The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room.
"Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name."
The officer, bethinking himself of political satellites who sometimes make a virtue of mystery, smiled as he directed: "Bring him in here, Tom. It's cold in the parlour."
Into the library came Boone, and stood silent until the negro had closed the door upon his exit; then he nodded curtly. There was an air of suppressed wildness in his eyes and a pallour under the bronze of his cheeks, upon which the attorney, as he offered a chair, made no comment.
"I'm here," announced the visitor with a brusque pointedness, "to give you information upon which it is your duty to act."
There was an unintended rasp of challenge in the manner, and under it the official's lips compressed themselves. Boone in his overwrought state felt that he must make haste, while he yet held himself in hand, and the attorney, believing his visitor to be ill, curbed his own temper.
"Let's have the information," he suggested. "Then I'll be in a better position to construe my own duty."
"Presumably you wish to punish all those guilty of the conspiracy that ended in Senator Goebel's death," went on the mountain man in a hard voice. "I say presumably, because the Commonwealth has heretofore appeared to discriminate among the accused."
The attorney bridled. "As to Governor Goebel's death," he asserted heatedly, and in the very employment of the widely different titles the two men proclaimed their antithesis of political creed and opinion, "my record speaks for itself. My sincerity needs no defence."
"That you can prove. Saul Fulton is under indictment in your court. He forfeited his bond and went to South America with or without your knowledge. He has come back, and I am prepared to direct your deputy sheriff to his hiding place. If he got away without your knowledge you ought to be glad to have this news. If you winked at his going, I mean to put you on record."
Boone Wellver had not seated himself. He still stood, with a stony face out of which the eyes burned unnaturally, and the Commonwealth's attorney took a step forward, his own cheeks grown livid with anger, so that the two men stood close and eye-to-eye.
"In this fashion I permit no man to address me," said the prosecutor, with his voice hard-schooled to evenness. "You have come to my house to insult me, and I order you to leave it."
For a moment Boone remained motionless. Between him and the man across from him swam spots of red; then words came with a coldly affronting yet quiet ferocity:
"I am not surprised, but I've done what decency demanded. I … gave you your chance … and you repudiated it … like the charlatan you are. This man shall die … but it was your duty and your right … to know first."
He turned on his heel and opened the door, and the man in the smoking jacket gazed after him in amazement. Evidently, the truculent visitor was not himself, and there was no virtue in quarrelling with a temporary madman. Boone knew only that he had invoked the law and the law had rebuffed him. He could not see that his reception, however just his mission, was inevitable since he had invited it with insult.
Back at his room he found another guest awaiting him. It was Joe Gregory, who had also come from the hills. Boone had reached that point at which surprise ends, and to this man, who was a kinsman and a deputy sheriff in Marlin County, he gave as cursory a greeting as though he had come only from the next street.
But Joe's grave face, in which character and sense spoke from every strongly drawn lineament, was disturbed, and he went without preamble to his point. Down there in the hills trouble was brewing, and among both Gregories and Carrs a restive feeling stirred. Fellows walked with chips on their shoulders as though each side were seeking to invite from the other some overt act of truce-breaking. Joe had sought to analyze the causes of this seemingly chance rebirth of long-quiet animosities. He had learned of Saul's return, but Saul was lying low and most men did not know of his presence. It must be, then, that from his hiding place that intriguer was inciting a spirit of truculence in the Carrs to which the Gregories were automatically responding. If that went on it meant the breaking out of the "war" afresh – and a renewal of bloodshed. The bearer of tidings ended his narrative with an appeal based on strong trust.
"Boone, thar's jest one man kin quiet our boys down and stop 'em short of mortal mischief, I reckon. They all trusts you."
"Will they all follow me?"
"Straight inter hell, they will!"
"And yet you think" – Boone looked full into the direct eyes of the other with a glint of challenge in his own – "yet you think I ought to quiet them instead of leading them?"
"Leading them which way, Boone? Whatever ther rest aims at, you an' me, we stan's fer law and peace, don't we? That's what you've always drilled into me, like gospel."
To his astonishment Joe had, for answer, a mirthless, almost derisive, laugh – a laugh that was barked.
"So far we've stood for that, and what have we gained?" Boone's mood, which had been all day seething like the imprisoned fire-flood of a volcano, burst now in lava-flow through the ruptured crater of repression. "Asa abided by the law seven years and more ago – didn't he? Well, he's rotted in a cell ever since! Saul Fulton played with the law and the law played with him and paid him Judas money and made him rich! You say they'll follow me. Then, before God in heaven, I'll lead them to a cleansing by fire! When we finish the job, those murderers and perjurers will be done for once and for all!"
