Beyond the goal of getting through college in three years, Boone had
planned his future but vaguely. He might seek election to the
Legislature, when he came of qualifying age, and strive upwards from
that beginning toward Congress and the larger rewards of a political
life. For such a career the law was a necessary preparation, so while he
was still in college he began its reading.
Whenever he went home from the university he saw Happy, and in the tacit
fashion of simple souls their neighbourhood fell to speaking of "Boone
and Happy," as though the linking of their names was natural and
logical, and in local gossip it was almost as though they were
betrothed.
Happy had other suitors, more than a few of them indeed, drawn to the
Spradling house by her beauty. Along those neighbourhood creeks, from
the trickles where they "headed up" to the mouths where they emptied,
there were few girls who could hope to compete with her loveliness of
sloe-eyes, dusky hair and slender grace of body. But the old wives shook
their heads, saying, "Happy Spradling wouldn't hurt a fly--but jest ther
same she's breakin' hearts right an' left because she's mortgaged ter
Boone Wellver--an' she's jest a'waitin' fer him."
Old Cyrus already looked on him as a son--and Boone spoke as little of
Anne Masters as he would have spoken of the things sealed in Masonic
secrecy.
Happy's school was one which arranged its terms and vacations in
accordance with local exigencies. Crop planting and gathering had the
right of way over text-books, and so it happened that when Anne was at
Marlin Town, Happy was usually at school--and their ways did not cross.
Yet each summer, too, as a man may go from the provinces to court and
yet not delude himself with the hallucination that he is a courtier,
Boone went over to Marlin Town. For every summer Anne Masters came for a
few weeks to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from
the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life.
During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern,
woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when
he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I
might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never
departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity
for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and
faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her.
She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to
the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he
ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he
shook his head.
"It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at
night--of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he
did not tell her.
* * * * *
One day in the spring of the year when Anne was sixteen, Mrs. Larry
Masters dropped into the office of her kinsman, Tom Wallifarro, to talk
over some small matter of business. It was one of the regrets of the
lady's life--a life somewhat touched and frost-bitten by
bitterness--that all of her business was small. It was, however, one of
her compensations that this gentleman gave to her petty affairs as much
care and consideration as to the major features of his large practice.
"My dear," observed the Colonel irrelevantly as he looked at the weary
eyes of the woman who had in her day been an almost famous beauty, "you
seem worried. You are altogether too young to let lines creep into your
face."
Mrs. Masters laughed mirthlessly.
"I have a daughter growing up. I am ambitious for her. She has charm,
grace, breeding--and she's the poor member of a rich family. Such things
bring wrinkles around maternal eyes, Cousin Tom."
"Happily she lives in Kentucky," the lawyer reminded his visitor. "We
are yet provincial enough to think something of blood, even when it's
not gilded with money."
"Yes, thank God--and thanks to you, she has had educational advantages.
If Larry had only had business sense--but I can't talk patiently about
Larry."
"No--I wish you could bring yourself to think of him more indulgently,
but--" Colonel Tom knew the fruitlessness of that line of counsel, so he
brushed lightly by to other topics. "But that isn't what I wanted to
talk about. I think Morgan ought to travel abroad for several months,
don't you?"
Mrs. Masters sighed. There was a thought in her mind which had long been
there. If Morgan and Anne could be brought to a fancy for each other,
her problem in life would be settled. The girl would no longer be a
charity child. But what she said was an amendment to the original
thought. "Isn't he a bit inexperienced--and headstrong yet, to be turned
loose alone in Europe?"
The Colonel's eyes twinkled. "I mean to have a check-rein on him."
"What fashion of check-rein, Cousin Tom?"
"I thought," said the lawyer off-handedly, since he always surrounded
his beneficences with a show of the casual, "that it would be a good
thing for Anne too. Now if you and she and Morgan made a European trip
together, the responsibility of two ladies on his hands would steady the
young scapegrace."
