Summer, before it has freckled into hot fulness and forgotten the fresh
scent and colour of blossoms! June heralding blitheness from the golden
throats of troubadour field larks, rustling and crooning her message in
green branches under a sky whose blue is proclamation of her love motif!
Certainly to Boone Wellver and Anne Masters picking strawberries
together in a little arbour-walled, orchard-bounded world of garden, the
centre of life lay within themselves, and the letters of life spelled
"You and I."
On the girl's uncovered hair the stir of a light breeze and the sparkle
of a clear sun awoke that dispute of dominion of which McCalloway had
spoken; contention along the borderland between brown and gold. On her
cheek the crystal brightness threw its searching question and revealed
no flaw.
Boone, looking up from the place where he knelt among the vines, found
in his own heart the echo to all the day's minstrelsy. He rose to his
feet with his bronzed face paled under a sudden wave of emotion, which
broke out of his surcharged feeling as a whitecap breaks on the crest of
a high running swell. His eyes, devouringly fixed on the girl, blazed
into a wordless adoration, and he felt, at once, giant-strong and
water-weak in the surge of the great paradox. It would just then have
been as easy for him to construe the fourth dimension as to put his
lover's thoughts into a lover's words, but her woman's eyes read what he
could not say and became bafflingly deep as she turned them away across
the gold and blue and green of the morning.
Boone's arms twitched at his sides under the fret of his inarticulate
fulness of spirit. The only language left in him was that primitive
language of action. His, under the superimposed structure of acquired
things, was a heritage which could know no love that was not a
soul-stirring passion; no hate that was not a withering fire.
Now it seemed to him that under the hurricane power of his love for Anne
Masters the pillars of the world shook. He caught her in his arms and
pressed her to him until her hair brushed his cheek and her heart-beat
could be felt against his breast.
His voice, at last regained, was broken like that of a man sobbing.
"I can't say it--there aren't any words--for it!"
All his previous love-making had made Anne remember that first agitated
confession, "I think of you like the evening star--you're as far out of
reach as if you were up there in heaven." Always there had been
something almost humble in his deference, as if he had admitted himself
a vassal lifting eyes to royalty. Now he was seizing her with the fierce
proprietary embrace of one who claims his own and who will not be
denied. The arms that held her pressed her till they hurt in the embrace
of the untamed man for his own woman, and, since for her too, love was
the great paradox, the fierce and ardent flood that had swept him lifted
her on its tide and rang through her with a sort of wild triumph.
"You--you don't have to say anything--now," she told him somewhat
faintly. If it had been up yonder, with the jutting escarpments of the
hills about them, this wild moment would have shaped itself in more
orthodox fashion with the eternal fitnesses. But the moment left them
with something of tumultuous exaltation, as though they had burst
together through the shell of a superficial world and touched the
essentials.
After a little, when again they could realize the more tranquil voices
of the birds and the little winds, Anne, with a hand on each of his
shoulders, spoke slowly and very thoughtfully:
"I don't need to be told, Boone. If I didn't know, life wouldn't be
worth much to me."
"When I'm away from you," he answered still in a shaken voice, "I always
hear your voice. I always see you, yet when I come back to you, you're
always a surprise to me--I find that my memory hasn't been able to do
you justice."
She was silent for a little, and then into the serene contentment of her
eyes crept a tiny shadow of trouble.
"Boone, dear," she said soberly, "we have a long time to wait--and we
can't afford to--let ourselves--be tempest-tossed this way--until we can
see the end. We can't be patient and--like this--at the same time."
"How can I be patient?" he demanded.
"You know," she reminded him. "I'm not wearing an engagement ring yet
and--"
His face shadowed ruefully, but he forced a confident smile and pitched
his tone to the manner of jest.
"The ring that's fit for you to wear ought to cost a king's ransom,
Anne," he declared, "and I haven't any monarchs in the 'jail-house' just
yet."
"It isn't that, dear, and you know it. If I were to wear your ring
now--with years perhaps of waiting--it would only mean endless war at
home. There'll be unavoidable battles enough when the time comes. It
hardly seems worth while to court them in advance."
"I knew,"--he spoke with a heavy heart--"that they'd take you through
the torture chamber before they let you marry me. Are you sure, dearest,
that I'm worth it to you?"
The girl's head came up with the tilt of pride which he loved, and with
the violet blaze in its eyes.