"And you," the deputy sheriff reminded him soberly, "you'll be plumb ruint."
"I'm ruined now."
It was not a handsome room in which the two men stood, and Boone had taken it with a provident eye to its cheapness, but it was in a hotel stone-built in the times of long ago, and from the days of Henry Clay and John C. Breckinridge to the time when Goebel died there history had had birth between those heavy walls.
In the cheaply furnished bedroom whose paper was faded, the observant eyes of Joe Gregory had caught one detail that struck his simple interest, even in the surge of weightier tides.
A massive silver photograph frame lay face downward on the table as though it had been inadvertently over-turned.
Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the mysterious words, "I'm ruined now," filled out with meaning as a sagging and formless sail rounds into shape under the livening breath of wind.
He, too, had in those few moments seen an idol at least totter on its pedestal. He had been a hill boy famishing for advancement, and before his eyes Boone Wellver, distantly his relative, had been an exemplar. Now Boone was in some unaccountable vortex and talking wildly of inciting men who needed to be calmed. Into Joe Gregory's mind flashed an instinct of resentment against Anne Masters, whom he had often seen there in the hills. In some fashion, he divined, she was to blame for this situation.
The representative wheeled and left his bewildered visitor standing in the room alone. Below in the basement bar of the hotel a noisily laughing crowd jostled at the counter, and the white-aproned Ganymedes were busy. From the door Boone Wellver cast smouldering eyes about the place, searching for a certain partisan Democrat.
Yonder, talking in loud voice, stood a colleague from a neighbouring mountain district. He was nursing, in fingers more used to the gourd-dipper, the stem of a cocktail glass, and his cheap wit, couched in an affected drawl and garbed with exaggerated colloquialisms, was being acclaimed with encouraging mirth. The fellow fancied himself a raconteur, appreciated. In reality he was a sorry clown being baited.
At another time that sight, trivial in itself, would have steadied Boone with a realization of his own self-duty to represent another type of mountain man. Now he was past such realization.
He found the man of whom he had come in search and drew him hastily aside.
"You said this afternoon you wanted to get away from Frankfort for a week."
"Why, yes, Wellver, I've got a sick child at home; but this deadlock's got me tied up. A man must stick to his colours."
Boone nodded. "You can go," he said briefly. "I've come to pair with you. I've got to go home, too. Do you agree not to vote in the house for one week's time?"
The opponent extended his hand. "It's a go, and thank you. Let's have a drink on it." But Boone had already turned. He was hastening up the stairs, and five minutes later found him throwing things into a bag.
"Now," he said in a savage voice to Joe Gregory who still waited, "let's get away from here. There's going to be a snake killing in Marlin."
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Left alone in Wellver's bedroom, Joe Gregory had been thrown back on the companionship of his own thoughts, and they told him that a tide and a wind were mounting which, unless they could he swiftly stemmed, would leave a trail of wreckage along the heights and valleys of Marlin, like drift in the wake of a spring flood-tide; but this would be human wreckage.
None of Boone's adherents at home had supported his program of progress more whole-heartedly than young Joe Gregory, and the infamous perfidy of Saul Fulton was a hateful thing to him, burning in his heart with need of reprisal, for Asa was his "blood-relation."
But as things had shaped themselves, Saul Fulton no longer stood alone, and so long as he was sheltered under the wing of Tom Carr, no blow could be struck him without reopening the "war." Joe knew what that meant. The hills again would redden; again men would ride in fear of death, and that fear would verify itself in murders; as Joe had put it, in "mortal mischief." The whole archaic damnation would rear its head over the new-taught security of peace. The sum of effort toward a stabilized order which men like Boone and himself had built tediously upon patience, would go the collapsing way of land behind a broken dyke.
If a human being lived who could stay that catastrophe it was Boone, so to Boone he had come and found the single available mediator hot-blooded for violence.
Now he shuddered. If Boone Wellver had the power to dissuade those tempestuous clansmen and hold them in abeyance, how much more easily and mightily could he spur them forward! If he, the apostle of peace, breathed the one word, "war," they would be the wild-eyed followers of a Geronimo cast loose on the blood trail.