Mrs. Masters almost gasped in her effort to control her delighted
astonishment. Morgan had always thought of Anne as a "kid" to be teased
and badgered, and of himself as a very finished and mature young
gentleman. Now they would see each other in a new guise. Their eyes
might be opened. In short, the possibilities were immense.
"Your goodness to us--" she began feelingly, but the Colonel cleared his
throat and raised a hand in defence against the embarrassment of verbal
gratitude.
A month later the three sat in the _salle-a-manger_ of the Elysee Palace
Hotel, by a window that commanded a view of the Arc de Triomphe, and
many things had happened. Among them was the surprising discovery by the
young man, that while few eyes seemed concerned with him, many turned
toward Anne, and having turned, lingered.
Only last night they had been to a dance, and Anne had been so occupied
with uniforms that she had found no time to waltz with him--though he
was sure that he danced circles about these stiff-kneed gentry with
petty titles.
Now over the _petit dejeuner_ he took his young and inconsiderate cousin
to task.
"Last night, Anne, I camped on your trail all evening, and you couldn't
manage to slip me in one dance. Nothing would do but goggling Britishers
and smirking frog-eaters. I'm getting jolly well fed up with these
foreigners."
Anne lifted her brows, but her eyes sparkled mischief.
"Oh, Morgan, I can dance with you any time," she assured him. "You're
just kin-folks. Is it because you're 'jolly well fed up' with foreigners
that you like to ape English slang?"
The young man blushed hotly, but he chose to ignore the question with
which she had capped her response. Inasmuch as it was a fair hit, he had
need to ignore it, but his eyes snapped with furious indignation. "Anne,
I don't understand you," he announced in a carefully schooled voice.
"You can play with absurd little dignitaries, or with mountain
illiterates--anything abnormal--but for your own blood--" He paused
there a moment, searching his abundant and sophomoric vocabulary for the
exact combination of withering words; and, while he hesitated, she
interrupted in a tone which was both quiet and ominous:
"Let's take up one thing at a time, Morgan. Just who is the illiterate
in the mountains?"
"You know as well as I do--Boone Wellver."
"Boone Wellver. I thought so. At all events, he's a man, even if he's
not quite twenty-one yet."
"A man: that is to say, a specimen of the _genus homo_. So is the fellow
that brought in the eggs just now. So is the chap that drives the taxi."
The young aristocrat shrugged his shoulders and snapped his fingers in
excellent imitation of Gallic expressiveness; then as Anne's twinkle
reminded him of his being "jolly well fed up with foreigners," the
change in his tone became as abrupt as the break in a boy's altering
voice, and he added: "The point is that he's hardly a gentleman. I
commend his ambition--but there's something in birth as well. Unless you
attach some importance to the elegances and nuances of life, you are
only a member of the mob."
"The elegances of life--as, for instance"--the dancing sparkle stole
mischievously back into the blue eyes and the voice took on a purring
softness--"as, for instance, the handling of the small sword--or fencing
foil?"
Morgan rose petulantly from the table and pushed back his chair. "If you
ladies will excuse me," he announced with superdignity, "I will leave
you for a while to your own devices."
Anne's laughter pursued him in exit with an echo of musical mockery.
But that evening Mrs. Larry Masters posted a letter to Colonel Tom
Wallifarro.
"Morgan has discovered Anne!" she said in part. "He has been too close
to her until now to realize her attractiveness; but she has been noticed
by other men, and at last Morgan is awake. They have quarrelled, and
next to making love that's the most significant of developments. My dear
kinsman and benefactor, you know what our mutual hope has been, and I
think its fulfilment is not so far away! Tonight when I sipped my
claret at dinner I drank a silent toast, 'To my girl and your boy.'"
While Mrs. Masters was writing that note, her daughter was sitting at
another desk in the same room, and her letter was addressed to a
post-office back of Cedar Mountain.
When Boone received that second missive, he turned the envelope over in
his hand and gazed at it for a long while. Even then he did not open it
until he sat alone in a place where the forests were silent, save for
the call of a blue-jay and the diligent rapping of a "cock of the woods"
who was sapping and mining for grubs.
