During the sitting of the legislature John Spurrier was a sporadic
onlooker, and his agents were as vigilant as sentinels in a danger
zone. The last day of the term drew to a wintry sunset, and when the
clock registered midnight the body would stand automatically adjourned
until gavel fall two years hence.
Spurrier, outwardly a picture of serenity, but inwardly tensed for the
final issue, sat in the visitors' gallery of the Senate chamber. The
charter upon which all his hopes hung as upon a fulcrum was all but in
his grasp. Seemingly the enemy slept on. Presumably in those last
tired hours the authorizing bill would slip through to passage with
the frictionless ease of well-oiled bearings.
The needed men had been won over. Carping critics might prate, here
and there, of ugly means that savored of bribery, but that was
academic. The promise of forth-coming victory remained. Methods may be
questionable. Results are not, and Spurrier was interested in
results.
A. O. and G. had corrupted and suborned certain public servants. He
had discovered their practice and played their own cards to their
undoing. His ostensible clients were perhaps little cleaner-handed
than their adversaries, but certainly, those other clients who did
not even know themselves to be represented stood with no stain on
their claims.
Those native men and women had not asked him to safeguard them, and
had they been able to see what he was doing they would have guessed
only that, after winning their faith, he was bent on swindling them.
But Spurrier knew not only the seeming facts but those which lay
beneath and he fought with a definite sense of stewardship.
First the _coup_ must succeed, since that success was the foundation
of all the rest, and the moment was at hand.
For this he had slaved, faced dangers and deprived himself of the
contentment of home and the society of his wife. Now it was about to
end in victory.
The enemy had been caught napping, and the victory would be his.
Certainly he had been as fair as the foe. What now remained was a
perfunctory confirmation by the Senate, and in these final wearied
hours it would slip through easily in the general wind-up of
uncontested affairs.
Spurrier had not slept for two days--or had slept little. When
this ended he would go to his bed and lie there in sunken hours of
restoration the clock around--and after that back to Glory. Already
he carried in his pocket the brief message which he meant to put
upon the wires to Harrison, at the moment of midnight and success.
Characteristically it read: "Complete victory. Spurrier."
Now as the clerk droned through the mass of unfinished matters that
burdened the schedule, the clock stood at ten in the evening, and a
spirit of disordered peevishness proclaimed itself in the chamber.
Seats were vacated. Voices rose in unparliamentary clamor.
From the desk where a mountain senator sat in touseled disarray, a
flask was drawn and tipped with scant regard to senatorial dignity.
Then the chairman of the committee which had the steering of
Spurrier's affairs arose and handed a paper to the clerk.
Spurrier himself maintained the same unemotional cast of countenance
with which, years before, he had watched a horse in the stretch
battling for more than he could afford to lose, but Wharton, who sat
at his side, chewed nervously on an unlighted cigar. Sleepy reporters
yawned at the press tables as the clerk droned out his sing-song, "An
act entitled an act conferring charter rights upon the Hemlock Pipe
Line Company of Kentucky."
The reading of the measure seemed devoid of interest or attention. It
went forward in confusion, yet when it was ended the mountain man who
had taken the swig out of his flask, came slowly to his feet.
"Mr. President of the Senate," he drawled, "I want to address a few
incongruvial remarks to the senators in regards to this here proposed
measure."
With a sudden sense of premonition Spurrier found himself sitting
electrically upright.
That man was Senator Chew who had sat in council with him and advised
him; his right hand in action and his fox-brain in planning, yet now,
with every moment invaluable he was burning up time!
He was a pygmy among small men, and as he drooled on he seemed to urge
no pertinent objection. Yet before he had been five minutes on his
feet his intent was clear and his success assured.
Out of the hands of their recognized lieutenants A. O. and G. had
taken the matter of serving them. Into the hands of this obscure and
loutish Solon who was ostensibly pledged to their enemies, they had
thrust their commission, and now with the clock creeping forward
toward adjournment, he meant to talk the charter measure to death by
holding the floor until the opportunity for a vote had elapsed.
Tediously and inanely he meandered along, and no one knew what he was
talking about. In extravagant metaphor and florid simile he indulged
himself--and the clock worked industriously, an ally not to be unduly
hurried.
"Gentlemen of the Senate--" he drooled, "most of us have been raised
in a land that knows little of the primitive features that make up
life with us, and though it may not at first seem germane or
pertinent, I want you to go with me as your guide, while I try to make
you see the life of those steep counties that are affected by the
measure before you; counties that lie behind the barriers and sleep
the ancient sleep of the forgotten."