And Boone's own future, the deputy sheriff mournfully reflected, when this storm was past would be a bright bubble pin-pricked and ended. The man whom local pride proclaimed a statesman to be reckoned with would stand a relapsed son of the vendetta with blood-soiled hands and an inconsistency-smirched record. Even the men whom he could so easily inflame now would, in the end, turn on him, and his career would be as brief as it was floridly picturesque.
They followed feud leaders – but they did not send them to Washington!
Yet Joe was of that blood, too, and could understand Boone's reversion – a reversion willing in a moment to cast aside the armour which he had served his term of years for the right to wear. The thing now was to bring him back in time out of the crimson fog that blinded him. Joe's eyes dwelt absently on the over-turned frame as he stood there thinking, and the articles on the table were photographed on his gaze with a pictorial accuracy of detail, yet because of his abstraction, without meaning of their own.
So mechanically and without at first realizing what he was doing, he read two outspread sheets of paper: Anne's note and McCalloway's telegram. Then abruptly the messages became an integral part of his thought.
Anne Masters, whom Boone loved, was going to marry another man – there was the key to Boone's wild mood, and Victor McCalloway, his friend, had gone away!
If it was Anne who had led Boone to the brink of this peril, it was her duty to lead him back. So ran his elementally simple logic.
"Ef she's decent," declared Joe Gregory tensely to himself, "she kain't skeercely do no less."
So after Boone had returned and begun packing his bag, Joe made a plausible excuse and went out to seek a telephone pay-station. Over the long distance he got Colonel Wallifarro's house, with the amused assistance of an operator who saw only his rustic gaucherie, and who missed entirely the simple, almost biblical, dignity of his bearing.
"Miss Anne? No, sir, she isn't here," replied Moses, the negro butler, and, while Joe's heart sank, that admirable majordomo, recognizing the long-distance call, secured a connection for the speaker with the Country Club.
While the wire buzzed distractingly, Joe Gregory stood in the closed booth and perspired. Outside he watched a travelling salesman who, with a chewed cigar between stout fingers, bent over the switchboard and chatted with the blonde operator. Then finally he heard a voice at the far end. It was a somewhat frightened and faint voice, but even in his anger he admitted that it held a sweet and gentle cadence.
Perhaps the girl half hoped that this ring which called her from guests to whom her engagement was being announced carried a twentieth-century equivalent for the appearance of Lochinvar. Perhaps she only feared bad news. At all events, she spoke low.
"Miss Masters, I'm Joe Gregory," announced an unfamiliar voice which held across the wire a straightforward and determined significance. The name, too, carried its effect, for Anne knew of this man as Boone's most stalwart disciple. "The thing I've got ter tell ye hain't skeercely suited ter speech over a telephone, an' yet thar hain't no other way. Hit's about him, an' he's in ther direst peril a man kin stand in. Thar's just one human soul thet hes a chanst ter save him – an' thet's you."
Sometimes the long-distance wire hums with confusion. Sometimes it enhances and clarifies the ghost of a whisper. Now Joe Gregory heard a choking breath, and for an instant there was no other sound; the man, catching the import of the gasping agitation, went on talking to its speechlessness. It was if between them "he" could mean only one man.
"He hain't skeercely in his rightful senses, or I wouldn't hev no need ter call on ye. He's goin' back ter – well, back home tonight. I kain't handily tell ye what ther peril is, but ef I was ter say thet two days hence he'll be past savin' – an' others along with him – I'd only be talkin' text ter ye."
"But how" – there was desperation of panic in the question – "how could I – save him?"
"He needs savin' from hisself, ma'am. Thar's a train of cars leavin' Looeyville nigh on midnight. Ef ye teks hit I'll meet ye at ther station when ye gets thar in ther mornin'. Him an' me is leavin' on one thet starts from hyar an hour from now. Thet's all I kin say afore I sees ye – save thet matters are plumb desperate."
"But I can't – I don't see how – "
Anne had never quite realized such a quietly unbending sternness as that of the voice which interrupted her:
"Ef ye don't aim ter stand by an' see his ruin, ye needs must find a way. Jest come, thet's all – an' come alone. No other way won't do. I'll be at ther deppo."
And the receiver clicked with a finality that brooked no argument, leaving the girl leaning unsteadily against the wall of the booth. She opened the heavy door a little but did not go out. From the dining-room came a sally of laughing voices, and from the dancing floor haunting scraps of the "Merry Widow" waltz. A clock across the passage ticked above these sounds, and on its dial the hands stood at eight forty-five.
