Sim Colby, after that day when he had slipped through the laurel, had
gone back to his own house and waited for the talk of John Spurrier's
mysterious death to drift along the waterways where news is the only
speedy traveler.
There had been no such gossip and he had dared betray his interest by
no inquiry, but he knew it could have only one meaning; that he had
failed.
Spurrier was alive, and obviously he was holding his counsel
concerning his narrow escape. This silence seemed to Sim Colby an
ominous thing indicative of some crafty purpose--as if the intended
victim were stalking grimly as well as being stalked. Sim came of a
race that knows how to bide its time and that can keep bright the edge
of hatred against long-delayed reprisals. It was certainly to be
presumed that Spurrier had taken some of his friends into his
confidence and that under the mantle of silence over on Little Turkey
Tail, these friends were now watchfully alert. The enterprise that had
once failed could not be reundertaken at once. Sim must wait for the
vigilance to "blow over," and while he waited the rancor of his hatred
must fester with the thorn-prickings of a thousand doubts and
apprehensions.
Then he heard one day that Spurrier had left the mountains, and on
another day the news was brought that the grand jury had declined to
reopen the old issues of the murder case in which Mosebury had
escaped justice. Both these things were comforting in themselves, but
they failed of complete reassurance for the deserter.
Men said that Spurrier was coming back again, so the day of reckoning
was only deferred--not escaped.
The determination with which Sim had set out on his mission of death
had largely preempted his field of thought. Now, after weeks and
months of brooding reflection, he himself had become only a sort of
human garment worn by the sinister spirit of resolve.
So all that winter while John Spurrier was away as the ambassador,
practicing in Moscow and Odessa the adroit arts of financial
diplomacy, the fixed idea of his assassination was festering in the
mind of the man who lived, under an assumed name, at the head of
Little Quicksand.
That obsession took fantastic shapes and wove webs of grotesque
patterns of hate as Colby, who had been Grant, sat brooding before his
untidy hearth while the winter winds wailed about the eaves and lashed
the mountain world into forlorn bleakness.
And while Colby meditated unendingly on the absentee and built ugly
plans against his return, so in another house and in another spirit,
the ex-officer was also remembered.
Winter in these well-nigh roadless hills meant a blockade and a siege
with loneliness and stagnation as the impregnably intrenched
attackers. The victims could only wait and endure until the rescue
forces of spring should come to raise the chill and sodden barricade,
with a flaunting of blossom-banners and the whispered song of warm
victory.
Glory Cappeze, for the first time in her life, suffered from
loneliness. She had thought herself too used to it to mind it much,
but John Spurrier had brought a new element to her existence and left
behind him a void. She had been hardly more than an onlooker to his
occasional visits with her father, but she had been a very interested
onlooker. When he talked a vigorous mind had spoken and had brought
the greater, unknown, outer world to her door. The striking face with
its square jaw; the ingrained graces and courtesies of his bearing;
the quickness of his understanding--all these things had been a light
in the gray mediocrity of uneventful days and a flame that had fired
her imagination to a splendid disquiet.
The infectious smile and force of personality that had been a
challenge to more critical women, had been almost dazzling qualities
to the mountain girl of strangled opportunities.
But it was that last meeting in which he had thawed her shyness into
friendliness that Glory remembered most eagerly. That had seemed to
make of Spurrier not only a hero admired from a distance but a hero
who was also a friend, and she was hungry for friends.
So it came to pass that to these two widely variant welcomes, neither
of which he suspected, John Spurrier was returning from Russia when
spring had lightly brushed the Cumberland slopes with delicate
fragrance and the color of blossoming.
In Louisville, in Frankfort, and in other Kentucky towns along his way
the returning man had made stops and investigations, to the end that
he came primed with certain information of an ex-cathedra sort.
The fruits of this research included an abstract of the personnel of
the legislature and the trend of oil influences in State politics, and
he studied his notebook as he traveled from the rolling, almost
voluptuous fertility of the bluegrass section to the piedmont where
the foothills began to break the sky.
On the porch of the dilapidated hotel at Waterfall a sparse crowd
centered about a seated figure, and when he had reached the spot
Spurrier paused, challenged by a sense of the medieval, that gripped
him as tangibly as a hand clapped upon his shoulder.
