As John Spurrier followed his host between rhododendron thickets that
rose above their heads, he found himself wondering what had become of
the girl, but when they drew near to an old house whose stamp of
orderly neatness proclaimed its contrast to the scattering hovels of
widely separated neighbors, he caught a flash of blue gingham by the
open door and realized that the Valkyrie had taken a short cut.
The dog, too, had arrived there ahead of its master and was
fawning now on the girl, who leaned impulsively over to take the
gentle-pointed muzzle between her palms.
"I'm sorry I whopped ye," she declared in a silver-voiced contrition
that made the man think of thrush notes. "Hit wasn't _yore_ fault
no-how. Hit was thet--thet stuck-up furriner. I _hates_ him!"
The setter waved its plumed tail in forgiveness and contentment, and
the girl, discovering with an upward glance that she had been
overheard, rose and stood for a moment defiantly facing the object of
her denunciation, then, as embarrassment flooded her cheeks with
color, fled into the house.
The sense of having stepped back into an older century had been
growing on John Spurrier ever since he had turned away from the town
of Waterfall, and now it possessed him with a singular fascination.
Here was a different world, somber under its shadow of frugality, and
breathing out the heavy atmosphere of isolation. The spirit of this
strange life looked out from the wearied eyes of Dyke Cappeze as he
sat filling his pipe across the hearth, a little later, and it sounded
in his voice when he announced slowly:
"It's not for me to withhold hospitality in a land where a ready
welcome is about all we have to offer, and yet you could hardly have
picked a worse house to come to between the Virginia border and the
Kaintuck ridges."
Spurrier raised his brows interrogatively, and at the same moment he
noticed matters hitherto overlooked. The windows were heavily
shuttered and his host sat beyond the line of vision from the open
door--with a rifle leaning an arm's length away.
"Coming as a stranger," continued Cappeze, "you start without
enmities--with a clean page. You might spend your life here and find a
sincere welcome everywhere--so long as you avoided other men's
controversies. But you come to me and that, sir, is a bad beginning--a
very bad beginning."
A contemplative cloud of smoke went up from the pipe, and the voice
finished in a tone of bitterness.
"I'm the most hated man in this region where hatreds grow like
weeds."
"You mean because you have stood out for the enforcement of law?"
The other nodded, "It has taken me a lifetime," he observed, "to learn
that the mountains are stronger, if not more obstinate, than I."
"Is that the only reason they hate you?" inquired the visitor, and the
lawyer, removing the pipe stem from his teeth, regarded him for a
space in silence. Then he commented quietly:
"If you knew this country better, you wouldn't have to ask that
question. In Athens, I believe, they ostracized Aristides because he
was 'too just a man.'"
"Nonetheless, I'm glad I came to you."
Cappeze smiled gravely. He had a rude sort of dignity which Spurrier
found beguiling; a politeness that sprang from a deeper rooting than
mere formula.
"Merely coming to see me--once in a while--won't damn you, I reckon. A
man has a license to be interested in freaks. But take my advice, and
I sha'n't be offended. Tell every one that you hold no brief for me
and listen with an open mind when they blackguard me."
Spurrier laughed. "In a place where assassination is said to come
cheap, you have at least been able to take care of yourself, sir."
"That," said the other slowly, "is as it happens. My partner was less
lucky. My own luck may break some day."
"And yet you go on living here when you'd be safe enough anywhere
else."
"Yes, I go on living here. It's a land where a man's mind starves and
where the great marching song of the world's progress is silent--and
yet----" Again he paused to draw in and exhale a cloud of pipe smoke.
"Yet there's something in the winds that blow here, in the air one
breathes, that 'is native to my blood.' Elsewhere I should be
miserable, sir, and my daughter----"
He came to an abrupt stop and Spurrier took him up quickly. "She
seems young and vital enough to crave all of life's variety."
"But she is contented, sir." The elderly man spoke eagerly as though
to convince himself and quiet troubling doubts. "She, too, would
rather be here. We know this life and take it as we find it."
Spurrier felt that the conversation was tending into channels too
personal for the participation of a chance acquaintance, and he guided
it to a less intimate subject.
"I understand, Mr. Cappeze, that in the campaign just ended, you
stumped this district whole-heartedly in behalf of one of the
candidates for the circuit judgeship."
Again the hawk-keen blaze flared in the eyes of his host.