"Have I complained?" she asked.
"Anne,"--the man bent forward and spoke with the fervent earnestness of
invincible resolve--"I have a long way to go. I'm still down on the
ground level and you are still the evening star! Stars and groundlings,
dear heart! They're very far apart, but there's a beacon burning before
me and there's a magic in your love!" His expression had grown as tender
as it had a little while before been elemental, yet it was not less
purposeful. "In time, by God's grace I shall climb up to you, but it's a
steep journey, and it's asking a good deal of you to mark time while I
travel it."
"It's asking so much," declared the girl, "that I wouldn't do it if it
wasn't the one thing in the world I want to do--if my heart wasn't set
on that and nothing else."
"Thank God!" he breathed, "and thank _you_!"
After a little Anne spoke speculatively:
"I've missed you rather terribly this time. You've seemed to be away so
long."
"I've been building political fences, but to me it's been exile," he
told her. "This race for the legislature seems a trivial thing to keep
me away from you. If I win it--and God knows I've _got_ to win--it's
still a petty victory. But it's the first stage of the journey, and
after the legislature comes Congress. You see, small as it is, it's
vital."
Anne studied the gossamer building about which a spider was busying
itself, and Boone knew that in her mind some matter was demanding
discussion. He waited for her to broach it and soon she began.
"Morgan held politics in contempt until he went too far into the game to
abandon it, but even now he's seeking to make it lead to something
else."
"What?" inquired Boone, wondering what topic Anne was approaching by
this path of indirection.
"I can tell you without abusing a confidence," she laughed, "because
he's never told me. I've only guessed it, but I'm sure I'm right. His
goal is a European embassy with a life near the trappings of a throne.
And since Morgan is Morgan, he'll get it. He never fails."
"In one thing," announced Boone shortly, "he's going to fail."
Anne nodded, "In one thing he is," she agreed. "But if he goes into the
diplomatic service, Boone, there'll be a place left vacant in the firm.
Have you thought of that? Wouldn't your own future lie smoother that
way? You could take your place here at the bar instead of struggling to
herd wild sheep, and in the end you'd be Uncle Tom's logical successor."
Boone's face became sober, almost, Anne thought, distressed. The easy
swing of his shoulders stiffened, and Anne intuitively knew that instead
of suggesting a new thought she had broached a subject of painful
deliberation, already mulled over with a heavy heart.
Into the young lover's mind flashed the picture of a rough hill
evangelist exhorting rougher hearers, and of scriptural words: ...
"taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them."
Finally he spoke: "I _have_ thought of it, Anne.... The Colonel has even
suggested it.... Of course he hasn't said anything about Morgan's going
away; he only intimated that there might be a place for me in the
practice."
"You didn't refuse? It's a good law firm, you know--old and honoured."
Suddenly he spread his hands in a gesture almost of appeal, as though he
hoped she might understand and yet hardly dared to expect it.
"Anne, those wild sheep you just spoke of are my people. Perhaps with
all their faults they have a few virtues too, and, if they have, loyalty
to their own blood is chief of them. The world knows most about their
murders, their moonshining and their abysmal ignorance, but you know
that their blood is the most undiluted and purest American blood in
America. You know that their children grow up illiterate only because
they have no alternative. You know that those people are wild, lawless,
but, thank God, generous to a fault, and as honest as the sun is
bright. You know that even in their law-breaking they don't follow a
base criminality so much as a perverted code of ethics. I was one of
them. I inherited their blood-hatreds and their squalor, and because of
generous friends I was rescued. If I am worth the effort spent on me at
all, I owe it to those men, who saved me from what I might have been, to
do my utmost for my 'wild sheep.'"
The girl was counting the iridescent threads of the spider's web, but
her eyes caught the fixity with which his hand had unconsciously
clenched itself. All that he said was undoubtedly true and creditable.
She would not, in theory, have had him feel or speak otherwise, yet,
since it is as impossible to eliminate one's ego from thought as to see
through one's reflection in a mirror, she felt suddenly sick at heart.
If the effect of his liberation from the squalid things of his origin
meant, after all, only to bind him the more strongly to them; if a
quixotic sense of obligation barred him from the broader world he had
won to, wherein lay the virtue of salvation? She loved the majestic
wildness of the hills and the sweep of their free winds, but of the
people in general she had thought as one gently bred and nurtured might
naturally think of the less fortunate and more vulgar of the world.
