With Joe Gregory entered three others, and to Anne, who was walled off
from any sight of what went on, every word and intonation came up the
enclosed stair well as if from a sounding board. She felt like a blind
theatregoer whose ears strain to make amends for the want of eyes while
a tense melodrama is building toward its climax.
Her imagination filled in the intervals of silence with heart-straining
anxiety, and she felt that she must see the movements, the gestures, the
light and shadow in the sombre eyes, when the wrath of the voices broke
off in ominous quiet. At the thought of the closed door which must soon
be opened to them she shuddered, and she wanted to see Boone; to be able
to assure herself that he was dominating the situation, which, as she
listened, seemed blazing beyond control like a fire that outgrows the
power of its fighters.
It was difficult to gauge the flow and counterflow of influences in the
scene below stairs. Boone's voice came infrequently as though he, too,
were only a listener, and in the other voices was a unanimity of
violence and hatred. It was a clamour for prompt vengeance unfolding an
iliad of long-fostered animosities.
To the girl it seemed an intolerable babel--a dissonance of profane fury
and menace--and she could feel her heart pounding like a muffled drum.
"We've passed out word to the boys and we won't hev need ter delay now
ter git 'em gathered together," came a deep-chested voice at whose
raising the others fell silent. "They're gathered right now in leetle
clumps an' hovers hyar an' thar, whar they kin rally straightway when ye
gives ther signal." The bass fell silent, then supplemented in
reassurance to the leader: "Thar hain't a timorous ner a disable feller
in ther lot."
"I'm obliged to you, Luther," Boone spoke as one in deep contemplation.
"Then I reckon we're fixed to go over there and take Saul away from the
Carrs, aren't we?"
Anne Masters pressed her hands agitatedly to her breast as a chorus of
yapping assent gave answer. Had he so soon, under the pressure of their
crowd influence, repudiated his decision to play the hard role of
restraint?
"Maybe, though, boys," the representative's voice continued reflectively
when he had succeeded in quieting them, "we'd better wait for the other
men before we start on any grave errand. I hear some of them out there
now."
For an hour the talk ran in a hot freshet, while newcomers augmented the
handful, and with the increase of numbers came a fuller-throated
mounting of passion. Would Boone be able to curb their ferocities? Could
any man do it? Did he even mean to try?
As she listened to the feud disciples coming in from creek beds and cove
pockets, it appeared to her entirely possible that they were capable of
turning on and rending the leader who ventured to cross their strongly
fixed purposes.
Saul Fulton's treachery to Asa, Tom Carr's giving sanctuary to the
Judas, the affront to the clan; these things made up the inflamed burden
of their growing and deepening wrath, and as yet they had not been told
of the man who lay dead, a victim freshly justifying their hunger for
reprisal!
Anne missed the voice of Joe Gregory who, after a brief consultation
with Boone, had gone out again. In Joe's presence she would have felt
strong reassurance, but Joe was carrying sorry tidings to the house of
the boy who lay dead.
Boone knew his people, and he was adroitly playing a most difficult
role, but to her ears came no proof of that. Until the clansmen had
opened and aired the festering sores of their grievances there lay in
them no hope of amenability. After that--perhaps--but the issue must
await its moment, neither anticipating nor procrastinating by the part
of a minute.
At last Boone's glance measured the crowd and recognized that there was
no longer any one for whom to wait. Ahead lay a disclosure, but before
its making he must throw his dice and let circumstances ordain with what
faces upward they would roll.
He stood before Victor McCalloway's fireplace and raised his hands.
"Men," he began without haste or excitement, "I've listened to all of
you and I've had little to say. I sat with Asa in the court that tried
him. I've visited him not once but often in the jail where Saul Fulton's
perjury has put him and kept him. I've besieged the Governor to plead
for him, and I yield to no man in loyalty to Asa Gregory. Now I claim
the right to be heard."
