Spurrier was not frightened, but he was deeply mystified, and when he
reached the cabin which he was preparing for occupancy he sat down on
the old millstone that served as a doorstep and sought enlightenment
from reflection and the companionship of an ancient pipe.
In an hour or two "Uncle Jimmy" Litchfield, under whose smoky roof he
was being temporarily sheltered, would arrive with a jolt wagon and
yoke of oxen, teaming over the household goods that Spurrier meant to
install. Already the new tenant had swept and whitewashed his cabin
interior and had let the clear winds rake away the mildew of its long
vacancy. Now he sat smoking with a perplexity-drawn brow, while a
tuneful sky seemed to laugh mockingly at the absurd idea of riflemen
in ambush.
Every neighbor had manifested a spirit of cordiality toward him. To
many of them he was indebted for small and voluntary kindnesses, and
he had maintained a diplomatic neutrality in all local affairs that
bore a controversial aspect.
Certainly, he could not flatter himself that as yet any premonition of
danger had percolated to those distant centers of industry against
which he was devising a campaign of surprise. One explanation only
presented itself with any color of plausibility.
That trickle of water might come to the gorge from a spot back in the
laurel where, under the shelter of a felled hemlock top, some one
tended a small "blockade" distillery; some one who resented an
invasion of his privacy.
Yet even that inference was not satisfactory. Only yesterday a man had
offered him moonshine whisky, declaring quite unsuspiciously: "Ef
ye're vouched fer by Uncle Jimmy, I ain't a'skeered of ye none. I made
thet licker myself--drink hearty."
Of the real truth no ghostly glimmer of suspicion came in even the
most shadowy fashion to his mind.
His efforts to trace to definite result some filament of fact that
might prove the court-martial to have reached a conclusion at variance
with the truth, had all ended in failure. That the matter was hopeless
was an admission which he could not afford to make and which he
doggedly denied, but with waning confidence.
This state of mind prevented him from suspecting any connection
between this present and mysterious enmity and those things which had
happened across the Pacific.
He had kept himself informed as to the movements of Private Severance
and when that time-expired man had stepped ashore at San Francisco,
John Spurrier had been waiting to confront him, even though it
involved facing men who had once been brother officers and who could
no longer speak to him as an equal.
From the former soldier, who brought a flush to his cheeks by saluting
him and calling him "Lieutenant," he had learned nothing. There had
been no reason to hope for much. It was unlikely that he would be
able to shake into a damaging admission of complicity--and any
statement of value must have amounted to that--the witness who had
come unscathed out of the cross-examination of two courts-martial.
Indeed Spurrier had expected to encounter unveiled hostility in the
attitude of the mountaineer, who had been doing sentry duty at the
door through which the prisoner, Grant, had escaped. It might have
followed logically upon the officer's defense, which had sought to
involve that sentinel as an accomplice in the fugitive's flight, and
even in the murder itself.
But Severance had greeted him without rancor and with the disarming
guise of candid friendliness.
"I'd be full willin' ter help ye, Lieutenant--ef so be I could," he
had protested. "I knows full well yore lawyers was plum obliged ter
seek ter hang ther blame wharsoever they was able, an' I ain't
harborin' no grudge because I happened ter be one they sought ter
hurt. But I don't know nothin' that kin aid ye."
"Do you think Grant escaped alive?" demanded Spurrier, and the other
shook his head.
"I feels so plum, dead sartain he died," came the prompt response,
"thet when I gits back home I'm goin' ter tell his folks he did. Bud
Grant was a friend of mine, but when he went out inter thet jungle he
was too weakly ter keer fer hisself an' ef he'd lived they would hev
done found him an' brought him back."
Spurrier had come to embrace that belief himself. The one man whose
admission, wrung from him by persuasion or compulsion, could give him
back his clean name, must have perished there in the _bijuca_
tangles. The hope of meeting the runaway in life had died in the
ex-officer's heart and consequently it did not now occur to him to
think of the deserter as a living menace.
At length he rose and stood against the shadowy background of his
door, which was an oblong of darkness behind the golden outer
clarity.
