Had Tom Carr chosen to sit in a penitential spirit, reviewing his life,
he might, perhaps, have been forced to acknowledge a record tarnished
with misdeeds, but his conscience would have remained clear of that most
depressing sin--bungling the undertaking to which he had set his hand.
Even his delegated murders had been accomplished with tidy and
praiseworthy dispatch. Now he had collaborated with a bungler and
harvested a dilemma. Saul Fulton had selected an executioner whose rifle
ball had targeted itself in a breast not marked for death--yet one which
would none the less cry out for vengeance. Above all, the _contretemps_
had proven most ill-timed, since it coincided with Asa's pardon and
return.
Word of his coming had reached the house of Tom Carr before Asa himself
had ridden away from the livery stable, and that same hour found Saul,
like the general discredited by a _debacle_, an outcast from the support
of his late allies and a refugee in full flight.
Tom conceived that he was doing enough by way of generosity when he
supplied Saul with a horse and a lantern and set him on his way toward
the Virginia boundary. Asa's recrudescence from the burial of prison
walls to the glamour of a delivered martyr brought him to a choice
between standing siege or throwing his Jonah to the whales, and Tom had
not hesitated.
So when the party that rode with the deputy sheriff dismounted at the
door of the Carr house, they found it unreservedly open to them. Tom did
not even waste a lie when he met eyes as uncompromising as though they
were looking across rifle-sights.
"You boys hev come jest a leetle too late," he tranquilly informed them.
"Yore man spent some sev'ral days an' nights with me--but he hain't hyar
now."
"Then,"--it was Boone who put the question, while Asa maintained the
stony-faced silence of a graven image--"then you admit that you took him
in and sheltered him?"
The eyes of the Carr leader had held the open light of candour. Now they
mirrored that of guileless surprise, and both expressions were master
achievements of deceit.
"Why wouldn't I take him in, Boone," he inquired with admirable gravity.
"He 'peared ter be mighty contrite erbout ther way he'd done acted at
Asa's trial. He 'lowed he'd come back home a' purpose ter put sartain
matters before ther new governor thet mout holp Asa git his pardon. Thet
was p'intedly what he said--or words ter thet amount."
Boone smiled his open and ironic disbelief. "And you swallowed that lie,
Tom? It doesn't stand on all fours with your repute for keen wits."
The face of the intriguer remained steadfast save that the unblinking
eyes became a little pained. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and from
among the few dirty envelopes that came out sheafed in his hands,
selected a crumpled page of letter paper.
"Thet's whut I went on," he said simply. "I've done lost ther envellup
hit come in, but thar hit is in Saul's own hand-write."
Boone took the missive which bore a South American date line and, after
reading it, handed it without comment to Asa.
"Dear Tom," it ran. "I swore to a volume of lies at Asa
Gregory's trial to save my own neck. It's been haunting me
until I've got to come back and help to get him a pardon. I'm
indicted myself, and I've got to come in secret or go to jail
without getting results. I'm coming to your house, and until
the time is ripe it mustn't be known that I'm there. You don't
love Asa, but we're all mountain men together, and that trial
was a trial of the mountains. Resp. Saul Fulton."
Saul had ridden away the night before in the haste of a man whose life
is forfeit to delay, yet before he mounted he had penned that letter at
Tom Carr's dictation, and the ink of the South American date line was
scarce twelve hours dry.
"I'll send it back to you, Tom," he had demurred. "There isn't time now.
They may come any minute to get me!"
"If ye don't write hit--an' thet speedily--they'll find a ready-made
corpse when they gits hyar," had been Tom's succinct reply with an
eloquent gesture toward his armpit holster. "Ye got me inter this
fix--now ye've got ter alibi me outen hit."
Without waste of words, the posse turned and left the house. They were
starting on a pursuit which they knew would end in nothing, but Tom,
following them to the gate, called out cheerfully: "I hope ye gits him,
boys. He left my house without no farewell betwixt sundown an'
sun-up--an' he took ther best nag outen my stable ter go with."
* * * * *
One who would sound the depths of ingenious depravity should lend ear to
the tale of the householder whose life has been ravished of tranquillity
by that small boy of the neighbourhood who leads and incites the local
gang of youthful hooligans.
