For a while they stood there together in the narrow road to whose
edges the dense greenery came down massed and dewy. Their breath was
quick with the excitement of that moment when the hills and the rocks
that upheld them seemed to them palpitant and gloriously shaken. Then
they heard the lumbering of wheels, and with one impulse that needed
no expression in words they turned through a gorge which ran at right
angles into the stillness of the woods--and away from interruption.
Spurrier had, it seemed to him, stepped through a curtain in life and
found beyond it a door of which he had not known. It seemed natural
that he and Glory should be going hand in hand into that place of
dreams like children at play and hearing joyous voices that were mute
and nonexistent in the world of commonplace and fact.
He did not even pause to reflect that this was a continuation of the
same ravine in which an assassin's bullet had once so narrowly missed
him. Yesterday, too, was forgotten.
Just now he was young in his heart again, and had love for his
talisman. Actuality had been dethroned by some dream wizardry and left
him free of obligation to reason. Then he heard Glory's voice
low-pitched and a little frightened.
"It kain't--can't--be true. It's just a dream!"
A flash of sanity, like the shock of a cold plunge, brought the
thought that, from her lips, had sounded a warning. This was the
moment, if ever, to draw back and take counsel of common sense. Now it
would be easier than later to abase himself and confess that in this
midsummer's madness was no substance or color of reality--that he
stood unalterably pledged to her renunciation.
But the earthquake does not still itself at the height of its tremor
and the cyclone does not stop dead with its momentum unspent. Years of
calculated and nerve-trying self-command were exacting their toll in
the satisfaction of outbreak. Spurrier's emotional self was in
volcanic eruption, the more molten and lava-hot for the prolonged
dormancy of a sealed crater.
He caught the girl again and pressed her so close that the commotion
of her heart came throbbing against him through the yielding softness
of her breast; and the agitation of her breath on his face was a
little tempest of acquiescent sweetness.
"Doesn't it seem real, now?" he challenged as he released her enough
to let her breathe, yet held her imprisoned, and she nodded,
radiant-eyed, and answered in a voice half bewildered and more than
half burdened with self-reproach.
"I didn't even hang back," she made confession. "I just walked right
into your arms the minute you held them out. I didn't seem able to
help myself."
Suddenly her eyes, impenitent once more, danced with mischief and her
smile broke like a sun flash over her face.
"If I'd had the power of witchcraft, I'd have put the spell on you,
Jack," she declared. "I had to make you love me. I just _had_ to do
it."
"I rather think you had--that power, dear."
He laughed contentedly as a man may who shifts all responsibility for
an indiscretion to a force stronger than his own volition.
"You see," she went on as if seeking to make illogic seem logical.
"From the first--I couldn't think of you except with storm thoughts. I
couldn't keep my heart quiet, when I was with you."
"At first," he reminded her, "you wanted to kill me. I heard you
confiding to Rover."
Her eyes grew seriously deep and undefensive in their frankness. It
was the candor of a woman's pride in conquest.
"I'm not sure yet," she said almost fiercely, "that I wouldn't almost
rather kill you than--lose you to any other girl."
Vaguely and as yet remotely, Spurrier's consciousness was pricked with
a forecast of reality's veto, but the present spoke in passion and the
future whispered weakly in platitudes.
"You won't lose me," he protested. "I'm yours."
"And yet," went on Glory, "you seemed a long way off. You were the man
who did big things in the world outside. You were--always cool
and--calculating."
"Glory," his words came with the rush of impetuosity for already the
whispers of warning were gaining in volume, and impulse was struggling
for its new freedom, "the man you've seen to-day is one I haven't
known myself before. Chilled calculation and self-repression have been
the articles of my creed. I've been crusted with those obsessions
like a ship's hull with barnacles. Did you know that when vessels pass
through the Panama Canal, the barnacles drop off?"
She shook her head.
"No," she said, and her lips twisted into something like wistfulness
as she dropped unconsciously into vernacular. "There's a lavish of
things I don't know. You've got to learn 'em all to me--I mean teach
them to me."
