CHAPTER IX
Sim Colby, after that day when he had slipped through the laurel, hadgone back to his own house and waited for the talk of John Spurrier'smysterious death to drift along the waterways where news is the onlyspeedy traveler.
There had been no such gossip and he had dared betray his interest byno inquiry, but he knew it could have only one meaning; that he hadfailed.
Spurrier was alive, and obviously he was holding his counselconcerning his narrow escape. This silence seemed to Sim Colby anominous thing indicative of some crafty purpose--as if the intendedvictim were stalking grimly as well as being stalked. Sim came of arace that knows how to bide its time and that can keep bright the edgeof hatred against long-delayed reprisals. It was certainly to bepresumed that Spurrier had taken some of his friends into hisconfidence and that under the mantle of silence over on Little TurkeyTail, these friends were now watchfully alert. The enterprise that hadonce failed could not be reundertaken at once. Sim must wait for thevigilance to "blow over," and while he waited the rancor of his hatredmust fester with the thorn-prickings of a thousand doubts andapprehensions.
Then he heard one day that Spurrier had left the mountains, and onanother day the news was brought that the grand jury had declined toreopen the old issues of the murder case in which Mosebury hadescaped justice. Both these things were comforting in themselves, butthey failed of complete reassurance for the deserter.
Men said that Spurrier was coming back again, so the day of reckoningwas only deferred--not escaped.
The determination with which Sim had set out on his mission of deathhad largely preempted his field of thought. Now, after weeks andmonths of brooding reflection, he himself had become only a sort ofhuman garment worn by the sinister spirit of resolve.
So all that winter while John Spurrier was away as the ambassador,practicing in Moscow and Odessa the adroit arts of financialdiplomacy, the fixed idea of his assassination was festering in themind of the man who lived, under an assumed name, at the head ofLittle Quicksand.
That obsession took fantastic shapes and wove webs of grotesquepatterns of hate as Colby, who had been Grant, sat brooding before hisuntidy hearth while the winter winds wailed about the eaves and lashedthe mountain world into forlorn bleakness.
And while Colby meditated unendingly on the absentee and built uglyplans against his return, so in another house and in another spirit,the ex-officer was also remembered.
Winter in these well-nigh roadless hills meant a blockade and a siegewith loneliness and stagnation as the impregnably intrenchedattackers. The victims could only wait and endure until the rescueforces of spring should come to raise the chill and sodden barricade,with a flaunting of blossom-banners and the whispered song of warmvictory.
Glory Cappeze, for the first time in her life, suffered fromloneliness. She had thought herself too used to it to mind it much,but John Spurrier had brought a new element to her existence and leftbehind him a void. She had been hardly more than an onlooker to hisoccasional visits with her father, but she had been a very interestedonlooker. When he talked a vigorous mind had spoken and had broughtthe greater, unknown, outer world to her door. The striking face withits square jaw; the ingrained graces and courtesies of his bearing;the quickness of his understanding--all these things had been a lightin the gray mediocrity of uneventful days and a flame that had firedher imagination to a splendid disquiet.
The infectious smile and force of personality that had been achallenge to more critical women, had been almost dazzling qualitiesto the mountain girl of strangled opportunities.
But it was that last meeting in which he had thawed her shyness intofriendliness that Glory remembered most eagerly. That had seemed tomake of Spurrier not only a hero admired from a distance but a herowho was also a friend, and she was hungry for friends.
So it came to pass that to these two widely variant welcomes, neitherof which he suspected, John Spurrier was returning from Russia whenspring had lightly brushed the Cumberland slopes with delicatefragrance and the color of blossoming.
In Louisville, in Frankfort, and in other Kentucky towns along his waythe returning man had made stops and investigations, to the end thathe came primed with certain information of an ex-cathedra sort.
The fruits of this research included an abstract of the personnel ofthe legislature and the trend of oil influences in State politics, andhe studied his notebook as he traveled from the rolling, almostvoluptuous fertility of the bluegrass section to the piedmont wherethe foothills began to break the sky.
On the porch of the dilapidated hotel at Waterfall a sparse crowdcentered about a seated figure, and when he had reached the spotSpurrier paused, challenged by a sense of the medieval, that grippedhim as tangibly as a hand clapped upon his shoulder.
