CHAPTER XXXIX
As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on modernity and to stand a hostage to the forces and emotions of the mediaeval.
The fire rose and fell and flickered. It snapped and sighed, roared and whispered, and with it the shadow of the sheeted figure and silhouette of the uncovered face grew and lessened in grotesque fluctuation.
Before she could begin her struggle with the man whose face wore little promise of conversion, she must conquer the struggle in herself, for suddenly she had need to defend her own feelings against the currents of thought that swayed him, and the rôle of righteous avenger no longer seemed so indefensible.
"Boone," she said, with an effort at convincing steadiness, yet feeling weak of will beside the set determination of his bearing, "I've come a long way to talk with you. Will you listen?"
His bow was that of compulsory assent, but his eyes showed defiant through their enforced courtesy.
"I'm listening," he said, "though when I asked you to listen, and everything we'd planned our lives for depended on your hearing me, you refused. Yet that was different, I suppose. After all, I'm only partly educated in the ways of polite society. I haven't learned to be casual in such things."
"If you're a barbarian now," she told him quietly, "it's from pure choice. Gentlemen have taught you their code. You've been a gentleman yourself."
Boone laughed.
"Cleopatra, I believe, had pet leopards that were allowed to purr on the steps of her throne. But they were only a part of the picture and they didn't quite become gentlemen. You let me be a pet leopard, too – for a while. Now I've gone back to the jungle."
She ignored the reference to herself. That way lay endless dispute, and this battle to avert feudal tragedies, she thought, was not a thing to be fought on a field of personalities. She spoke slowly and with a dignity that made his cheeks redden to the realization of his own bitter facetiousness. "I came," she said, "only to bring a warning – while there was time."
"Warning of what?" The question was ominously quiet.
"Against confusing black hallucinations with all the saner, bigger things that you know. Warning against betraying a confidence you have won by stampeding people who believe in you and follow you blindly."
The eyes of Boone Wellver narrowed and hardened defensively under this arraignment from lips that had once shaped for him softer responses. Then as they fell again upon the man who had died in his cause, a baleful light reawoke in them. From that spokesman came a silent argument which needed no voice: "Here I am, not a theory but a fact. I died for you!"
He spoke to her as one who makes an explanation, not of obligation but as a concession to the motives which had brought her.
"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law. Blackstone says that before a man takes human life – even in defence of his own – he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate, and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and then only, I assumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then, and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight lips.
"You have come a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is – you must pardon the candour of saying it – a sermon of platitudes. They have lost their virtue with me – because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts and thinking naked thoughts."
"Just what are you going to do?"
"Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first, though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong crew."
He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened up and his eyes again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he had been trying to repress.
They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery.
Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once worshipped, who, after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf, inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love.
Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying.
"What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with the sort of calm assurance that can speak without faltering or misgiving against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. You couldn't do it, except in a moment of delirium – "
Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate. Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a battle of wills with a dead man lying between them – and the dead man had been murdered for him.
"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"
Anne's chin came up a little.
"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them; but murder's not good enough for you!"
He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:
"I was asking you why – so far as I'm concerned – you care?"
The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegrass garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a touch of the responsiveness that clamoured in her find expression, but she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally – for to her just then it seemed quite incidental – she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.
"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of platitude in her words, "because of the past – because we are – old friends."
Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:
"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"
"Will he sleep easier because you prove a deserter to the cause to which you swore allegiance?" There was a touch of scorn in her voice now. "Does his rest depend on your punishing one murder with another?"
"We're talking two languages," he retorted, and the upflaring of his lover's hope had left him, in its quenching, inflexible. "Our standards are as far apart as the Koran and the Bible."
"Neither of them exalts the coward," came her swift response. "Any agitator could lash the Gregories into mob-violence tonight. Only one man might have the courage – and the strength – to hold them in leash."
Boone set down the heavy box and came out into the room where the fire burned. He seemed, in his white-hot anger, too distrustful of himself for speech, and, perhaps because he loved her so unconquerably and despairingly, his fury against her was the greater.
"Before Almighty God," he declared, in a voice low and quaking with passion, "I think I can understand how some men kill the women they love! Call me a barbarian if you like. I am one. Call me a renegade from your self-complacent culture. I welcome the impeachment, but don't call me a coward, because that's a lie."
He broke off; then burst out again in a mounting voice:
"Until a little while ago I might have yielded to everything you asked, because the fear of offending you was a mightier thing to me than everything else combined. But that was the infirmity of a man weakened by love – not strengthened. I've regained my strength now, and I mean to keep it. Hate is a stronger god than love!"
Remaining stiff-postured on the hearth, Boone rained upon her the wrath that cumulative incitements had kindled and fed to something like mania, and she met it with challenge for challenge and with eyes whose fires were clearer than those of his own.