Off in the tangle of oak and poplar and pine a ruffed grouse drummed
and a "cock of the woods" rapped its tattoo on a sycamore top.
Once he fancied he heard a stirring in the rhododendron where its
large waxen leaves banked themselves thickly a hundred yards distant,
and his eyes turned that way seeking to pierce the impenetrable
screen--but unavailingly. Perhaps some small, wild thing had moved
there.
Then, as had happened before that afternoon, the stillness broke to a
rifle shot--this time clean and sharp, unclogged by echoes.
Spurrier stood for an instant while a surprised expression showed in
his out-staring eyes, then he swayed on his feet. His hands came up
and clutched spasmodically at his left breast, and with a sudden
collapse he dropped heavily backward, and lay full length, swallowed
in the darkness that hung beyond the door.
Over the rhododendron thicket quiet settled drowsily again, but
through the toughness of interlaced branches stole upward and outward
an acrid powder smell and a barely perceptible trickle of smoke.
Crouched there, his neutral-hued clothing merging into the earth tones
about him, a man peered out, but he did not rise to go forward and
inspect his work. Instead, he opened the breech block of his piece
and with unhurried care blew through the barrel--cleansing it of its
vapors.
"I reckon thar ain't no needcessity to go over thar an' look at him,"
he reflected. "When they draps down _thet_-away, they don't git up no
more--an' some person from afar mout spy me crossin' ther dooryard."
So he edged backward into the tangle, moving like a crawfish and
noiselessly took up his homeward journey.
When the slow plodding ox team came at last to the dooryard and Uncle
Billy stood shouting outside the house, Sim Colby, holding to tangles
where he would meet no chance wayfarer, was already miles away and
hurrying to establish his alibi against suspicion, in his own
neighborhood--where no one knew he had been absent.
Though it be an evil thing and shameful to confess, ex-private Bud
Grant, alias Sim Colby, traveled light-heartedly, roweled by no
tortures of conscience, but blithe in the assurance of a ghost laid,
and a peril averted.
He would have been both amazed and chagrined had he remained peering
from his ambuscade, for when Uncle Billy's shadow fell through the
open door the man to whom he had come rose from a chair to meet him,
and he presented no mangled or blood-stained breast to the eyes of his
visitors.
"Ye ain't jest a-quippin' with me, be ye?" demanded the old
mountaineer incredulously when he had heard the story in all its
detail. "This hyar's a right serious-soundin' matter--an' ye ain't
got no enemies amongst us thet I've heered tell of."
Spurrier pointed out the spot in the newly whitewashed wall where the
bullet lay imbedded with its glint of freshly flattened lead.
"After the first experience," he explained, "I'd had some time to
think. I was standing in the door so I fell down--and played dead." He
added after a pause quietly: "I've seen men shot to death, and I
happened to know how a man drops when it's a heart hit. I fell inside
where I'd be out of sight, because I was unarmed, and all I could do
was to wait for you. I watched through the door, but the fellow never
showed himself."
"Come on, boys," commanded the old mountaineer in a determined voice.
"Let's beat thet la'rel while ther tracks is still fresh. Mebby we
mout l'arn somethin' of this hyar monstrous matter."
But they learned nothing. Sim Colby had spent painstaking thought upon
his effort and he had left no evidence written in the mold of the
forest.
"Hit beats all hell," declared the nonplussed Uncle Billy at last.
"I ain't got ther power ter fathom hit. Ef I war you I wouldn't
talk erbout this ter no man save only me an' old Dyke Cappeze.
Still-huntin' lands more game then blowin' a fox horn." And
Spurrier nodded his head.
Though Spurrier for a few days after that slipped through the gorge
with the stealth of a sharpshooter, covering himself behind rocks as
he went, he heard no sound there more alarming than the chatter of
squirrels or the grunt of a strayed razor-back rooting among the
acorns. Gradually he relaxed his vigilance as a man will if his
nature is bold and his dreams too sweeping to be forever hobbled by
petty precautions.