"Well," he went on slowly, "steamers that pass through the fresh
water, from salt to salt, automatically cleanse their plates. You've
been fresh water to me, Glory."
"Jack," she declared with tempestuous anxiety, "you say I've changed
you. I'll try to change myself, too, all the ways I can--all the ways
you want."
"I don't want you changed," he objected. "If you were changed, it
wouldn't be you."
"Maybe," she persisted, "you'd like me better if I were taller or had
black eyes."
"I wonder now," he teased with the whimsey of the moment, "what you
would look like with black eyes? I can't imagine it. Will you do that
for me?"
"Come to our house to-night," she irrelevantly commanded. "Won't
you?"
"Yes," he said, "I'd come to-night if I had to swim the Hellespont."
But when he had left her an hour later at the crossroads and started
back, his eyes fell on the ugly shapes of the three rattlesnakes, over
which he had forgotten to keep watch and which she had not even seen,
and yesterday came back with the impact of undisguised realization.
Yesterday and to-morrow stood out again in their own solid
proportions and to-day stood like a slender wisp of heart's desire
shouldered between uncompromising giants of fact.
Spurrier could no longer deny that his personal world centered about
Glory; that away from her would be only the unspeakable bleakness of
lonely heart hunger.
But it was equally certain that he could not abandon everything upon
which he had underpinned his future, and in that structure was no
niche which she could occupy.
Sitting alone in his house with a chill ache at his heart and facing a
dilemma that seemed without solution, he knew for once the tortures of
terror. For once he could not face the future intrepidly.
He had recognized when the army had stigmatized him and cast him out,
that only by iron force and aggression could he break his way through
to success. He was enlisted in a warfare captained by financiers of
major caliber and committed to a struggle out of which victory would
bring him not only wealth, but a place of his own among such
financiers--a place which Glory could not share.
He and his principals alike were fighting for the prizes of the
looting victor in a battle without chivalry, and whether he won or was
crushed by American Oil and Gas, the native landholder must be ground
and bruised between the impact of clashing forces. In the trail of his
victory, no less than theirs, would be human wreckage.
Sitting before his dead hearth while the afternoon shadows slanted and
lengthened, Spurrier wondered what agonies had wracked the heart of
Napoleon when he was called upon to choose between Josephine and a
dynasty. For even in his travail the egoist thought of himself and his
ambitions in Napoleonic terms.
As he sat there alone with silences about his lonely cabin that seemed
speaking in still voices of vastness, the poignant personality of his
thoughts brought him, by the strange anomaly of life, to realizations
that were not merely personal.
Glory had won his heart and it was as though in doing so she had also
made his feelings quicken for her people: these people from whose
poverty, hospitality and kindness had been poured out to him: these
people who had taken him at first with reserve and then accepted him
with faith.
He had eaten their bread and salt. He had drunk their illicit whiskey,
given to him with no fear that he would betray them even in the
lawlessness which to them seemed honorable and fair.
And yet his purpose here, was the single one of enabling a certain
group of money-grabbing financiers to triumph over another group at
the cost of the mountaineer land-holders. It was not because, if he
succeeded, there would not be enough of legitimate profit to enrich
all, but because in a campaign of secrecy he could make a confidant of
no one. If the enterprise were carried through at all he must have
secured, for principals who would abate nothing and give back nothing,
the necessary property bought on the basis of barren farming land.
Were it his own endeavor he could first plunder and develop and then
make restitution, but acting as an agent he could no more do that
than the soldier who has unconditionally surrendered, can subsequently
demand terms.
The man who had been a plunger at gaming table and race track, who had
succeeded as an imitator of schemes that attracted major capital, was
of necessity one of imagination. Perhaps had life dealt him different
cards, Spurrier would have been a novelist or even a poet, for that
imagination which he had put into heavy harness was also capable of
flights into phantasy and endowed with something almost mystic.
Now under the stress of this conflict in his mind, as he sat before
his hearth in shadows that were vague of light and shape, that
unaccustomed surrender to imagination possessed him, peopling the
dimness with shapes that seemed actual.
