Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of
mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and
shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts. Except when the spring thaws
carried a tawny flood up almost to the edge of his doorstep and the
"tide" had right of way, that creek bed and the sandy lane angling
across it constituted the junction of the Smoky Hollow Road and that
debouching over to "The left hand fork of Nighway Creek." Roundabout it
were streamlets with pools where, in season, the mountain trout leaped
and darted in shimmering flashes, and to the store one summer noon came
two hungry fishermen from the lowlands. They sat on cracker boxes,
eating canned peaches and "Vienny" sausages, encouraging the keen-eyed
old storekeeper to talk and plying him with questions as to what his
coal royalties had run to on this tract and what on that, in the space
of the past few years. With neither boast nor evasion, the old man
answered them.
"But, heavens above, Uncle Billy," exclaimed one of the visitors--(for
every man and child called him Uncle Billy--"An' I reckon," he said,
"ther houn-dawgs would too, if so be they had ther gift of speech").
"Heavens above, if you go on making money like that you'll be able to
sign a check for a million dollars before you end up!"
The storekeeper fished from the pocket of cotton overalls some crumbs of
"natural leaf" to rub between his leathery palms, and thrust them
greedily between his white-stubbled lips.
"I reckon, son," he answered drily as he once more shoved forward along
the counter the tin of crackers, "ef so be thar was any sich-like need,
I could back a bank-check fer thet much money terday."
His visitors sat up agaze, with "Vienny" sausages poised between tin-can
and lip, dripping grease on their khaki-clad knees.
At last one of them inquired in a dazed voice, "But why don't you live
like a rich man, Uncle Billy? Aren't you sick of this God-forsaken
desolation?"
Uncle Billy leaned with his elbows on his counter and seemed to be
giving the question judicial reflection. Finally he shook his head.
"A man's right apt ter weary of anything in due time, but I've always
lived hyar. I wouldn't hardly hev no ease in my mind no-whars else, I
reckon. I leaves all thet newfangled business ter my children an'
gran'children and I follers in the track of my fore-parents my own
self." He paused, then added with a note of defensive pride:
"Not thet I denies myself nothin' though. My old woman's got a brussels
cyarpet on ther floor upsta'rs right now an' a pianner thet hit tuck
four yoke of oxen ter team acrost ther mountings from ther railroad
cars."
"Would she play it for us, Uncle Billy?"
"Wa'al she kain't jest ter say play hit, yit, but she aims ter git
somebody ter l'arn her how some day--She l'arnt readin' an' writin' when
she war past three score."
Back in Marlin Town--a town now boasting sidewalks of concrete and a new
brick station, the fishermen saw the columned and porticoed mansions of
the old man's sons--and their thoughts went back to the store with its
bolts of calico, its harness, and above it the living quarters where
these children had been born.
For the wealth of that county in coal had brought spurs of railroads
bristling into pockets of the wilderness where there had hardly been
"critter trails," and overnight fortunes had sprung into being. Moneyed
interests that centered there would have made the young attorney, who
was also the district's member in Congress, something more than a local
representative, had he not chosen to represent the native holders and to
stand as a buffer between their unsophistication and their would-be
exploiters. But if Boone could set his name to no million-dollar checks
or build himself no colonial mansions, more practice came to the office
where his shingle hung than he and his two new associates could handle.
In other newly developed sections, Boone had seen the native exploited
and embittered. It had been his care that when prosperity came into
Marlin it should come as a blessing to the hill dwellers and not as a
curse. To that end he had locked horns with some adroit and powerful
adversaries, outriders of capital who would have been bandits had the
way lain open. They had first laughed at him, then resolved to crush him
and in the end sought to propitiate him. Finally they gave him his half
of the road and shook their heads in wonderment because he chose the way
of folly and refused to be made deviously rich.
To each new advance he had had one answer: "I belong to these people,
gentlemen. They must be fairly dealt with."
And yet while these mighty transitions worked themselves into being, the
alchemy of the Midas touch left life unchanged back of Cedar Mountain
itself. The brooding range threw its cordon of peaks across the tide of
development and turned it right and left. Not until the many fields
lying virgin and accessible had been worked out, would capital need to
wrestle with engineering assaults upon those sky-high barriers of flint.
And with fidelity to history's ironic precedent, the man whose dream had
been strong in a world of doubters stood by unbenefited, while others
who had not known the nature of a vision reaped wealth. For Larry
Masters had thrown his initial winnings into other speculative
properties. He was the gambler who had won a large bet, and whose
ambition straightway burns to "break the bank." He had bought land in
his own right on a rising tide of values, and he had seen his own veins
of coal narrow to nothing, until his engineers had "pulled the pillars"
and abandoned the lodes. Finding himself ill omened and fallen on desert
spots in a land of oases, he had closed his bungalow in disgust and
taken a salaried position with an oil concern operating in Mexico.
* * * * *
Sometimes there comes into a Kentucky midsummer a strayed touch of
autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its
sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the
horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.