The purpose which he privately served called for ranging the country
with a trained eye, and with him went the contour maps upon which were
traced red lines.
One day he came, somewhat winded from a stiff climb, to an eminence
that spread the earth below him and made of it a panorama. The bright
carnival of the autumn was spending itself to its end, but among trees
already naked stood others that clung to a gorgeousness of color the
more brilliant in the face of death. Overhead was flawless blue, and
there was a dreamy violet where it merged mistily with the skyline
ridges.
"All that it needs," mused the man whimsically and aloud, "is the
music of Pan's pipes--and perhaps a small chorus of dryads."
Then he heard a laugh and, wheeling suddenly, discovered Glory Cappeze
regarding him from the cap of a towering rock where, until he had
reached this level, she had been hidden from view. Now she flushed
shyly as the man strode over and confronted her.
"Do you still hate me?" he inquired.
"I reckon thet don't make no master differ ter ye, does hit?" The
musical voice was painfully diffident, and he remembered that she had
always been shy with him except on that first meeting when the leaping
anger in her eyes had burned away self-consciousness.
"You know," he gravely reminded her, "when I first saw you, you were
on the point of thrashing me. You had me cowed and timid. Since then
I've come to think of you as the shooting star."
He paused, waiting for her to demand an elucidation of that somewhat
obscure statement, but she said nothing. She only sat gazing over his
head toward the horizon, and her cheeks were excitedly flushed from
the delicate pink of apple bloom to the warmer color of peach
blossom.
"Since you don't ask what I mean," he continued easily, "I shall tell
you. I've been to your house perhaps four or five times. From afar,
each time, I've seen a scrap of color. Sometimes it has been blue,
sometimes red, but always it has vanished with the swiftness of a
shooting star. It is a flash and it is gone. Sometimes from beyond a
door I also hear a voice singing."
He leaned his elbows on the rock at her feet and stood gazing into the
eyes that would not meet his own, and still she favored him with no
response. After a little silence the man altered his tone and spoke
argumentatively:
"You forgave the dog, you know--why not the man?"
That question carried her thoughts back to the murdered quail and a
gusty back-flash of resentment conquered her diffidence. Her sternness
of tone and the thrushlike softness of her voice, mingled with the
piquancy of paradox.
"A dawg don't know no better."
"Some dogs are very wise," he assured her. "And some men very
foolish."
"The dawg," she went on still unplacated, "got right down on his
stomach and asked my pardon. I _hed_ ter fergive him, when he humbled
hisself like that."
"I'm willing," John Spurrier amiably assured her, "to get right down
on my stomach, too."
Then she laughed, and though she sought to retreat again into her
aloofness, the spell was broken.
"Am I forgiven?" he demanded, and she shook her head doubtfully though
no longer with conviction.
"No," she told him; then she added with a startlingly exact mimicry of
her father's most legalistic manner: "No. The co'te will take the case
under advisement an' defer jedgment."
"I forgot," he said, "that you are a lawyer's daughter. What were you
looking at across there--so fascinatedly?"
"Them hills," she enlightened succinctly.
Spurrier studied her. Her deep eyes had held a glow of almost
prayerful enchantment for which her laconic words seemed inadequate.
Watching her out of the tail of his eye he fell into borrowed phrases:
"'Violet peaks uplifted through the crystal evening air.'"
She shot a glance at him suddenly, eagerly; then at once the lids
lowered, masking the eyes again as she inquired:
"Thet thar's poetry, ain't hit?"
"I'm prepared to go to the mat with any critic who holds the
contrary," he assured her.
"Hit's comin' on ter be night. I've got ter start home," she
irrelevantly announced, as she slid from her rough throne, and the man
fell boldly in step at her side.
"When your honor rules on the matter under advisement," he said
humbly before their paths separated, "please remember that the
defendant was a poor wretch who didn't know he was breaking the law."
For the first time their glances engaged fully and without avoidance,
and a twinkle flashed in the girl's pupils.
