. In some fashion, he divined, she was to blame for this situation.
The representative wheeled and left his bewildered visitor standing in the room alone. Below in the basement bar of the hotel a noisily laughing crowd jostled at the counter, and the white-aproned Ganymedes were busy. From the door Boone Wellver cast smouldering eyes about the place, searching for a certain partisan Democrat.
Yonder, talking in loud voice, stood a colleague from a neighbouring mountain district. He was nursing, in fingers more used to the gourd-dipper, the stem of a cocktail glass, and his cheap wit, couched in an affected drawl and garbed with exaggerated colloquialisms, was being acclaimed with encouraging mirth. The fellow fancied himself araconteur, appreciated. In reality he was a sorry clown being baited.
At another time that sight, trivial in itself, would have steadied Boone with a realization of his own self-duty to represent another type of mountain man. Now he was past such realization.
He found the man of whom he had come in search and drew him hastily aside.
"You said this afternoon you wanted to get away from Frankfort for a week."
"Why, yes, Wellver, I've got a sick child at home; but this deadlock's got me tied up. A man must stick to his colours."
Boone nodded. "You can go," he said briefly. "I've come to pair with you. I've got to go home, too. Do you agree not to vote in the house for one week's time?"
The opponent extended his hand. "It's a go, and thank you. Let's have a drink on it." But Boone had already turned. He was hastening up the stairs, and five minutes later found him throwing things into a bag.
"Now," he said in a savage voice to Joe Gregory who still waited, "let's get away from here. There's going to be a snake killing in Marlin."
Left alone in Wellver's bedroom, Joe Gregory had been thrown back on the companionship of his own thoughts, and they told him that a tide and a wind were mounting which, unless they could he swiftly stemmed, would leave a trail of wreckage along the heights and valleys of Marlin, like drift in the wake of a spring flood-tide; but this would be human wreckage.
None of Boone's adherents at home had supported his program of progress more whole-heartedly than young Joe Gregory, and the infamous perfidy of Saul Fulton was a hateful thing to him, burning in his heart with need of reprisal, for Asa was his "blood-relation."
But as things had shaped themselves, Saul Fulton no longer stood alone, and so long as he was sheltered under the wing of Tom Carr, no blow could be struck him without reopening the "war." Joe knew what that meant. The hills again would redden; again men would ride in fear of death, and that fear would verify itself in murders; as Joe had put it, in "mortal mischief." The whole archaic damnation would rear its head over the new-taught security of peace. The sum of effort toward a stabilized order which men like Boone and himself had built tediously upon patience, would go the collapsing way of land behind a broken dyke.
If a human being lived who could stay that catastrophe it was Boone, so to Boone he had come and found the single available mediator hot-blooded for violence.
Now he shuddered. If Boone Wellver had the power to dissuade those tempestuous clansmen and hold them in abeyance, how much more easily and mightily could he spur them forward! If he, the apostle of peace, breathed the one word, "war," they would be the wild-eyed followers of a Geronimo cast loose on the blood trail.
And Boone's own future, the deputy sheriff mournfully reflected, when this storm was past would be a bright bubble pin-pricked and ended. The man whom local pride proclaimed a statesman to be reckoned with would stand a relapsed son of the vendetta with blood-soiled hands and an inconsistency-smirched record. Even the men whom he could so easily inflame now would, in the end, turn on him, and his career would be as brief as it was floridly picturesque.
They followed feud leaders—but they did not send them to Washington!
Yet Joe was of that blood, too, and could understand Boone's reversion—a reversion willing in a moment to cast aside the armour which he had served his term of years for the right to wear. The thing now was to bring him back in time out of the crimson fog that blinded him. Joe's eyes dwelt absently on the over-turned frame as he stood there thinking, and the articles on the table were photographed on his gaze with a pictorial accuracy of detail, yet because of his abstraction, without meaning of their own.
So mechanically and without at first realizing what he was doing, he read two outspread sheets of paper: Anne's note and McCalloway's telegram. Then abruptly the messages became an integral part of his thought.