The seated man was blind and shabby, with a beggar's cup strapped to
his knee, and a "fiddle" nestling close to the stubbled chin of a
disfigured face. He sang in a weird falsetto, with minors that rose
thin and dolorous, but he was in every essential the ballad singer who
improvised his lays upon topical themes, as did Scott's last
minstrel--a survival of antiquity.
Now he was whining out a personal plaint in the words of his "song
ballet."
"I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an' green,
I used ter work a standard rig an' drill fer kero_sene_."
The singer's lugubrious pathos appeared to be received with attentive
and uncritical interest. Beyond doubt he took himself seriously and
sadly.
"I used ter know a woman's love, an' read a woman's eyes,
An' look into my baby's face an' dwell in paradise,
Until a comp'ny foreman, plum' heedless in his mind
Let nitroglycer_een_ explode an' made me go stone blind."
Spurrier, half-turning, saw a traveling salesman standing at his elbow
with a repressed grin of amusement struggling in his glance.
"Queer card, that," whispered the drummer. "I've seen him before; one
of the wrecks left over from the oil-boom days. A 'go-devil' let loose
too soon and blinded him." He paused, then added as though by way of
apology for his seeming callousness: "Some people say the old boy is a
sort of a miser and has a snug pile salted away."
Spurrier nodded and went on into the office, but later in the day he
sought out the blind fiddler and engaged him in conversation. The
man's blinding had left him a legacy of hate for all oil operators,
and from such relics as this of the active days Spurrier knew how to
evoke scraps of available information. It was not until later that it
occurred to him that he had answered questions as well as asked
them--but, of course, he had not been indiscreet.
With John Spurrier, riding across hills afoam with dogwood blossom and
tenderly vivid with young green, went persistently the thought of the
blind beggar who seemed almost epic in his symbolism of human wreckage
adrift in the wake of the boom. Yet he was honest enough to admit
inwardly that should victory fall to his banners there would be
flotsam in the wake of his triumph, too; simple folk despoiled of
their birthright. He came as no altruist to fight for the native
born. He, no less than A. O. and G., sought to exploit them.
When he went to the house of Dyke Cappeze he did not admit the
curiosity, amounting to positive anxiety, to see again the little
barbarian, who slurred consonants, doubled her negatives, split her
infinitives and retorted in the Latin of Blackstone. Yet when Glory
did not at once appear, he found himself unaccountably disappointed.
"There's been another stranger in here since you went away," the old
man smilingly told him. "What is he doing here? That's the one burning
question debated along the highways when men 'meet and make their
manners.'"
"Well," laughed Spurrier, "what _is_ he doing here?"
Cappeze shrugged his bent shoulders as he knocked the rubble from his
pipe and a quizzical twinkle came into his eyes.
"So far as I can make out, sir, he's as much a gentleman of leisure as
you are yourself."
Spurrier knew what an excellent subterfuge may sometimes lie in
frankness, and now he had recourse to its concealment.
"Good heavens, Mr. Cappeze, I'm no idler!" he declared. "I'm
associated with capitalists who work me like a mule. Since I saw you,
for example, I've been in Russia and I've been hard-driven. That's why
I come here. If I couldn't get absolutely away from it all now and
then, I'd soon be ready for a madhouse. Here I can forget all that and
keep fit."
Cappeze nodded. "That's just about the way I sized you up. At first,
folks pondered about you, too, but now they take you on faith."
"I hope so--and this new man? Has he stepped on anybody's toes?"
"Not yet. He hasn't even bought any land, but there have been some
several transfers of property, in other names, since he came. He _may_
be some man's silent partner."
"What sort of partnership would it be?"
"God knows." For an instant the shrewd eyes leaped into a glint of
feeling. "These poor benighted devils suspect the Greeks bearing
gifts. Civilization has always come here only to leave its scar. They
have been stung once--over oil. God pity the man who seeks to sting
them again."
"You think," Spurrier responded lightly, as one without personal
interest, "they wouldn't take it kindly?"
Once again the sonorous and kindly voice mounted abruptly to
vehemence.
"As kindly, sir, as a wolf bitch robbed, the second time, of her
whelps. It's all a wolf bitch has."