"_Ignorantia legis neminem excusat_," she serenely responded, and
Spurrier gasped. Here was a girl who could not steer her English
around the shoals of illiteracy, giving him his retort in Latin:
"Ignorance of the law excuses no one." Of course, it meant only that
her quick memory had appropriated and was parroting legal phrases
learned from her father, but it struck the chord of contrasts, and to
the man's imagination it dramatized her so that when she had gone on
with the lissome grace of her light stride, he stood looking after
her.
Rather abruptly after that the autumn fires of splendor burned out to
the ashes of coming winter, and then it was that Spurrier went north.
As his train carried him seaward he had the feeling that it was also
transporting him from an older to a younger century, and that while
his mind dwelt on the stalwart and unsophisticated folk with whom he
had been brushing shoulders, the life resolved itself into an austere
picture against which the image of Glory stood out with the quick
vividness of a red cardinal flitting among somber pine branches.
Because she was so far removed from his own orbit he could think of
her impersonally and enjoy the thought as though it were of a new type
of flower or bird, recognizing her attractive qualities in a detached
fashion.
As Spurrier gave himself up to the relaxation of reminiscence with
that abandon of train travel which admits of no sustained effort, he
began comparing this life, left over from another era, with that he
had known against more cultivated and complex backgrounds.
Then in analytical mood he reviewed his own past, looking with a
lengthening of perspective on the love affair that had been broken by
his court-martial. His adoration of the Beverly girl had been youthful
enough to surround itself with young illusions.
That was why it had all hurt so bitterly, perhaps, with its ripping
away of his faith in romantic conceptions of love-loyalty.
He wondered now if he had not borne himself with the Quixotic
martyrdom of callowness. He had sought to shield the girl from even
the realization that her lack of confidence was ungenerous. He had
sought to take all the pain and spare her from sharing it. But she had
solaced herself with a swift recovery and a new lover, and had he been
guilty she could not have abandoned him more cavalierly. Well, that
softness belonged to an out-grown stage of development.
He had seen himself then as obeying the dictates of chivalry. He
thought of it now as inexperienced folly--perhaps, so far as she was
concerned, as a lucky escape. His amours of the present were not so
naively conducted. To Vivian he had paid his attentions with an eye
watchful of material advantages. They belonged to a sophisticated
circle which seasoned life's fare rather with the salt of cynicism
than with the sugar of romanticism. Yet the thought of Vivian caused
no pulse to flutter excitedly.
The glimpse of Glory had been refreshing because she was so honest and
sincere that she disquieted one's acquired cynicism of viewpoint. One
might as well spout world-wisdom to a lilac bush as to Glory! Yet
there was a sureness about her which argued for her creed of
wholesome, simple things and old half-forgotten faiths which one would
like to keep alive--if one could.
Snow drifted in the air and made a nimbus about each arc light as
Spurrier's taxi, turning between the collonade pillars of the
Pennsylvania Station, gave him his first returning glimpse of New
York. He had come East in obedience to a wired summons from Martin
Harrison, brief to curtness as were all business messages from that
man of few and trenchant words. The telegram had been slow crossing
the mountain, but Spurrier had been prompt in his response.
A tempered glare hung mistily above the Longacre Square district
through the snow flurries to the north, and the rumbled voice of the
town, after these months in quiet places, was to the returned pilgrim
like the heavy breathing of a monster sleeping out a fever.
At the room that he kept at his club in Fifth Avenue--for that was a
part of the pretentious display of affluence made necessary by his
ambitious scheme of things--he called up a number from memory. It was
a number not included in the telephone directory, and, recognizing the
voice that answered him, he said briefly:
"Manners, this is Mr. Spurrier. Will you tell Mr. Harrison I'm on the
wire?"
"Hello, Spurrier," boomed a deep voice after an interval. "We're
dining out this evening and we go to the opera afterward, but I want a
word with you to-night. In fact, I want you to start for Russia on
Wednesday. Drop into our box, and drive home with me for a few minutes
afterward."
