But while Boone waited for Anne to come into the ring he made no
assiduous search for her in the boxes, because, like many other men
whose outward seeming is one of boldness, he was fettered by an
inordinate shyness in this heavy atmosphere of the unaccustomed. Later
Anne accused him of snubbing her. "You passed right by me a half dozen
times," she teased with violet mischief shimmering in her eyes. "You
wouldn't even look at me."
"I was plain scared," he made candid admission; "but when you went into
the ring I looked at you every minute."
"You're jolly well right you did," she laughed. "You were glued to the
rail, tramping down women and small children. Every time I came round I
saw you there and your face haunted me like a spirit in purgatory. Your
eyes were positively bulging with terror."
"That's what you get," Boone retorted calmly, "for making a
chicken-hearted fellow fall in love with you. I had to hang 'round and
wait. I could no more pursue you through the roses and diamonds than a
cat could follow you into water."
The girl shook her head with a bewildered indulgence. "I can't
understand it," she protested. "There is nothing to be frightened
about."
The young mountaineer grinned sheepishly. "I reckon a lion-tamer would
say the same thing," he asserted, "about going into the cage. He's used
to it."
Anne sat silent for a few moments, and between her eyes came a tiny
pucker, as if a thought tinged with pain had pricked, thornlike, into
her reflections.
At last she spoke slowly: "Suppose you couldn't swim, and I had to
spend a lot of time in deep water. Wouldn't you learn?"
"That's different," he assured her. "You might need me in that event."
"You say society frightens you, and it's a thing I can't understand. I
could understand its boring you. It bores me. I love informal things. I
love my friends and the door that stands open as it always does here,
but I hate the dress parades. There's some sense in the Horse Show. It
makes a market for expensively bred and trained animals, and it's a sort
of fancy advertising; but I don't care for a human application of the
same idea."
"I feel that way, too," he responded quickly, "and not being expensively
bred or trained, I can't escape feeling like a cart horse would feel in
that ring."
"I'm going to make my debut, Boone," she said quietly. "I'm going to do
it because both mother and Uncle Tom have their hearts set on it and
there's no graciousness in stubborn resistance. There are times coming
when I've got to stand out against them, and I don't want to multiply
them needlessly. But there's something more than just ordinary dislike
back of my feeling as I do about it all, and I think it's a thing you'd
be the first to understand."
"I guess I ought to understand, Anne, but I've got so much to learn.
Please make allowances for me and explain." His tone was humble and
self-accusing.
"This debut ball is just their way of putting me on the marriage
market--duly labelled and proclaimed. I don't fancy being put up at
auction, and it doesn't even seem quite honest. It's not a genuine offer
of sale, because it's all fixed in their own minds. Morgan is to bid me
in when the time comes."
Boone's face grew sombre, and his strong mouth line stiffened over his
resolute chin.
"God knows that arrangement is going to come to grief," he said in a low
voice that shook with feeling.
"Not if Lochinvar doesn't come to the party," she retorted with a swift
change to the riffle of laughing eyes. "I'm letting sleeping dogs lie
for the present, Boone, because it's the best way. There isn't any doubt
of you in my heart. You know that, but it will be a long time before you
can marry me. Meantime,--" the battle light shone for a flashing instant
in her pupils--"I'm standing out for one thing. They've got to give you
full acknowledgment. Everybody that accepts me must accept you--and
unless you claim recognition, they won't do it."
Boone rose and came over. He took her hands in his own and looked down
at her, and, though he smiled, his voice was full of worship.
"Lochinvar will come, dearest," he declared. "He'll come in full
war-paint, and nobody but himself will know how stiff he's scared."
It was the morning after that that Boone sat again as a defendant in the
police court, flanked by Morgan and the Colonel. He was on trial for
shooting and wounding, and there had been broadly circulated hints that
his prosecution would be gruelling enough to dissuade bold and adverse
spirits on election day. Yet when the case was reached on the docket,
Henry Simpson, whose finger was in every pie as a master pastry cook for
the intrenched element, arose from his place at the right hand of the
court's prosecutor and sonorously cleared his throat.
"May it please your Honour," he announced, with the rhetorical dignity
of a Roman senator--or a criminal lawyer's idea of a Roman senator--"the
prosecuting witness harbours no feeling of rancour in this affair,
despite the injuries which he sustained. The defendant seems to have
been led astray in the hot enthusiasm of his youth by older heads.
Having no wish to punish a cat's-paw for the responsibility of his
mentors, we move the dismissal of the accused."