"You are mistaken, sir," he declared with heated emphasis. "It was
less _for_ a candidate than _against_ one that I worked. The man whom
circumstances compelled me to support was a poor thing, but he was
better than his adversary."
"Was it party spirit that prompted you, then?" inquired the guest,
feeling that politeness called for some show of interest.
"Sometimes I think," said the lawyer with a grim smile, "that from
some men God withholds the blessed power of riding life's waves. All
they can do is to buffet and fight and wear themselves out. Perhaps
I'm that sort. The man who won--who succeeded himself on the bench--is
an expedientist. So long as he presides, timid juries will return
timid verdicts and the law will falter. I took the stump to brand him
before the people as an apostate to his oath. I knew he would win,
but I meant to make him wear his trade-mark of cowardice along with
his smirk of self-righteousness!"
As Spurrier listened, not to a feudist but to a man who had worn
himself out fighting feudism, there came to him like a revelation an
appreciation of the bitterness which runs in the grim undertow of this
blood.
"I believe," he suggested, glancing sidewise at the door beyond which
he heard the thrushlike voice of the girl, "that you made an issue of
a murder case which collapsed--a case in which you had been employed
to prosecute."
"Yes," Cappeze told him. "Because I believe it to be one in which the
officers of the court lay down and quit like dogs. The defendant was a
red-handed bully, generally feared--and the law was in timid keeping.
I am still trying to have the grand jury call before it the
prosecutor, the sheriff, and every deputy who served on that posse. I
want to make them tell, on oath, just how hard they sought to
apprehend the assassin--who still walks boldly and freely among
us--unwhipped of justice."
Spurrier rose, deeply impressed by the headstrong, willful courage of
this old insurgent, whose daughter's eyes were so full of spring
gentleness.
* * * * *
Far up the dwindling thread of a small water course, where the forest
was jungle-thick, a log cabin hung perched to a rocky cornfield that
tilted like a steep roof, and under its shingles Sim Colby dwelt
alone. Since his coming here he had been assimilated into the
commonplace life of the neighborhood and the question of his
origin was no longer discussed. The time had gone by when even an
acquaintance of other days would be apt to calculate that his term of
enlistment in the army had not run its full course. Moreover, there
were no such acquaintances here; none who had known him before he
changed his name from Grant to Colby. The shadow of dread which had
once obsessed him had gradually and imperceptibly lightened until
for weeks together he forgot how poignantly it had once haunted him.
He had painstakingly established a reputation exemplary beyond the
tendencies of his nature in this new habitat--since trouble might
cause closed pages to reopen.
Now on a November afternoon a deputy sheriff, serving summonses in
that neighborhood dismounted at the door where Sim stood with his hand
resting on the jamb, and the two mulled over what sparse gossip the
uneventful neighborhood afforded.
"Old Cappeze, he's a-seekin' ter rake up hell afresh an' brew more
pestilence fer everybody," announced the deputy glumly.
"What's he projeckin' at now?" asked Sim.
"He's seekin' ter warm over thet ancient Sam Mosebury case afore ther
grand jury. Come ter think of hit, Sim, ye rid with ther high sheriff
yoreself thet time, didn't ye?"
Moodily the other nodded. That was a matter he preferred to leave
buried.
"Waal, Cappeze is claimin' now thet ther possy didn't make no master
effort ter lay hands on Sam. He aims ter hev all ye boys tell ther
grand jury what ye knows erbout ther matter."
The deputy turned away, but in afterthought he paused, thrashing idly
with his switch at the weed stalks, as he retailed an almost forgotten
item of news.
"A furriner come ter town yistidday, an' sot out straightway acrost
Hemlock Mountain fer old Cappeze's dwellin' house."
"What manner of man war he, Joe?" Sim's interest was perfunctory. Had
he been haled into the grand-jury room in those earlier days, the
prospect would have bristled with apprehensions, but now he had behind
him the background of respectability and Mose Biggerstaff, who alone
knew of his craven behavior as a member of the posse, was dead. Sim
felt secure in his mantle of virtue.
"He war a right upstandin' sort of feller--ther furriner," enlightened
the deputy. "He goes under ther name of Spurrier--John Spurrier."
As though an electric wire of high tension had broken and brushed him
in falling, Sim Colby's attitude stiffened and every muscle grew taut
from neck to ankles as his jaw sagged.
