So if the time ever came when Boone stood face to face with Saul Fulton,
it would, for all the amendment of his new life, be a moment of
desperate crisis. The pig iron of his half-savage beginning had been
made malleable and held promise of tempered and flexible steel--but the
metal was still feudist ore. McCalloway comforted himself with the
reflection that Saul was not likely to return, but did not delude
himself into forgetting that strange perversity which seems to draw the
mountaineer inevitably back to his crags and woods, even in the face of
innumerable perils. Some day Saul might attempt to slip back, and Boone
would almost inevitably hear of his coming. Then for a day or an hour,
the lad might relapse into his old self, even to the forgetting of his
pledge. Such an inconsidered day or an hour would be enough to wreck his
life.
Carefully and adroitly, therefore, McCalloway played upon the softer
strings of life, and sometimes, to that end, he opened a hitherto closed
door upon the events of his own life, and let his protege look in on
glimpses that were sacredly guarded from other eyes.
One summer night, for example, Boone laid down a book and said suddenly,
"It tells here about a fellow winning the Star of India and the Victoria
Cross. I'd love to see one of those medals."
Silently McCalloway rose and went over to the folding desk, to come back
with his battered dispatch box. He unlocked it and laid out before the
boy not one decoration, but several. The ribbons were somewhat faded
now, and the metal tarnished; but Boone bent forward, and his face
glowed with the exaltation of one admitted to precincts that are
sacrosanct. For a long while he studied the maltese cross with its
lion-surmounted crown and its supporting bar chased with rose leaves;
the cross that bears the Queen's name, for which men brave death. Beside
it lay the oval, showing Victoria's profile, and the gilt inscription on
a blue enamelled margin: "Heaven's Light Our Guide." A star caught it to
its white-edged blue riband--and that was the coveted Star of India.
Here before his eyes--eyes that burned eagerly--were the priceless
trifles that he had never hoped to see. The modest gentleman who had,
for his sake, relinquished fresh honours in China, had won them, and
until now had never spoken of them, but Boone knew that they are not
lightly gained--and that in no way can they be bought.
A sudden and unaccountable mistiness blurred his sight.
"I'm obliged to you, sir," he said seriously. "I know you don't often
show them."
He had meant to say nothing more than that, but youth's questioning urge
mastered his resolution, so that he put an interrogation very slowly,
half fearing it might seem an impertinence.
"You told me once, sir, that I might ask whatever questions I liked--and
that you would refuse to answer when _you_ felt like it. I'm going to
ask one now--but I reckon I oughtn't to." Again there was a diffident
pause, but the sincere blue eyes were unwaveringly steady as they met
the gray ones.
"Do you reckon, sir, the day will ever come--when I can know the real
name--of the man I owe--pretty nigh everything to?"
McCalloway blinked his eyes, which this cub of a boy had a way of
tricking into unsoldierly emotion, and resolutely set his features into
immobility.
"No, sir; I'm afraid not," he answered with a gruffness that in no way
deceived his questioner. "McCalloway is as good a name as any--I'm
afraid, at all events, it will have to serve to the end."
Slowly and gravely the lad nodded his head. "All right, sir," he
declared. "It was just curiosity, anyhow. The name I know you by is good
enough for me."
But McCalloway was disquietingly moved. He rose and replaced the
dispatch box on its shelf, and after that paced the room for a few
moments with quick, restive strides. Then his voice came with an
impulsive suddenness. "There's a paper in that dispatch box ... that
would answer your question, Boone," he said. "I tell you because I want
you to realize how entirely I trust you. It's the secret chamber of my
Bluebeard establishment. While I live it must remain locked."
After a moment he added, "If I should die ... and you still want to
know--then you may open the box ... but even then what you learn is for
yourself alone, and I want that you shall destroy all those documents
and whisper no word whatever of their contents to any living soul."
"I promise, sir," declared the boy, "on my honour."
* * * * *
When August had brought the yellow masses of the golden-rod and the
rusty purple of the ironweed; when the thistles were no longer a sting
to the touch but down drifting along the lightest breeze, two horses
stopped at McCalloway's fence, and a girl's voice called out, "Can we
come in?"