"And we, your Honour," came the uptake of Morgan Wallifarro so swiftly
as to leave no margin of pause between statement and retort, "insist
upon a trial and a full vindication. This prosecuting witness who would
now spread the benign mantle of charity over the conduct of his
assailant, fell face foremost while leading an armed raid on a
registration booth. I am prepared to prove that the wounded man who now
sits there, an exemplar of Christian forgiveness, was spirited away,
after his gang fled, and cared for in a private room at the City
Hospital under the tender auspices of certain officials. I am further
prepared to prove that the name which this municipal favourite now wears
is, for him, a new one and that until recently he was known as Kid
Repetto whose likeness and Bertillon measurements are preserved in the
local rogues' gallery. The profession which he ornamented until the city
hall cried out for his skilled aid was burglary and second-story work--"
The judicial gavel fell with an admonitory slam, and the magisterial
jaws came warningly together.
"Mr. Wallifarro," declared the judge, "the court sustains the
prosecution's motion of dismissal. Your unproven statements are highly
improper in their innuendo of collusion by an officer of this court. You
are seeking to try this case in the newspapers, sir," and Morgan,
closing his portfolio, smiled his mocking admission of the charge. He
had watched the busy pencils at the press table, and knew that some of
them would blossom in flaring headlines. He had seen the cartoonist who
had come to make a pencil sketch of Boone himself finish his task, and
he enjoyed the judge's resentment. Now he turned away with the
irritating jauntiness of one who has scored.
But that evening, at the Horse Show, Boone suffered the embarrassment of
that flare-up of publicity which he felt was purely adventitious. Chance
had made him a scrap in a pattern of ephemeral interest, and to him it
seemed that one man in three carried an afternoon paper in his pocket
with his own hasty albeit recognizable portrait starkly displayed to the
public gaze. On faces which he did not know he caught smiles of amused
recognition, and on one which he did know a glower of hate. That was
the face of the policeman who had arrested him.
Some of the women in the boxes had him dragged before them for
introduction, and he responded with a shyness that was cloaked under the
reserve of his half-barbaric dignity.
Anne smiled, and a proprietary pride lurked in her expression.
"Anne looks as docile and amiable as a sweet child," sighed Mrs. Masters
to Colonel Wallifarro, as he bade her good night that same evening, "but
she's got Larry's British stubbornness in every fibre."
"Added," suggested the Colonel with a truant twinkle, "to the admirable
resoluteness of our own family."
"She's absolutely set on having this young protege of yours at her debut
ball, and I suppose you know what that signifies. It means that through
her whole social career he'll be dangling along frightening off really
eligible men!" The lady gave a well-bred little snort of disdain. "He's
about as possible as a pet toad!"
The Colonel laughed.
"I'm afraid, my dear, that I like Anne the better for it. We've agreed
that Morgan is your choice, and mine--and I don't think Morgan is going
to be scared off. Besides, this young man is in my office."
"So is your office cat--if you have one," sniffed the anxious mother.
"We're not sending the cat an invitation, you know."
"I have no cat," observed the lawyer with perfect gravity, and Mrs.
Masters shrugged her shoulders with unconvinced resignation.
When the telephone on Boone's desk rang one afternoon he was quite alone
there, and he took up the receiver, to hear Anne's voice. The
conversation at first indicated no definite objective, but after a
little the girl demanded:
"Boone, you _are_ coming to my party--aren't you?"
For a moment the young man hung hesitantly on the question; then he
said: "Anne, I'd go anywhere for the chance of seeing you, but you know
'I hain't nuver run a set in my life. My folks they don't hold hit ter
be godly.'"
Her laughter tinkled back to him, but he had caught the underlying
insistence of her tone, and he remembered what she had said about this
ball: what it meant to her, and what his being there meant too.
"Take young Lochinvar for instance," he went on banteringly yet with a
dubious touch in his voice. "It wasn't the first party of the season
that he came to, was it? And even at the finish he was a little late.
Maybe there was some delay in getting his coat of mail ready."
"Oh," the girl's exclamation was one of quick understanding. She knew
something of Boone's financial pinch, and how he felt it a point of
honour to stretch as far as possible the fund his patron had left him.
"You mean--" she broke off, and the young mountaineer spoke bluntly,
"I mean I haven't a dress suit, and short of stealing one--"
"I understand," she declared, and began talking animatedly of other
things, but when she had rung off Boone sat staring at an open law book
and making nothing of its text. Then he heard a movement at his back and
swung around in his swivel chair, but the next instant he was on his
feet with an exclamation that was an outburst of joy.
There, standing just inside the door, tanned like saddle leather,
somewhat grayer about the temples and sparer of figure than of old, but
with the strong vigour of active months, stood Victor McCalloway.
"I think, my boy," he said, as though he had never been away at all, "we
can run to a dress suit."