The seated man was blind and shabby, with a beggar's cup strapped tohis knee, and a "fiddle" nestling close to the stubbled chin of adisfigured face. He sang in a weird falsetto, with minors that rosethin and dolorous, but he was in every essential the ballad singer whoimprovised his lays upon topical themes, as did Scott's lastminstrel--a survival of antiquity.
Now he was whining out a personal plaint in the words of his "songballet."
"I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an' green, I used ter work a standard rig an' drill fer kero_sene_."
The singer's lugubrious pathos appeared to be received with attentiveand uncritical interest. Beyond doubt he took himself seriously andsadly.
"I used ter know a woman's love, an' read a woman's eyes, An' look into my baby's face an' dwell in paradise, Until a comp'ny foreman, plum' heedless in his mind Let nitroglycer_een_ explode an' made me go stone blind."
Spurrier, half-turning, saw a traveling salesman standing at his elbowwith a repressed grin of amusement struggling in his glance.
"Queer card, that," whispered the drummer. "I've seen him before; oneof the wrecks left over from the oil-boom days. A 'go-devil' let loosetoo soon and blinded him." He paused, then added as though by way ofapology for his seeming callousness: "Some people say the old boy is asort of a miser and has a snug pile salted away."
Spurrier nodded and went on into the office, but later in the day hesought out the blind fiddler and engaged him in conversation. Theman's blinding had left him a legacy of hate for all oil operators,and from such relics as this of the active days Spurrier knew how toevoke scraps of available information. It was not until later that itoccurred to him that he had answered questions as well as askedthem--but, of course, he had not been indiscreet.
With John Spurrier, riding across hills afoam with dogwood blossom andtenderly vivid with young green, went persistently the thought of theblind beggar who seemed almost epic in his symbolism of human wreckageadrift in the wake of the boom. Yet he was honest enough to admitinwardly that should victory fall to his banners there would beflotsam in the wake of his triumph, too; simple folk despoiled oftheir birthright. He came as no altruist to fight for the nativeborn. He, no less than A. O. and G., sought to exploit them.
When he went to the house of Dyke Cappeze he did not admit thecuriosity, amounting to positive anxiety, to see again the littlebarbarian, who slurred consonants, doubled her negatives, split herinfinitives and retorted in the Latin of Blackstone. Yet when Glorydid not at once appear, he found himself unaccountably disappointed.
"There's been another stranger in here since you went away," the oldman smilingly told him. "What is he doing here? That's the one burningquestion debated along the highways when men 'meet and make theirmanners.'"
"Well," laughed Spurrier, "what _is_ he doing here?"
Cappeze shrugged his bent shoulders as he knocked the rubble from hispipe and a quizzical twinkle came into his eyes.
"So far as I can make out, sir, he's as much a gentleman of leisure asyou are yourself."
Spurrier knew what an excellent subterfuge may sometimes lie infrankness, and now he had recourse to its concealment.
"Good heavens, Mr. Cappeze, I'm
no idler!" he declared. "I'massociated with capitalists who work me like a mule. Since I saw you,for example, I've been in Russia and I've been hard-driven. That's whyI come here. If I couldn't get absolutely away from it all now andthen, I'd soon be ready for a madhouse. Here I can forget all that andkeep fit."
Cappeze nodded. "That's just about the way I sized you up. At first,folks pondered about you, too, but now they take you on faith."
"I hope so--and this new man? Has he stepped on anybody's toes?"
"Not yet. He hasn't even bought any land, but there have been someseveral transfers of property, in other names, since he came. He _may_be some man's silent partner."
"What sort of partnership would it be?"
"God knows." For an instant the shrewd eyes leaped into a glint offeeling. "These poor benighted devils suspect the Greeks bearinggifts. Civilization has always come here only to leave its scar. Theyhave been stung once--over oil. God pity the man who seeks to stingthem again."
"You think," Spurrier responded lightly, as one without personalinterest, "they wouldn't take it kindly?"
Once again the sonorous and kindly voice mounted abruptly tovehemence.
"As kindly, sir, as a wolf bitch robbed, the second time, of herwhelps. It's all a wolf bitch has."
