John Spurrier stepped from the train at Carnettsville into a life that
had been revolutionized. At last he had succeeded in leaving his
German exile. His own country was in the war but he, with the
equipment of a soldier, bore a dishonored name, which would bar him
from a commission. Here he found the development of his dreams
realized, but by other hands than his own.
Above all, he must see Glory. He had cabled her and written her, so
she would be expecting him. Now he gazed about streets through which
teemed the new activity.
Here was the thing he had seen in his dreams when he stood on wooded
hills and thought in the terms of the future. Here it stood vivid and
actual before the eyes that had visioned it.
With a groan he turned into the road homeward on a hired horse. He
still meant to fight, and unless the Bud Hawkins property had escaped
him, he would still have to be accounted with--but great prizes had
slipped away.
At the gate of his house, his heart rose into his throat. The power of
his emotion almost stifled him. Never had his love for Glory
flickered. Never had he thought or dreamed of anything else or any one
else so dearly and so constantly as of her.
He stood at the fence with half-closed eyes for a moment, steadying
himself against the surges of up-welling emotion, then, raising his
eyes, he saw that the windows and the door were nailed up. The chimney
stood dead and smokeless.
Panic clutched at his throat as with a physical grasp. Before him
trooped a hundred associations unaccountably dear. They were all
memories of little things, mostly foolish little things that went into
the sacred intimacy of his life with Glory.
Now there was no Glory there.
He rode at the best speed left in his tired horse over to old
Cappeze's house, and, as he dismounted, saw the lawyer, greatly aged
and broken, standing in the door.
One glance at that face confirmed all the fears with which he had been
battling. It was a face as stern as those on the frieze of the
prophets. In it there was no ghost of the old welcome, no hope of any
relenting. This old man saw in him an enemy.
"Where is Glory?" demanded Spurrier as he hurried up to the doorstep,
and the other looked accusingly back into his eyes and answered in
cold and bitterly clipped syllables.
"Wherever she is, sir, it's her wish to be there alone." Suddenly the
old eyes flamed and the old voice rose thin and passionate. "If I
burned in hell for it to the end of eternity, I would give you no
other word of her."
"She--she is not dead, then?"
"No--but dead to you."
"Mr. Cappeze," said Spurrier steadily, "are you sure that I may not
have explanations that may change her view of me?"
"We know," said the lawyer in a voice out of which the passion had
passed, but which had the dead quality of an opinion inflexibly
solidified, "that since your marriage, you never made her the
companion of any hour that was not a backwoods hour. We know that you
never told us the truth about yourself or your enterprises--that you
came to us as a friend, won our confidence, and sought to exploit us.
Your record is one of lies and unfaithfulness, and we have cast you
out. That is her decision and with me her wish is sacred."
The returned exile stood meeting the relentless eyes of the old man
who had been his first friend in these hills and for a few moments he
did not trust himself to speak.
The shock of those shuttered windows and that blankly staring front at
the house where he had looked for welcome; the collapse of all the
dreams that had sustained him while a prisoner in an internment camp
and a refugee hounded across the German border were visiting upon him
a prostration that left him trembling and shaken.
Finally he commanded his voice.
"To me, too, her wish is sacred--but not until I hear it from her own
lips. She alone has the right to condemn me and not even she until I
have made my plea to her. Great God, man, my silence hasn't been
voluntary. I've been cut off in a Hun prison-camp. I've kept life in
me only because I could dream of her and because though it was easier
to die, I couldn't die without seeing her and explaining."
"It was from her own lips that I took my orders," came the unmoved
response. "Those orders were that through me you should learn
nothing. You had the friendship of every man here until you abused
it--now I think you'll encounter no sympathy. I told you once how the
wolf-bitch would feel toward the man who robbed her of her young. You
chose to disregard my warning--and I'll ask you to leave my house."
John Spurrier bowed his head. He had lost her! If that were her final
conclusion, he could hardly seek to dissuade her. At least he could
lose the final happiness out of his life--from which so much else had
already been lost--as a gentleman should lose.
And he knew that however old Cappeze might feel, he would not lie. If
he said that was Glory's deliberately formed decision, that statement
must be accepted as true.
"I have never loved any one else," said Spurrier slowly. "I shall
never love any one else. I have been faithful despite appearances. The
rest of your charges are true, and I make no denial. I gambled about
as fairly as most men gamble. That is all."
A stiffening pride, made flinty by the old man's hostility, shut
into silence some things that Spurrier might have said. He scorned
the seeming of whine that might have lain in explanations, even
though the explanations should lighten the shadow of his old friend's
disapproval. He offered no extenuation and breathed nothing of the
changes that had been wrought in himself by the tedious alchemy of
time and reflection.
He had begun under the spur of greedy ambition, but changes had been
wrought in him by Glory's love.