To such a tale the judge of the Louisville Juvenile Court was listening
now, and the defendant, who sat sullen eyed in the essential wickedness
of his eleven years, heard witness after witness unfold his record of
misdoing. He and his vassal desperadoes, it was averred, broke windows
and street light globes, preyed upon the apple barrels of the corner
grocery, and used language that scalded and sullied the virginal ears of
passing wash-ladies and plumber-gentlemen.
"There can't nobody live in peace in them two blocks, Judge, your
Honour," came the heated asseveration of the man in the witness chair.
"He's got more influence over my boys than what I've got myself--and the
Reform School's the only place for the likes of him."
"Where do you spend your Saturday nights?" inquired the personage on the
bench irrelevantly, and the furtive eyes of the witness shifted and lost
their self-assurance.
"Here and there, Judge, your Honour. Sometimes I drop in at Mike's place
for a glass of common beer."
"Do you occasionally send your boys--the followers of this dangerous
bandit--to Mike's place with a bucket?"
The man hesitated, and his glance savoured of repressed truculence.
"Maybe I do, once in a while," he replied doggedly. "I ain't on trial
here, am I?"
"No--not just now." The judge spoke almost gently. "Stand down and let
the fellow who _is_ on trial take that chair."
The child with the sullen face slouched forward, and the Judge's eyes
engaged his smouldering young pupil's with less austerity perhaps than
the description of his turpitude warranted. This man, who sat one day a
week to try the cases of delinquent and incorrigible children, presided
five days over more mature hearings. From Monday through Thursday he
mantled himself in judicial dignity and his language was the decorous
speech of the bench. One who observed him only on Friday would hardly
have gathered that. Just now he leaned forward and addressed the boy in
a conversational tone and an argot that savoured of the
alley-playground.
"Willie, haven't you got any other name--I mean amongst those kids that
belong to your gang?"
Willie swallowed hard, but inasmuch as he failed to reply, his
inquisitor went on:
"Surely those other kids don't call a rough-neck like you just Willie.
You wouldn't stand for that, would you? Haven't you got some
professional name like Bulldog Bill--or something?"
A fugitive glint of pride flashed in the boy's eyes under their
cultivated toughness and their present alarm, and with a sheepish grin
he enlightened this embodiment of the law.
"The other kids calls me 'Apache Bill.'"
The Judge did not smile, but accepted the information with full gravity,
and spoke reflectively:
"Officer McGuire tells me that there are about a dozen members in your
gang. It looks like a feller that can boss a crew of that size ought to
have something in him. Look here, kid, let's talk this over."
After five minutes of low-toned confidences the man on the bench found
himself looking into eyes of abated sullenness and listening to a voice
that was simply small boy.
"You see it's a sucker play for you to travel the route that ends in the
pen."
The Judge made it seem that Apache Bill himself had arrived at this sane
conclusion in which his Honour merely concurred.
"And since you realize that yourself, I'm not going to send you to the
Reform School this trip. You are going to give me your promise to run
that gang differently." He looked up, and his glance fell on a young
woman sitting among several others at the back of the room. There was
much in her appearance to arrest the attention and challenge interest,
but what one noticed most were eyes that held an inner light and a
starry brightness. "I'm going to have you report to one of our probation
officers every week," continued the Judge to Willie alias "Apache Bill,"
"and come to see me myself occasionally."
Usually for a case of this sort he would have selected a man from that
group of volunteers who made effective the machinery of the children's
court but this young terrorist would take a bit of understanding in his
reclamation, and among the men and women who aided and abetted his
efforts no other seemed to see into the intricacies of the boy mind
quite so unerringly as that young woman with the starry eyes, who had
been a famous belle and before that a tom-boy.
So the Judge nodded to her and said, "Miss Masters, I'm going to have
'Apache Bill' report to you. You two might talk over a boy-scout
organization down there in his district."
As the girl rose from her chair, the Judge's face suddenly developed
stern lines and his brows knit closely as he turned his attention to the
principal complainant.
"John Vaster," he announced, this time with no softening of tone, "a
probation officer is coming to your house, too. If those boys of yours
go to Mike's place after this with a bucket, or if you don't find a way
to keep them off the streets at night, you're coming back here, not as a
prosecuting witness but as a defendant."
Anne Masters had turned to this work of volunteer probation officer as
to a refuge from herself. Perhaps in her own mind it stood also for a
sort of penance for sins with which she stood self-charged.
Her marriage with Morgan had been set for June, and somehow it seemed to
her that when the ceremony had been gone through with her besetting
doubts and struggles would end, if not in happiness, at least in
resignation. Then she would acknowledge the abdication of Romance and
accept her allegiance to Duty.