His eye fell upon the empty three-legged stool that stood on the
opposite side of the hearth, and as though he were looking at one of
those motion picture effects which show, in double negative one
character confronting his dual and separate self, he seemed to see a
figure sitting there and regarding him out of contemptuous eyes.
It was the figure of a very young man clad in the tunic of a
graduating West Point cadet and it was a figure that bore itself with
the prideful erectness of one who regards his right to wear his
uniform as a privilege of knighthood. For Spurrier was fancying
himself confronted by the man he had been in those days of eager
forward-looking, and of almost religious resolve to make of himself a
soldier in the best meaning of the word. Then as his eyes closed for a
moment under the vividness of the fancy, the figure dissolved into its
surroundings of shadow and near the stool with folded arms and a
bitterer scorn stood a lieutenant in khaki.
"So this is what you have come to be," said the imaginary Spurrier
blightingly to the actual Spurrier. "A looter and brigand no better
than the false _amigos_ that I fought over there. I was a gentleman
and you are a cad!"
Had the man been dreaming in sleep instead of wakefulness, his vision
could hardly have worn habiliments of greater actuality, and he found
himself retorting in hot defensiveness.
"Whatever I am you made me. It was you who was disgraced. It is
because I was once you that I am now I. You left me no choice but to
fight with the weapons that came to hand, and those weapons were
predatory.... If I have deliberately hardened myself it is only as
soldiers of other days put on coats of mail--because soft flesh could
not survive the mace and broadsword."
"And when you win your prizes, if you ever win them," the accusing
vision appeared to retort, "you will have paid for them by spending
all that was honorable in yourself; all that was generous and
soldierly. When you were I, you led a charge across rice paddies
without cover and under a withering fire. For that you were mentioned
in dispatches and you had a paragraph in the Army and Navy Journal.
Have you ever won a prize since then, that meant as much to you?"
John Spurrier came to his feet, with a groan in his throat. His
temples were moist and marked with a tracery of outstanding veins and
his hands were clenched.
"Good God!" he exclaimed aloud. "Give me back the name and the uniform
I had then, and see how gladly I'll tell these new masters to go to
hell!"
Startled at the sound of his own voice arguing with a fantasy as with
a fact, the man sank back again into his chair and covered his face
with his spread hands. But shutting out sight did not serve to shut
out the images of his fancy.
He saw himself hired out to "practical" overlords and sent to prey on
friends, then he rose and stood confronting the empty stool where the
dream-accuser in uniform had stood and once more he spoke aloud. As he
did so it seemed that the figure returned and stood waiting, stern and
noncommittal, while he addressed it.
"Give me the success I need, and the independence it carries, and I'll
spend my life exonerating my name. I'll go back to the islands and
live among the natives till I find a man who will tell the truth. I'll
move heaven and earth--but that takes money. I've always stood, in
this business, with wealth just beyond my grasp--always promised,
never realized. Let me realize it and be equipped to fight for
vindication. These men I serve have the prizes to dispense, but I am
bound hand and foot to them. They take their pay in advance. Once
victorious I can break with them."
"And these people who have befriended you," questioned the mentor
voice, "what of them?"
"I love them. They are her people. I shall seem to plunder them, but
if my plans succeed I shall be in a position to make terms--and my
terms shall be theirs. Until I succeed I must seem false to them. God
knows I'm paying for that too. I love Glory!"
Suddenly Spurrier wiped a hand across a clammy forehead and stood
looking about his room, empty save for himself. He seemed a man who
had been through a delirium. But he reached no conclusion, and when
twilight found him tramping toward the Cappeze house it was with a
heart that beat with anticipation--while it sought refuge in postponed
decision.
When Glory received him in the lamp-lighted room he halted in
amazement, for the girl who stood there with a mischievous smile on
her lips no longer looked at him out of eyes violet-blue, but black as
liquid jet.
"How did you do that?" he demanded in a voice blank with astonishment.
"It's a sheer impossibility!"
"Maybe it's witchcraft, Jack," she mocked him.
"Can you change them back?" he asked a little anxiously, and she shook
her head.
"No, but they'll change of themselves in a day or two."