He was still ambitious, but in a different way. He wanted to salvage
something for the equitable beneficiaries. He wanted to stand, not
among the predatory millionaires, but to be his own man, with a clean
name and solvent.
Before he could attain that condition he must render unto Harrison the
things that were Harrison's and wipe out his own tremendous
liabilities--but his heart was in the hills.
John Spurrier went slowly and heavy heartedly back to the house which
he had refashioned for his bride; the house that had become to him a
shrine to all the dear, lost things of life.
The sun fell in mottled luminousness across its face of tempered gray
and from the orchard where the lush grass grew knee-high came the
cheery whistle of a Bob-white.
At the sound the man groaned with a wrench of his heart and throat,
and his thoughts raced back to that day when the same note had come
from the voices of hidden assassins and when Glory had exposed her
breast to rifle-fire to send out the pigeon with its call for help.
The splendid oak that had shaded their stile had grown broader of
girth and more majestic in the spread of its head-growth since he had
stood here before, and in the flower beds, in which Glory had
delighted, a few forlorn survivors, sprung up as volunteers from
neglected roots, struggled through a choke of dusty weeds.
The man looked about the empty yard and his breath came like that of a
torture victim on the rack. The desolation and ache of a life deprived
of all that made it sweet struck in upon him with a blight beside
which his prison loneliness had been nothing.
"If she knew the whole truth--instead of only half the truth," he
groaned, "she might forgive me."
He ripped the padlock from the door and let himself in. He flung wide
a shutter and let the afternoon sun flood the room, and once inside a
score of little things worked the magic of memory upon him and tore
afresh every wound that was festering.
There hung the landscapes that he and she had loved and as he looked
at them her voice seemed to sound again in his ears like forgotten
music. From somewhere came the heavy fragrance of honeysuckle and old
nights with her in the moonlight rushed back upon him.
Then he saw an apron on a peg--hanging limp and empty, and again he
saw her in it. He went and opened a drawer in which his own clothes
had been kept--and there neatly folded by her hand were things of
his.
John Spurrier, whose iron nerve had once been cafe talk in the Orient,
sat down on a quilted bed and tearless sobs racked him.
"No," he said to himself at last. "No, if she wants her freedom I
can't pursue her. I've hurt her enough--and God knows I'm punished
enough."
Unless he were tamely to surrender to the despair that beset him, John
Spurrier had one other thing to do before he left the hills. He must
come to such an agreement with Bud Hawkins as would give him a right
of way over that single tract and complete his chain of holdings. Thus
fortified the field beyond the ridge would be safe against invasion by
his enemies and even the other field would have readier outlet to
market by that route. In the Hawkins property lay the keystone of the
arch. With it the position was impregnable. Without it all the rest
fell apart like an inarticulated skeleton.
It happened that Spurrier met Hawkins as he went away from his lonely
house, and forcing his own miseries into the background, he sought to
become the business man once more. He began with a frank statement of
the facts and offered fair and substantial terms of trade.
Both because his affection for the old preacher would have tolerated
nothing less and because it would have been folly now to play the
cheaper game, he spoke in the terms of generosity.
But to his surprise and discomfiture, Brother Hawkins shook a stubborn
head.
"Thar ain't skeercely no power on 'arth, Mr. Spurrier," he declared,
"thet could fo'ce me inter doin' no business with ye."
"But, Brother Hawkins," argued the opportunity hound, "you are cutting
your own throat. You and I standing together are invincible. Separate,
we are lost. I'm almost willing to let you name the terms of
agreement--to write the contract for yourself."
"I've done been pore a right long while already," the preacher
reminded him as his eyes kindled with the zealot's fire. "Long afore
my day Jesus Christ was pore an' ther Apostle Paul, an' other
righteous men. I ain't skeered ter go on in likewise ter what I've
always done." He paused and laid a kindly hand on the shoulder of the
man who offered him wealth.
"I ain't seekin' ter fault ye unduly, John Spurrier. Mebby ye've done
follered yore lights--but we don't see with no common eye, ner no
mutual disc'arnment. Ye've done misled folk thet swore by ye, ef I
sees hit a'right. Now ye offers me wealth, much ther same as Satan
offered hit ter Jesus on a high place, an' we kain't trade--no more
then what they could trade."
The old preacher's attitude held the trace of kindliness that sought
to drape reproof in gentleness and to him, as had been impossible with
Cappeze, Spurrier poured out his confidence. At the outset, he
confessed, he had deliberately dedicated himself to the development of
wealth for himself and his employers, with no thought of others.
Later, in a fight between wary capitalists where vigilance had to be
met with vigilance, the seal of secrecy had been imperative. Frankness
with the mountain men would have been a warning to his enemies. Now,
however, his sense of responsibility was awake. Now he wanted to win
back his status of confidence in this land where he had known his only
home. Now what weight he had left to throw into the scales would be
righteously thrown. Even yet he must move with strict, guarded
secrecy.