Boone had not known that Anne Masters was back on this side of the
Atlantic, nor had he ventured to hope that she would find time to come
up here into the hills before the summer ended, but the voice had
brought him out to the stile, as swiftly as a cry for help could have
done. Now he stood, looking up at her as she sat in her saddle, with a
blaze of worship in his blue eyes that went far to undo all the
self-restraint with which he had so studiously hedged about his speech
and manner. Surprise has undone many wary generals. So his eyes made
love to her, even while his lips remained guarded of utterance.
"I didn't have any idea that you were on this side of the world," he
declared. "It's just plum taken my breath away from me to see you
sitting right there on that horse."
Larry Masters had dismounted and was hitching his mule. Now he turned to
inquire, "Where's Mr. McCalloway?"
The boy had momentarily forgotten the existence of his patron. He had
forgotten all things but one, and now he laughed with guilty
realization.
"I reckon I'll have to ask your pardon, sir. I was so astonished that I
forgot to tell you he wasn't here. He's gone fishing--and I'm afraid he
won't be back before sundown."
"Well, we've ridden across the mountain and we're tired. If you don't
mind we'll wait for him."
Anne reached down into her saddle bags and produced a small, neatly
wrapped package.
"I brought you a present," she announced with a sudden diffidence, and
Boone remembered how once before, as he stood by a fence, she had spoken
almost the same words. Then, too, she had been looking down on him from
the superior position of one mounted. He wondered if she remembered, and
in excellent mimicry of his old boyish awkwardness he said, "Thet war
right charitable of ye.... Hit's ther fust present I ever got--from
acrost ther ocean-sea."
Anne's laugh rippled out, and she followed suit--quoting herself from
the memory of other years:
"Oh, no, it isn't that at all. Please don't think it's charity." Then
she slid down and watched him as he unwrapped and investigated his gift;
a miniature bust of Bonaparte, the Conqueror, in Parian marble. The
light August breeze stirred the curls against her cheeks with a delicate
play--but they stirred against the boy's heart with the power of
lightning and tornado.
Anne was at her father's house for several weeks, and scarcely a day of
that time did her vassal fail to ride across the mountain, but those
hours squandered together were fleet of wing. McCalloway smiled
observantly and held his counsel. The charm and gaiety of Anne's bright
personality would do more to dispel the menace of gloom from the dark
corners of the boy's nature, where tendencies of melancholy lurked, than
all his own efforts and wisdom. Later there would come an aftermath of
bitter heartache, for between them lay the fortified frontier which
separates red blood and blue; the demarcation of the contrary codes of
Jubal and Tubal Cain, but at that thought the soldier shrugged his
shoulders with a ripe philosophy. Just now the girl's influence was
precisely what the lad needed. Later, when perhaps he needed something
else, he would take his punishment with decent courage, and even the
punishment would do him good. A blade is not forged and tempered without
being pounded between anvil and sledge--and if Boone could not stand
it--then Boone could not realize the dreams which McCalloway built for
his future.
The wisdom of middle-age can treat, as ephemeral, disasters in which
first love can contemplate only incurable scars. Boone himself regarded
the golden present as an era for which the whole future must pay with
unrelieved levies of black despair.
It was chiefly as he rode home at night that he faced this death's-head
future with young lips stiffening and eyes narrowed. In the morning
sunlight, or through woods that sobbed with rain, he went buoyant,
because then he was going toward her, and whatever the indefinite future
held in store, he had that day assured with all its richness.
None-the-less, Boone played the game as he saw it, with the guiding
instincts of a gentleman. Because it was all a wonderful dream, doomed
to an eventual awakening, he sealed his lips against love-making.
Anne was taking him for granted, he reasoned. He had simply become a
local necessity to a bright nature, overflowing with vital and
companionable impulses.
As vassal he gladly and proudly offered himself, and as vassal she
frankly and without analysis accepted him. Should he let slip the check
upon his control, and go to mooning about love, instead of meeting her
laughter with his laughter and her jest with his jest, she would send
him away into a deserved exile.
On the day before Anne was to leave they were on the great pinnacle rock
above Slag-face, and by now Boone had come to regard that as the lofty
shrine where he had discovered love. Afterwards it would stand through
the years as a spot of hallowed memories.
Anne had been talking with vivacious enthusiasm of the things she had
seen abroad, and Boone had followed her with rapt attentiveness. She had
a natural gift for vivid description, and he had seemed to stand with
her, by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum, and to look out with her
from the top of Cheops' pyramid over the sands of Ghizeh and the ribbon
of the Nile.