Then she heard his words going on again but seeming to sound from a
distance:
"Except for what generous friends did for me, I might--I would in all
probability have grown as rank and wild as many other boys up there. The
feud would perhaps have claimed me. For human life and human rights, I
might have had the same contempt, and instead of standing here free and
fortunate I might even now be wearing stripes in the penitentiary. If
I've escaped, I think my people are entitled to what little I can offer
them."
Anne felt a weight of foreboding on her heart, but she laid her hands on
his shoulders. "Of course, dear," she said softly, "it's not just
getting to the place, after all, is it? One must travel the right road,
too."
* * * * *
On the deck-rail of a coast-wise fruit steamer beating down from
equatorial waters leaned two men, whose ages were seemingly about forty.
Off the starboard bow lay the island of San Lorenzo, yellow in the sun,
with its battered crown of broken fortress. Ahead lay Callao, yellow,
too, with its adobe walls, and rust-red where its corrugated iron roofs
caught and husbanded the heat which needed no husbanding. Far off,
between terraces of sand and the slopes of San Cristobal, one could make
out the church towers of Lima.
The two travellers looked idly, somewhat contemptuously, on a shore line
that had fired the imagination of Pizarro and his conquistadores. They
were not of those to whom historic associations lend glamour, neither
were they themselves precisely objects of romantic interest. One was
dark of hair and skin and saturnine of expression. The other was blond,
floridly blond, and unmistakably Teutonic.
"Know anything about oil, mein friendt?" inquired the fair-haired
traveller, and the other laughed.
"Oil? My middle name's oil. I've drilled it in Mexico and--" abruptly
the speaker became less expansive as he added, "and elsewhere."
The German smiled. "Elsewhere?" he observed. "It is a large place--nein?
Has oil been always your business?"
From Guayaquil they had been travelling companions, but they had shared
no personal confidences. The reply came non-committally.
"I've followed some several things."
The Teuton did not press his interrogations, and a silence fell between
the two. While it lasted, the face of Saul Fulton settled into a frown
of discontent.
At Lima there would perhaps be mail, and upon the answer to a letter
written long ago his future plans depended.
"Shall we dine together in Lima?" The suggestion came at last from the
German. "So perhaps we shall be less bored."
Saul Fulton nodded. "Why not? I'll meet you at the American cafe at six,
but the dinner'll be on me."
Fulton could afford to entertain if the spirit moved him, and if his
news was good he would have the wish to celebrate. These years of his
wanderings since he had left home with an indictment hanging above his
head had not all been lean, but prosperity in exile had of late become
bitter on his tongue with the ashiness of dead-sea fruit. Saul was
homesick. He wanted to shake from his feet for ever this dry dust of the
rainless west coast. He wanted to see the stars come up out of a paling
lemon afterglow, across peaks ragged with hardwood and fringed with
pine.
He had tasted the bread and wine of many latitudes, and perhaps in all
of them life had been more kindly than in the mountains of his birth,
yet no child could be more homesick. He wanted to parade before the
pinch of his neighbour's poverty the little prizes of his ignoble
success--and, more than that, he wanted something else.
But when the sun was dropping back of San Cristobal's cone he stood on a
cobble-stoned street on the outskirts of Lima, cursing under his breath
with a torn envelope in his hand. His letter had not brought him good
news.
The communication, in the first place, had not come from the man to whom
he had written, though he grudgingly admitted that perhaps this
vicarious reply was essential to caution.
"To come back here now would be the most heedless thing in the world, he
says." That had been the hateful gist culled from the detail. The "he
says" must refer to the unnamed attorney, to whom Saul had made the
confession which gave value to his evidence against Asa Gregory.
If Asa were free, of course he knew that to return to Marlin County
would be to ask insistently for death--and not to ask in vain. But Asa
lay securely immured behind jail walls which would not be apt to open
for him unless to let him pass into the still safer walls of the
penitentiary or out into the cemented yard where the gallows stood.
The forces of the prosecution owed him something. They owed him so much
that he had walked in no terror of extradition, or even, after a prudent
absence, molestation at home. Technically of course he still stood
charged as an accomplice to murder who had forfeited his bond, but there
may be divergences between a technical and an actual status. The
attorney who preferred now not to be quoted had doubtless discussed the
matter with the Commonwealth, and that the Commonwealth had no wish to
hound him was indicated by this passing on of the advice "ride wide."
