A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face
of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy
windfall out of the unexpected.
Never had that other face and figure been far from his thoughts. Never
had his ardent hero-worship waned or tarnished. His speculations and
dreams had been haunted by misgivings bred of the fierce chances of war,
chances which might make of the features, into which he now looked
again, only a memory.
New and varied activities in his life had bulwarked him against actual
brooding, and youth is too brightly hopeful to accept grim
possibilities, unproven; but the mists of denied fear had hung
undissolved, and there had been moments when they had thickened and
congealed on the crystal of his thoughts to dark foreboding.
He had not known with what name or rank his beloved preceptor had been
serving over there beyond the Pacific. Many officers had fallen, and
McCalloway was not one to turn half aside from any danger. If he had
been among the lost, Boone might never have known. Even his torture of
mind over Asa had been free of this intolerable character of suspense.
Now it was lifted, and without a forerunner of hint the man stood there
before him in the flesh, smiling and talking of a dress suit!
"I can't believe it, sir," Boone stammered, and McCalloway's ruddy face
became quizzical.
"Had you made up your mind to lose me, then?" he inquired.
Much they had in common at that moment of reunion, and one thing in
antithesis. Boone thought of his lost race and was smitten with a pang
of failure to report, but McCalloway was reading the clarity of bold and
honest eyes: of a face to which it was given to wear the karat-mark of
dauntlessness and integrity, and at the end of his gaze he gave an
unuttered summary of what he had read: "Clean as a hound's tooth--and as
strong."
"They beat me to a pulp down there, sir," Boone made prompt and rueful
confession, "but there's time to tell about that later. I guess for a
while I'm going to keep you busy declining to answer questions about
yourself."
"There may be some uncensored passages," smiled the Scot. "I sha'n't
have to walk in total darkness."
"The important question is already answered, sir. You are safely back.
You were with Kuroki, weren't you?" There Boone halted and grinned as he
added: "'Don't answer that thar question onlessen ye've a mind ter.'"
"I was with him for a time. Why do you ask?"
"Because," came the instant and confident response, "where he went there
were the signs of genius."
"Genius went with Kuroki quite independently of his subordinates,"
McCalloway assured him gravely, "but a few moments back I heard you tell
some one over the telephone that you couldn't come to her party because
you had no evening clothes. The Russian war is over, but the matter of
that dress suit retains the force of present crisis."
A half hour later, while the elder man displayed a sartorial knowledge
which surprised him, Boone was being measured for his first evening
clothes.
"For the Lord's sake, sir," he besought with sudden realization as they
left the tailor's shop, "don't ever breathe a word about that spade-tail
coat back there in Marlin. I'm going to run for the legislature next
time, you know. The man that licked me before had patches on his pants."
McCalloway nodded his head. "I'll tell it not in Gath, speak it not in
Ascalon," he promised. "That suit of clothes might prove your political
shroud."
Boone saw Anne that evening and with a thrilling voice told her of
McCalloway's return--but of the visit to the tailor he said nothing, and
she refrained from reverting to the topic of the party.
Anne was sensitive on the point of an invitation urgently given and not
eagerly accepted. That is what her consciousness registered, and she
told herself that it was petulant and unworthy to attach so much
importance to a minor disappointment. But without full realization,
other and graver thought elements hung with ponderous weight from the
peg of that lesser circumstance. Boone's inability to buy a dress suit
was a measure of his poverty and of the great undertaking which lay
ahead of him; of the length and steepness of the road he must travel
before he could come to her and say, "I have made a home for you."
She herself was to be presented to society with expensive display, and
her pride shivered fastidiously at the realization that all this outlay
came from a purse not their own, and entailed an undeclared obligation.
She had never been told just how far she and her mother depended on the
Colonel's bounty. That had been carefully left enveloped in a hazy
indefiniteness that revealed no sharp or embarrassing angle of detail.