"I reckon," commented Dyke Cappeze, looking up from his book by the
table, "I oughtn't to give away feminine secrets, but it's a right
simple matter, after all. She just put some Jimson-weed juice in her
eyes and the trick was done."
"Jimson weed," echoed the visitor, and the elder nodded.
"If you happen to remember your botany, you'll recall that its longer
name is _Datura stramonium_--and it's a strong mydriatic. It swells
the pupil and obliterates the iris."
It was walking homeward with a low moon overhead that evening that
Spurrier's thoughts found time to wrestle with other problems than
those affecting himself and Glory. The incident of the black eyes had
at first interested him only because they were _her_ eyes, but now he
thought also of the episode of the rattlesnakes and the letter from
Major Withers.
In his first analysis of what that letter might mean to him he had
decided that his man would be recognizable by his mismated eyes. He
had recalled Sim Colby's black ones while thinking of unusual eyes in
general and had, in passing, set him down as one who stood alibied.
Now, in the light of this Jimson-weed discovery, those black eyes took
on a new interest. Presumably it was a trick commonly known in these
hills. _If_ Colby's eyes had been so altered--and they had seemed
unnatural in their tense blackness--it must have been with a
deliberate and sufficient motive. Sim Colby was not making his pupils
smart and sting as a matter of vanity. A man resorting to disguises
seeks first to change the most salient notes of his appearance.
Spurrier recalled, with the force of added importance, the surprised
look on Sam Mosebury's face when that genial murderer, upon his
arrival, had stifled some impulse of utterance.
Suspicion of Colby was perhaps far-fetched, but it took a powerful
hold on Spurrier, and one from which he could not free himself. At all
events, he must see this Sim Colby when Colby did not know he was
coming--and look at his eyes again.
So he made a second trip across the hills to the head of Little
Quicksand, and for the sake of safeguarding against any warning going
ahead of him, he spoke to no one of his intention.
This time he went armed with an automatic pistol and a very grim
purpose. When they met--if the mountaineer's eyes were no longer
black--he would probably need both.
But once again the opportunity hound encountered disappointment. He
found a chimney with no smoke issuing from it and a door barred. The
horse had been taken out of the stable and from many evidences about
the untenanted place he judged that the man who lived alone there had
been absent for several days.
To make inquiries would be to proclaim his interest and prejudice his
future chances of success, so he slipped back again as surreptitiously
as he had come, and the determination which he had keyed to the
concert pitch of climax had to be laid by.
At home again he found that the love which he could neither accept nor
conquer was demoralizing his moral and mental equipoise. He could no
longer fix and hold his attention on the problems of his work. His
spirit was in equinox.
The only solution was to go to Glory and tell her the truth, for if he
let matters run uncontrolled their momentum would become unmanageable.
It was the simple matter of choosing failure with her or success
without her, and he had at last reached his decision. It remained only
to tell her so.
It had pleased John Spurrier to find a house upon an isolated site
from which he could work unobserved, while he maintained his careful
semblance of idleness. His nearest neighbor was a mile away as the
crow flew, and Dyke Cappeze almost two miles. Even the deep-rutted
highroad, itself, lay beyond a gorge which native parlance called a
"master shut-in."
Now that remoteness pleased his enemies as well. Former efforts toward
his undoing had been balked by accidents. One must be made that could
have no chance to fail and an isolated setting made for success.
Matters that required deft handling could be conducted by daylight
instead of under a tricky moon. It was a good spot for a "rat-killing"
and Spurrier was to be the rat.
It was well before sunset on a Thursday afternoon that rifle-armed
men, holding to the concealment of the "laurel hells," began
approaching the high place above and behind Spurrier's house. They
came from varying directions and one by one. No one had seen any
gathering, for the plans had been made elsewhere and the details of
liaison perfected in advance. Now they trickled noiselessly into their
designated posts and slowly drew inward toward the common center of
the house itself.
Spurrier who rode in at mid-afternoon from some neighborhood mission
commented with pleasure upon the cheery "Bob Whites" of the quail
whistling back in the timber.