But at last they had fallen silent, and with something like a sigh the
girl said, "Tomorrow I go back to Louisville."
He had forgotten that for the moment, and he flinched at the reminder,
but his only reply was, "And in a few days I've got to go back to
Lexington. I always miss the hills down there."
Her violet eyes challenged him with full directness, "Won't you
miss--anything else?"
Boone, who was looking at her, closed his eyes. He was sure that they
would betray him, and when he ventured to open them again he had
prudently averted his gaze. But though he looked elsewhere, he still saw
her. He saw the hair that had enmeshed his heart like a snare, saw the
eyes that held an inner sparkle--which was for him an altar fire.
"I'm not the sort of feller that can help missing his friends," he
guardedly said, but his tongue felt dry and unwieldy.
Usually people were not so niggardly as that with their compliments to
Anne, and as she held a half-piqued silence Boone knew that she was
offended, so his next question came with a stammering incertitude.
"You _are_ a friend of mine, aren't you?"
She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there
lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question
she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his
temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one
instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain.
Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had
heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness
was by nature alien.
"Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like
that?"
Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and
perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominant
disappointment.
"I mean, Boone Wellver, that I don't know how to take you. Sometimes I
think you really like me--lots. Not just lumped in with everybody that
you can manage to call a friend. I have no use for lukewarm
friendships--I'd rather have none at all. You seem to be in deadly fear
of spoiling me with your lordly favour."
The boy stood before her with a face that had grown ashen. It seemed
incredible to him that she could so misconstrue his attitude; an
attitude based on hard and studied self-control.
"You think that, do you?" he inquired in a low voice, almost fierce in
its intensity. "Do you think I'm fool enough not to take thankfully what
I can get, without crying for the moon?"
"What has the moon to do with it?" she demanded.
But the vow of silence which Boone had taken with the grave solemnity of
a Trappist monk was no longer a dependable bulwark. The dam had broken.
"Just this," he said soberly. "You're as far out of my reach as the moon
itself. You say I seem afraid to tell you that I really like you. I _am_
afraid. I'm so mortally afraid that I'd sworn I'd never tell you.... God
knows that I couldn't start talking about that without saying the whole
of it. I can't say I like you because I don't like you--I love you--I
love you like--" The rapid flood of words broke off in abrupt silence.
Then the boy raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of
despair. "There isn't anything in the world to liken it to," he
declared.
Anne's eyes had widened in astonishment. She said nothing at all, and
Boone waited, steeling himself against the expected sentence of exile.
Nothing less than banishment, he had always told himself, could be the
penalty of such an outburst.
"Now," he continued in a bitter desperation, "I've done what I said I'd
never do. I've foresworn myself and told you that I love you. I might as
well finish ... because I reckon I can guess what _you'll_ say
presently. From the first day when you came here, I've been in love with
you.... I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck'
Ridges that I haven't looked at it ... and thought of it as your own
star.... I've never seen it either that I haven't said to myself, 'You
might as well love that star,' and I've tried just to live from hour to
hour when I was with you and not think about the day when you'd be gone
away."
Anne still stood with wide and questioning eyes, but no anger had come
into them yet. Her voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you
think of me that way, Boone? Why am I--so far--out of reach?"
"Why!"--his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that
cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my
people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a
gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West,
and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry
rotted."
As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he
stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last
question he had read the reserve of controlled anger--such as a just
judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he
braced himself and tried not to look at her--but he felt that the length
of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade
cruel--unintentionally so, of course.
The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the
eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he
sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own
suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious.
At last she spoke.
"You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her
surprising pronunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or
any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little
bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a
spirit--and courage."
"But, Anne--"
"I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is
one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges--whether they're two hundred
years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into
a kitchen door at court--so he came in through the front way with a
triumphal arch built over it. _He_ knocked down barriers, and got what
he wanted."
"Then--" his voice rang out suddenly--"then if I can ever get up to
where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?"
She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll
be a man--that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that
was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."
"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the
hills. I'll miss _you_--like--all hell--because I love you like that."
They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost
children and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their
plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or
circumstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the
intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The
girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's
heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling,
whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a
silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated
from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she
had returned his first kiss.