The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 13

But they learned nothing. Sim Colby had spent painstaking thought upon his effort and he had left no evidence written in the mold of the forest.

"Hit beats all h.e.l.l," declared the nonplussed Uncle Billy at last.

"I ain't got ther power ter fathom hit. Ef I war you I wouldn't talk erbout this ter no man save only me an' old d.y.k.e Cappeze.

Still-huntin' lands more game then blowin' a fox horn." And Spurrier nodded his head.

Though Spurrier for a few days after that slipped through the gorge with the stealth of a sharpshooter, covering himself behind rocks as he went, he heard no sound there more alarming than the chatter of squirrels or the grunt of a strayed razor-back rooting among the acorns. Gradually he relaxed his vigilance as a man will if his nature is bold and his dreams too sweeping to be forever hobbled by petty precautions.

The purpose which he privately served called for ranging the country with a trained eye, and with him went the contour maps upon which were traced red lines.

One day he came, somewhat winded from a stiff climb, to an eminence that spread the earth below him and made of it a panorama. The bright carnival of the autumn was spending itself to its end, but among trees already naked stood others that clung to a gorgeousness of color the more brilliant in the face of death. Overhead was flawless blue, and there was a dreamy violet where it merged mistily with the skyline ridges.

"All that it needs," mused the man whimsically and aloud, "is the music of Pan's pipes--and perhaps a small chorus of dryads."

Then he heard a laugh and, wheeling suddenly, discovered Glory Cappeze regarding him from the cap of a towering rock where, until he had reached this level, she had been hidden from view. Now she flushed shyly as the man strode over and confronted her.

"Do you still hate me?" he inquired.

"I reckon thet don't make no master differ ter ye, does. .h.i.t?" The musical voice was painfully diffident, and he remembered that she had always been shy with him except on that first meeting when the leaping anger in her eyes had burned away self-consciousness.

"You know," he gravely reminded her, "when I first saw you, you were on the point of thras.h.i.+ng me. You had me cowed and timid. Since then I've come to think of you as the shooting star."

He paused, waiting for her to demand an elucidation of that somewhat obscure statement, but she said nothing. She only sat gazing over his head toward the horizon, and her cheeks were excitedly flushed from the delicate pink of apple bloom to the warmer color of peach blossom.

"Since you don't ask what I mean," he continued easily, "I shall tell you. I've been to your house perhaps four or five times. From afar, each time, I've seen a sc.r.a.p of color. Sometimes it has been blue, sometimes red, but always it has vanished with the swiftness of a shooting star. It is a flash and it is gone. Sometimes from beyond a door I also hear a voice singing."

He leaned his elbows on the rock at her feet and stood gazing into the eyes that would not meet his own, and still she favored him with no response. After a little silence the man altered his tone and spoke argumentatively:

"You forgave the dog, you know--why not the man?"

That question carried her thoughts back to the murdered quail and a gusty back-flash of resentment conquered her diffidence. Her sternness of tone and the thrushlike softness of her voice, mingled with the piquancy of paradox.

"A dawg don't know no better."

"Some dogs are very wise," he a.s.sured her. "And some men very foolish."

"The dawg," she went on still unplacated, "got right down on his stomach and asked my pardon. I _hed_ ter fergive him, when he humbled hisself like that."

"I'm willing," John Spurrier amiably a.s.sured her, "to get right down on my stomach, too."

Then she laughed, and though she sought to retreat again into her aloofness, the spell was broken.

"Am I forgiven?" he demanded, and she shook her head doubtfully though no longer with conviction.

"No," she told him; then she added with a startlingly exact mimicry of her father's most legalistic manner: "No. The co'te will take the case under advis.e.m.e.nt an' defer jedgment."

"I forgot," he said, "that you are a lawyer's daughter. What were you looking at across there--so fascinatedly?"

"Them hills," she enlightened succinctly.

Spurrier studied her. Her deep eyes had held a glow of almost prayerful enchantment for which her laconic words seemed inadequate.

Watching her out of the tail of his eye he fell into borrowed phrases: "'Violet peaks uplifted through the crystal evening air.'"

She shot a glance at him suddenly, eagerly; then at once the lids lowered, masking the eyes again as she inquired:

"Thet thar's poetry, ain't hit?"

"I'm prepared to go to the mat with any critic who holds the contrary," he a.s.sured her.

"Hit's comin' on ter be night. I've got ter start home," she irrelevantly announced, as she slid from her rough throne, and the man fell boldly in step at her side.

"When your honor rules on the matter under advis.e.m.e.nt," he said humbly before their paths separated, "please remember that the defendant was a poor wretch who didn't know he was breaking the law."