Men yawned while his tediousness spun itself into a tawdry flow of
slow words, but the Honorable Mr. Chew talked on.
"Many the day, as a lad, have I lain by a rushing brook," he
declaimed, "where the water gushes with the sparkle of sunlit crystal
and watched the deer come down on gingerly lifted feet to drink his
fill. Now I reckon mighty few of you gentlemen have seen a deer come
down to drink----"
The minute hand of the clock, in comparison with this windy
deliberation seemed to be racing between the dial characters.
"In God's name," exclaimed Spurrier, "isn't there any way to shut that
fool up? He's ruining us. Get some of our leaders up here, Wharton.
We've got to stop him."
"How?" demanded Wharton with a fallen jaw.
"I don't give a damn how! Kill him--buy him. Anything!"
"It's too late," responded Wharton grimly. "He's already bought. We've
walked into their trap. We might as well go home."
Spurrier sent for his whip, but he had come to the end of his
resourcefulness and shook a dejected head.
"If you want to shoot him down as he stands there," said the gentleman
testily, "I dare say it would stop him short. I know no other way. He
is having resort to the senatorial privilege of filibuster. We have
let them slip up on us. A. O. and G. has outbid you, that's all."
"But how in God's name did they get wise?"
The other laughed grimly. "Wise?" he snorted. "My guess is that
they've been wise all the time and that hayseed Iscariot has been
playing us along for suckers."
Held by a deadly fascination, Spurrier sank back into his seat. The
clock over the speaker's desk traveled once, almost twice around
the dial, and yet that nasal voice wandered on in an endless
stream of grotesque bombast--talking the charter to a slow death by
strangulation.
Now, reflected Spurrier bitterly, his connection with the enterprise
must seem to any eye that viewed it that only of Harrison's jackal and
lobbyist, who had signally failed in his attempt to raid A. O. and G.
To the mountain folk themselves, if the facts ever percolated into the
hills, his seeming would be far from heroic and with nothing tangible
accomplished, it would do no good to tell them that he had made his
fight with their interests at heart. Such a claim would only stamp him
in the face of contrary evidence as taking a coward's refuge in lies.
Then when it seemed to him that he could no longer restrain himself,
Spurrier heard the gavel fall. It was a light sound, but it crashed on
his brain with thunders of destruction.
"Gentlemen," declared the presiding officer, "The Senate stands
adjourned, _sine die_."
Had John Spurrier gone to see the "witch woman" when Mosebury advised
it, his course from that point on would have brought him to a
different ending.
In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it with
consecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shot
through with disconnected scraps of recollection. When events began to
marshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotel
room were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he was
sitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Back
of that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.
At last he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and that picture
of disheveled wildness startled him and brought him back to
realization.
Then self-contempt swept in on him. He had been called a man of iron
nerve; a plunger who never turned a hair under reversals of
fortune--and now he stood looking through the glass at a broken
gambler with frenzied eyes. It was such a face as one might see in the
circle before the Casino at Monte Carlo--the place of suicides.
The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked last
night with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To be
outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart
from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the
realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating
wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who
sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater
caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to
this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and
sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically,
they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns--one
rustic and the other urban.
He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of rich
prospects, but in the face of defeat a man cannot change his colors.
Had he been able to undertake this fight as his own man and choose his
own methods--changing them as he grew in stature--there might have
been a man's zest in the game.
Now, less than ever, could he speak open truth to these simple friends
who had trusted him. Now he must fight out a damaged campaign to the
end along the lines to which he stood committed, and until the end
there was nothing to say.
Perhaps if he could avert total ruin, he might yet have opportunity to
reclaim the confidence of these Esaus who had traded for a mess of
pottage. Certainly they had nothing to hope for from the myrmidons of
Trabue.
John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. He
compelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of a
smile.
Not only had every resource he could muster gone into the scrapped
enterprise, leaving him worse than bankrupt, but through him Martin
Harrison had been led into the sinking of a fortune.
Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the money
loss, than the thought of the triumphant smile on Trabue's thin lips,
but it was quite in the cards that, with his contempt for failure, he
would wash his hands of Spurrier.
That, of course, spelled ruin. The exhibition skater had gone through
the thin ice.
Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. He
had seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debts
he could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent on
success. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employee
shattered beyond hope of recovery.
But when Spurrier went down to the hotel dining room at breakfast
time, a cold bath and a superhuman exertion of will power had
transformed him. His bearing was a nice blending of the debonair and
the dignified.