Russia on Wednesday! Spurrier's unoccupied hand clenched in
irritation, but his voice was as unruffled as if he had been asked to
make ready for a journey to Hoboken. He knew enough of Harrison's
methods to ask no questions. If they could have been answered over the
phone Harrison could have found many men to send to Russia. It was
because they were for his ear alone that he had been called to New
York.
That evening he listened to "Otello" with thoughts that wandered from
the voices of the singers. They refused even to be chained by the
novelty of a slender tenor as a new Russian star held the spotlight.
He was studying the almost too regular beauty of Vivian Harrison's
profile as she sat serene and self-confident with the horseshoe of the
Metropolitan beyond her.
At midnight Spurrier sat with Harrison in his study and listened to a
crisp summarizing of the Russian scheme. It proved to be a project
boldly conceived on a broad scale and requiring an ambassador
dependable enough and resourceful enough to decide large matters as
they arose, without cabling for instructions.
In turn Spurrier talked of his own past doings, and through their
cigar smoke the seeming idleness of those weeks assayed a wealth of
exact information and stood revealed as the incubation period of a
large conception. Keenly formulated plans emerged from his recitals so
simply and convincingly that the greater financier leaned forward and
let his cigar die.
Then Harrison rose and paced the room.
"You know something about me, Spurrier," he began. "When I came East
they laughed at me--if they deigned to notice me at all. They said:
'Here comes a bushleaguer who thinks he's good enough for the big
game. It's one more lamb to the shearing shed.' That's the East,
Spurrier! That's cocksure New York! They sneer at a Western-bred
horse--or a Western-trained prize fighter--and when the newcomer licks
the best they've got they straightway let out a holler that they
taught him all he knows. Why, New York would die of lassitude and
anaemia if it wasn't for blood infusions from the provinces!"
Spurrier gazed interestedly at the tall figure of the man with
the sandy red mustache, and the snapping eyes, who for all his
impeccability of evening dress, might have taken a shovel or
pick from a section hand and taught him how to level a road bed.
Harrison laughed shortly.
"They haven't inhaled me so far. I brought only a million with me to
this town, and I've got--well, I've got plenty, but I can't call it a
day quite yet. There's one buccaneer to be settled with first! He's
got to go to the mat with me and come up bloody enough to admit that
he's been in a ruction. He chooses to pretend that I'm nonexistent,
and I won't stand being ignored! I want to leave my mark on that man,
and with God's help--and yours--I'm going to do it!"
"You mean Trabue?" asked Spurrier, and Harrison's head gave a decisive
jerk of affirmation while the hot glow of his eyes made his companion
think of smelting furnaces.
"That's why this thing of yours interests me. That's why I'm willing
to get behind you and back you to the hilt," the big fellow of finance
went on. "A. O. and G. are trying to hold others out of this Kentucky
field. That proves that they think enough of it to be hurt by having
it torn from their teeth. All I need to know is what will hurt them!
If you can take some teeth along with the bone, so much the better."
He paused, then in a voice that had altered to cold steadiness,
commanded: "Now, give me your facts."
"At present prices of oil," summarized Spurrier, "the development
back of Hemlock Mountain wouldn't pay. With higher market values, it
_would_ pay, but less handsomely than other fields A. O. and G. can
work. Once the initial cost is laid out, the profit will be
constant. The A. O. and G. idea is to hold it in reserve and await
developments--meanwhile keeping up the 'no trespass' sign."
"Doesn't the range practically prohibit railroading?"
"Possibly--but it doesn't prohibit pipe lines."
Spurrier opened the packet he had brought in his overcoat pocket and
spread a map under the flooding light of a table lamp.
"I have traced there what seems to me a practical piping route," he
explained. "I call it the neck of the bottle. There is a sort of gap
through the hills and a porous formation caused by a chain of
caverns. Nature is willing to help with some ready-made tunnels."
"Why haven't they discovered that?"
"The oil development of fifteen years ago never crossed Hemlock
Mountain. It came the other way."
Harrison stood thinking for a time, then demanded tersely: "Have you
secured any land or options?"
"Not an acre, nor an inch," laughed Spurrier. "This is a waiting game.