That evening as he walked slowly homeward with a neighbor whom he had
met by the way, Spurrier came face to face with Wharton, the other
stranger, and the mountaineer performed the offices of introduction.
The two men from the outer world eyed each other incuriously and
parted after an exchange of commonplaces.
When Spurrier separated from his chance companion, the hillsman
drawled: "Folks _says_ thet feller's buyin' land. God knows what fer
he wants hit, but ef he _does_ hone fer hit, hit's kinderly probable
thet hit's wuth holdin' on to."
When the brook trout began to leap and flash Cappeze delegated Glory
to act for him as Spurrier's guide, and as the girl led the way to the
likeliest pools, the young, straight-growing trees were not more
gracefully slender.
The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had no
delicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair.
The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighter
than her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom and
like the hills she was wild of beauty.
Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to the
pagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged to
rigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ring
within him as a tuning fork rings to its note.
Since the days of Augusta Beverly's ascendency, he had never felt the
need of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. At
first he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-hater
and more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, an
expedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, and
Vivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades so
long as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been snobs
in a sense, and in a sense he too was a snob.
But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things in
their primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politer
usage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his proffered
comradeship for the attitude of the lover--and that would have been
most disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanations
that would wound her, embarrass him and arouse the old man's just ire.
For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yet
prouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own ground
there was no common meeting place between their standards of living.
Yet Glory's presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich and
lyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would have
believed in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stood
fast when Augusta had cut loose.
This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally--and
perhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased him
to humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made him
step more elastically as she went on ahead.
When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored,
Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in grass that waved
knee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she moved
about crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself,
herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.
"Glory," he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the first
time and in a mood of experiment.
As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, she
turned toward him and answered in kind.
"What air hit, Jack?"
"Thank you."
"What fer?"
"For calling me Jack."
Then her cheeks colored deeply and she wheeled to her work again. But
after a little she faced him once more to say half angrily:
"I called ye Jack because ye called me Glory. You've always put a Miss
afore hit till now, an' I 'lowed ye'd done made up yore mind ter be
friendly at last."
"I've always wanted to be friendly," he assured her. "It was you who
began with a hickory switch and went on with hard words in Latin."
The girl laughed, and the peal of her mirth transmuted their status
and dispelled her self-consciousness. She came over and stood looking
down at him with violet eyes mischievously a-sparkle.
"The co'te," she announced, "hes carefully weighed there evidence in
ther case of Jack Spurrier, charged with ther willful murder of Bob
White, and is ready to enter jedgment. Jack Spurrier, stand up ter be
sentenced!"
The man rose to his feet and stood with such well-feigned abjectness
of suspense that she had to fight back the laughter from her eyes to
preserve her own pose of judicial gravity.
"It is well established by the evidence befo' ther co'te," she went
solemnly on, "thet ther defendant is guilty on every count contained
in the indictment." She checked off upon the fingers of the left hand
the roster of his crime as she summarized it.
"He entered inter an unlawful conspiracy with the codefendant Rover, a
setter dawg. He made a felonious assault without provocation. He
committed murder in the first degree with malice prepense."
Spurrier's head sank low in mock despair, until Glory came to her
peroration and sentence.
"Yet since the defendant is amply proved to be a poor, ignorant
wanderer upon the face of the earth, unpossessed of ordinary
knowledge, the court is constrained to hold him incapable of
discrimination between right an' wrong. Hence he is not fully
responsible for his acts of violence. Mercy as well as justice lies in
the province of the law, twins of a sacred parentage and equal before
the throne."
She broke off in a laugh, and so sudden was the transition from
absolute mimicry that the man forgot to laugh with her.
"Glory," he demanded somewhat breathlessly, "have you ever been to a
theater in your life? Have you ever seen a real actress?"
"No. Why?"
"Because you _are_ one. Does this life satisfy you? Isn't there
anything off there beyond the hills that ever calls you?"
The dancing eyes grew abruptly grave, almost pained, and the response
came slowly.
"_Everything_ down thar calls ter me. I craves hit all!"
Spurrier suddenly recalled old Cappeze's half-frightened vehemence
when the recluse had inveighed against the awakening of vain longings
in his daughter. Now he changed his manner as he asked:
"I wonder if I'd offend you if I put a question. I don't want to."