They were Glory's birds, and this winter he would know better than to
shoot them!
But they were not Glory's birds. They were not birds at all, and those
pipings came from human throats, establishing touch as the murder
squad advanced upon him to kill him.
The man opened a package which had come by mail and drew from its
wrappings the portrait of a girl in evening dress with a rope of
pearls at her throat. Its silver frame was a counterpart of the one
which had stood on Martin Harrison's desk that night when Spurrier had
lifted it and Vivien's father had so meaningly said: "Make good in
this and _all_ your ambitions can be fulfilled."
Now Spurrier set the framed picture on the table at the center of the
room and it seemed to look out from that point of vantage with the
amused indulgence of well-bred condescension upon the Spartan
simplicity of his house--the rough table and hickory-withed chairs,
the cot spread with its gray army blanket.
The man gave back to the pictured glance as little fire of eagerness
as was given out from it.
Just now Vivien seemed to him the deity and personification of a creed
that was growing hateful, yet one to which he stood still bound. He
was like the priest whose vows are irrevocable but whose faith in his
dogma has died, and to himself he murmured ironically, "'The idols are
broke in the temple of Baal'--and yet I've got to go on bending the
knee to the debris!"
But when he turned on his heel and looked through the door his face
brightened, for there, coming over the short-cut between Aunt Erie
Toppit's and her own home, was Glory, carrying a basket over which was
tied a bit of jute sacking.
She came on lightly and halted outside his threshold.
"I'm not comin' visitin' you, Mr. John Spurrier," she announced
gravely despite the twinkle in her eyes. "I'm bent on a more seemly
matter, but I'm crossin' your property an' I hope you'll forgive the
trespass."
"Since it's you," he acceded in the same mock seriousness, "I'll grant
you the right of way. You paid the toll when you let me have a glimpse
of you."
"And this is your house," she went on musingly. "And I've never seen
inside its door. It seems strange, somehow, doesn't it?"
Spurrier laughed. "Now that you're here," he suggested, "you might as
well hold an inspection. It's daylight and we can dispense with a
chaperon for ten minutes."
She nodded and laughed too. "I guess the granny-folk would go tongue
wagging if they found it out. Anyhow, I'm going to peek in for just a
minute."
She stepped lightly up to the threshold and looked inside, and the
slanting shaft from the window fell full on the new photograph of
Vivien Martin, so that it stood out in the dim interior emphasized by
the flash of its silver frame.
Glory went over and studied the face with a somewhat cryptic
expression, but she made no comment and at the door she announced:
"I'll be goin' on. You can have three guesses what I've got in this
basket."
But Spurrier, catching sight of a bronze tail-quill glinting between
the bars of the container, spoke with prompt certainty.
"One guess will be enough. It's one of those carrier pigeons that
Uncle Jimmy Litchfield gave you."
"You peeped before you guessed," she accused. "I'm going to leave it
with Aunt Erie and let her take it to Carnettsville with her to-morrow
and set it free."
"Compare your watches," advised the man, "and get her to note the time
when she opens the basket. Then you can time the flight."
Glory shook her head and laughed. "I don't own any watch," she
reminded him. "And even if I did I misdoubt if Aunt Erie would have
anything to compare it with--unless she carried her alarm clock along
with her."
"Wait a minute," admonished the man, as he loosened the strap of his
wrist watch, "I've two as it happens--and a clock besides. You keep
this one and give Aunt Erie my other. I'll get it for you and set it
so that they'll be together to the second."
He wheeled then and went into the room at the back and for a few
minutes, bachelor-like he rummaged and searched for the time-piece
upon which he had supposed he could lay his fingers in the dark.
Yet Spurrier's thought was not wholly and singly upon the adventure of
timing the flight of a carrier pigeon. In it there lurked a sense of
half-guilty uneasiness, which would have been lighter had Glory asked
some question when she gazed on the picture which sat in a seeming
place of honor at the center of his room. Her silence on the subject
had seemed casual and unimportant, yet his intuition told him that had
it been genuinely so, she would have demanded with child-like interest
to be told who the woman might be with the high tilted chin and the
rope of pearls on her throat. The taciturnity had sprung, he fancied,
less from indifference than from a fear of questioning, and when he
came quietly to the door, he stood there for a moment, then drew back
where he would not be so plainly visible.