I don't mean to appear interested. If any man offered to give me a
farm I should say it wasn't worth State taxes."
"How do we get the property into our hands then?"
"The buying must be gradual and through men with whom we appear to
have no connection."
"And the State charter--how about that?"
"There lies the chief problem," admitted Spurrier. "The charter must
come from a legislature that A. O. and G. can, at present, control."
"What," Harrison shot the question out like a cross-examiner, "is the
present attitude of the natives toward oil and oil men?"
"Indifference and skepticism." The reply was prompt but the
amplification more deliberate. "Once they saw wealth ahead--then the
boom collapsed, and they have no longer any faith in the magic of the
word 'oil.'"
"I presume," suggested Harrison, "you are encouraging that disbelief?"
Spurrier's face clouded, but only for a moment. "I am the most
skeptical of all the skeptics," he assented, "and yet I'm sorry that
they can't be gainers. They are an honest, upstanding folk and they
have always felt the pinch of privation. After all they are the
rightful owners and development of their country ought to benefit
them. Of course, though, to forecast the possibilities would kill the
game. We can't take them into our confidence without sounding a
warning to the enemy."
"Growing sentimental?" queried Harrison dryly, and the younger man
shook his head.
"No," he responded slowly, "I can't afford that--yet."
"And see that you don't," admonished the chief sharply. "Bear in mind,
as you have in the past, that we don't want to depend on men of
brittle resolution and temperamental squeamishness. We are in this
thing toward a definite end and not as humanitarian dreamers.
However----" He broke off abruptly and added in a milder voice, "I
don't have to caution you. You understand the proposition."
For some minutes the cigar smoke floated in a silent room, while
Martin Harrison sat with the knitted brows of concentrated thought.
Spurrier did not interrupt the mental process which he knew had the
heat and power of an ore smelter, reducing to fluid amenability the
hard metal of a stubborn proposition. He knew, too, that the fuel
which fed the fire was his principal's animosity against Trabue,
rather than the possibilities or extent of the loot. This, no less
than the mountain vendetta, was, in last analysis, a personal feud and
in the parlance of the Cumberlands a "war was in ther b'ilin'."
At last Harrison straightened up and tossed away his cigar.
"You are ambitious, Spurrier," he said. "Put this thing over and I
should say that all your ambitions can come to realization."
While he sat waiting Spurrier had lifted from the table a photograph
of Vivien, appropriately framed in silver. He had taken it up idly
because it was a new portrait and one that he had not before seen, but
into the gesture the father read a deeper significance. It was as if
Spurrier had asked "All my ambitions?" and had emphasized his question
by laying his hands on the picture of the girl. That, thought
Harrison, was an audacious suggestion, but it was Spurrier's audacity
that recommended him.
Slowly the capitalist's eyes lighted into an amused smile as their
glance traveled from the younger face to the framed photograph, and
slowly he nodded his head.
"_All_ your ambitions," he repeated meaningly, then with the electric
snap of warning in his voice he added an admonition: "But don't
underestimate the difficulties of your undertaking. You are bucking
the strongest and most relentless piracy in finance. You will incur
enmities that will stop nowhere, and you must operate in a country
where murderers are for 'hire.'"
The threat of personal danger just at that moment disquieted John
Spurrier less than the other curtailment of freedom implied in
Harrison's words; the tacit acceptance of him as Vivien's suitor. It
came to him abruptly that he did not love Vivien; that he wished to
remain untrammeled. Heretofore, he had always postponed matrimonial
thoughts for the misty future. Now they became embarrassingly near and
tangible.
But quick on this realization followed another. Here was an offered
alliance of tremendous advantage and one not to be ignored. To be
Vivien's husband might fail of rapture, but to be Martin Harrison's
son-in-law meant triumph. It meant his own nomination as heir apparent
and successor in that position of cardinal importance to which he had
looked upward as to a throne.
There was no trace of dubiety in his voice as he answered:
"I have counted the handicaps, sir. I'm taking my chance with open
eyes."