Anne Masters, whom Boone loved, was going to marry another man—there was the key to Boone's wild mood, and Victor McCalloway, his friend, had gone away!
If it was Anne who had led Boone to the brink of this peril, it was her duty to lead him back. So ran his elementally simple logic.
"Ef she's decent," declared Joe Gregory tensely to himself, "she kain't skeercely do no less."
So after Boone had returned and begun packing his bag, Joe made a plausible excuse and went out to seek a telephone pay-station. Over the long distance he got Colonel Wallifarro's house, with the amused assistance of an operator who saw only his rustic gaucherie, and who missed entirely the simple, almost biblical, dignity of his bearing.
"Miss Anne? No, sir, she isn't here," replied Moses, the negro butler, and, while Joe's heart sank, that admirable majordomo, recognizing the long-distance call, secured a connection for the speaker with the Country Club.
While the wire buzzed distractingly, Joe Gregory stood in the closed booth and perspired. Outside he watched a travelling salesman who, with a chewed cigar between stout fingers, bent over the switchboard and chatted with the blonde operator. Then finally he heard a voice at the far end. It was a somewhat frightened and faint voice, but even in his anger he admitted that it held a sweet and gentle cadence.
Perhaps the girl half hoped that this ring which called her from guests to whom her engagement was being announced carried a twentieth-century equivalent for the appearance of Lochinvar. Perhaps she only feared bad news. At all events, she spoke low.
"Miss Masters, I'm Joe Gregory," announced an unfamiliar voice which held across the wire a straightforward and determined significance. The name, too, carried its effect, for Anne knew of this man as Boone's most stalwart disciple. "The thing I've got ter tell ye hain't skeercely suited ter speech over a telephone, an' yet thar hain't no other way. Hit's about him, an' he's in ther direst peril a man kin stand in. Thar's just one human soul thet hes a chanst ter save him—an' thet's you."
Sometimes the long-distance wire hums with confusion. Sometimes it enhances and clarifies the ghost of a whisper. Now Joe Gregory heard a choking breath, and for an instant there was no other sound; the man, catching the import of the gasping agitation, went on talking to its speechlessness. It was if between them "he" could mean only one man.
"He hain't skeercely in his rightful senses, or I wouldn't hev no need ter call on ye. He's goin' back ter—well, back home tonight. I kain't handily tell ye what ther peril is, but ef I was ter say thet two days hence he'll be past savin'—an' others along with him—I'd only be talkin' text ter ye."
"But how"—there was desperation of panic in the question—"how could I—save him?"
"He needs savin' from hisself, ma'am. Thar's a train of cars leavin' Looeyville nigh on midnight. Ef ye teks hit I'll meet ye at ther station when ye getstharin ther mornin'. Him an' me is leavin' on one thet starts from hyar an hour from now. Thet's all I kin say afore I sees ye—save thet matters are plumb desperate."
"But I can't—I don't see how—"
Anne had never quite realized such a quietly unbending sternness as that of the voice which interrupted her:
"Ef ye don't aim ter stand by an' see his ruin, ye needs mustfinda way. Jestcome, thet's all—an' come alone. No other way won't do. I'll be at ther deppo."
And the receiver clicked with a finality that brooked no argument, leaving the girl leaning unsteadily against the wall of the booth. She opened the heavy door a little but did not go out. From the dining-room came a sally of laughing voices, and from the dancing floor haunting scraps of the "Merry Widow" waltz. A clock across the passage ticked above these sounds, and on its dial the hands stood at eight forty-five.
Upon her ears these impressions fell with a sense of remoteness and lightness as if they could be thrust away, but more oppressive and close was the unnamed something brooding in the hills two hundred miles—yes, and two centuries—away.
She knew that she stood at one of those unequivocal moments that cannot be met with life's ordered deliberation. By tomorrow things might be done which could never be undone. An hour hence, decision would be the harder for newly recognized difficulties. The penalty of faltering might be a life of self-accusation for herself—for Boone a tragedy.