Had she known it all, her shiver of distaste would have been a shudder
of chagrin. But Anne was enough in love with Boone to feel that by his
absence from her social launching the sparkle of her little personal
triumph would be dulled.
But when at last she stood in her receiving line, radiant in her young
loveliness, she glanced up and her violet eyes took on a sudden sparkle,
while her cheeks flushed with surprised pleasure, for there, making his
way through the door, came Boone.
He came with his stage fright as invisible as the secrets of Bluebeard's
closet, so that even Mrs. Masters, looking up with equal surprise though
not an equal delight, admitted that in appearance, at least, he was no
liability to her company of guests.
The clothes that Victor McCalloway had supervised were tailored as they
should have been, with every requisite of conservative elegance, and
they set off a figure of a man well sculptured of line and proportion.
As he took Anne's hand he said in a lowered voice and with a twinkle in
his eyes, "I came in through the front door--but there wasn't any arch.
My legs are shaking."
Anne glanced down. "They are doing it very quietly," she reassured. "No
fuss at all."
Because of a straight-eyed sincerity and a candid vigour which endowed
him with a forcefulness beyond his years, and because a certain
deliberate humour played in his eyes and flashed occasionally into his
ungarrulous speech, he found himself smiled upon with the tolerant
approval of the older ladies and the point-blank delight of the younger.
Back at his desk the next morning he was again the grave-eyed and
industrious young utility man, but in his breast pocket was a crumpled
rosebud which to him still had fragrant life. In his mind were certain
rich memories and in his veins raced hot currents of love--pitched to a
new exhilaration.
Victor McCalloway had become again the lone man of the mountains, and
Boone burned with anxiety to go to him there, but the soldier had
prohibited that just now. The boy had put his hand to the plough of a
virulent city campaign, and until the furrow was turned he must stay
there with the men who were making the fight.
"For you, my boy," he had declared, with a live interest that ran to
emphasis, "this is an opportunity not to be missed. It is a phase of
transition, not only in your own development but in that of your State
and your country. Through all of it sounds the insistent message of the
future: whoever takes into his hands public affairs must give to the
public a conscientious accounting. This is a declaration of war on the
old, slothfully accepted dogma that to the victor belongs the spoils.
It is Humanity's plea for a place in government."
When McCalloway had gone, Boone carried into the steps and developments
of that autumn's activities a freshly galvanized sense of romance and of
high adventure. Through the labour of each day thrilled the thought of
Anne, and the quiet triumph of being no longer "poor white trash."
In the forces of the political enemy clinging doggedly to the spoils of
long possession and sticking at no desperate effort, the boy discovered
much that was not mean--rather was it picturesque with a sort of Robin
Hood flavour and the drama of a passing order. Here were the
twentieth-century counterparts of the gentlemen-gamblers of the old
Mississippi steamboat days, a gentry bold and mendacious, unable to
perceive that what had been must not for that reason continue to be.
Often Boone went to hear Morgan delivering his philippics to street
corner audiences, and often too he dropped around inconspicuously to
listen as that administration orator popularly called "The Bull"
exhorted "the pure in heart." He liked the extremes between the edged
satire and nervous force of the young lawyer whose dress and appearance
was always point-device, and whose message was always "_Carthago delenda
est_," and the great sonorous voice of the rougher man who knew the
hearts of the mob and how to reach them.
At the end of a white-hot campaign came an election day that eclipsed in
violence the period of registration, and out of its confusion emerged,
as bruised victors, the forces of the city hall.
But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in
court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens
attended mass meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew
for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city
clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills
that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the
gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor
McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings,
the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with
the confidence reposed in him--and the older with a quiet light of
satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had
taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed.
"How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when
the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel
you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country
has followed?"
Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about
caught up with the Mexican War."
After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and
refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went
reflectively on again:
"Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a
prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us--in your own time.
You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer
talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere;
as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man,
like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation
cannot--and I still feel that when that message of merging and common
cause comes, it will come not on the wings of the peace dove but belched
from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."