Anne crouched, listening with inheld breath, while the voices below
stairs dwindled from clamour to attention. She tried to visualize the
speaker, but because the whole world had receded from familiarity he,
too, became vague and hard to picture.
But as Boone talked, she knew that his voice and words and the heart
which was meeting, full-front, an issue he had been in danger of
deserting, were making magic, and along her own scalp went the creep
that is the ultimate test of drama. Inconsequentially she fretted
because she could not see his eyes. His auditors, though, could see the
eyes and respond to their hypnotic fires--respond though the text he
taught was hard to stomach.
He was winning them against their prejudices, and so skilfully had he
carried them step by step that they were saved from anything like full
realization of self-reversal, which means loss of self-esteem. If for
the hireling shot from the laurel they had no other response than
retaliation in kind, they were only rising to the bait of a lawless and
unimaginative enemy. It was better, he asserted, that the efforts to
murder him succeed than that they should draw the life essence out of
every principle in which his adherents had supported him.
Anne said to herself that Boone had carried the night, but Boone knew
otherwise.
A handful of men keyed for violence now accorded him calm attentiveness.
They could even laugh, on occasion, but he was thinking of the closed
door of McCalloway's room. He had need to grapple them to his leadership
more strongly yet, for when he opened that door they would no longer
laugh.
Now he drew a deep breath.
"These things that I am saying to you, I say not only with a full
knowledge of all that you men have told me but with a knowledge of a
harder thing to bear." He paused, and then he told them bluntly:
"'Little' Jim Bartleton lies dead behind that door. He was killed
tonight when he rode my horse on an errand for me, and was taken for
me."
After an interval of hushed amazement, the commotion broke afresh, and
Boone again raised his hands and awaited its subsiding.
"When a man asks his friends to hold their hands, though their hearts
are justly hot, he has need to prove his own steadfastness. Here is my
promise. Tomorrow Joe Gregory as deputy sheriff, and myself are going to
Tom Carr's house. We are going alone in the full light of day and
without any force of armed men to bolster up our demands. If any enemy
seeks our injury he must do that too in the full light of day. In the
name of the law and not of the mob, we will demand that Saul be turned
over to us. We will accept no lies and no evasions. We will take Saul to
Frankfort and present him to the court that refused to send for him. If
they fail, then, it will be time for _you_ to act. Meanwhile you must
wait. I have never before asked any test of your trust in me. Now those
that believe in me must stand with me, and--" his last words were like
the crack of a cattle whip--"and those that don't must fight me."
With eyes that burned and a breast that pounded, Anne awaited the
reception of that peroration, and for what seemed an endless time there
was no reception at all, except tense silence. The girl closed her eyes
and fancied a pendulum swinging in the dark, and as it registered
seconds her nerves tautened until the impulse to scream became poignant.
Yet she told herself this long silence meant assent--must mean assent.
Then, with an abruptness that made her start, came a voice, not from the
room below, but raised from the roadside in a long halloo, and from
within sounded the staccato challenge, "Who's thar?"
Once more a silence momentary and taut, a silence that hurt, came like a
margin about sound, then the outer voice spoke again:
"Hit's me--Mark Bartleton." That much was steady, but there the
intonation altered and mingled challenge with heartbreak. "I've done
come with my jolt wagon--ter fotch my dead boy home."
Anne covered her face with her hands and shivered behind the door. She
did not need to have her fears confirmed in the growing whisper that
raised itself slowly from the sunken levels of silence. Those words with
the weighty force of their simplicity had crashed upon trembling scales
of indecision, and they trembled no longer. Labour and courage and
effort had gone into Boone's upbuilding dam of persuasion. It took a
single blow to shatter it.
Now the night belonged to the torch and rifle, unless a miracle
intervened, and though Boone would struggle like a shepherd whose flock
has been scattered, he would persevere in the face of foredoomed
failure. Yet until the death-freighted and ox-drawn wagon had strained
and jolted slowly away, and even a little longer, the specious calm
held.