She had assured herself with passionate reiteration that Boone was a character in a chapter torn out of her life, but the heartache remained in stubborn mutiny against that ordaining. It had been first gnawingly, then fiercely, present while she laughed and talked at the table with an effervescence no more natural than that pumped into artificially charged wine, and she had needed no death's-head to sober her against too abandoned a gaiety at that feast. Joe Gregory's words had, for all their want of explicitness, been inescapably definite. They meant ruin—no less—unless she intervened and came at once.
To go meant to stir tempests in teapots—to defy conventions, and perhaps by a vapidly rigid interpretation, to compromise herself. To refuse to go meant to abandon Boone to some undescribed, and therefore doubly terrifying, disaster.
Anne Masters was not the woman to shrink from crises or from the determined action for which crises called. Almost at once she knew that she was going by the midnight train to the hills, and let the problems that sprung from her going await a later solution. But how?
Going unaccompanied from a country-club dinner party to desperate affairs brewing in the Cumberlands presented difficulties too tangible to be dismissed. To confide in Colonel Tom or Morgan would mean only that they would insist upon accompanying her. To confide in her mother would mean burning up precious moments in hysteria. The one unobstructed alternative appeared to be the unwelcome one of flight without announcement.
But back to the table she carried little outward agitation. If her heart pounded it was with a sort of exaltation born of impending moments of action. If her face had paled it gave a logical basis for the plea of violent headache upon which she persuaded Morgan to drive her home as soon as the guests rose, and to make the necessary explanations only after she had gone.
When Mrs. Masters returned she found a note entreating her not to give way to undue anxiety. Anne was gone, and the hurriedly written lines said she would telegraph tomorrow from her father's house, but that it was not illness which had called her there.
In such a situation, provided one approach it in the mood of Alexander toward the Gordian knot, the greater complexities appear in retrospect.
It was looking back on those pregnant hours that their various enormities were made plain to her, chiefly through the expounding ofex-post-factowisdom operating cold-bloodedly and without the urge of a peril to be met.
With much the same acceptance of the bizarre as that which marks the fantasy of dreams, she endured the discomforts of that night's journey and found herself at daybreak looking into gravely welcoming eyes on the station at Marlin Town.
Her own eyes felt sunken and hot with fatigue, but to Joe Gregory, who had also spent a sleepless night, she seemed a picture of the fresh and dauntless.
They went first to her father's bungalow, and there a new difficulty presented itself. Larry Masters had gone away to some adjacent town and had left his house tight locked.
"Boone's on the move today," Joe Gregory informed her, "but matters'll come to a head ternight. Twell then things won't hardly bust, but when ther time comes, whatever ye kin do hes need ter be done swiftly. When I talked with ye last night I misdoubted we'd hev even this much time ter go on."
Then as they sat on the doorstep of the closed house, which no longer afforded her the conventional sanction of paternal presence, the deputy sheriff outlined for her with admirable directness and vigour the situation which had driven him to her for help. To clear away all mystification he sketched baldly the little episode of the down-turned photograph and the bitterness of the three words, "I'm ruined now."
"Thet's how come me ter know," he enlightened simply, "thet Boone war sort of crazed-like—an' thetyoumout cure him, ef so be yewould." Then with a sterner note he added: "Whatever took place betwixt ther two of ye air yore own business, but thar's some of us thet would go down inter hell ter save Boone Wellver. I needed ye, an', despite yer bein' a woman, ef ye're a man in any sense at all, ye'll stand by me right now."
Anne rose from the doorstep where she had been dejectedly sitting and held out a hand.
"You see, I came," she said briefly; "and I aim to be man enough to do my best."
From the door of the wretched hotel as the morning grew to noon, she watched the streets, and it seemed to her that, quite aside from the usual gloom of the winter's day and the scowl of the heavy sky, there was a new and intangible spirit of foreboding upon the town. That, she argued, could be only the creative force of imagination.
She wished for Joe Gregory, but among many busy people that day he was the busiest, and it was not until near sunset that he came for her, leading a saddled horse. Riding along the steep and twisting ways, a sense of sinister forces oppressed her.