But meanwhile, until the solemn seal of the Church's ritual had been set
upon that resolve, bringing, as she sought to convince herself it would,
a steadied feeling of solace and of perplexities resolved, she seemed to
hang like a Mahomet's coffin in suspended disquiet and misery.
Boone had said he would never explain--and she accepted his assertion as
final. But for that explanation which she had once silenced, and which,
when she was receptive, he had refused, she now burned with anxiety.
Unless she had work to do while she fought back the insurgency and
revolt of her heart, she would not be able to endure the pictures with
which her imagination filled the future. Through this period of
heartache she missed the essential, in that she did not discern the
artificiality of the whole situation or the cure that would have lain in
a repudiation of false pride.
Whatever mistakes she had made, she was now bound by her promise to
Morgan, and doubly bound by the tyranny of her mother's dependence
which, having been once accepted, could no longer be repudiated.
Colonel Wallifarro, bending over his desk one forenoon some two months
after he had given the dinner to announce his son's engagement, had
chokingly fallen forward with his face on his elbows.
When the physicians arrived, he was lying on his office lounge under the
age-yellowed engraving of President Jefferson Davis and the grouped
cabinet of the erstwhile Confederate States of America, and it was there
that he died within the half hour.
"Acute indigestion," said the doctors, "His blood pressure was high and
he refused to ease up on the work. He had often been warned that this
might occur."
His will showed that in one respect at least he had heeded the warning,
for its date was recent. The estate, much shrunken below the estimate of
public supposition, was devised entirely to his son except for a bequest
of a few thousand dollars to Anne's mother. There was mention, too, of a
note, as yet unpaid, for twenty thousand dollars "loaned and hereby
released, to my friend Lawrence Masters, Esq."
"In leaving my whole estate to my beloved son Morgan," read an
explanatory clause of the document, "I do so happy in the knowledge that
I likewise provide for my niece, Anne Masters, to whom he is engaged to
be married, and for whom my love and affection is that of a father."
And Boone Wellver, who had still hoped against hope to receive from Anne
the word that would restore to him at least a fighting chance, heard
nothing. It all seemed to his gloomy analysis relentlessly logical that
the girl, who for a long while had fought for her choice of an alien in
her own world, should go back to her kind. After all she was not for
him, and his dream had only been a fantasy long indulged but no longer
possible of indulgence. So Boone plodded on, and in the more obvious
manifestations of life was not greatly changed. The zest of the game was
gone, but its realities remained to be met, and for him there was a
coward memory to be lived down--the memory of a relapse from which a
woman had saved him.
The ordeal of waiting was almost over for Anne, and the wedding
preparations were under way. From the bed which she had not been able to
leave since the day of Colonel Wallifarro's burial, Mrs. Masters
injected a more fervent enthusiasm into these preliminaries than did the
bride to be.
After the fashion of one who has been embittered and enjoys a belated
triumph, the mother lived in a sort of fantasy which could see no clouds
in the sky of her daughter's future. A factitious gaiety animated her,
even though the death of her mainstay had crushed her into invalidism.
The haunted misery in Anne's face, and the lids that closed as if
against a painful glare when Mrs. Masters forecast the happiness to be,
were things that had no recognition or acknowledgment from the lady in
the sick bed. It was as if her own joy in a dream achieved were
comprehensive enough to embrace and assure the life-long happiness of
her daughter, as the whole includes the part.
But when Anne sat down at her desk one afternoon to address some of the
wedding invitations, she was out of sight of the maternal eye and her
sensitive lips dropped piteously.
On the list before her, made out by herself and augmented by Morgan and
her mother, she had come upon the name of Boone Wellver, and suddenly
the things on her desk swam through a mist of tears.
Anne Masters sat there for a long while, then with a white face she drew
a line through the name on the list. At least he should be spared that
heartlessness of reminder.
She and Morgan were going abroad. Morgan had foreign business which made
the journey imperative, and it was only when the courts adjourned and
political matters fell quiet with the coming of summer that he could so
long be away from his practice and his public affairs, but Anne could
not think of Europe now. Her thoughts turned mutinously to imagined
vistas seen from a rock at the lop of Slag-face across valleys where
sunset cast the shadows of mountains: where just now the dogwood was in
a foam of blossom and the laurel would soon be in pink flowering.