For Glory had returned to the table and stood with her eyes riveted on
the framed portrait. Unconscious of being observed her face was no
longer guarded of betrayal, and in the swift expressiveness of her
delicate features the man read a gamut and vortex of emotion as
eloquent as words. The jealousy which her pride sought to veto, the
doubt which her faith strove to deny, the realization of her own
self-confessed inferiority in parallel with this woman's aristocratic
poise and cynical smile, flitted in succession across the face of the
mountain girl and declared themselves in her eyes.
For an instant the small hands clenched and the lips stirred and the
pupils blazed with hot fires, so that the man could almost read the
words that she shaped without sound: "He's mine--he ain't your'n--an'
I ain't goin' ter give him up ter ye!"
Spurrier remembered how she had declared she would almost rather see
him die than surrender him to another girl.
Then out of the face the passion faded and the deep eyes widened to a
suffering like that of despair. The sweetly curved lips drooped in an
ineffable wistfulness and the smooth throat worked spasmodically,
while the hands went up and covered the face.
Spurrier drew back into the room into which Glory could not see, and
then in warning of his coming spoke aloud in a matter-of-fact voice.
"I've found it," he declared. "It was hiding out from me--that
watch."
When, after that preface, he came back, Glory was standing again in
the doorway and as she turned, she presented a face from which had
been banished the storm of her recent agitation.
He handed her the watch which she took with a steady hand, and a brief
but cheery, "Farewell."
As she started away Spurrier braced himself with a strong effort and
inquired: "Glory, didn't you have any question to ask me--about the
girl--in the frame?"
She halted in the path and stood looking down. Her lowered lids hid
her eyes, but he thought her cheeks paled a shade. Then she shook her
head.
"Not unless it's something--you want to tell--without my asking," she
announced steadfastly.
For over a week he had struggled to bring himself to his confession
and had failed. Now a sudden impulse assured him that it would never
be easier; that every delay would make it harder and blacken him with
a heavier seeming of treason. Vivien's portrait served as a fortuitous
cue, and he must avail himself of it.
This was the logical time and place, when silence would be only an
unuttered lie and when procrastination would strip him of even his
residue of self-respect. To wait for an easy occasion was to hope for
the impossible and to act with as craven a spirit as to falter when
the bugle sounded a charge.
Yet he remained so long silent that Glory, looking up and reading the
hard-wrung misery on his face and the stiff movement of the lips that
made nothing of their efforts, knew, in advance, the tenor of the
unspoken message.
She closed her eyes as if to shut out some sudden glare too painful
to be borne, and then in a quietly courageous voice she helped him
out.
"You _do_ want to tell me, Jack. You want to take back--what you
said--over there--don't you?"
Spurrier moistened his lips, with his tongue. "God knows," he burst
out vehemently, "I don't want to take back one syllable of what I
said--about loving you."
"What is it, then?"
"Come inside, please," he pleaded. "I'll try to explain."
He went stumblingly ahead of her and set a chair beside the table and
then he leaned toward her and sought for words.
"I love you, Glory," he fervently declared. "I love you as I didn't
suppose I could love any one. To me you are music and starlight--but I
guess I'm almost engaged to her." He jerked his head rebelliously
toward the portrait.
Glory was numb except for a dull, very present ache that started in
her heart and filled her to her finger tips, and she made no answer.
"Her father," Spurrier forced himself on, "is a great financier. I'm
his man. I'm a little cog in a big machine. It's been practically
understood that I was to become his son-in-law--his successor. I'm too
deep in, to pull out. It's like a soldier in the thick of a campaign.
I've got to go through."
That seemed an easier and kinder thing to say than that she herself
was not qualified for full admittance into the world of his larger
life.
"You knew this--the other day--as well as now," she reminded him,
speaking in a stunned voice, yet without anger.
"So help me God, Glory--I had forgotten--everything but--you."