It seemed to her that the dirge through the brown-gray forests and the shriek of blasts along the gorges were blended into an untamable litany. "We are the ancient hills that stand unaltered! We and our sons refuse to pass under the rod. Wild is our breath and fierce our heritage. Let the plains be tamed and the valleys serve! Here we uphold the law of the lawless, the nihilism of ragged freedom!"
Once Joe halted her with a raised band. "Stay hyar," he ordered, "twell I ride on ahead. Folks hain't licensed ter pass hyar terday ontil they gives ther right signal."
He went forward a few rods, and had Anne not been watching his lips she would have sworn that it was only the caw of a crow she heard; but soon from a cliff overhead and then from a thicket at the left came the response of other cawing. Then with a nod to her to follow, her guide flapped his reins on the neck of his mule, and again they moved forward.
It was dark when they came to the road that passed in front of Victor McCalloway's house, and there Joe drew rein.
"I've still got some sev'ral things ter see to," he informed the girl, "so I won't stop hyar now. Boone's inside thar, an' like as not hit'll be better fer ther two of ye ter talk by yoreselves. I'll give ther call afore I rides on, so thet ther door'll open for ye. Hit hain't openin' ter everybody ternight."
Then for the first time Anne faltered.
"Must I go in there—alone?" she demanded, and Gregory looked swiftly up.
"Ye hain't affrighted of him, be ye? Thar hain't no need ter be."
Anne stiffened, then laughed nervously. "No," she said, "I'll go in."
The deputy sitting sidewise in his saddle, watched her dismount, and when she reached the doorstep he sung out: "Boone, hit's Joe Gregory talkin'. Open up!"
Anne's knees were none too steady, nor was her breath quite even as the door swung outward and Boone stood against its rectangle of light peering out with eyes unaccommodated to the dark. He was flannel shirted and corduroy breeched, and since yesterday he had not shaved. But his face, drawn and strained as he looked out, not seeing her because he was studying the stile from which the voice had come, was the face of one who has been in purgatory and who has not yet seen the light of release.
"Boone," said the girl softly, and he started back with astonishment for the unaccountable. Then as his gaze swung incredulously upon her, still wraith-like beyond the shaft of the door's outpouring, he moved to the side, and she stepped into the room.
"But you're in Louisville," he declared in the low voice of one whose reason resents the trickery of apparitions, and his pupils burned with an abnormal brightness. "You're announcing your engagement."
"Not tonight," she reminded him; and then his brain, like his eyes, having readapted its perception to reality, he slowly nodded his head.
"No. That was—lastnight," he answered, with a bitter change of tone. "I'd forgotten.... Things are moving so rapidly, you see."
"I came," she said, with direct gravity, "because some one told me that you were in danger—of wrecking your life. I came to speak ... for the thought in time."
While her eyes held his, he returned her gaze with a steady inscrutability, and the two stood there with a long silence between them.
Then the man announced in a dead tone:
"It's too late. Come here!"
He led the way to the bedroom door and threw it open with an emotionless gesture. The girl flinched as she looked in and succeeded in stifling a scream only by bringing both her hands swiftly to her lips. But Boone took a step over to the cot where Victor McCalloway had slept and lifted the sheet from something that lay there.
"That's 'Little' Jim Bartleton—or was," he added slowly. "I folded his hands there on his breast such a little while ago that they're hardly cold yet." He paused a moment; then the flat quality went out of his bearing and his voice, though no louder than before, became transformed. It held the throbbing intensity of distant drums beating for action and battle.
"He was trying to serve me by watching the enemies that plotted my murder. He was riding my horse—and was mistaken for me. You see, you come too late."
"But, Boone—when—did this—?"
"About an hour ago," the man interrupted her. "He fell just about where you dismounted, drilled through by a bullet hired by Saul Fulton and Tom Carr. I found him there—and brought him in."
"Do—do his people know?"
"Not yet. Only you and I know it—yet." Again the voice leaped tumultuously: "But soon his people are coming here—his people and mine. They are coming for my counsel, and, by God, it's ready for them!"
"And you'll tell them?"