Who then stood between him and a safe return to the State he had served
with vital testimony? This letter told him in the none too elegant
phrasing of a friend from the hills.
"Asa himself won't bother you unless the Governor pardons him
out--and the Governor ain't likely to do that. He's the man
that went in when Goebel died. I say he ain't likely to pardon
Asa--but still there has been some changes here. The Democrat
party has had some quarrels inside itself. The Louisville crowd
has been kicked out by this same governor, and the lawyers that
helped get it done were the Wallifarro crowd. You may not
remember much about Boone Wellver, because he was a kid when
you left, but he thinks Asa's a piece of the moon, and he's a
lawyer now hisself in Wallifarro's offices. Those men stand
close to the Governor, and this Boone Wellver has wore out the
carpet at Frankfort, tramping in to argue for Asa's pardon. But
that ain't all. He's talked hisself blue in the face trying to
have you brought back and hung. Back in Marlin he's aimin' to
go to the legislature and he's buildin' up influence. If he
wins out he's goin' to be a power there, and, if he gets to be,
you can't never come home."
At that point Saul lowered the pages of the letter and cursed again
under his breath. Then he read on again though by now he knew the
contents by heart.
"It was heedless for you to write to Jim Beverly. Wellver heard
of that through some tattle-talk and went to the Commonwealth
attorney and told where you was at. He'll hound you as long as
he lives, and if you come back here you'll walk into his
trap--unless you can contrive to get him out of the way. He
stands across your path, and you've got either to lay low or
get rid of him. If you came back here, one of you would have to
die as sure as God sits on high."
Saul thrust the letter back into his pocket. A string of pack llamas
swung grunting by under their loads, driven by ponchoed cholos. Overhead
a vulture lumbered by. From the stand of a street vendor drifted the
odours of skewered fowl-livers and black olives. Over the whole
Spanish-American panorama brooded the treeless foothills of the
Cordilleras that went back to the Andes. Everything that came to eye and
nostril of Saul Fulton carried the hateful aspect and savour of the
alien.
"I disgust the whole damn land," he declared as he rose, for though he
no longer felt in a mood of celebration it was time to meet the
"Dutchman" for dinner.
Reticence was second nature to the plotter who had just heard of the
growing power of a new enemy, but there was wine for dinner and a
sympathetic listener, and under the ache of nostalgia and the need of
outpouring, his discretion for once weakened.
It was late when over their coffee cups and cigarettes Saul realized
that he had been talking too freely, but the German leaned forward and
nodded a sympathetic head.
"I am discreet," he reassured. "I understand."
After a moment he added, "It may surprise you, mein friendt, to learn
that I, too, have been in your Kentucky mountains. It was when they
first talked of oil there some years back.... I did not remain long....
Oil there was but not in gushers ... at the price of the markets it did
not pay. It only tantalized with false hope."
Saul looked up. A crafty gleam shot into his eyes as he started to
speak, then he repressed the words on his lips and remained silent.
After a long while, however, he began hesitantly:
"There's oil there still--and there's places where it would pay. That's
why I'm itchin' to go back. With what I know now and those fools there
don't know, I could get rich; big rich, and this damned young Wellver
stands barrin' my way."
"Perhaps,"--the German spoke tentatively--"we could do business
together. I go to the States shortly mein-self."
"Business, hell!" Saul Fulton's hand smote the table. "A stranger
couldn't swing things. Folks would jump prices on you. They suspicion
strangers, there."
He sat silent for a time, and the German puffed contemplatively at his
cigarette. Outside somewhere a band was playing. Above the patio where
they sat at table the stars were large and tranquil. A fountain plashed
in silvery tinkles.
Saul Fulton's face grew sinister with its thoughts, and when at last he
spoke again it was with the air of a man who has debated to a conclusion
the problem that besets him and who, having decided, sets his foot into
the Rubicon of action.
"I'm goin' back there, myself. There's ways an' means of gettin' rid of
brash trouble-makers, an' if any man knows 'em in an' out, an' back an'
forth, it's me."
Otto Gehr shrugged his white-coated shoulders.
"The fit should survive," he made answer.
Saul raised his almost empty glass. "Here's Luck," he said. "This
Wellver lad is marked down for what's comin' to him."