The boy held between thumb and forefinger an envelope of a sort he had
never seen before, of thin outer paper over a dark coloured lining. In
one corner was a stamp of the French Republic, and there in writing that
had crossed the sea was his name and address.
"She found time to write to me," he said rapturously to himself, and
then dropping intentionally and whimsically into his old, childhood
speech he added, nodding his head sagely to a pert squirrel that frisked
its tail near by, "She's done writ me a letter cl'ar from t'other
world."
* * * * *
It was that same summer, when Anne had gone to Europe, that Boone came
back from college, very serious and taciturn, and McCalloway was prompt
to guess the reason.
"You went down to Louisville, didn't you?" he inquired, as the two sat
by the doorstep on the day of the boy's return, and Boone nodded.
The man did not nag him with questions. His seasoned wisdom contented
itself with smoking on in silence, and after a little the lad jerked his
head.
"I reckon you know what took me there--sir."
The final word came in afterthought. No mountaineer says "sir," by
habit.
A part of that stubborn independence which is at once the virtue and the
fault of the race balks at even such small measure of implied
deference, but Boone had noticed that "down below," where courtesy
flowers into graciousness, the form of address was general.
McCalloway responded slowly.
"Yes, I can guess your errand there. How is he?"
The boy's eyes gazed off across the slopes through contracted lids, and
his voice came in deliberate but repressed tenseness.
"I hunted up Colonel Wallifarro's office and he went over there with
me.... I reckon, except for that, they wouldn't have let me see him."
He paused, and the man thoughtfully observed, "No, I fancy not."
"You go into that jail-house through a stone door, and there's a
rough-lookin' feller settin'--I mean sitting--there in front of another
door made of iron gratin's as thick as crowbars.... The place don't
smell good."
"Isn't it well kept?" inquired McCalloway in some surprise, and the boy
hastily explained.
"I don't mean that it plum stinks. I reckon it's as clean as a jail can
be, but the air is stale--even out on the street that lowland air is
flat.... It don't taste right in a man's throat.... Asa was reared up
here in these free hills. He's like a caged hawk down there."
The soldier nodded sympathetically.
"Did he--seem well?"
"He hasn't sickened none ... but his face used to be right colourful....
Now it's pale ... and sort of gray-like.... Of course a turnkey went
along with us, and we didn't talk with him by himself.... I reckon he
didn't say none of the things he craved most to say.... He was right
silent-like."
The boy broke off, and for a while the two sat in silence. When Boone
took up the thread of his narrative again, there was something like a
catch in his throat.
"They were pretty polite to us there.... They showed us all over the
place ... they even took us to the death row.... There was a nigger in
there that was goin' ter be hung next morning at daybreak.... I reckon
he's dead now.... A feller kept walkin' back and forth in front of that
cell ... and an electric light was burnin' there full bright.... That
nigger, neither night ner day ... could ever git away from that
light.... They were afraid he might seek ter kill hisself.... He come
ter the bars an' said, 'Howdy, white folks,' ... an' then he went back
an' sat down on the ledge that he sleeps on."
The recital, painfully punctuated with its frequent pauses, halted
there. It was a matter of several minutes before it began again. Now the
voice was laboured, as if the speaker were panting for breath, and the
careful pronunciation relapsed wildly into the older and ruder forms of
solecism.
"They tuck us out an' ... showed us the cement yard ... whar the gallows
stood.... It was painted a sort of brownish red.... It put me in mind of
dried blood. The nigger could hear the hammers whilest they set the
thing up.... Asa could hear 'em too.... Asa hed done seed ther scaffold
hisself ... through the winder-bars when ... he exercised ... in the
corrider.... But when I looked at the nigger thet's dead by now ...
seemed like it was Asa I saw ... with thet lamp glarin' in on him,
daylight and night time alike...." The voice leaped into a soblike
vehemence. "Thet's what Judas money dogged him to! Seemed like ... I
couldn't endure it!"