"Ye mout try an' see. I ain't got no power ter answer twell I hears
hit."
"All right. I'll risk it. Your father doesn't talk mountain dialect.
His English is pure--and you were raised close to him. Why do _you_
use--the other kind?"
She did not at once reply and, when she did, the astonishingly
adaptable creature no longer employed vernacular, though she spoke
slowly and guardedly as one might who ventured into a foreign tongue.
"My father has lived down below as well as here. He's a gentleman, but
he aims--I mean he intends--to live here now till he dies."
As she paused Spurrier prompted her.
"Yes--and you?"
"My father thinks that while I _do_ live here, I'd better fit into the
life and talk in the phrases that don't seem high-falutin' to my
neighbors."
"I dare say," he assured her with forced conviction, "that your father
is right."
There was a brief silence between them while the warm stillness of the
woods breathed its incense and its langour, then the girl broke out
impulsively:
"I want to see and hear and taste everything, out there!"
Her hands swept outward with an all-embracing gesture toward the whole
of the unknown. "There aren't any words to tell how I want it! What do
you want more than anything else, Jack?"
The man remained silent for a little, studying her under half-lowered
lids while a smile hovered at the corners of his lips. But the smile
died abruptly and it was with deep seriousness that he answered.
"I think, more than anything else, I want a clean name and a
vindicated reputation."
Glory's eyes widened so that their violet depths became pools of
wondering color and her lips parted in surprise.
"A clean name!" she echoed incredulously. "What blight have you got on
it, Jack?" Then catching herself up abruptly she flushed crimson and
said apologetically: "That's a question I haven't any license to put
to you, though. Only you broached the subject yourself."
"And having broached it, I am willing to pursue it," he assured her
evenly. "I was an army officer until I was charged with unprovoked
murder--and court-martialed; dishonorably discharged from the service
in which my father and grandfather had lived and died."
For a moment or two she made no answer but her quick expressiveness of
lip and eye did not, even for a startled interval, betray any shock of
horror. When she did speak it was in a voice so soft and compassionate
that the man thought of its quality before he realized its words.
"Did the man that--that was _really_ guilty go scot free, whilst you
had to shoulder his blame?"
There had been no question of evidence; no waiting for any denial of
guilt. She had assumed his innocence with the same certainty that her
eye assumed the flawlessness of the overheard blue. Her interest was
all for his wronging and not at all for his alleged wrong.
The man started with surprise; the surprise of one who had trained
himself into an unnatural callousness as a defense against what had
seemed a universal proneness to convict. He had told himself that
Glory would see with a straighter and more intuitive eye. He had told
her baldly of the thing which he seldom mentioned out of an
inquisitiveness to test her reaction to the revelation, but he was
unprepared for such unhesitant belief.
"I think you are the first human being, Glory," he said quietly but
with unaccustomed feeling in his voice, "who ever heard that much and
gave me a clean bill of health without hearing a good bit more. Why
didn't you ask whether or not I was guilty?"
"I didn't have to," she said slowly. "Some men could be murderers and
some couldn't. You couldn't. You might have to _kill_ a man--but not
murder him. You might do lots of things that wouldn't be right. I
don't know about that--but those people that convicted you were
fools!"
"Thank you," he said soberly. "You're right, Glory. I was as innocent
of that assassination as you are, yet they proved me guilty. It was
only through influence that I escaped ending my days in prison."
Then he gave her the story, which he had already told her father and
no one else in the mountains. She listened, thinking not at all of the
damaging circumstances, but secretly triumphant that she had been
chosen as a confidant.
But that night Spurrier looked up from a letter he was reading and let
his eyes wander to the rafters and his thoughts to the trout stream.
It was a letter, too, which should have held his attention. It
contained, on a separate sheet of paper, a list of names which was
typed and headed: "Confidential Memorandum." Below that appeared the
notation: "Members of the general assembly, under American Oil and Gas
influence. Also names of candidates who oppose them at the next
election, and who may be reached by us."
Spurrier lighted his pipe and his face became studious, but presently
he looked up frowning.