That evening as he walked slowly homeward with a neighbor whom he hadmet by the way, Spurrier came face to face with Wharton, the otherstranger, and the mountaineer performed the offices of introduction.
The two men from the outer world eyed each other incuriously andparted after an exchange of commonplaces.
When Spurrier separated from his chance companion, the hillsmandrawled: "Folks _says_ thet feller's buyin' land. God knows what ferhe wants hit, but ef he _does_ hone fer hit, hit's kinderly probablethet hit's wuth holdin' on to."
When the brook trout began to leap and flash Cappeze delegated Gloryto act for him as Spurrier's guide, and as the girl led the way to thelikeliest pools, the young, straight-growing trees were not moregracefully slender.
The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had nodelicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair.The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighterthan her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom andlike the hills she was wild of beauty.
Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to thepagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged torigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ringwithin him as a tuning fork rings to its note.
Since the days of Augusta Beverly's ascendency, he had never felt theneed of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. Atfirst he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-haterand more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, anexpedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, andVivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades solong as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been snobsin a sense, and in a sense he too was a snob.
But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things intheir primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politerusage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his profferedcomradeship for the attitude of the lover--and that would have beenmost disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanationsthat would wound her, embarrass him and arouse the old man's just ire.For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yetprouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own groundthere was no common meeting place between their standards of living.
Yet Glory's presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich andlyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would havebelieved in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stoodfast when Augusta had cut loose.
This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally--andperhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased himto humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made himstep more elastically as she went on ahead.
When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored,Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in grass that wavedknee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she movedabout crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself,herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.
"Glory," he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the firsttime and in a mood of experiment.
As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, sheturned toward him and answered in kind.
"What air hit, Jack?"
"Thank you."
"What fer?"
"For calling me Jack."
Then her cheeks colored deeply and she wheeled to her work again. Butafter a little she faced him once more to say half angrily:
"I called ye Jack because ye called me Glory. You've always put a Missafore hit till now, an' I 'lowed ye'd done made up yore mind ter befriendly at last."
"I've always wanted to be friendly," he assured her. "It was you whobegan with a hickory switch and went on with hard words in Latin."
The girl laughed, and the peal of her mirth transmuted their statusand dispelled her self-consciousness. She came over and stood lookingdown at him with violet eyes mischievously a-sparkle.
"The co'te," she announced, "hes carefully weighed there evidence inther case of Jack Spurrier, charged with ther willful murder of BobWhite, and is ready to enter jedgment. Jack Spurrier, stand up ter besentenced!"
The man rose to his feet and stood with such well-feigned abjectnessof suspense that she had to fight back the laughter from her eyes topreserve her own pose of judicial gravity.
"It is well established by the evidence befo' ther co'te," she wentsolemnly on, "thet ther defendant is guilty on every count containedin the indictment." She checked off upon the fingers of the left handthe roster of his crime as she summarized it.
"He entered inter an unlawful conspiracy with the codefendant Rover, asetter dawg. He made a felonious assault without provocation. Hecommitted murder in the first degree with malice prepense."
Spurrier's head sank low in mock despair, until Glory came to herperoration and sentence.
"Yet since the defendant is amply proved to be a poor, ignorantwanderer upon the face of the earth, unpossessed of ordinaryknowledge, the court is constrained to hold him incapable ofdiscrimination between right an' wrong. Hence he is not fullyresponsible for his acts of violence. Mercy as well as justice lies inthe province of the law, twins of a sacred parentage and equal beforethe throne."
She broke off in a laugh, and so sudden was the transition fromabsolute mimicry that the man forgot to laugh with her.
"Glory," he demanded somewhat breathlessly, "have you ever been to atheater in your life? Have you ever seen a real actress?"
"No. Why?"
"Because you _are_ one. Does this life satisfy you? Isn't thereanything off there beyond the hills that ever calls you?"
The dancing eyes grew abruptly grave, almost pained, and the responsecame slowly.
"_Everything_ down thar calls ter me. I craves hit all!"
Spurrier suddenly recalled old Cappeze's half-frightened vehemencewhen the recluse had inveighed against the awakening of vain longingsin his daughter. Now he changed his manner as he asked:
"I wonder if I'd offend you if I put a question. I don't want to."