The swinging lantern had disappeared around a turn; the sounds of
creaking axle and hub had died into the night and the door of the house
had been closed, before the hum of low talk gave her any coherent sign.
Below there was only the confused blurring of words such as may come
from a locked jury room, until over it sounded the deep basso that she
had heard first that evening.
Its words were not pitched in oratorical effect, but they were
contemptuous and final. "Come on along, men," said the voice. "We're
wastin' time hyar foolin' with a man thet kain't do nothin' but talk.
What we wants now is a man with guts inside him."
The sentiment of accord declared itself loudly, profanely and
indubitably. But as the fickle gathering grew turbulent, Anne heard once
again a shout followed by the opening of a door, and after that an
outcry of amazement which she could in no wise translate, beyond a
realization that something was happening which was both unforeseen and
incredible.
Anne's posture, as she listened to the fluttering of her own heart, was
one of terror in its most abject and helpless form. She had persuaded
him, not only with argument but the taunt of cowardice, to interpose
himself between this tidal wave of human savagery and its object. Now
the wave had seized him up and tossed him from his precarious foothold.
His career had ended: his influence, crumbled under too severe a strain,
and his life itself probably hung on a hair balance while he stood among
wolves. She told herself that the responsibility lay with her, and her
reason grew palpitant and dizzy. Only a miracle could quench the
conflagration now, and a miracle five minutes hence would be too late.
This deadly pause was unendurable. A door had opened and clamour had
been breathlessly stilled. What did it mean? Some one had entered--Who
was it?
The man who had just made his entrance had boldly pushed his way to the
threshold before he called out, and had as boldly thrown wide the door
without awaiting a reply. Faces turning with a single impulse toward the
invader remained staringly intent as they saw standing there the
broad-shouldered figure of Asa Gregory, who should be in jail, who for
seven years had not been free to ride or walk the highways.
"I was pardoned out, this morning," he said briefly, "and I met up with
some of our boys while'st I was ridin' home. I was right interested in
what them boys told me."
"Ye've done come in good season, Asa," shouted an impulsive spokesman.
"We're settin' out ter settle old scores, an' Boone Wellver's done laid
down on us."
But Asa turned a cool eye on the informant, and into the sonorous
quality of his voice came an acid bite.
"Who's got the best license here to talk about score-settling? Who's
been sulterin' in jail for seven years?"
"You have, Asa," came the chorused response. "We're hearkenin' ter ye,
Asa."
"All right," snapped back the new arrival. "What I have need to say I
kin say right speedily. Quit it! Go home and leave me to pay off my own
scores!" He crossed to Boone and laid a hand on his shoulder, and
standing that way, he added: "The man that says this boy lays down is a
liar. As for me, I stands by what _he_ says! Ef our own folks don't know
who their strong men are, our enemies know--an' seek to hire 'em kilt.
Go home an' wait till we calls on ye!"
An hour later Boone stood alone with Anne in the room where he had been
overthrown and rehabilitated.
"I ought to take you across to Aunt Judy's house," he told her in a
weary voice. "I don't suppose you should be left here--with me--like
this--for what's left of the night. Until now there's been company
enough."
The girl shook her head wearily. "I'd fall off of a horse," she said.
"I'm too tired to ride. I'm going back up those stairs--"
The man moved a step forward.
"Joe Gregory is coming back," he explained, "but it will probably be
near to dawn before he gets here."
As she reached the stairway she halted impulsively with her hand on the
latch, and stood poised there with an expression of baffling, half-eager
expectancy. The sensitive beauty of her face and the slender grace of
her body seemed for a moment to cast aside their fatigue and to invite
him, but Boone stood resolutely the width of the room away.
Had he known it, that was a moment in which he might have grasped a more
vital rehabilitation. Had he then offered again the explanation for
which he had once been denied opportunity, her readiness to hear him
would have been eager. At that moment she was once more his for the
taking. He need only have extended his arms and said, "Come!" and she
would have responded instantly and gladly. She was receptive, stirred,
but one thing her pride still inhibited. She could not make the
advances.