Upon her ears these impressions fell with a sense of remoteness and lightness as if they could be thrust away, but more oppressive and close was the unnamed something brooding in the hills two hundred miles – yes, and two centuries – away.
She knew that she stood at one of those unequivocal moments that cannot be met with life's ordered deliberation. By tomorrow things might be done which could never be undone. An hour hence, decision would be the harder for newly recognized difficulties. The penalty of faltering might be a life of self-accusation for herself – for Boone a tragedy.
She had assured herself with passionate reiteration that Boone was a character in a chapter torn out of her life, but the heartache remained in stubborn mutiny against that ordaining. It had been first gnawingly, then fiercely, present while she laughed and talked at the table with an effervescence no more natural than that pumped into artificially charged wine, and she had needed no death's-head to sober her against too abandoned a gaiety at that feast. Joe Gregory's words had, for all their want of explicitness, been inescapably definite. They meant ruin – no less – unless she intervened and came at once.
To go meant to stir tempests in teapots – to defy conventions, and perhaps by a vapidly rigid interpretation, to compromise herself. To refuse to go meant to abandon Boone to some undescribed, and therefore doubly terrifying, disaster.
Anne Masters was not the woman to shrink from crises or from the determined action for which crises called. Almost at once she knew that she was going by the midnight train to the hills, and let the problems that sprung from her going await a later solution. But how?
Going unaccompanied from a country-club dinner party to desperate affairs brewing in the Cumberlands presented difficulties too tangible to be dismissed. To confide in Colonel Tom or Morgan would mean only that they would insist upon accompanying her. To confide in her mother would mean burning up precious moments in hysteria. The one unobstructed alternative appeared to be the unwelcome one of flight without announcement.
But back to the table she carried little outward agitation. If her heart pounded it was with a sort of exaltation born of impending moments of action. If her face had paled it gave a logical basis for the plea of violent headache upon which she persuaded Morgan to drive her home as soon as the guests rose, and to make the necessary explanations only after she had gone.
When Mrs. Masters returned she found a note entreating her not to give way to undue anxiety. Anne was gone, and the hurriedly written lines said she would telegraph tomorrow from her father's house, but that it was not illness which had called her there.
In such a situation, provided one approach it in the mood of Alexander toward the Gordian knot, the greater complexities appear in retrospect.
It was looking back on those pregnant hours that their various enormities were made plain to her, chiefly through the expounding of ex-post-facto wisdom operating cold-bloodedly and without the urge of a peril to be met.
With much the same acceptance of the bizarre as that which marks the fantasy of dreams, she endured the discomforts of that night's journey and found herself at daybreak looking into gravely welcoming eyes on the station at Marlin Town.
Her own eyes felt sunken and hot with fatigue, but to Joe Gregory, who had also spent a sleepless night, she seemed a picture of the fresh and dauntless.
They went first to her father's bungalow, and there a new difficulty presented itself. Larry Masters had gone away to some adjacent town and had left his house tight locked.
"Boone's on the move today," Joe Gregory informed her, "but matters'll come to a head ternight. Twell then things won't hardly bust, but when ther time comes, whatever ye kin do hes need ter be done swiftly. When I talked with ye last night I misdoubted we'd hev even this much time ter go on."
Then as they sat on the doorstep of the closed house, which no longer afforded her the conventional sanction of paternal presence, the deputy sheriff outlined for her with admirable directness and vigour the situation which had driven him to her for help. To clear away all mystification he sketched baldly the little episode of the down-turned photograph and the bitterness of the three words, "I'm ruined now."
"Thet's how come me ter know," he enlightened simply, "thet Boone war sort of crazed-like – an' thet you mout cure him, ef so be ye would." Then with a sterner note he added: "Whatever took place betwixt ther two of ye air yore own business, but thar's some of us thet would go down inter hell ter save Boone Wellver. I needed ye, an', despite yer bein' a woman, ef ye're a man in any sense at all, ye'll stand by me right now."
Anne rose from the doorstep where she had been dejectedly sitting and held out a hand.
"You see, I came," she said briefly; "and I aim to be man enough to do my best."
From the door of the wretched hotel as the morning grew to noon, she watched the streets, and it seemed to her that, quite aside from the usual gloom of the winter's day and the scowl of the heavy sky, there was a new and intangible spirit of foreboding upon the town. That, she argued, could be only the creative force of imagination.
She wished for Joe Gregory, but among many busy people that day he was the busiest, and it was not until near sunset that he came for her, leading a saddled horse. Riding along the steep and twisting ways, a sense of sinister forces oppressed her.