"And now," she half whispered in a dulled monotone, "you remember all
the rest."
She sat there with the basket on the puncheon floor at her feet, and
her fingers twisted themselves tautly together. Her lips, parted and
drooping, gave her delicate face a stamp of dumb suffering, and
Spurrier's arms ached to go comfortingly around her, but he held
himself rigid while the silence lengthened. The old clock on the
mantel ticked clamorously and outside the calls of the bobwhites
seemed to grow louder and nearer until, half-consciously, Spurrier
noted their insistence.
Then faintly, Glory said: "You didn't make me any promise. If you
had--I'd give it back to you."
She rose unsteadily and stood gathering her strength, and Spurrier,
struggling against the impulse which assailed him like a madness to
throw down the whole structure of his past and designed future and
sweep her into his arms, stood with a metal-like rigidity of posture.
Whatever his ultimate decision might be, he kept telling himself, no
decision reached by surrender to such tidal emotion at a moment of
equinox could be trusted. Glory herself would not trust it long.
So while the room remained voiceless and the minds of the man and the
girl were rocking in the swirl of their feelings, the physical senses
themselves seemed, instead of inert, preternaturally keen--and
something came to Spurrier's ears which forced its way to his
attention through the barrier of his abstraction.
Never had the calls of the quail been so frequent and incessant
before, but this sound was different, as though some one in the nearby
tangle had stumbled and in the effort to catch himself had caught and
shaken the leafage.
So the man went to the door and stood looking out.
For a moment he remained there framed and exposed as if painted upon a
target, and--so close that they seemed to come together--two rifles
spoke, and two bullets came whining into the house. One imbedded
itself with a soggy thud in the squared logs of the rear wall but one,
more viciously directed by the chances of its course, struck full in
the center of the glass that covered the pictured face of Vivien
Harrison and sent the portrait clattering and shattered to the floor.
In an instant Spurrier had leaped back, once more miraculously saved,
and slammed the door, but while he was dropping the stanch bar into
its sockets, a crash of glass and fresh roars from another direction
told him that he was also being fired upon through the window. That
meant that the house was surrounded.
"Who are they, Jack?" gasped the girl, shocked by that unwarned
fusillade into momentary forgetfulness of everything, except that her
lover was beset by enemies, and the man who was reaching for his
rifle, and whose eyes had hardened into points of flint, shook his
head.
"Whoever they are," he answered, "they want me--only me--but it would
be death for you to go out through the door."
He drew her to a shadowed corner out of line with both door and
window, and seized her passionately in his arms.
"If we--can't have each other----" he declared tensely, "I don't want
life. You said you'd almost rather see me killed than lose me to
another woman. Now, listen!"
Holding her close to his breast, he drew a deep breath and his
narrowed eyes softened into something like contentment.
"If you tried to go out first, you'd die before they recognized you.
They think I'm alone here and they'll shoot at the first movement. But
if _I_ go out first and fight as long as I can then they'll be
satisfied and the way will be clear for you."
She threw back her head and her hysterical laugh was scornful.
"Clear for me after _you're_ dead!" she exclaimed. "Hev ye got two
guns? We'll both go out alive or else neither one of us."
Then suddenly she drew away from him, and he saw her hurriedly
scribbling on a scrap of paper. Outside it was quiet again.
Glory folded the small sheet and took the pigeon from its basket and
then, for the first time, Spurrier, who had forgotten the bird,
divined her intent.
He was busying himself with laying out cartridges, and preparing for a
siege, and when he looked up again she stood with the bird against her
cheek, just as she had held the dead quail on that first day.
But before he could interfere she had drawn near the window and he saw
that to reach the broken pane and liberate the pigeon she must, for a
moment, stand exposed.
He leaped for her with a shout of warning, but she had straightened
and thrust the bird out, and then to the accompaniment of a horrible
uproar of musketry that drowned his own outcry he saw her fall back.
Spurrier was instantly on his knees lifting the drooping head, and as
her lids flickered down she whispered with a pallid smile:
"The bird's free. He'll carry word home--if ye kin jest hold 'em back
fer a spell and----"