For the first time their glances engaged fully and without avoidance, and a twinkle flashed in the girl's pupils.

"_Ignorantia legis neminem excusat_," she serenely responded, and Spurrier gasped. Here was a girl who could not steer her English around the shoals of illiteracy, giving him his retort in Latin: "Ignorance of the law excuses no one." Of course, it meant only that her quick memory had appropriated and was parroting legal phrases learned from her father, but it struck the chord of contrasts, and to the man's imagination it dramatized her so that when she had gone on with the lissome grace of her light stride, he stood looking after her.

Rather abruptly after that the autumn fires of splendor burned out to the ashes of coming winter, and then it was that Spurrier went north.

As his train carried him seaward he had the feeling that it was also transporting him from an older to a younger century, and that while his mind dwelt on the stalwart and unsophisticated folk with whom he had been brus.h.i.+ng shoulders, the life resolved itself into an austere picture against which the image of Glory stood out with the quick vividness of a red cardinal flitting among somber pine branches.

Because she was so far removed from his own orbit he could think of her impersonally and enjoy the thought as though it were of a new type of flower or bird, recognizing her attractive qualities in a detached fas.h.i.+on.

As Spurrier gave himself up to the relaxation of reminiscence with that abandon of train travel which admits of no sustained effort, he began comparing this life, left over from another era, with that he had known against more cultivated and complex backgrounds.

Then in a.n.a.lytical mood he reviewed his own past, looking with a lengthening of perspective on the love affair that had been broken by his court-martial. His adoration of the Beverly girl had been youthful enough to surround itself with young illusions.

That was why it had all hurt so bitterly, perhaps, with its ripping away of his faith in romantic conceptions of love-loyalty.

He wondered now if he had not borne himself with the Quixotic martyrdom of callowness. He had sought to s.h.i.+eld the girl from even the realization that her lack of confidence was ungenerous. He had sought to take all the pain and spare her from sharing it. But she had solaced herself with a swift recovery and a new lover, and had he been guilty she could not have abandoned him more cavalierly. Well, that softness belonged to an out-grown stage of development.

He had seen himself then as obeying the dictates of chivalry. He thought of it now as inexperienced folly--perhaps, so far as she was concerned, as a lucky escape. His amours of the present were not so naively conducted. To Vivian he had paid his attentions with an eye watchful of material advantages. They belonged to a sophisticated circle which seasoned life's fare rather with the salt of cynicism than with the sugar of romanticism. Yet the thought of Vivian caused no pulse to flutter excitedly.

The glimpse of Glory had been refres.h.i.+ng because she was so honest and sincere that she disquieted one's acquired cynicism of viewpoint. One might as well spout world-wisdom to a lilac bush as to Glory! Yet there was a sureness about her which argued for her creed of wholesome, simple things and old half-forgotten faiths which one would like to keep alive--if one could.

Snow drifted in the air and made a nimbus about each arc light as Spurrier's taxi, turning between the collonade pillars of the Pennsylvania Station, gave him his first returning glimpse of New York. He had come East in obedience to a wired summons from Martin Harrison, brief to curtness as were all business messages from that man of few and trenchant words. The telegram had been slow crossing the mountain, but Spurrier had been prompt in his response.

A tempered glare hung mistily above the Longacre Square district through the snow flurries to the north, and the rumbled voice of the town, after these months in quiet places, was to the returned pilgrim like the heavy breathing of a monster sleeping out a fever.

At the room that he kept at his club in Fifth Avenue--for that was a part of the pretentious display of affluence made necessary by his ambitious scheme of things--he called up a number from memory. It was a number not included in the telephone directory, and, recognizing the voice that answered him, he said briefly:

"Manners, this is Mr. Spurrier. Will you tell Mr. Harrison I'm on the wire?"

"h.e.l.lo, Spurrier," boomed a deep voice after an interval. "We're dining out this evening and we go to the opera afterward, but I want a word with you to-night. In fact, I want you to start for Russia on Wednesday. Drop into our box, and drive home with me for a few minutes afterward."

Russia on Wednesday! Spurrier's unoccupied hand clenched in irritation, but his voice was as unruffled as if he had been asked to make ready for a journey to Hoboken. He knew enough of Harrison's methods to ask no questions. If they could have been answered over the phone Harrison could have found many men to send to Russia. It was because they were for his ear alone that he had been called to New York.

That evening he listened to "Otello" with thoughts that wandered from the voices of the singers. They refused even to be chained by the novelty of a slender tenor as a new Russian star held the spotlight.

He was studying the almost too regular beauty of Vivian Harrison's profile as she sat serene and self-confident with the horseshoe of the Metropolitan beyond her.