"Ye mout try an' see. I ain't got no power ter answer twell I hearshit."
"All right. I'll risk it. Your father doesn't talk mountain dialect.His English is pure--and you were raised close to him. Why do _you_use--the other kind?"
She did not at once reply and, when she did, the astonishinglyadaptable creature no longer employed vernacular, though she spokeslowly and guardedly as one might who ventured into a foreign tongue.
"My father has lived down below as well as here. He's a gentleman, buthe aims--I mean he intends--to live here now till he dies."
; As she paused Spurrier prompted her.
"Yes--and you?"
"My father thinks that while I _do_ live here, I'd better fit into thelife and talk in the phrases that don't seem high-falutin' to myneighbors."
"I dare say," he assured her with forced conviction, "that your fatheris right."
There was a brief silence between them while the warm stillness of thewoods breathed its incense and its langour, then the girl broke outimpulsively:
"I want to see and hear and taste everything, out there!"
Her hands swept outward with an all-embracing gesture toward the wholeof the unknown. "There aren't any words to tell how I want it! What doyou want more than anything else, Jack?"
The man remained silent for a little, studying her under half-loweredlids while a smile hovered at the corners of his lips. But the smiledied abruptly and it was with deep seriousness that he answered.
"I think, more than anything else, I want a clean name and avindicated reputation."
Glory's eyes widened so that their violet depths became pools ofwondering color and her lips parted in surprise.
"A clean name!" she echoed incredulously. "What blight have you got onit, Jack?" Then catching herself up abruptly she flushed crimson andsaid apologetically: "That's a question I haven't any license to putto you, though. Only you broached the subject yourself."
"And having broached it, I am willing to pursue it," he assured herevenly. "I was an army officer until I was charged with unprovokedmurder--and court-martialed; dishonorably discharged from the servicein which my father and grandfather had lived and died."
For a moment or two she made no answer but her quick expressiveness oflip and eye did not, even for a startled interval, betray any shock ofhorror. When she did speak it was in a voice so soft and compassionatethat the man thought of its quality before he realized its words.
"Did the man that--that was _really_ guilty go scot free, whilst youhad to shoulder his blame?"
There had been no question of evidence; no waiting for any denial ofguilt. She had assumed his innocence with the same certainty that hereye assumed the flawlessness of the overheard blue. Her interest wasall for his wronging and not at all for his alleged wrong.
The man started with surprise; the surprise of one who had trainedhimself into an unnatural callousness as a defense against what hadseemed a universal proneness to convict. He had told himself thatGlory would see with a straighter and more intuitive eye. He had toldher baldly of the thing which he seldom mentioned out of aninquisitiveness to test her reaction to the revelation, but he wasunprepared for such unhesitant belief.
"I think you are the first human being, Glory," he said quietly butwith unaccustomed feeling in his voice, "who ever heard that much andgave me a clean bill of health without hearing a good bit more. Whydidn't you ask whether or not I was guilty?"
"I didn't have to," she said slowly. "Some men could be murderers andsome couldn't. You couldn't. You might have to _kill_ a man--but notmurder him. You might do lots of things that wouldn't be right. Idon't know about that--but those people that convicted you werefools!"
"Thank you," he said soberly. "You're right, Glory. I was as innocentof that assassination as you are, yet they proved me guilty. It wasonly through influence that I escaped ending my days in prison."
Then he gave her the story, which he had already told her father andno one else in the mountains. She listened, thinking not at all of thedamaging circumstances, but secretly triumphant that she had beenchosen as a confidant.
But that night Spurrier looked up from a letter he was reading and lethis eyes wander to the rafters and his thoughts to the trout stream.
It was a letter, too, which should have held his attention. Itcontained, on a separate sheet of paper, a list of names which wastyped and headed: "Confidential Memorandum." Below that appeared thenotation: "Members of the general assembly, under American Oil and Gasinfluence. Also names of candidates who oppose them at the nextelection, and who may be reached by us."
Spurrier lighted his pipe and his face became studious, but presentlyhe looked up frowning.
