The transforming touch of a razor, a studied amendment of manner and
apparel, and the passing of ten years: these are things which can work
an effective disguise for an Enoch Arden returned to village streets
that knew him long ago. Quietly dressed in clothes that were neither
good enough nor mean enough to arrest the passing eye, a middle-aged man
dropped from the evening train onto the cinder platform at Marlin Town.
Shrewd winds whipped in through icicled ravines, and the new arrival
fresh from equatorial latitudes shivered under their sting.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled about him. For so long
his memory had softened the uneven contours and colours of this town
with the illusory qualities of homesickness that now its tawdry
actuality brought something of a shock. It was all raw and comfortless,
and as the newcomer looked up at the forbidding summits he snarled to
himself, "They ain't a patch on the Andes."
Across from the old brick court house, with its dilapidated cupola and
its indefinable air of the mediaeval, sat the general store, proclaimed
in a sign of crippled lettering, "The Big Emporium." Tom Carr's nephews
directed this centre of industry and, from a grimy "office" above
stairs, Tom Carr directed his nephews. Until recent days he had also
directed, with a dictator's fiat power, most of the affairs of the
countryside. From that second-story room, the Gregories would have
declared with conviction Tom's father had "hired" Asa's father killed.
It was in its unadorned fashion a place of crumbling traditions.
Sitting there of late, Tom had done some unvarnished thinking anent the
expanding influence of young Boone Wellver.
He was sitting there now in the light and reek of a smoky lamp, by a
stove that was red-hot with no window open, and he was alone. He heard
the wooden stairs creaking under the ascending tread of stranger feet,
for to his acute ears footsteps were as individual as voices, and his
head inclined expectantly. Tom was waiting there for a man who had
written him a letter.
There followed a rap on the panels, and in response to his growled
permission the door opened and closed almost without sound, showing
inside the threshold a man clean shaven and inconspicuously dressed.
"Howdy, Saul," welcomed the seated baron of diminished powers. "I'd call
hit a right boldacious thing ter do--comin' back hyar--if I stood in
yore shoes."
Into the furtive eyes of the visitor came a shallow flash of bravado.
"Who's to hinder me, Tom?"
"Young Boone Wellver's got ter be a right huge power in these parts here
of late. He don't love ye none lavish, ef what folks norrates be true."
Saul seated himself, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I've had run-ins
with worse men than him," he declared, "and I'm still on the hoof."
"On the hoof an' fattenin', I should say," graciously acceded the leader
of the Carrs. "Ye've got a corn-fed look about ye, Saul."
"I stayed away from home," continued Fulton, "so long as it was to my
profit to be elsewheres. Now it suits me to come back, and there isn't
room enough here for both me an' him."
The elderly feudist surveyed his visitor with a cool shrewdness, and
after a long pause he remarked drily: "Ef so be, Boone Wellver was
called ter his reward, Saul, I wouldn't hardly buy me no mournin'
clothes, but for my own self I don't dast break ther truce. Howsomever,
when a feller hits at a snake he had ought ter _git_ hit. Thet feller
thet ye hired ter lay-way him hyar of late didn't seem ter enjoy no
master luck."
"All he needed was a little overseein'," retorted Saul blandly. "That's
why I'm here now. I've got to lay low for a while because there's still
the little matter of an indictment outstandin' but the same man stands
in your light and mine--we ought to be able to do some business
together."
"Things have changed a mighty heap," demurred Tom uneasily, but Saul
laughed.
"Let's change them back, then," he responded.
The plotting of a murder is erroneously presumed by the unpracticed to
be an affair of hushed voices and deeply closeted conspirators. Between
these two craftsmen it was discussed in the calm hard-headedness of
severe practicality. To Saul, who had been long an absentee, Tom Carr's
intimate familiarity with current conditions proved a bureau of vital
statistics. To Tom, who saw in Boone a dangerous trouble-maker and who
yet hesitated to make a feud-killing of the matter, the hand of a
volunteer was welcome, and so, as they talked, a community of interests
developed. Tom was to provide Saul with an inconspicuous refuge, and
Saul was to do the rest. A few others whose active participation was
needed were to be taken into confidence, but the secret was to be held
in close-guarded circle.