To no eye of observation was there any trace of collapse or reversal.
He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.
At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom
Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of
the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.
Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a scene
of recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than one
occasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened into
truculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swept
tentatively toward his hip.
But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it was
no part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim,
by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of the
politician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled,
and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only by
the man who knew its cause.
Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he had
expected to say, yet in it went no whine of despair:
Have suffered a temporary reversal.
Those were the words that the capitalist read when the message, after
being decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.
Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thought
truculently of that nearby office in which Trabue was also receiving
telegraphic information, and he writhed in the wormwood of chagrin.
The curtness of his response scorched the wires:
Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.
So John Spurrier packed his bag and caught the first train for the
mountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this final
ordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could brace
himself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.
As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and something
about his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in all
the world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veins
rose an intoxicating tumult like that of wine.
Back of that emotional wave though lurked a misery of self-reproach.
Glory had made the magic of his brief happiness, but there was a
background, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. He
had learned to know these people and to revise his first, false views
of them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak and
hickory.
First he had striven to plunder them, then sought to lift the yoke of
poverty from their long-bowed shoulders. In both efforts he had
failed.
But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the black
shadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters and
made final victory only the brighter for its contrast with lurid
misfortune?
He had been the plunger who seemed strongest when he was weakest, and
these enduring hills spoke their message of steadfastness to him as he
stood surrounded by their lofty crests of spruce and pine.
Then he had reached the door and flung it open and Glory was in his
arms, but unaccountably she had burst into a tempest of tears.
Before he had had time to speak of the necessity that called him East
she was telling of the visit of Martin Harrison and his indignant
departure.
Despite his all-consuming absorption of a moment before, Spurrier drew
away, chilled by that announcement, and Glory read in his eyes a
momentary agony of apprehension.
"In God's name," he demanded in a numbed voice, "why didn't you write
me about that?"
"He said," responded the wife simply, "that _he_ would write to you at
Frankfort. I thought you knew."
"But I should have thought you'd have spoken of his coming and
going--like that."
Her head came up with a brief little flash of hurt pride.
"You hadn't ever told him--about me," she said, though without
accusation. "I didn't want to talk to you about it until you were
ready to suggest it. It might have seemed--disloyal."
Spurrier again braced his shoulders. After a moment he took her in his
arms.
"Glory, my sweetheart, I've been playing a game for big stakes. I've
had to do some things I didn't relish. I've got to do another now. I'm
summoned to Harrison's office in New York, at once--and I have no
choice."
Glory drew away and looked with challenging directness into his eyes.
"I suppose--you'll go alone?"
"I must. Business affairs are at a crisis, and I need a free hand.
But, God granting me a safe return, it's to be our last separation. I
swear that. I am always wretched without you."
Always before when disappointment or disquiet had riffled the deeps of
her eyes, it had taken only a word and a smile from this man to dispel
them and bring back the serenity of content. Her moments of panic when
she had seemed to drop down, down into pits of foreboding until she
had plumbed the depth of despair, had been moments to which she had
surrendered in his absence and of which he had been given no hint.
Now with a gravity that was bafflingly unreadable she stood silent and
looked about the room, and the man's eyes followed hers.
Why was it, he almost fiercely demanded of himself, that this cottage
set in remote hills shed about him a feeling of soul-satisfaction that
he had never encountered in more luxurious places?
Now as he looked at it the thought of leaving it cramped his heart
with a sort of breathless agony.
Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because in
everything it was reflection of Glory's own spirit and to him Glory
stood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him than
himself.
The simplicity and good taste of the small house, standing in a land
of squalid cabins like a disciple of quiet elegance among beggars, had
been the result of their collaboration. Glory had had the instinct of
artistic perception and true values and he had been able to guide her
from his sybarite experience.
The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands from
rocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him a
beautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at the
saw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfied
the eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East were
all landscapes that meant something to each of them--lyric bits of
canvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attached
itself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.
But now Glory, too, was looking at all these things as though she as
well as himself were leaving them. There was something of farewell in
the glance that lingered on them and caressed them, as if of
leave-taking and into Spurrier's heart crept the intuition that
despite his declaration just made that this should be their last
separation, she was seeing in it a threat of permanence.
And that was the thought that was chilling Glory's heart and muting
the song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place which
had been founded with all the promise of home and companionship was
beginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and something
like abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, but
she had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of shared
happiness.
And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessary
unless, as she had told herself in panic moments and denied so
persistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom he
could enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison with
others?