"I must speak to old Cappeze," he said aloud and musingly. "He's beingunfair to her." And that did not seem a relevant comment upon thepaper he held in his hand.
Then Spurrier started a little as from outside a human voice soundedabove the chorus of the frogs and whippoorwills.
"Hallo," it sung out. "Hit's Blind Joe Givins. Kin I come in?"
A few minutes later into the lamplight of the room shambled the beggarof the disfigured face, whom Spurrier had last seen at the town ofWaterfall, led by a small, brattish boy. His violin case was tightlygrasped under his arm, and his free hand was groping.
"I'd done sot out ter visit a kinsman over at ther head of Big Wolfpenbranch," explained the blind man, "but ther boy hyar's got a stonebruise on his heel an' he kain't handily go on, ter-night. We wondercould we sleep hyar?"
Spurrier bowed to the law of the mountains, which does not denyshelter to the wayfarer, but he shivered fastidiously at the unkemptraggedness of his tramp-like visitor, and he slipped into his pocketthe papers in his hand.
That night before Spurrier's hearth, as in elder times before theroaring logs of some feudal castle, the wandering minstrel paid hisboard with song and music; his voice rising high and tremulous inquaint tales set to measure.
But on the next morning the boy set out on some mission in theneighborhood and left his charge to await his return, seated in a lowchair, and gazing emptily ahead.
Spurrier went out to the road in response to the shout of a passingneighbor, and left his papers lying on the table top, forgetful of thepresence of the sightless guest, who sat so negligibly quiet in thechimney corner.
When he entered the room again the blind man had risen from his seatand moved across to the hearth. On the threshold the householderhalted and stood keenly eyeing him while he groped along the mantelshelf as if searching with wavering fingers for something that hiseyes could not discover--and the thought of the papers which he hadleft exposed caused an uneasy suspicion to dart into Spurrier's mind.Any eye that fell on that list would have gained the key to his wholestrategy and intent, but, of course, this man could not see. StillSpurrier cursed himself for a careless fool.
"I was jest seekin' fer a match," said Joe Givins as a slight soundfrom the other attracted his attention. "I aimed ter smoke for aleetle spell."
The host struck a match and held it while the broken guest kindled hispipe, then he hurriedly glanced through his papers to assure himselfthat nothing had been disturbed--and though each sheet seemed as hehad left it, the uneasiness in Spurrier's mind refused to be stilled.
Presumably this bat-blind ragamuffin was no greater menace to thesecrecy of his plans than a bat itself would have been, yet a glimpseof this letter would have been so fatal that he asked himselfanxiously, "How do I know he's not faking?" The far-fetchedapprehension gathered weight like a snowslide until suddenly out of itwas born a grim determination.
He would make a test.
Noiselessly, while the ugly face that had been mutilated by a blastingcharge gazed straight and sightlessly at him, Spurrier opened thetable drawer and took from it a heavy calibered automatic pistol. Itwas a deadly looking thing and it needed no cocking; only the silentslipping forward of a safety catch. In this experiment Spurrier mustnot startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfyhimself that his sight was genuinely dead.
"I thought," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchinglystudied the other face through narrowed lids, "that when sight went,the enjoyment of tobacco went with it." As he spoke he raised andleveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into thestaring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the balefulstamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly asa gargoyle of hatred.
If the man were by any possibility shamming it would take cold nerveto sit there without any hint of confession as this unwarneddemonstrati
on was made against him--a demonstration that seemedgenuine and murderous. For an instant Spurrier fancied that he heardthe breath rasp in the other's throat, but that, he realized, musthave been fancy. The face itself altered no line of expression,flickered no eyelid. It remained as it had been, stolid and blank, sothat the man with the pistol felt ashamed of his suspicion.
But Spurrier rose and leaned across the table slowly advancing themuzzle until it almost touched the bridge of the nose, just betweenthe eyes he was so severely testing. Still no hint of realization camefrom the threatened guest. Then the voice of the blind man soundedphlegmatically:
"That's what folks say erbout terbaccy an' blind men--but, bycrickety, hit _ain't so_."
John Spurrier withdrew his pistol and put it back in the drawer.
"I guess," he said to himself, "he didn't read my letters."
The Law of Hemlock Mountain Page 9