Boone let his moment pass; let it pass unrecognized with the blindness
of life's perverse coincidence. At that precise instant, a mood was upon
him which was no intrinsic reflection of his own spirit, but rather the
reflection of all the stormy transitions of the night.
She had seen him at a crisis when he had been on the verge of collapse
like a bridge whose centre rests upon a span of flawed steel. True, he
had not actually collapsed, but, save for her intervention, he would
have done so. Now his mortification withered him and perversely
expressed itself in resentment against her--for having witnessed his
shame.
He owed her everything--so much that his self-respect was
bankrupted--and if he could have hated her, he would have hated her just
then. He even fancied that he did. He saw in her a cold, impersonal
deity, consciously superior to himself and secretly triumphant over his
weakness. So he not only let the moment pass, but he rebuffed its
unspoken invitation.
"I owe you everything," he said with the cold ungraciousness of a
grudging confession. "If you hadn't come, I'd have had a hell in my
conscience tomorrow. I'd have been a murderer. I even tried to force you
to admit that it was for me, myself, that you cared enough to do it. I'm
ashamed of that.... It won't happen again." He paused and his voice was
bitterly edged when he went on. "I begged for the chance to explain
things--when there was still time. You refused to hear me. Now I
wouldn't explain if _you_ begged _me_ to--That's over, but I acknowledge
the debt I owe you--for tonight. It's a heavier debt than any man can
stand in and keep his self-respect."
* * * * *
Morgan and Anne had been to the theatre, and when they came back to the
house the lawyer had drawn from his pocket a small package, and while
Anne opened it he looked on. It was an engagement ring, and quite worthy
of his connoisseur's selection. But when he put out his hand to take
hers, she drew it back and spoke impulsively:
"Before you put that on--Morgan--there's something I must tell you."
He smiled his acquiescence and waited with the emerald set emblem in his
fingers, while, in the manner of one who has determined upon a recital
that does not flow easily, she began. She filled in for him the events
of the two days of her recent and somewhat mysterious absence, and its
cause.
Morgan had learned to accept with a certain philosophy the
impulse-governed life of the girl who had promised to marry him. If Anne
had been less uniquely her own unstereotyped self, she would not have
been the fascinating person who had captured his fastidious admiration.
While she talked, his face grew sober, but he refrained from any
interruption, and at last she looked up and said simply: "I thought it
was best to tell you all about it now. I went--and that's where I
was--and for hours of that ghastly night--there was no one else
there--but just the two of us."
"I see," said Morgan slowly. She waited for him to supplement the two
words, and when he failed to do so, she went on:
"I thought maybe that--knowing about that--you might not want to--" She
broke off, and her eyes falling on the ring, finished the sentence.
Morgan shook his head. His usual self-possession was a shade shaken, but
he responded definitely, "I do."
"Of course," she conscientiously explained, "when I went, I didn't know
what lay ahead, but I took the chances and--that's what it's important
for you to understand, Morgan--even if it were to do over--and I knew it
all, I'd go again."
"Yes," said her fiance slowly, "I suppose so." He paused a moment before
he finished. "Naturally, it's not a thing that I'd have chosen to have
occur, but it was the only thing you could do--and be yourself."
"And you have no--questions to ask me?"
Once more he shook his head. He even smiled faintly.
"No," he said without hesitancy, "I have no questions to ask you."
Anne rose from her chair and laid a hand on his arm.
"Morgan," she exclaimed, "you know how to be generous. I've got to be
honest with you. I'll stand by my agreement--but I guess I'll always
love him. If you marry me, you're taking that chance. I can't give you
my heart because it's not mine."
He slipped the ring on her finger, and across his serious features came
a slow smile.
"I suppose it's what a thousand fools have said before, Anne, and a
thousand more may say it again, but all I ask is the chance to make you
love me. I'll succeed because I can't afford to fail."