On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet
fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed
chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.
He did not require the spell of that indefinable melancholy which lay
along the hilltops to bring home to him a mood of sadness, because for
two weeks he had been here alone with his thoughts. It had been his whim
during that time to isolate himself completely, and to wear, as a man
may wear old clothes or old shoes, the ease of solitude that makes no
demands upon one's conventional self.
In Washington there was always the need of living before other eyes.
Here he had not even ridden across the ridge for letters or papers.
At the moment, while the bees droned loudly about him and the mountains
slept in their ancient impassivity, he held on his knees Victor
McCalloway's tin dispatch box, and his eyes were deep with thoughts of
bereavement.
The veteran had said that, on his death, Boone might turn the key of
that battered receptacle and read the papers which would give him a full
knowledge of the identity of his benefactor.
Once he had declared, half smilingly and half in earnest:
"I suppose that at any time you hear nothing of me for five years you
may assume my death." It had been five years now, and more, since he had
left the little world of his hermitage, and no word had come back to
Boone.
The young man's heart was heavy with loneliness, and as he sat there
alone, he ached to know the secret that had shadowed the life of the man
to whom his devotion was almost an idolatry; the secret that had robbed
of a name one whose past must have been both colourful and tragic.
In those five years since they had met, Boone had passed the milestones
from the local to the national, and if he held the respect of his
colleagues he owed it all to Victor McCalloway. They said that he was a
man with a broad and national vision. That, too, if it were true, was a
reflection of the soldier's teaching.
But if McCalloway were to be only a memory, Boone looked forward to a
life almost beggared. There was that solitary strain in his nature which
came perhaps of having attached himself too strongly to a few,
all-important friends. Of these McCalloway had been the chief. A
facetious fellow-member had given Boone a nickname out of Kipling in
coatroom small-talk, and the title had stuck. "Wellver," said the
representative, "is 'the cat that walks by himself, and all places are
alike to him.'"
Now, if he were not to see his old preceptor again, he must indeed walk
by himself.
With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been,
and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.
The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had
set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old
feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The
Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the
Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and
burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies
were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had
his friend played a part?
Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of
the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the
unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary
exile--a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own
he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the
war-eagles.
Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had
only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the
stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to
him. He had seen--often--the warmth of affection like the softened glow
of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and--on occasion--the keen,
cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too,
white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it
had taken the battlefield to bring out.
And these he did not know.
He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled
many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a
critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought,
undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.
Prince himself had been a historian, and yet Boone doubted whether he
could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing.
As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes.
He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by
Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments,
governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn
sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had
breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.
Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his
portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe
that often it became adverse criticism.
Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an
answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a
spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.
Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had
abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even
after five years, to that admission.
For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodpecker
rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust
the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the
house again, unopened.
Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into
his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on
those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no
power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the
sunlight he was thinking of her.
He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and
daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without
that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville
had been an adventure, daring everything.
All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken
with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous
wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the
most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core
the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters
of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able
only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once
saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which
might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an
intolerable obligation.
Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the
moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its
boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across
the hills, he said aloud:
"It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or
hear of her again!"
But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an
indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he
broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her.... You always
will!"
Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone
recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered
and mounted on a livery beast.
But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a
fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a
few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of
whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have
been until his hair had turned white.
Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his
unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he
inquired, after they had shaken hands:
"Is it politics, Morgan?"
Wallifarro nodded.
"In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind
down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune
into the teeth of a hurricane."
"Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't
follow you."
"My God, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement,
"don't you know?"
"Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks,"
smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days."
Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent;
then he said sharply:
"The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany,
Russia, France! They are all in it--and yesterday England came in."
The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned
blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road
the woodpecker began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the
hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow butterflies.
Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"
Morgan shook his head. "Two weeks ago," he said, "the whole thing was a
sheer impossibility.... Now anything is possible."
Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... "When that
message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings
of peace but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."
"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."
Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another
errand. What was it?"
Morgan, who had been seated, rose and paced the floor with his mouth
tight drawn, and then stopping before his host, he broke out bluntly:
"Once before, Boone, we talked about _her_. Now we must do it again."
Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive
reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and
with Morgan it was impossible.
"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's
wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed,
and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour--I can't talk of
her."
"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner
darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering
actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk
of her?"
"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My God, man,
don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them--and, if you do,
don't waste time!"
For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her
bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so
resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command,
had failed to learn anything of her or her circumstances.
"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some
cabin in a frozen wilderness--without provisions, without even matches
or an axe, and God knows what she found there!"
The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table
that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of
terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the
falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he
had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard
Morgan again:
"Between us--somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she
was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what
parted you--but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see
her married to you--and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her.
Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps she _wouldn't_ hide
from you--"
Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly
into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a
short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:
"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."
But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he
had come.
One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his
newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the
Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she
had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her
bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed,
and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's
shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned
over for burial among the pauper dead.
Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for
his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him.
In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall
where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires
of candle-light.