It is said that no other bitterness can be so saturated as that of the
apostate, and Saul brought into Tom's presence one day a boyish fellow
whose blood was Gregory blood but whose one strong emotion seemed to be
hatred of his own breed. He had been selected by the intriguer as the
man to take in hand and carry to success the assassination of Boone
Wellver.
Into Tom's office slouched "Little" Jim Bartleton by the front way, and
into it, by back stairs, came Saul at the same time.
Until a short time back no one had thought much about Little Jim. He had
not been a positive personality until recently, when he had taken to
drink and developed a mean streak. Always he had been fearless, but that
elicited no comment in a land where cowards are few. His most recent
friendships had all been among the Carrs, and no insult to his own
people had been uttered in his hearing which he had not capped with one
more scathing.
Just where his grievance lay had been his own secret. For Saul's
purpose, it sufficed that it existed and was dominant.
"Son," questioned Tom Carr in his suave voice, "I see plenty of reasons
why a feller should disgust Boone Wellver, but he's yore kin. Why does
ye hate him so?"
The answer came, prefaced with a string of oaths:
"I hain't nuver named this hyar ter nairy man afore now, but I aimed ter
wed an', ter git me money enough, I sot me up a small still-house nigh
ter whar he dwells at."
Spurts of hatred shot out of the speaker's dark eyes; eyes which in
kindlier moods were lighted by intelligence.
"Ef I'd been left alone I could of got me enough money ter do what I
wanted ter do ... ther gal was ready ter hev me. But, damn his
law-an'-order, hypocritical piety! he hed ter nose out my still an' warn
me thet without I quit he'd tip me off ter ther revenuer."
"Some folks," put in Tom, "moutn't even hev warned ye."
"Thet's jest ther p'int," panted the boy. "He told ther revenuer
fust-off an' then warned me atterwards. Ef hit hedn't of been fer a
right gay piece of luck, ther raiders would of come afore I got ther
still hid away--an' I'd be sulterin' in jail right now. I've done swore
ter kill him."
"An' ther gal, son," prompted Tom gently.
The black face went even blacker.
"I reckon," he said savagely, "she don't aim ter wait fer me no longer.
I owes thet ter Boone Wellver, too."
"An' so ye're willin'--?"
"Plumb willin' an' anxious! I've done held my counsel. He don't
suspicion how I feels.... I knows every path an' by-way over thar. I
knows every step he takes when he's at home. Thar hain't no fashion I
could fail."
"An' ye knows, too, how ter keep yore mouth shut?"
"I hain't nuver told nuthin' yit."
The two conspirators looked at each other and nodded. Here was an agent
who could move without suspicion and act out of his own ardour of
hatred. Decidedly he was a discovery.
So the hireling was instructed and given a leave of absence to go and
"set up with ther gal in Leslie County." But he did not go to Leslie
County. He went, instead, by a roundabout road to the state capital, and
one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.
When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding
face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an
unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.
Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had
said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for
indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."
Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off
despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals.
To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying
calm--and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words
with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother
that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's
strong note.
This misfortune, be assured himself, at least exhausted the
possibilities of perverse circumstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of
tricks were empty now!
Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be
smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at
just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had
brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.
Tonight he wanted the hills--not calm and star-lit, but rocking to
hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices
could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.
Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him,
and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed
shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering
brain-nerves like the merciless lashing of an invisible scourge. He
tried to analyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself,
but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as
cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a
summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural
heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the
only assuagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again--to
lash out and punish some one for his hurting.
The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star.
Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his
star.
But her world--to which he had climbed with a dominant ambition--that
was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.
The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the
lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leadership as animates
the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who
smokes the pipe of sane counsel.
Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought
down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the
reach of his blow.
Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there
remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must
combat and overcome.
"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a
man, "I've been as deep down in hell today as a man can go." Then he
started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim
Bartleton of Marlin Town.
