As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the
dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on
modernity and to stand a hostage to the forces and emotions of the
mediaeval.
The fire rose and fell and flickered. It snapped and sighed, roared and
whispered, and with it the shadow of the sheeted figure and silhouette
of the uncovered face grew and lessened in grotesque fluctuation.
Before she could begin her struggle with the man whose face wore little
promise of conversion, she must conquer the struggle in herself, for
suddenly she had need to defend her own feelings against the currents of
thought that swayed him, and the role of righteous avenger no longer
seemed so indefensible.
"Boone," she said, with an effort at convincing steadiness, yet feeling
weak of will beside the set determination of his bearing, "I've come a
long way to talk with you. Will you listen?"
His bow was that of compulsory assent, but his eyes showed defiant
through their enforced courtesy.
"I'm listening," he said, "though when I asked you to listen, and
everything we'd planned our lives for depended on your hearing me, you
refused. Yet that was different, I suppose. After all, I'm only partly
educated in the ways of polite society. I haven't learned to be casual
in such things."
"If you're a barbarian now," she told him quietly, "it's from pure
choice. Gentlemen have taught you their code. You've been a gentleman
yourself."
Boone laughed.
"Cleopatra, I believe, had pet leopards that were allowed to purr on the
steps of her throne. But they were only a part of the picture and they
didn't quite become gentlemen. You let me be a pet leopard, too--for a
while. Now I've gone back to the jungle."
She ignored the reference to herself. That way lay endless dispute, and
this battle to avert feudal tragedies, she thought, was not a thing to
be fought on a field of personalities. She spoke slowly and with a
dignity that made his cheeks redden to the realization of his own bitter
facetiousness. "I came," she said, "only to bring a warning--while there
was time."
"Warning of what?" The question was ominously quiet.
"Against confusing black hallucinations with all the saner, bigger
things that you know. Warning against betraying a confidence you have
won by stampeding people who believe in you and follow you blindly."
The eyes of Boone Wellver narrowed and hardened defensively under this
arraignment from lips that had once shaped for him softer responses.
Then as they fell again upon the man who had died in his cause, a
baleful light reawoke in them. From that spokesman came a silent
argument which needed no voice: "Here I am, not a theory but a fact. I
died for you!"
He spoke to her as one who makes an explanation, not of obligation but
as a concession to the motives which had brought her.
"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law.
Blackstone says that before a man takes human life--even in defence of
his own--he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate,
and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have
me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and
then only, I assumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his
people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then,
and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight
lips.
"You _have_ come a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant
difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending
are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a
kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is--you must
pardon the candour of saying it--a sermon of platitudes. They have lost
their virtue with me--because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts
and thinking naked thoughts."
"Just what are you going to do?"
"Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr
to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them
that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first,
though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong
crew."
He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the
demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more
pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor
behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened
up and his eyes again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her
voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he
had been trying to repress.
They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade
of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the
coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery.
Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had
chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once worshipped, who,
after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf,
inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love.
Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of
her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that
to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this
moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in
which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner
lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying.
"What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with
the sort of calm assurance that can speak without faltering or misgiving
against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. You
_couldn't_ do it, except in a moment of delirium--"
Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a
struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in
Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate.
Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a
battle of wills with a dead man lying between them--and the dead man had
been murdered for him.
"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry
emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"
Anne's chin came up a little.
"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them;
but murder's not good enough for you!"
He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and
abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:
"I was asking you why--so far as I'm concerned--you care?"
The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice
that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had
come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegrass
garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a
touch of the responsiveness that clamoured in her find expression, but
she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers
who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not
here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if
she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally--for to her just then
it seemed quite incidental--she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.
"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of platitude
in her words, "because of the past--because we are--old friends."
Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked
down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:
"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"
"Will he sleep easier because you prove a deserter to the cause to which
you swore allegiance?" There was a touch of scorn in her voice now.
"Does his rest depend on your punishing one murder with another?"
"We're talking two languages," he retorted, and the upflaring of his
lover's hope had left him, in its quenching, inflexible. "Our standards
are as far apart as the Koran and the Bible."
"Neither of them exalts the coward," came her swift response. "Any
agitator could lash the Gregories into mob-violence tonight. Only one
man might have the courage--and the strength--to hold them in leash."
Boone set down the heavy box and came out into the room where the fire
burned. He seemed, in his white-hot anger, too distrustful of himself
for speech, and, perhaps because he loved her so unconquerably and
despairingly, his fury against her was the greater.
"Before Almighty God," he declared, in a voice low and quaking with
passion, "I think I can understand how some men kill the women they
love! Call me a barbarian if you like. I am one. Call me a renegade from
your self-complacent culture. I welcome the impeachment, but don't call
me a coward, because that's a lie."
He broke off; then burst out again in a mounting voice:
"Until a little while ago I might have yielded to everything you asked,
because the fear of offending you was a mightier thing to me than
everything else combined. But that was the infirmity of a man weakened
by love--not strengthened. I've regained my strength now, and I mean to
keep it. Hate is a stronger god than love!"