"You say you've regained your strength. Is that why you're afraid to listen to me? Is that why you don't dare undergo my test?"
"Afraid to listen?" In spite of his fury he put his question with a courteous gravity that was disconcerting. "Haven't I been listening? Am I not still listening?"
But Anne was not to be deflected, and her clear-noted voice still rang with the authority of conviction:
"You talk of holding your hand until you had 'retreated to the ditch or wall,' or whatever your legal phrase was, yet you know that you don't dare give your anger time to cool. You don't dare hold these men, who are crying out for blood, quiet for twenty-four hours and spend that time alone with your own conscience."
"And yet," he ventured to remind her, "I left Frankfort last night. Before I started I reached my decision. There have been already more than twenty-four hours, but they haven't cooled me except to make my certainty greater."
"This boy whose face you just showed me brought word to Frankfort that Saul Fulton was back to have you murdered," went on the girl with unshaken steadiness. "The old instinct for vengeance swept you into passion, but you didn't surrender to it then. You went to the prosecutor. Why?"
"I've already told you. I tried the law first."
"Because yesterday you realized that this lawless way was the wrong way. Your rebuff there maddened you still more. You came back, and when you got here you were in doubt again. Isn't that true?"
"Not for long," he replied shortly.
"Yet you were in doubt. Then you listened to the hot heads, and the fever rose again in your veins. Tonight this boy was killed. One after the other these things happened to work you up to a sort of frenzy and keep you there. I've heard you tell how murder lords here used to hire assassins and how they had to keep them keyed up with whiskey till the work was done. Don't you see that you've been drinking a more dangerous whiskey, and that you don't dare to let this vengeance wait, because you know if you did, you couldn't face your own self-contempt?"
At first there had been despair in her heart because the face of the man she thought she knew had been the face of a stranger, as unamenable to change as that of the sphinx. But now she knew that if she could only make him see in time what she had seen, she might succeed. He was a sleep-walker, and to the sleep-walker only the dream is real – yet he had only to be waked to step again into sanity. The steel had been too gradually forged, tempered and tested to become pig iron again in a breath, simply because it dreamed itself pig iron.
"You talk of your strength, and I call on you to test it. I call on you to do not what any persuasive agitator could do, but what only you can do – to keep the wild-beast impulses in your own men caged for one more day – and to spend that day with your own conscience."
"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting me very easy tasks tonight!"
"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."
Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as though under a lash.
"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is no apostle of tame submission."
Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well, the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously refrained from mentioning until now.
"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips. You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."
She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"
Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more – a request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."
Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a painful thing to watch, and after a little while he turned from her and she could see only his back – with shoulders that twitched a little from time to time under the spasmodic assault of some torturing thought. She was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.
But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a bloody and darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were passing pictures out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarrassment of talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat of agony.
The crystal into which he gazed cleared and clouded; clouded and cleared. He could not yet be sure of himself. While he stood with that stress upon him still in molten indecision, he was not quite sure whether he heard the girl's voice, or whether it came to him from memory of other days, as it had sounded under dogwood blossoming on the crest of Slag-face:
"Comes now to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!"
It was, however, a real voice though a faint one, that came next to his ears.
"You said these wild sheep were your people – that you owed them what you could give them – of leadership."
Boone wheeled, and his voice broke from him like a sob, as the watch slipped from his fingers and fell, shattered.
"Do you mean to go through with it – you and Morgan?"
But before she could shape a response, his hand came up and he went on in excited haste: "No, don't answer. You didn't come to answer questions." Then, with a long intake of breath and an abrupt change to flint hardness again, he added: "It was I who was to answer you. You are right. I was a damned quitter. These are my people, and I belong to them – but not to the feud-war, to myself – nor to you."
"Boone," began Anne Masters, but she got no further than that, for the man again raised a warning hand and spoke in a crisp whisper:
"Hush!" he commanded, and bent, listening.
In the distance a long whoop was dying away, and then after a moment of tense silence a cautious whistle sounded from the night outside. Boone took a step toward the door, and halted.
"They're coming! It won't do for you to be found here with me alone." He cast a hurried glance toward the other room, then added; "No —he's in there. They'll have to see him. Can you wait upstairs?"
Anne Masters nodded, and as, with a lamp which he handed her, she put her foot upon the lowest step of the boxed-in stairway, he went on:
"You've paid me one compliment tonight. You said that I could control men. As for myself, I doubt that, and if I fail – well, that comes later."
From the stairhead she looked down. Boone had gone to the door and stood with his hand on the latch, yet for the moment he did not lift it. To her he seemed bracing himself against a fresh assault of heavy forces.
CHAPTER XL
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 rôle 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 rôle, 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!"