"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's
done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."
Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece
with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming
degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who
fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little"
Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to
insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.
* * * * *
The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone
to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in
slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an
afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly
by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle
which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of
political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the
frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon
bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the
United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky
and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly
unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer
had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby.
Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He sat upright in
his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks
ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land."
The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped
the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who
was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room.
"Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent
in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name."
The officer, bethinking himself of political satellites who sometimes
make a virtue of mystery, smiled as he directed: "Bring him in here,
Tom. It's cold in the parlour."
Into the library came Boone, and stood silent until the negro had closed
the door upon his exit; then he nodded curtly. There was an air of
suppressed wildness in his eyes and a pallour under the bronze of his
cheeks, upon which the attorney, as he offered a chair, made no comment.
"I'm here," announced the visitor with a brusque pointedness, "to give
you information upon which it is your duty to act."
There was an unintended rasp of challenge in the manner, and under it
the official's lips compressed themselves. Boone in his overwrought
state felt that he must make haste, while he yet held himself in hand,
and the attorney, believing his visitor to be ill, curbed his own
temper.
"Let's have the information," he suggested. "Then I'll be in a better
position to construe my own duty."
"Presumably you wish to punish all those guilty of the conspiracy that
ended in Senator Goebel's death," went on the mountain man in a hard
voice. "I say presumably, because the Commonwealth has heretofore
appeared to discriminate among the accused."
The attorney bridled. "As to Governor Goebel's death," he asserted
heatedly, and in the very employment of the widely different titles the
two men proclaimed their antithesis of political creed and opinion, "my
record speaks for itself. My sincerity needs no defence."
"That you can prove. Saul Fulton is under indictment in your court. He
forfeited his bond and went to South America with or without your
knowledge. He has come back, and I am prepared to direct your deputy
sheriff to his hiding place. If he got away without your knowledge you
ought to be glad to have this news. If you winked at his going, I mean
to put you on record."
Boone Wellver had not seated himself. He still stood, with a stony face
out of which the eyes burned unnaturally, and the Commonwealth's
attorney took a step forward, his own cheeks grown livid with anger, so
that the two men stood close and eye-to-eye.
"In this fashion I permit no man to address me," said the prosecutor,
with his voice hard-schooled to evenness. "You have come to my house to
insult me, and I order you to leave it."
For a moment Boone remained motionless. Between him and the man across
from him swam spots of red; then words came with a coldly affronting yet
quiet ferocity:
"I am not surprised, but I've done what decency demanded. I ... gave you
your chance ... and you repudiated it ... like the charlatan you are.
This man shall die ... but it was your duty and your right ... to know
first."
He turned on his heel and opened the door, and the man in the smoking
jacket gazed after him in amazement. Evidently, the truculent visitor
was not himself, and there was no virtue in quarrelling with a temporary
madman. Boone knew only that he had invoked the law and the law had
rebuffed him. He could not see that his reception, however just his
mission, was inevitable since he had invited it with insult.
Back at his room he found another guest awaiting him. It was Joe
Gregory, who had also come from the hills. Boone had reached that point
at which surprise ends, and to this man, who was a kinsman and a deputy
sheriff in Marlin County, he gave as cursory a greeting as though he had
come only from the next street.
But Joe's grave face, in which character and sense spoke from every
strongly drawn lineament, was disturbed, and he went without preamble to
his point. Down there in the hills trouble was brewing, and among both
Gregories and Carrs a restive feeling stirred. Fellows walked with chips
on their shoulders as though each side were seeking to invite from the
other some overt act of truce-breaking. Joe had sought to analyze the
causes of this seemingly chance rebirth of long-quiet animosities. He
had learned of Saul's return, but Saul was lying low and most men did
not know of his presence. It must be, then, that from his hiding place
that intriguer was inciting a spirit of truculence in the Carrs to which
the Gregories were automatically responding. If that went on it meant
the breaking out of the "war" afresh--and a renewal of bloodshed. The
bearer of tidings ended his narrative with an appeal based on strong
trust.
