Slowly and grudgingly Tom sheathed his weapon. He knew that to fire on
an unarmed man in the tensely overwrought gathering would mean wholesale
blood-letting. Black looks told of a tempest brewing; so, with a surly
nod, he stepped back and helped Jim Blair to his place again. Blair,
dust covered and bruised, with a dribble of blood still trickling from
his mashed lip, made an effort to complete his speech which ended in
anticlimax. To Boone he said nothing more, and to the interrupted
subject he gave no further mention.
That episode had rather strengthened than hurt Wellver's prospects, and
he would have gone away somewhat appeased of temper had he not met Cyrus
Spradling face-to-face in the court house yard, and halted, with a
mistaken impulse of courtesy, to speak to him.
But the old friend, who had become the new enemy, looked him balefully
in the eye and to the words of civil greeting gave back a bitter
response: "I don't want ye ter speak ter me--never ergin," he declared.
"But I'm glad I met up with ye this oncet, though. I promised ye my vote
one day--an' I'm not a man thet breaks a pledge. I kain't vote fer ye,
now, with a clean conscience, though, and I wants ye ter give me back
thet promise."
Boone knew without delusion that this public repudiation of him by the
neighbour who had expected to be his father-in-law had sealed his doom.
He knew that all men would reason, as he had done, that Cyrus would give
no corroboration to belittling gossip concerning his daughter, unless
the wound were deep beyond healing and the resentment righteous beyond
concealment.
"Of course," responded the young candidate gravely, "I give back your
promise. I don't want any vote that isn't a willing one." But he mounted
his horse with a sickened heart, and it was no surprise to him, when the
results of the primaries were tallied, to find that he was not only a
beaten man but so badly beaten that, as one commiserating friend
mournfully observed to him, "Ye mout jest as well hev run on ther
demmycrat ticket."
Boone went back to McCalloway's house that afternoon and sat uncomforted
for hours before the dead hearth.
His eyes went to the closet wherein was locked the sword which Victor
McCalloway had entrusted to his keeping, but he did not take it out. In
the black dejection of his mood he seemed to himself to have no business
with a blade that gallant hands had wielded. He could see only that he
had messed things and proven recreant to the strong faith of a
chivalrous gentleman and the love of two girls.
On the mantle-shelf was a small bust of Napoleon Bonaparte in
marble--the trifle that Anne had brought across the "ocean-sea" to be an
altar-effigy in his conquest of life! Boone looked at it, and laughed
bitterly.
"That's my pattern--Napoleon!" he said, under his breath. "I'm a right
fine and handsome imitation of _him_. The first fight I get into is my
Waterloo!"
He met Happy in the road a few days later, and she stopped to say that
she was sorry. She had heard, of course, of how decisively he had been
beaten, but he drew a tepid solace from reading in her eyes that she did
not know the part her father had played in his undoing. He hoped that
she would never learn of it.
It was early in September when Boone set the log house in order, nailed
up its windows and put a padlock on the door. He carried the key over to
Aunt Judy's, and then on his return he sat silently on the fence gazing
at its square front for a long while in the twilight.
Before him lay new battles in the first large city he had yet seen--a
city which until now he had seen only once when he went there to visit
its jail. But his preternaturally solemn face at length brightened.
Anne was there, and Colonel Wallifarro had said, "A warm welcome awaits
you."
In due course Boone presented himself at the office door in Louisville
with the three names etched upon its frosted glass, and was conducted by
a somewhat supercilious attendant to the Colonel's sanctum.
The Colonel came promptly from his chair with an outstretched hand.
"Well, my boy," he exclaimed heartily, "I'm right glad to see you."
Morgan sat across the desk from his father. Some matter of consultation
had brought him there, and the fact that the Colonel had permitted young
Wellver's arrival to interrupt it annoyed him.
"So you lost your race up there, didn't you?" Colonel Wallifarro
laughed. "I wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. After all,
it's not the only campaign you'll ever make."
But the eyes of the young mountaineer held the sombreness of his
humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he
said. "I hate to have to tell him--that the first fight I ever went into
was a--Waterloo."
"Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your
Austerlitz later--but I know General Prince will want to see you." The
lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince
that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office."
As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne--Miss Masters?"
At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a
glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the
memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's
taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her
after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin."
"Yes, sir, I'll miss her."
So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver
a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.
* * * * *
The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned
savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer
example of the Old South--which was now the New South as well; but one
friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange
world of its loneliness.
At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer
battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize--only the
bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and
others--that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to
conceal--until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.
He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and
manners.
Morgan was consistently polite--but it was a detached politeness which
often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat.
Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the
habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel
Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated
people--though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness.
As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which
Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as "the conduct of a gentleman
reduced to its simplest and most natural terms."
But for the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the
office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the
life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap
gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed
men who should, they were assured, if life stood on all fours with
justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary
existence of unalleviated obscurity.
But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window
and a gas jet.
The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old
sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a
club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and
out.
At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the
gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring
into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked.
Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books.
So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation
and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster,
Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his "Lives
of the Caesars," with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch,
Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling.
Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance.
But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief.
As the train took him back through flat beargrass and swelling
bluegrass, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first
log booms in the rivers--his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to
broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before.
Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone
went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the assurance of a
courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself
before he crossed the stile.
To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the
effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friendship which, on
one side, had been love.
"It's Boone Wellver. Can I come in?" he shouted from the road, and
Cyrus, who looked aged and hunched his shoulders more dejectedly than of
old, rose slowly from his hickory-withed chair on the porch and stood
upright.
At first he did not speak. Indeed, he did not speak at all until he had
come with deliberate steps down to the stile, where he faced the visitor
across the boundary fence, as a defending force might parley over a
frontier. Then raising a long arm and a pointed finger down the road, he
spoke the one word, "Begone!"
"I came to see Happy," said the visitor steadily. "I don't think she is
nursing any grudge."
"No," the old fellow's eyes flashed dangerously; "women folks kin be too
damn fergivin', I reckon. Hit war because she exacted a pledge from me
to keep hands off thet I ever let matters slide in ther first place. I
don't know what come ter pass. She hain't nuver told me--but I knows you
broke her heart some fashion. Many a mountain war has done been started
fer less."
Boone straightened a little and his chin came up, but still there was no
resentment in his voice:
"Then I can't see your daughter--at your house? Will you tell her that I
sought to?"
In a hard voice Cyrus answered: "No--ef she war hyar I wouldn't give her
no message from ye whatsoever--but since she ain't hyar thet don't make
no great differ."
"Where is she?"
"Thet's her business--and mine. Hit hain't none o' yourn--. An' now,
begone!"
Boone turned on his heel and strode away, but it was only from other
neighbours that he learned that a second school, similar to the one
which the girl herself had attended, was being started some forty miles
away in a district that had heard of the first, and had sent out the
cry, "Come over into Macedonia and help us!"
To that school Happy had gone--this time as a teacher of the younger
children.
But before the summer ended Anne came to Marlin Town, and though she
had been at an Eastern college Boone found no change in her save that
her beauty seemed more radiant and her graciousness more winning. He had
been a trifle afraid of meeting her, this time, because he felt more
keenly than in the past how many allowances her indulgence must make for
his crudities.
But Anne knew many men who had the superficial qualities that Boone
coveted--and little else. What she did see in her old playmate was a
fellow superbly fitted for companionship out under the broad skies, and,
above all, she loved the open places and the freedom of the hills where
the eagles nested in their high eyries.
"I love it all," she exclaimed one day, with an outsweep of her arms. "I
believe that somewhere back in my family tree there must have been an
unaccounted-for gipsy. I've not been here so very much, and yet I always
think of coming here as of going home."
"God never made any other country just like it, I reckon," Boone
answered gravely. "It's fierce and lawless, but it's honest and
generous, too. Men kill here, but they don't steal. They are poor, but
they never turn the stranger away. It's strange, though, that you should
love it so. It's very different from all you've known down there."
"I guess there's a wild streak in me, too," she laughed. "Those virtues
you speak of are the ones I like best. When I go home I feel like a
canary hopping back into its cage, after a little freedom."