As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the
afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the
platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away
from a finished chapter.
The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears,
usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for
service.
Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned
to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own
tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing
under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.
Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies,
and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of
swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the
cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the
farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her
grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.
McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the
convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this
impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of
its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now
he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his
sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the
face of his youthful protege began to lighten. Boone was as yet too
young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of
his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must
break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut--and dual. Asa's "woman" must
have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be
wrung from its stinted productivity--and he must put behind him that
ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned
to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.
One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house,
knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of
frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first
raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.
But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sight of whose face
McCalloway bent forward as though confronted by a spectre--and indeed
the newcomer belonged to a world which he had renounced as finally as
though it had been of another incarnation.
This visitor was lean and weather-beaten. His face was long and somewhat
dour, but tanned brown, and instead of speaking he brought his hand to
his temple with a smart salute. It was such a salute as bespoke a long
life of soldiering and the second nature of military habit. The voice in
which McCalloway greeted him was almost unrecognizable as his own,
because it was both far away and strained.
"Sergeant!" he exclaimed; "what has brought you here?"
"The lad, sor'r," the other gravely reminded him. "I must speak with ye
alone. 'Tis a verra private and a verra serious matter that brings me."
Boone had never heard so hard a note in his benefactor's voice as that
which crept into his curt reply:
"It must needs be--to warrant your coming without permission,
MacTavish."
They were just finishing their daylight supper, and the boy rose,
pushing back his chair. Faithfully he regarded his pledge of respecting
the other's privacy whenever he was not invited to share it, and
instinctively he felt that this was no moment for his intrusion.
"I reckon I'll hev ter be farin' over thar ter see how Asa's woman's
comin' on," he remarked casually, as he reached for the hat that lay at
his feet. "Like es not she needs a gittin' of firewood erginst
nightfall."
But the matter-of-fact tone and manner were on the surface. Boone
secretly distrusted the few messages that came to his preceptor from the
outside world. By such voices he might be called back again and hearken
to the summons. Boone could not contemplate existence with both his
idols ravished from his temple.
Now he closed the door behind him in so preoccupied a mood that he left
his rifle standing against the wall forgotten and McCalloway remained
standing by the table rather inflexible of posture and sternly
inquisitorial of countenance.
"MacTavish," he said in sharply clipped syllables, "you are one of
few--a very few--who know of my incognito and address. I have relied
upon you implicitly to guard those secrets. I trust you can explain
following me into what you must know was a retirement not to be
trespassed upon without incurring my anger--my very serious anger."
Respectfully, but with a face full of eager resoluteness, the other
saluted again.
"General," he said, "it's China--they need you there."
"Sergeant"--an angry light leaped in the steel-gray eyes--"if they want
me in China some one whom I have trusted has betrayed my identity. No
living soul there ever heard of Victor McCalloway, _Mister_ McCalloway,
not General Anything, mind you!"
The newcomer crossed to the centre of the room, and his movements were
quick and precise, as are those of the drill-ground.
"To every other man on earth ye may be _Mister_ McCalloway--but to me ye
are my general. Before I'd betray any trust ye might place in me, sor'r,
I'd cut off that hand at the wrist, as ye ken, sor'r, full well. I've
told nae soul where ye wor'r. I've only said that I'd seek for ye."
"But in God's name how--?"
"If I may interrupt ye, sor'r, I am no longer Sergeant Major MacTavish;
I'm a time-retired man at home, but when I wear a uniform now it's that
of the army of the Manchu Emperor. They seek to reorganize their army
along western lines. They want genius. They ken nothin' of ye save that
one Victor McCalloway was once a British officer of high rank who served
so close to Dinwiddie, that Dinwiddie's strategy is known to him.--Read
this, sor'r, and ye'll understand more of the matter."
The General took the large, official-looking missive and stood for a
moment with a drawn and concentrated brow before he slit its linen-lined
covering.
The feel of the thing in his fingers brought to him a certain stirring
and quickening of the pulses: such a restiveness as may come to the
retired thoroughbred at the far-off sound of the paddock bugle, or to
the spent war horse at the rolling of drums.
The heavy blue paper and the thick seal set into disquieting momentum an
avalanche of memories. Active days which he had resolved to forget were
conjured into rebirth as he handled this bulky envelope which proclaimed
its officialdom. Even the daily papers came to him here with desultory
lack of sequence. He knew in disjointed fashion how that same summer an
anti-foreign revolt had broken out in Shantung and spread to Pechili. He
had read that the Japanese Government had dispatched twenty thousand men
to China. Later he had followed the all too meagre accounts of how the
Allies had raced for Peking to relieve the besieged legations. The young
Emperor's ambition to impress upon his realm the stamp of western
civilization had made him, for two years, a virtual prisoner to the
Empress Dowager and her reactionaries. Now in turn the Empress Dowager
was in flight and, presumably, the Japanese, working in concert with
agents of the captive Emperor and Prince Ching, were looking toward the
future.--It would seem that they divined once more the opportunity to
Occidentalize army and government. If so, it was the rising of a world
tide which might well run to flood, and it offered him a man's work. At
all events, this letter which caused his fingers to itch and tremble as
they held it, came from high Japanese sources and it was addressed only
"Excellency," without a name. The envelope itself was directed to "The
Honourable Victor McCalloway."
For a long time he stood there immovable, looking at the paper, as great
dreams marched before him. Organization, upbuilding--that was his
_metier_!
Seeing the rapt concentration of his brow and the hunger of his eyes,
the former British sergeant spoke again with persuasive fervour:
"Go under any name ye like, sor'r; ye'll be prompt to give it glory! For
many years I served under ye, General. For God's sake, let me take my
commands from ye once again! Come out to China, sor'r, where they need a
great soldier--and can keep silent!"
The hermit strode over and laid a hand on the shoulder of his visitor.
Their eyes met and held. "Old comrade," said McCalloway, as the rust of
huskiness creaked in his voice, "I know you for the truest steel that
ever God put into the blade of a man's soul--but I must have time to
think."
He crossed the room slowly and took up Dinwiddie's sword. Tenderly he
drew the blade from the scabbard, and as he looked at it his eyes first
glowed with fires of longing, then grew misty with the sadness of
remembrance.
After that he laid the scabbard down and handled once more the sheets
that had been in the envelope. He did not re-read the written sentences,
but let his fingers move slowly along the smooth surface of the paper,
while his pupils held as far-away a look as though they were seeing the
land from which the communication had come.
But, after a little, McCalloway came out of that half-hypnotized
absorption, and his eyes wandered about the room until finally they
fell on the rifle that the mountain boy had forgotten to take away with
him.
He knew Boone well enough to feel sure that he had not gone far without
remembering. He was certain, too, that his young protege would have
returned for it before now had he not been inhibited by his deference
for the elder's privacy.
Over there across the world was an army to be shaped, disciplined--but
an army of alien blood, of yellow skins. Here was the less conspicuous
task to which he had set his hand; the shaping of a single life, beset
with hereditary dangers, into a worthy edifice of which the timbers and
masonry were Anglo-Saxon and the pattern Americanism. He had too far
committed himself to that architecture to turn back.
Slowly he shook his head. The struggle had been sharp, but the decision
was final.
"No, MacTavish, old comrade and old friend," he said very seriously;
"no; I've withdrawn from all that. I'll not deny that my hand sometimes
aches for a grip on a sabre-hilt, and my ears are hungry for a
bugle--but that's all past. Go out and make an army there, if you can,
but I stay here. I needs must stay."