"Boone, thar's jest one man kin quiet our boys down and stop 'em short
of mortal mischief, I reckon. They all trusts _you_."
"Will they all follow me?"
"Straight inter hell, they will!"
"And yet you think"--Boone looked full into the direct eyes of the other
with a glint of challenge in his own--"yet you think I ought to quiet
them instead of leading them?"
"Leading them which way, Boone? Whatever ther rest aims at, you an' me,
we stan's fer law and peace, don't we? That's what you've always drilled
into me, like gospel."
To his astonishment Joe had, for answer, a mirthless, almost derisive,
laugh--a laugh that was barked.
"So far we've stood for that, and what have we gained?" Boone's mood,
which had been all day seething like the imprisoned fire-flood of a
volcano, burst now in lava-flow through the ruptured crater of
repression. "Asa abided by the law seven years and more ago--didn't he?
Well, he's rotted in a cell ever since! Saul Fulton played with the law
and the law played with him and paid him Judas money and made him rich!
You say they'll follow me. Then, before God in heaven, I'll lead them to
a cleansing by fire! When we finish the job, those murderers and
perjurers will be done for once and for all!"
"And you," the deputy sheriff reminded him soberly, "you'll be plumb
ruint."
"I'm ruined now."
* * * * *
It was not a handsome room in which the two men stood, and Boone had
taken it with a provident eye to its cheapness, but it was in a hotel
stone-built in the times of long ago, and from the days of Henry Clay
and John C. Breckinridge to the time when Goebel died there history had
had birth between those heavy walls.
In the cheaply furnished bedroom whose paper was faded, the observant
eyes of Joe Gregory had caught one detail that struck his simple
interest, even in the surge of weightier tides.
A massive silver photograph frame lay face downward on the table as
though it had been inadvertently over-turned.
Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a
moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity
which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held
the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then
he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face
down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the
gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an
instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the
mysterious words, "I'm ruined now," filled out with meaning as a sagging
and formless sail rounds into shape under the livening breath of wind.
He, too, had in those few moments seen an idol at least totter on its
pedestal. He had been a hill boy famishing for advancement, and before
his eyes Boone Wellver, distantly his relative, had been an exemplar.
Now Boone was in some unaccountable vortex and talking wildly of
inciting men who needed to be calmed. Into Joe Gregory's mind flashed an
instinct of resentment against Anne Masters, whom he had often seen
there in the hills. In some fashion, he divined, she was to blame for
this situation.
The representative wheeled and left his bewildered visitor standing in
the room alone. Below in the basement bar of the hotel a noisily
laughing crowd jostled at the counter, and the white-aproned Ganymedes
were busy. From the door Boone Wellver cast smouldering eyes about the
place, searching for a certain partisan Democrat.
Yonder, talking in loud voice, stood a colleague from a neighbouring
mountain district. He was nursing, in fingers more used to the
gourd-dipper, the stem of a cocktail glass, and his cheap wit, couched
in an affected drawl and garbed with exaggerated colloquialisms, was
being acclaimed with encouraging mirth. The fellow fancied himself a
_raconteur_, appreciated. In reality he was a sorry clown being baited.
At another time that sight, trivial in itself, would have steadied Boone
with a realization of his own self-duty to represent another type of
mountain man. Now he was past such realization.
He found the man of whom he had come in search and drew him hastily
aside.
"You said this afternoon you wanted to get away from Frankfort for a
week."
"Why, yes, Wellver, I've got a sick child at home; but this deadlock's
got me tied up. A man must stick to his colours."
Boone nodded. "You can go," he said briefly. "I've come to pair with
you. I've got to go home, too. Do you agree not to vote in the house for
one week's time?"
The opponent extended his hand. "It's a go, and thank you. Let's have a
drink on it." But Boone had already turned. He was hastening up the
stairs, and five minutes later found him throwing things into a bag.
"Now," he said in a savage voice to Joe Gregory who still waited, "let's
get away from here. There's going to be a snake killing in Marlin."