"I'll tell them that I've come back from following after new gods. I'll tell them that the blood of my forefathers hasn't grown cold in me, and that if they follow me, tonight they will see 'Little' Jim avenged." He paused an instant before adding passionately, "Not by a single man or a couple, but with as many filthy lives as it takes to balance one decent life."
As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on modernity and to stand a hostage to the forces and emotions of the mediaeval.
The fire rose and fell and flickered. It snapped and sighed, roared and whispered, and with it the shadow of the sheeted figure and silhouette of the uncovered face grew and lessened in grotesque fluctuation.
Before she could begin her struggle with the man whose face wore little promise of conversion, she must conquer the struggle in herself, for suddenly she had need to defend her own feelings against the currents of thought that swayed him, and the rôle of righteous avenger no longer seemed so indefensible.
"Boone," she said, with an effort at convincing steadiness, yet feeling weak of will beside the set determination of his bearing, "I've come a long way to talk with you. Will you listen?"
His bow was that of compulsory assent, but his eyes showed defiant through their enforced courtesy.
"I'm listening," he said, "though when I asked you to listen, and everything we'd planned our lives for depended on your hearing me, you refused. Yet that was different, I suppose. After all, I'm only partly educated in the ways of polite society. I haven't learned to be casual in such things."
"If you're a barbarian now," she told him quietly, "it's from pure choice. Gentlemen have taught you their code. You've been a gentleman yourself."
Boone laughed.
"Cleopatra, I believe, had pet leopards that were allowed to purr on the steps of her throne. But they were only a part of the picture and they didn't quite become gentlemen. You let me be a pet leopard, too—for a while. Now I've gone back to the jungle."
She ignored the reference to herself. That way lay endless dispute, and this battle to avert feudal tragedies, she thought, was not a thing to be fought on a field of personalities. She spoke slowly and with a dignity that made his cheeks redden to the realization of his own bitter facetiousness. "I came," she said, "only to bring a warning—while there was time."
"Warning of what?" The question was ominously quiet.
"Against confusing black hallucinations with all the saner, bigger things that you know. Warning against betraying a confidence you have won by stampeding people who believe in you and follow you blindly."
The eyes of Boone Wellver narrowed and hardened defensively under this arraignment from lips that had once shaped for him softer responses. Then as they fell again upon the man who had died in his cause, a baleful light reawoke in them. From that spokesman came a silent argument which needed no voice: "Here I am, not a theory but a fact. I died for you!"
He spoke to her as one who makes an explanation, not of obligation but as a concession to the motives which had brought her.
"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law. Blackstone says that before a man takes human life—even in defence of his own—he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate, and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and then only, I assumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then, and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight lips.
"Youhavecome a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is—you must pardon the candour of saying it—a sermon of platitudes. They have lost their virtue with me—because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts and thinking naked thoughts."
"Just what are you going to do?"
"Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first, though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong crew."
He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened up and his eyes again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he had been trying to repress.
They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery.
Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once worshipped, who, after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf, inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love.
Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying.
"What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with the sort of calm assurance that can speak without faltering or misgiving against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. Youcouldn'tdo it, except in a moment of delirium—"
Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate. Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a battle of wills with a dead man lying between them—and the dead man had been murdered for him.
"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"
Anne's chin came up a little.
"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them; but murder's not good enough for you!"
He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:
"I was asking you why—so far as I'm concerned—you care?"
The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegrass garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a touch of the responsiveness that clamoured in her find expression, but she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally—for to her just then it seemed quite incidental—she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.
"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of platitude in her words, "because of the past—because we are—old friends."
Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:
"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"
"Will he sleep easier because you prove a deserter to the cause to which you swore allegiance?" There was a touch of scorn in her voice now. "Does his rest depend on your punishing one murder with another?"
"We're talking two languages," he retorted, and the upflaring of his lover's hope had left him, in its quenching, inflexible. "Our standards are as far apart as the Koran and the Bible."
"Neither of them exalts the coward," came her swift response. "Any agitator could lash the Gregories into mob-violence tonight. Only one man might have the courage—and the strength—to hold them in leash."