The deputy, with his foot already in the stirrup, missed the terror
spasms of the face gone suddenly putty gray. He missed the gasp that
contracted the throat and caused its breath to wheeze, and when he
glanced back again from his saddle, the other had, with an effort of
sheer desperation, regained his outward semblance of composure. He
still leaned indolently against the door frame, but now he needed its
support, because all his nerves jumped and a confusion like the
swarming of angry bees filled his brain.
Afterward he groped his way inside and dropped down into a low chair
by the hearth. For a long time he sat there breathing stertorously
while the untended fire died away to ashen dreariness. The sun went
down beyond the pine tops and still he sat dully with his hands
hanging over his knees, their fingers twitching in panic aimlessness.
Out of a past that he had cut away from the present had arisen a ghost
of hideous menace. Here into the laurel which had promised sanctuary
his Nemesis had pursued him.
Two men with the guilt of a murder standing between them had come into
a radius too small to contain them both. It was as if they had met on
a narrow log spanning a chasm where only one could pass and the other
must fall.
If old Cappeze dragged him to the courthouse now, he would be
delivered over to Spurrier, waiting there to identify him, as a fox in
a trap is delivered to the skinning knife. That must be the meaning of
the stranger's visit to the lawyer.
Sim Colby went to an ancient and dilapidated bureau and from a
creaking drawer took out a memento which, for some reason, he had
preserved from times not treasured in memory. He carried it to the
open door and stood looking at it as it lay on the palm of his hand
with the light glinting upon it.
It was a sharpshooter's medal, for, whatever his military shortcomings,
Private Grant had been an efficient rifleman, and as he looked at it
now his lips twisted into a grim smile. Then he took his rifle from its
corner and, sitting on the doorstep, polished it with a fond
particularity, oiling its mechanism and burnishing its bore.
Already Spurrier had made arrangements to ensconce himself under the
roof of a house he had rented. Already the faces that he met in the
road were, for the most part, familiar, and without exception they
were friendly. Quick on the heels of his first disgust for the squalor
of this lapsed and retarded life, had succeeded an exhilaration born
of the wine-like sparkle of the air and the majestic breadth of vistas
across ridge and valley. As he watched mile-wide shadows creep between
sky-high lines of peaks, his dreams borrowed something of their
vastness.
Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken
spaces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter
of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood
virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil
derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of
refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of
conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power.
One afternoon Spurrier started over to the house he had rented, but
into which he had not yet moved. The way lay for a furlong or more
through a gorge deeply and somberly shaded. Even now, at midday, the
sunlight of the upper places left it cloistered and the bowlders
trooped along in ferny dampness, where the little waters whispered.
Beside a bulky hummock of green-corroded sandstone the man halted and
stood musingly, with eyes downcast and thoughts uplifted--uplifted
to the worship of his one god: Ambition. At his feet was an oily
sediment along the water's edge and the gravel was thick with
"sand blossom"--tiny fossil formations that are prima facie evidence
of oil. Then, without warning, he felt a light sting along his
cheek and the rock-walled fissure reverberated under what seemed a
volley of musketry.
But the magnified and crumbling effect of the echo struck him with a
less poignant realization than a slighter sound and a sharper one. As
if a taut piano wire had been sharply struck, came the clear whang
that he recognized as the flight song of a rifle bullet, and, whatever
its origin it called for a prompt taking of cover.
Spurrier side-stepped as quickly as a boxer, and stood, for the moment
at least, bulwarked behind the rock that was so providentially close.
"I'm John Spurrier--a stranger in these parts," he sung out in a
confident voice of forced boldness and cheerfulness. "I reckon you've
made a mistake in your man."
There was no answer and Spurrier cautiously raised his hat on the end
of a stick with the same deliberation that might have marked his
action had it been his own head emerging from cover.
Instantly the hidden rifle spoke again and the hat came down pierced
through its band, while the rocks once more reverberated to multiplied
detonations.
"It would seem," the man told himself grimly, "that after all there
was no mistake."
He was unarmed and in no position to pursue investigations of the
mystery, but by crawling along on his belly he could keep his body
shielded behind the litter of broken stone that edged the brook until
he reached the end of the gorge itself and came to safer territory.
Slowly, Spurrier traveled out of his precarious position, flattening
himself when he paused to rest and listen, as he had made his men
flatten themselves over there in the islands when they were going
forward without cover under the fire of snipers.