"I must speak to old Cappeze," he said aloud and musingly. "He's being
unfair to her." And that did not seem a relevant comment upon the
paper he held in his hand.
Then Spurrier started a little as from outside a human voice sounded
above the chorus of the frogs and whippoorwills.
"Hallo," it sung out. "Hit's Blind Joe Givins. Kin I come in?"
A few minutes later into the lamplight of the room shambled the beggar
of the disfigured face, whom Spurrier had last seen at the town of
Waterfall, led by a small, brattish boy. His violin case was tightly
grasped under his arm, and his free hand was groping.
"I'd done sot out ter visit a kinsman over at ther head of Big Wolfpen
branch," explained the blind man, "but ther boy hyar's got a stone
bruise on his heel an' he kain't handily go on, ter-night. We wonder
could we sleep hyar?"
Spurrier bowed to the law of the mountains, which does not deny
shelter to the wayfarer, but he shivered fastidiously at the unkempt
raggedness of his tramp-like visitor, and he slipped into his pocket
the papers in his hand.
That night before Spurrier's hearth, as in elder times before the
roaring logs of some feudal castle, the wandering minstrel paid his
board with song and music; his voice rising high and tremulous in
quaint tales set to measure.
But on the next morning the boy set out on some mission in the
neighborhood and left his charge to await his return, seated in a low
chair, and gazing emptily ahead.
Spurrier went out to the road in response to the shout of a passing
neighbor, and left his papers lying on the table top, forgetful of the
presence of the sightless guest, who sat so negligibly quiet in the
chimney corner.
When he entered the room again the blind man had risen from his seat
and moved across to the hearth. On the threshold the householder
halted and stood keenly eyeing him while he groped along the mantel
shelf as if searching with wavering fingers for something that his
eyes could not discover--and the thought of the papers which he had
left exposed caused an uneasy suspicion to dart into Spurrier's mind.
Any eye that fell on that list would have gained the key to his whole
strategy and intent, but, of course, this man could not see. Still
Spurrier cursed himself for a careless fool.
"I was jest seekin' fer a match," said Joe Givins as a slight sound
from the other attracted his attention. "I aimed ter smoke for a
leetle spell."
The host struck a match and held it while the broken guest kindled his
pipe, then he hurriedly glanced through his papers to assure himself
that nothing had been disturbed--and though each sheet seemed as he
had left it, the uneasiness in Spurrier's mind refused to be stilled.
Presumably this bat-blind ragamuffin was no greater menace to the
secrecy of his plans than a bat itself would have been, yet a glimpse
of this letter would have been so fatal that he asked himself
anxiously, "How do I know he's not faking?" The far-fetched
apprehension gathered weight like a snowslide until suddenly out of it
was born a grim determination.
He would make a test.
Noiselessly, while the ugly face that had been mutilated by a blasting
charge gazed straight and sightlessly at him, Spurrier opened the
table drawer and took from it a heavy calibered automatic pistol. It
was a deadly looking thing and it needed no cocking; only the silent
slipping forward of a safety catch. In this experiment Spurrier must
not startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfy
himself that his sight was genuinely dead.
"I thought," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchingly
studied the other face through narrowed lids, "that when sight went,
the enjoyment of tobacco went with it." As he spoke he raised and
leveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into the
staring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the baleful
stamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly as
a gargoyle of hatred.
If the man were by any possibility shamming it would take cold nerve
to sit there without any hint of confession as this unwarned
demonstration was made against him--a demonstration that seemed
genuine and murderous. For an instant Spurrier fancied that he heard
the breath rasp in the other's throat, but that, he realized, must
have been fancy. The face itself altered no line of expression,
flickered no eyelid. It remained as it had been, stolid and blank, so
that the man with the pistol felt ashamed of his suspicion.
But Spurrier rose and leaned across the table slowly advancing the
muzzle until it almost touched the bridge of the nose, just between
the eyes he was so severely testing. Still no hint of realization came
from the threatened guest. Then the voice of the blind man sounded
phlegmatically:
"That's what folks say erbout terbaccy an' blind men--but, by
crickety, hit _ain't so_."
John Spurrier withdrew his pistol and put it back in the drawer.
"I guess," he said to himself, "he didn't read my letters."