Boone set down the heavy box and came out into the room where the fire burned. He seemed, in his white-hot anger, too distrustful of himself for speech, and, perhaps because he loved her so unconquerably and despairingly, his fury against her was the greater.
"Before Almighty God," he declared, in a voice low and quaking with passion, "I think I can understand how some men kill the women they love! Call me a barbarian if you like. I am one. Call me a renegade from your self-complacent culture. I welcome the impeachment, but don't call me a coward, because that's a lie."
He broke off; then burst out again in a mounting voice:
"Until a little while ago I might have yielded to everything you asked, because the fear of offending you was a mightier thing to me than everything else combined. But that was the infirmity of a man weakened by love—not strengthened. I've regained my strength now, and I mean to keep it. Hate is a stronger god than love!"
Remaining stiff-postured on the hearth, Boone rained upon her the wrath that cumulative incitements had kindled and fed to something like mania, and she met it with challenge for challenge and with eyes whose fires were clearer than those of his own.
"You say you've regained your strength. Is that why you're afraid to listen to me? Is that why you don't dare undergo my test?"
"Afraid to listen?" In spite of his fury he put his question with a courteous gravity that was disconcerting. "Haven't I been listening? Am I not still listening?"
But Anne was not to be deflected, and her clear-noted voice still rang with the authority of conviction:
"You talk of holding your hand until you had 'retreated to the ditch or wall,' or whatever your legal phrase was, yet you know that you don't dare give your anger time to cool. You don't dare hold these men, who are crying out for blood, quiet for twenty-four hours and spend that time alone with your own conscience."
"And yet," he ventured to remind her, "I left Frankfort last night. Before I started I reached my decision. There have been already more than twenty-four hours, but they haven't cooled me except to make my certainty greater."
"This boy whose face you just showed me brought word to Frankfort that Saul Fulton was back to have you murdered," went on the girl with unshaken steadiness. "The old instinct for vengeance swept you into passion, but you didn't surrender to it then. You went to the prosecutor. Why?"
"I've already told you. I tried the law first."
"Because yesterday you realized that this lawless way was the wrong way. Your rebuff there maddened you still more. You came back, and when you got here you were in doubt again. Isn't that true?"
"Not for long," he replied shortly.
"Yet youwerein doubt. Then you listened to the hot heads, and the fever rose again in your veins. Tonight this boy was killed. One after the other these things happened to work you up to a sort of frenzy and keep you there. I've heard you tell how murder lords here used to hire assassins and how they had to keep them keyed up with whiskey till the work was done. Don't you see that you've been drinking a more dangerous whiskey, and that you don't dare to let this vengeance wait, because you know if you did, you couldn't face your own self-contempt?"
At first there had been despair in her heart because the face of the man she thought she knew had been the face of a stranger, as unamenable to change as that of the sphinx. But now she knew that if she could only make him see in time what she had seen, she might succeed. He was a sleep-walker, and to the sleep-walker only the dream is real—yet he had only to be waked to step again into sanity. The steel had been too gradually forged, tempered and tested to become pig iron again in a breath, simply because it dreamed itself pig iron.
"You talk of your strength, and I call on you to test it. I call on you to do not what any persuasive agitator could do, but what only you can do—to keep the wild-beast impulses in your own men caged for one more day—and to spend that day with your own conscience."
"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting me very easy tasks tonight!"
"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."
Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as though under a lash.
"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is no apostle of tame submission."
Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well, the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously refrained from mentioning until now.
"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips. You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."
She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"
Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more—a request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."
Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a painful thing to watch, and after a little while he turned from her and she could see only his back—with shoulders that twitched a little from time to time under the spasmodic assault of some torturing thought. She was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.
But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a bloody and darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were passing pictures out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarrassment of talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat of agony.
The crystal into which he gazed cleared and clouded; clouded and cleared. He could not yet be sure of himself. While he stood with that stress upon him still in molten indecision, he was not quite sure whether he heard the girl's voice, or whether it came to him from memory of other days, as it had sounded under dogwood blossoming on the crest of Slag-face: