Except in that narrow circle of American life which follows the doings
and interests of the army and navy, the world had forgotten, in the
several years since its happening, the court-martial and disgrace of
John Spurrier--but Spurrier himself had not been able to forget.
His name had become forcefully identified with other things and, in
the employ of Snowdon's company, he had been into those parts of the
world which call to a man of energy and constructive ability of major
calibre. But the joy of seeing mine fields open to the rush where
there had been only desert before: of seeing chasms bridged into
roadways had not been enough to banish the brooding which sprung from
the old stigma. In remote places he had encountered occasional army
men to remind him that he was no longer one of them and, though he was
often doing worthier things than they, they were bound by regulations
which branded him.
So Spurrier had hardened, not into outward crustiness of admitted
chagrin, but with an inner congealing of spirit which made him look on
life as a somewhat merciless fight and what he could wrest from life
as the booty of conquest.
One day, in Snowdon's office after a more than usually difficult
task had reached accomplishment, the chief candidly proclaimed
justification for his first estimate of his aide, and Spurrier
smiled.
"It's generous of you to speak so, sir," he said slowly, "and I'm glad
to leave you with that impression--because with many regrets I _am_
leaving you."
The older man raised his brows in surprise.
"I had hoped our association would be permanent," he responded. "I
suppose, though, you have an opening to a broader horizon. If so it
comes as recognition well earned."
"It's an offer from Martin Harrison, sir," came the reply in slowly
weighed words. "There are objections, of course, but the man who gains
Harrison's confidence stands in the temple of big money."
"Yes. Of course Harrison's name needs no amplification." The man who
had opened a door for Spurrier in what had seemed a blank wall, sat
for a moment silent then broke out with more than his customary
emphasis of expression. "Objection from me may seem self-interested
because I am losing a valuable assistant. But--damn it all, Harrison
is a pirate!"
Spurrier's tanned cheeks flushed a shade darker but he nodded his
head. His fine eyes took on that glint of hardness which, in former
times, had never marred their engaging candor.
"I'd like to have you understand me, sir. I owe you that much and a
great deal more. I know that Harrison and his ilk of big money
operators are none too scrupulous--but they have power and opportunity
and those are things I must gain."
"I had supposed," suggested Snowdon deliberately, "that you wanted two
things above all else. First to establish your innocence to the
world, and secondly, even if you failed in that, to make your name so
substantially respected that you could bear--the other."
"Until recently I had no other thought." The young man rose and stood
with his fine body erect and as full of disciplined strength as that
of a Praxiteles athlete. Then he took several restless turns across
the floor and halted tensely before his benefactor.
"I have let no grass grow under my feet. You know how I have run
down every conceivable clue and how I stand as uncleared as the day
the verdict was brought at Manila. I've begun to despair of
vindication.... I am not by nature a beast of prey.... I prefer
fair play and the courtesies of sportsmanlike conflict."
He paused, then went forward again in a hardening voice: "But in this
land of ours there are two aristocracies and only two--and I want to
be an aristocrat of sorts."
"I didn't realize we had even so much variety as that," observed
Snowdon and the younger man continued.
"The real aristocracy is that of gentle blood and ideals. Our little
army is its true nucleus and there a man doesn't have to be rich. I
was born to that and reared to it as to a deep religion--but I've been
cast out, unfrocked, cashiered. I can't go back. One class is still
open to me; the brazen, arrogant circles of wealth into which a
double-fisted achiever can bruise his way. I don't love them. I don't
revere them, but they offer power and I mean to take my place on their
tawdry eminence. It's all that's left."
"I'm not preaching humility," persisted Snowdon quietly. "I started
you along the paths of financial combat and I see no fault in your
continuing, but may I be candid to the point of bluntness?"
He paused for permission and Spurrier prompted: "Yes, please go on."
"Then," finished Snowdon, "since you've been with me I've watched you
grow--and you _have_ grown. But I've also seen a fine chivalric sense
gradually blunting; a generous predisposition hardening out of
flexibility into something more implacable, less gracious. It's a
pity--and Martin Harrison won't soften you."
For a while Spurrier stood meditatively silent, then he smiled and
once more nodded his head.
"There isn't a thing you've said that isn't true, Mr. Snowdon,
and you're the one man who could say it without any touch of
offensiveness. I've counted the costs. God knows if I could go back
to the army to-morrow with a shriven record, I'd rather have my
lieutenant's pay than all the success that could ever come from
moneyed buccaneers! But I can't do that. I can't think of myself
as a fighting man under my own flag whose largest pay is his
contentment and his honor. Very well, I have accepted Hobson's
choice. I will join that group which fights with power, for power;
the group that's strong enough to defy the approval they can't
successfully court. I _have_ hardened but I've needed to. I hope I
shan't become so flagrant, however, that you'll have to regret
sponsoring me."
Snowdon laughed.
"I'm not afraid of that," he made hasty assurance. "And my friendliest
wishes go with you."
Since that day John Spurrier had come to a place of confidence in the
counsels over which Harrison presided with despotic authority.
The man in the street, deriving his information from news print, would
have accorded Martin Harrison a place on the steering committee of the
country's wealth and affairs, and in such a classification he would
have been both right and wrong.
There were exclusive coteries of money manipulation to which Harrison
was denied an entree. These combinations were few but mighty, and
until he won the sesame of admission to their supreme circle his
ambition must chafe, unsatisfied: his power, greater than that of many
kings, must seem to himself too weak.
It must not be inferred that Harrison was embittered by the wormwood
of failure. His trophies of success were numerous and tangible enough
for every purpose except his own contentment.
To-night he was smiling with baronial graciousness while he stood
welcoming a group of dinner guests in his own house, and as his butler
passed the tray of canapes and cocktail glasses the latest arrival
presented himself.
The host nodded. "Spurrier," he said, "I think you know every one
here, don't you?"
The young man who had just come was perfectly tailored and self-confident
of bearing, and as vigorous of bodily strength as a wrestler in training.
The time that had passed over him since he had left Snowdon's company for
wider and more independent fields had wrought changes in him, and in so
far as the observer could estimate values from the externals of life,
every development had been upward toward improvement. Yet, between the
man's impressive surface and his soul lay an acquired coat of cynicism and
a shell of cultivated selfishness.
John Spurrier, who had renounced the gaming table, was more
passionately and coldly than ever the plunger, dedicated to the single
religion of ambition. He had failed to remove the blot of the
court-martial from his name, and, denied the soldier's ethical place,
he had become a sort of moss-trooper of finance.
Backed only by his personal qualifications, he had won his way into a
circle of active wealth, and though he seemed no more a stranger there
than a duckling in a pool, he himself knew that another simile would
more truly describe his status.
He was like an exhibition skater whose eye-filling feats are
watched with admiration and bated breath. His evolutions and dizzy
pirouettings were performed with an adroit ease and grace, but he
could feel the swaying of the thin ice under him and could never
forget that only the swift smoothness of his flight stood between
himself and disaster.
He must live on a lavish scale or lose step with the fast-moving
procession. He must maintain appearances in keeping with his
associations--or drop downscale to meaner opportunities and paltrier
prizes. The wealth which would establish him firmly seemed always just
a shade farther away than the reach of his outstretched grasp.
"We were just talking about Trabue, Spurrier," his host enlightened
him as he looked across the rim of his lifted glass, with eyes
hardening at the mention of that name.
Spurrier did not ask what had been said about Trabue, but he guessed
that it savored of anathema. For Trabue, whose name rarely appeared in
the public announcements of American Oil and Gas, was none the less
the white-hot power and genius of that organization--its unheralded
chief of staff. Just as A. O. and G. dominated the world of finance,
so he dominated A. O. and G.
Harrison laughed. "I'm not a vindictive man," he declared in humorous
self-defense, "but I want his scalp as Salome wanted the head of John
the Baptist."
The newly arrived guest smiled quietly.
"That's a large order, Mr. Harrison," he suggested, "and yet it's in
line with a matter I want to take up with you. My conspiracy won't
exactly separate O. H. Trabue from his scalp lock, but it may pull
some pet feathers out of his war bonnet. I'm leaving to-morrow on a
mission of reconnaissance--and when I come back----"
The eyes of the elder and younger engaged with a quiet interchange of
understanding, and Spurrier knew that into Martin's mind, as crowded
with activities as a busy harbor, an idea had fallen which would grow
into interest.
When dinner was announced, the adventurer de luxe--for it was so that
he recognized himself in the confessional of his own mind--took in the
daughter of his host, and this mark of distinction did not escape the
notice of several men.
Spurrier himself was gravely listening to some low-voiced aside from
the girl who nibbled at an olive, and who merited his attention.
She was tall and undeniably handsome, and if her mentality sparkled
with a cool and brilliant light rather than a warm and appealing glow,
that was because she had inherited the pattern of her father's mind.
If, notwithstanding her wealth and position, she was still unmarried
three seasons after her coming-out, it was her own affair and
possibly his good fortune. For when the Jack Spurrier of these days
contemplated marriage at all, he thought of it as an aid to his career
rather than a sentimental adventure.
"I'm leaving in the morning," he was saying in a low voice, "for the
Kentucky Cumberlands, where I'm told life hasn't changed much since
the pioneers crossed over their divide. It's the Land of Do-Without."
"The Land of Do-Without?" she repeated after him. "It's an expressive
phrase, Jack. Is it your own or should there be quotation marks?"
Spurrier laughed as he admitted: "I claim no credit; I merely quote,
but the land down there in the steeps is one, from all I hear, to stir
the imagination into terms more or less poetic."
He leaned forward a little and his engaging face mirrored his own
interest so that the girl found herself murmuring: "Tell me something
about it, then."
"It is," he assured her, "a stretch of unaltered mediaevalism entirely
surrounded by modernity--yet holding aloof. Though the country has
spread to the Pacific and it lies within three hundred miles of
Atlantic tidewater, it is still our one frontier where pioneers live
under the conditions that obtained in the days of the Indian."
"That seems difficult to grasp," she demurred, and he nodded his
head, abstractedly sketching lines on the damask cloth with his oyster
fork.
"When the nation was born," he enlightened, "and the questing spirit
of the overland voyagers asserted itself, the bulk of its human tide
flowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through Cumberland Gap lay
their one discovered gate in the wall that nature had built to the sky
across their path. It was a wall more ancient than that of the Alps
and between the ridges many of them were stranded."
"How?" she demanded, arrested by the vibrant interest of his own
voice, and he continued with a shrug of the shoulder.
"Many reasons. A pack mule fallen lame--a broken wagon-wheel; small
things were enough in such times of hardship to make a family settle
where it found itself balked. The more fortunate won through to 'take
the west with the axe and hold it with the rifle.' Then came railroads
and steamboats, going other ways, and the ridges were swallowed again
by the wilderness. The stranded brethren remained stranded and they
did not alter or progress. They remained self-willed, fiercely
independent and dedicated to the creed 'Leave us alone.' Their life
to-day is the life of two centuries ago."
The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require no
penciling.
"That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought you
the most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? I
didn't know you ever ran on cold trails." She spoke with a delicately
shaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own viewpoint, yet
he knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldly
attainment.
He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon,
the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind had
harked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now he
only smiled with diplomatic suavity.
"Pearls," he said, "don't feed oysters into robustness. They make
'em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in these
hills, where I'm going, might starve for centuries over buried
treasure--which some one else might find."
The girl nodded.
"In the stories," she answered, though she did not seem disturbed at
the thought, "the stranger in the Cumberlands always arouses the ire
of some whiskered moonshiner and falls in a creek bed pierced by a
shot from the laurel."
Spurrier grinned.
"Or he falls in love with a barefoot Diana and teaches her to adore
him in return."
Miss Harrison made a satirical little grimace. "At least teach her to
eat with a fork, too, Jack," she begged him. "It will contribute to
your fastidious comfort when you come back here to sell your pearls at
Tiffany's or in Maiden Lane, or wherever it is that one wholesales his
treasure-trove."
* * * * *
If John Spurrier had presented the picture of a man to the manner born
as he sat with Martin Harrison's daughter at Martin Harrison's table,
he fitted into the ensemble, too, a week later, as he crossed the
hard-tramped dirt of the street from the railway station at Waterfall
and entered the shabby tavern over the way--for the opportunity hound
must be adaptable.
Here he would leave the end of the rails and travel by mule into a
wilder country, for on the geological survey maps that he carried with
him he had made tracings of underground currents which it had not been
easy to procure.
These red-inkings were exact miniatures of a huge wall chart in the
headquarters of American Oil and Gas, and to others than a trusted few
they were not readily accessible. How Spurrier had achieved his
purpose is a separate story and one over which he smiled inwardly,
though it may have involved features that were not nicely ethical.
The tavern had been built in the days when Waterfall had attracted men
answering the challenge of oil discovery. Now it had fallen wretchedly
into decay, and over it brooded the depression of hopes and dreams
long dead. Gladly Spurrier had left that town behind him.
Now, on a crisp afternoon, when the hill slopes were all garbed in the
rugged splendor of the autumn's high color, he was tramping with a
shotgun on his elbow and a borrowed dog at his heels. He had crossed
Hemlock Mountain and struck into the hinterland at its back.
Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but he
had discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning at
Hell's Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for a
hundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet into
the sky. Along this entire length it offered only a few passes over
which a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.
He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-chinked log-cabin,
where he had shared the single room with six human beings and two
dogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which was
segregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding with
scraps simplified the problem of stock raising.
His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retired
lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had
stopped along the railroad.
Cappeze was a "queer fellow," a recluse who had quit the villages and
drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither
win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and,
having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of
Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and
Spurrier meant to know him.
So he pretended to hunt quail--in a country where a covey rose and
scattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow.
One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficiently
careless of the things which were really the core and center of his
interest. And now Cappeze's place ought to be near by.
Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble,
and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle with
distended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking away
into the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.
Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: "He's made a stand
on a rabbit. That dog's a liar and the truth is not in him!"
But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque
pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for
the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.
Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder of
whirring wings with which quail break cover.
The ground seemed to burst with a tiny drumming eruption of up-surging
feathery shapes, and Spurrier's gun spoke rapidly from both barrels.
Save for the two he had downed, the covey crossed a little rise beyond
a thicket of blackberry brier where he marked them by the tips of a
few gnarled trees, and the man nodded his head in satisfaction as the
dog he had libeled neatly retrieved his dead birds and cast off again
toward the hummock's ridge.
Spurrier, following more slowly, lost sight of his setter and, before
he had caught up, he heard a whimpering of fright and pain. Puzzled,
he hastened forward until from a slight elevation, which commanded a
burial ground, choked with a tangle of brambles and twisted fox
grapes, he found himself looking on a picture for which he was
entirely unprepared.
His dog was crouching and crawling in supplication, while above him,
with eyes that snapped lightning jets of fury, stood a slender girl
with a hickory switch tightly clenched in a small but merciless hand.
As the gunner came into sight she stood her ground, a little startled
but obdurately determined, and her expression appeared to transfer
her anger from the animal she had whipped to the master, until he
almost wondered whether she might not likewise use the hickory upon
him.
He tried not to let the vivid and unexpected beauty of the apparition
cloud his just indignation, and his voice was stern with offended
dignity as he demanded:
"Would you mind telling me why you're mistreating my dog? He's the
gentlest beast I ever knew."
The girl was straight and slim and as colorful as the landscape which
the autumn had painted with crimson and violet, but in her eyes flamed
a war fire.
"What's that a-bulgin' out yore coat pocket, thar?" she demanded
breathlessly. "You an' yore dog air both murderers! Ye've been
shootin' into my gang of pet pa'tridges."
"Pet--partridges?" He repeated the words in a mystified manner, as
under the compulsion of her gaze he drew out the incriminating bodies
of the lifeless victims.
The girl snatched the dead birds from him and laid their soft breasts
against her cheek, crooning sorrowfully over them.
"They trusted me ter hold 'em safe," she declared in a grief-stricken
tone. "I'd kept all the gunners from harmin' 'em--an' now they've done
been betrayed--an' murdered."
"I'm sorry," declared Spurrier humbly. "I didn't know they were pets.
They behaved very much like wild birds."
The dog rose from his cowering position and came over to shelter
himself behind Spurrier, who just then heard the underbrush stir
at his back and wheeled to find himself facing an elderly man with a
ruggedly chiseled face and a mane of gray hair. It was a face that
one could not see without feeling a spirit force behind it, and when
the man spoke his sonorous voice, too, carried a quality of
impressiveness.
"He didn't have no way of knowin', Glory," he said placatingly to the
girl. "Bob Whites are mostly wild, you know." Then turning back to the
man again he courteously explained: "She fed this gang through last
winter when the snows were heavy. They'd come up to the door yard an'
peck 'round with the chickens. She's gifted with the knack of gentlin'
wild things." He paused, then added with a grim touch of irony. "It's
a lesson that it would have profited me to learn--but I never could
master it. You're a furriner hereabouts, ain't you?"
"My name is John Spurrier," said the stranger. "I was looking for Dyke
Cappeze."
"I'm Dyke Cappeze," said the elderly man, "an' this is my daughter,
Glory. Come inside. Yore welcome needs some mendin', I reckon."