It seemed to her that the dirge through the brown-gray forests and the shriek of blasts along the gorges were blended into an untamable litany. "We are the ancient hills that stand unaltered! We and our sons refuse to pass under the rod. Wild is our breath and fierce our heritage. Let the plains be tamed and the valleys serve! Here we uphold the law of the lawless, the nihilism of ragged freedom!"
Once Joe halted her with a raised band. "Stay hyar," he ordered, "twell I ride on ahead. Folks hain't licensed ter pass hyar terday ontil they gives ther right signal."
He went forward a few rods, and had Anne not been watching his lips she would have sworn that it was only the caw of a crow she heard; but soon from a cliff overhead and then from a thicket at the left came the response of other cawing. Then with a nod to her to follow, her guide flapped his reins on the neck of his mule, and again they moved forward.
It was dark when they came to the road that passed in front of Victor McCalloway's house, and there Joe drew rein.
"I've still got some sev'ral things ter see to," he informed the girl, "so I won't stop hyar now. Boone's inside thar, an' like as not hit'll be better fer ther two of ye ter talk by yoreselves. I'll give ther call afore I rides on, so thet ther door'll open for ye. Hit hain't openin' ter everybody ternight."
Then for the first time Anne faltered.
"Must I go in there – alone?" she demanded, and Gregory looked swiftly up.
"Ye hain't affrighted of him, be ye? Thar hain't no need ter be."
Anne stiffened, then laughed nervously. "No," she said, "I'll go in."
The deputy sitting sidewise in his saddle, watched her dismount, and when she reached the doorstep he sung out: "Boone, hit's Joe Gregory talkin'. Open up!"
Anne's knees were none too steady, nor was her breath quite even as the door swung outward and Boone stood against its rectangle of light peering out with eyes unaccommodated to the dark. He was flannel shirted and corduroy breeched, and since yesterday he had not shaved. But his face, drawn and strained as he looked out, not seeing her because he was studying the stile from which the voice had come, was the face of one who has been in purgatory and who has not yet seen the light of release.
"Boone," said the girl softly, and he started back with astonishment for the unaccountable. Then as his gaze swung incredulously upon her, still wraith-like beyond the shaft of the door's outpouring, he moved to the side, and she stepped into the room.
"But you're in Louisville," he declared in the low voice of one whose reason resents the trickery of apparitions, and his pupils burned with an abnormal brightness. "You're announcing your engagement."
"Not tonight," she reminded him; and then his brain, like his eyes, having readapted its perception to reality, he slowly nodded his head.
"No. That was —last night," he answered, with a bitter change of tone. "I'd forgotten… Things are moving so rapidly, you see."
"I came," she said, with direct gravity, "because some one told me that you were in danger – of wrecking your life. I came to speak … for the thought in time."
While her eyes held his, he returned her gaze with a steady inscrutability, and the two stood there with a long silence between them.
Then the man announced in a dead tone:
"It's too late. Come here!"
He led the way to the bedroom door and threw it open with an emotionless gesture. The girl flinched as she looked in and succeeded in stifling a scream only by bringing both her hands swiftly to her lips. But Boone took a step over to the cot where Victor McCalloway had slept and lifted the sheet from something that lay there.
"That's 'Little' Jim Bartleton – or was," he added slowly. "I folded his hands there on his breast such a little while ago that they're hardly cold yet." He paused a moment; then the flat quality went out of his bearing and his voice, though no louder than before, became transformed. It held the throbbing intensity of distant drums beating for action and battle.
"He was trying to serve me by watching the enemies that plotted my murder. He was riding my horse – and was mistaken for me. You see, you come too late."
"But, Boone – when – did this – ?"
"About an hour ago," the man interrupted her. "He fell just about where you dismounted, drilled through by a bullet hired by Saul Fulton and Tom Carr. I found him there – and brought him in."
"Do – do his people know?"
"Not yet. Only you and I know it – yet." Again the voice leaped tumultuously: "But soon his people are coming here – his people and mine. They are coming for my counsel, and, by God, it's ready for them!"
"And you'll tell them?"
"I'll tell them that I've come back from following after new gods. I'll tell them that the blood of my forefathers hasn't grown cold in me, and that if they follow me, tonight they will see 'Little' Jim avenged." He paused an instant before adding passionately, "Not by a single man or a couple, but with as many filthy lives as it takes to balance one decent life."