But the old circuit rider shook his head.
"Hit's too late, now, ter rouse faith in me, John," he reiterated.
"Albeit I'd love ter credit ye, ef so-be I could. What's come ter pass
kain't be washed out with words." He paused before he added the simple
edict against which there was no arguing.
"Mebby I mout stand convinced even yit ef I didn't know thet ther
devil was urgin' me on with prospects of riches."
One thing remained to him; the pride that should stiffen him in the
presence of his accusers and judges. When he went into the eclipse of
ruin, at least he would go with unflinching gallantry.
And it was in that mood that Spurrier reached his club in New York and
prepared himself for the ordeal of the next day's interview.
He had wired Harrison of his coming, but not of his hopelessness, and
when his telephone jangled and he heard the voice of the financier, he
recognized in it an undercurrent of exasperation, which carried omen
of a difficult interview.
"That you, Spurrier? This is Harrison. Be at my office at eleven
to-morrow morning. Perhaps you can construe certain riddles."
"Of what nature, sir?"
"Of a nature that won't bear full discussion over the wire. We have
had an anonymous letter from some mysterious person who claims to come
with the situation in a sling. It may be a crank whom we'll have to
throw out--or some one we dare not ignore. At all events, it's up to
you to dispose of him. He's in your province. If you fail, we lose out
and, as I said once before, you go to the scrap heap."
Spurrier hung up the phone and sat in a nerveless trepidation which
was new and foreign to his nature. This interview of to-morrow morning
would call for the tallest bluffing he had ever attempted, and the
chances would, perhaps, turn on hair-trigger elements of personal
force.
He must depend on his coolness, audacity, and adroitness to win a
decision, and, except by guesswork, he could not hope to formulate in
advance the terrain of battle or the nature of counter-attack with
which he must meet his adversary.
That evening he strolled along Broadway and found himself yielding to
a dangerous and whimsical mood. He wondered how many other men
outwardly as self-assured and prosperous as himself were covertly
confessing suicide as one of to-morrow's probabilities.
Over Longacre Square the incandescent billboards flamed and flared.
The darning-wool kitten disported itself with mechanical abandon. The
woman who advertised a well-known corset and the man who exploited a
brand of underwear brilliantly made and unmade their toilets far above
the sidewalk level. Motors shrieked and droned and crowds drifted.
Before a moving-picture theater, his introspective eye was momentarily
challenged by a gaudy three-sheet. The poster proclaimed a popular
screen star in a "fight fuller of punch than that of 'The Wreckers.'"
What caused Spurrier to pause was the composition of the picture--and
the mental comparison which it evoked. A man crouched behind a heavy
table, overthrown for a barricade--as he had once done.
Fallen enemies lay on the floor of a crude Western cabin. Others still
stood, and fought with flashing guns and faces "registering"
desperation, frenzy, and maniac fury. The hero only, though alone and
outnumbered, was grimly calm. The stress of that inferno had not
interfered with the theatric pose of head and shoulders--the grace and
effect of gesture that was conveyed in the two hands wielding two
smoking pistols.
Spurrier smiled. It occurred to him that had a director stood by
while he himself had knelt behind a table he would have bawled out
many amendments which fact had overlooked. Apparently he and his
attackers had, by these exacting standards of art, missed the drama of
the situation.
Over him swept a fresh flood of memory, and it brought a cold and
nervous dampness to his temples. Again he saw Glory rising at the
broken window with a pigeon to release--and a life to sacrifice, if
need be. On her face had been no theatric expression which would have
warranted a close-up.
Spurrier hastened on, turning into a side street where he could put
the glare at his back and find a more mercifully dark way.
He was seeing, instead of dark house fronts, the tops of pine trees
etched against an afterglow, and Glory standing silhouetted against a
hilltop. Above the grind of the elevated and the traffic, he was
hearing her voice in thrushlike song, happy because he loved her.
The agony of loss overwhelmed him, and he actually longed, as for a
better thing, for that moment to come back when behind an overturned
table he had endured the suspense which death had promised to end in
an instant filled and paid for with revenge.
Then through his disturbed brain once more flashed lines of verse:
"I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I should hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forebore,
And bade me creep past."
At all events he would, in the figurative sense, die fighting
to-morrow. He knew his mistakes now. If he lived on he hoped to atone
for them, but if he died he would go out without a whine.
And if he must die, there was one way that seemed preferable to
others. The army would have none of him, as an officer, because he
stood besmirched of honor. But he knew the stern temper of the
mountaineers. They would rise in unanimous response to the call of
arms. He could go with them, not with any insignia on his collar, but
marching shoulder against shoulder into that red hell of Flanders and
France, where a man might baptize himself, shrive himself, and die.
And in dying they would leave a record behind them!