Remaining stiff-postured on the hearth, Boone rained upon her the wrath
that cumulative incitements had kindled and fed to something like mania,
and she met it with challenge for challenge and with eyes whose fires
were clearer than those of his own.
"You say you've regained your strength. Is that why you're afraid to
listen to me? Is that why you don't dare undergo my test?"
"Afraid to listen?" In spite of his fury he put his question with a
courteous gravity that was disconcerting. "Haven't I been listening? Am
I not still listening?"
But Anne was not to be deflected, and her clear-noted voice still rang
with the authority of conviction:
"You talk of holding your hand until you had 'retreated to the ditch or
wall,' or whatever your legal phrase was, yet you know that you don't
dare give your anger time to cool. You don't dare hold these men, who
are crying out for blood, quiet for twenty-four hours and spend that
time alone with your own conscience."
"And yet," he ventured to remind her, "I left Frankfort last night.
Before I started I reached my decision. There have been already more
than twenty-four hours, but they haven't cooled me except to make my
certainty greater."
"This boy whose face you just showed me brought word to Frankfort that
Saul Fulton was back to have you murdered," went on the girl with
unshaken steadiness. "The old instinct for vengeance swept you into
passion, but you didn't surrender to it then. You went to the
prosecutor. Why?"
"I've already told you. I tried the law first."
"Because yesterday you realized that this lawless way was the wrong way.
Your rebuff there maddened you still more. You came back, and when you
got here you were in doubt again. Isn't that true?"
"Not for long," he replied shortly.
"Yet you _were_ in doubt. Then you listened to the hot heads, and the
fever rose again in your veins. Tonight this boy was killed. One after
the other these things happened to work you up to a sort of frenzy and
keep you there. I've heard you tell how murder lords here used to hire
assassins and how they had to keep them keyed up with whiskey till the
work was done. Don't you see that you've been drinking a more dangerous
whiskey, and that you don't dare to let this vengeance wait, because you
know if you did, you couldn't face your own self-contempt?"
At first there had been despair in her heart because the face of the man
she thought she knew had been the face of a stranger, as unamenable to
change as that of the sphinx. But now she knew that if she could only
make him see in time what she had seen, she might succeed. He was a
sleep-walker, and to the sleep-walker only the dream is real--yet he had
only to be waked to step again into sanity. The steel had been too
gradually forged, tempered and tested to become pig iron again in a
breath, simply because it dreamed itself pig iron.
"You talk of your strength, and I call on you to test it. I call on you
to do not what any persuasive agitator could do, but what only you can
do--to keep the wild-beast impulses in your own men caged for one more
day--and to spend that day with your own conscience."
"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old
friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to
impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting
me very easy tasks tonight!"
"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not
for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser
strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then
abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your
teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."
Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as
though under a lash.
"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly
demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is
no apostle of tame submission."
Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well,
the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to
confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously
refrained from mentioning until now.
"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips.
You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a
mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his
blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you
a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."
She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it
questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"
Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more--a
request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."
Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either
acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood
holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a
painful thing to watch, and after a little while he turned from her and
she could see only his back--with shoulders that twitched a little from
time to time under the spasmodic assault of some torturing thought. She
was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of
retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because
when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.
But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a bloody and
darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were passing pictures
out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarrassment of
talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods
admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain
boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of
bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a
doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of
an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without
counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat
of agony.
The crystal into which he gazed cleared and clouded; clouded and
cleared. He could not yet be sure of himself. While he stood with that
stress upon him still in molten indecision, he was not quite sure
whether he heard the girl's voice, or whether it came to him from memory
of other days, as it had sounded under dogwood blossoming on the crest
of Slag-face:
"Comes now to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!"
It was, however, a real voice though a faint one, that came next to his
ears.
"You said these wild sheep were your people--that you owed them what you
could give them--of leadership."
Boone wheeled, and his voice broke from him like a sob, as the watch
slipped from his fingers and fell, shattered.
"Do you mean to go through with it--you and Morgan?"
But before she could shape a response, his hand came up and he went on
in excited haste: "No, don't answer. You didn't come to answer
questions." Then, with a long intake of breath and an abrupt change to
flint hardness again, he added: "It was I who was to answer you. You are
right. I was a damned quitter. These _are_ my people, and I belong to
them--but not to the feud-war, to myself--nor to you."
"Boone," began Anne Masters, but she got no further than that, for the
man again raised a warning hand and spoke in a crisp whisper:
"Hush!" he commanded, and bent, listening.
In the distance a long whoop was dying away, and then after a moment of
tense silence a cautious whistle sounded from the night outside. Boone
took a step toward the door, and halted.
"They're coming! It won't do for you to be found here with me alone." He
cast a hurried glance toward the other room, then added; "No--_he's_ in
there. They'll have to see him. Can you wait upstairs?"
Anne Masters nodded, and as, with a lamp which he handed her, she put
her foot upon the lowest step of the boxed-in stairway, he went on:
"You've paid me one compliment tonight. You said that I could control
men. As for myself, I doubt that, and if I fail--well, that comes
later."
From the stairhead she looked down. Boone had gone to the door and stood
with his hand on the latch, yet for the moment he did not lift it. To
her he seemed bracing himself against a fresh assault of heavy forces.