The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 20

The interior was dusky in contrast with the outer light, but from one window a shaft of golden radiance slanted inward and in it the dust motes danced.

Spurrier paused and glanced about him, but before he had thrown down the hat he had taken from his perspiring forehead, a sound hideously unmistakable caused his heartbeat to miss its rhythm and pound in commotion.

Every man has his one terror, or, at least, one antipathy which he is unable to treat with customary calmness. With Spurrier it was everything reptilian. In the islands he had dreaded the snake menace more than fever or head hunters. Now, from the darkened floor near his feet came the vicious whir of rattles, and as his eyes flashed toward the sound he saw coiled there a huge snake with its flat, arrow-shaped head sinuously waving from side to side.

With an agility made lightning-quick by necessity, he leaped aside and, at the same instant, the snake launched itself with such venomous force that the sound of its striking and falling on the puncheon floor was like the las.h.i.+ng of a mule whip. The man had felt the disturbed air of its pa.s.sing as of a sword stroke that had narrowly missed him.

But he had no leisure to regain the breath that had caught startled in his throat, before, from his left, he heard again the ominous note of warning, and felt his scalp creep with horror. The place which he had left locked and believed to be mosquito proof, now seemed alive with the loathsome trespa.s.sers.

As Spurrier leaped for his couch he heard again the sound of a living coil released and its hawserlike las.h.i.+ng of the floor. Now he could see more plainly and, calculating his distance, he jumped for the table from which he could reach the loaded shotgun that hung on his wall. If he fell short, he would come down at their mercy--but he landed securely and without capsizing his support. His elevation gave him a precarious sort of safety, but on the floor below him he counted three rattlesnakes, crawling and recoiling; their cold-blooded eyes following his movements with baleful intentness.

Spurrier was conscious of his trembling hands as he leveled the weapon, and of a crawling sensation of loathing along his spine.

Twice the gun roared, splintering the flooring and spattering its ricochetting pellets, and two of the rattlers twisted in convulsive but harmless writhings. But the third head--and it seemed the largest of the three--had withdrawn under the cot. He was not even sure that these three made up the total. There might be others.

With painstaking care Spurrier came down and armed himself with a stout hickory flail which had been used in other days by some housewife in her primitive laundry work as a "battling stick."

Then he advanced to the battle, swinging one end of the cot wide and s.h.i.+ftily sidestepping. The rattler which lay in piled circles of coppery length regarded him with steely venom, turning its swaying head deliberately as its enemy circled. With the startling abruptness of an electric buzzer it warned and sprang. He escaped by an uncomfortable margin and attacked it with the flail before it could rearrange its coils. Finally he stood panting with exertion over the scene of slaughter.

As he searched the place with profoundest particularity his mind was a.n.a.lyzing the strange invasion. His house was as tight as he had thought it. There was no cranny that would have let in three large rattlers. How had they come there?

Spurrier went out and studied his door. The hasps that held his padlock were in place, but the woodwork about them had been recently scarred. The lock fastenings had been pulled out and replaced.

With a nervous moisture on his brow the man recognized the fiendish ingenuity of his mysterious enemy. These slithering creatures had come here by human agency as brute accomplices in the murder that had failed from the rifle muzzle. The pertinacity and cunning of the scheme's anonymous author gave promise of eventfulness hereafter.

Had he been struck, according to the evident intention, as he entered his house, he would probably have died there, unsuccored, leaving the door open. The rattlers would either have found their way out after that, or, when his body was discovered, the open door would have explained their presence inside, and no suspicion of a man's conspiracy would have remained.

One thing stood out clear in Spurrier's summing-up. Whatever the source of the enmity which pursued him, it had its nerve center in an ingenious brain and it threw about itself that element of mystery which a timid man would have found terrifying and unendurable. Also it operated with a patience which was a manifest of its unswerving determination. Effort might be expected to follow effort until success came--or the unknown plotter were discovered and disposed of.

Yet the author of these malignant attempts worked with an unflurried deliberation, allowing pa.s.sive intervals to elapse between activities, like the volcano that rests in the quiet of false security between fatal eruptions.

Of course, the letter with the mention of Private Grant might be a clew of ident.i.ty, yet calm reflection discounted that a.s.sumption as a wild and unconfirmed grasping out after something tangible.

Perhaps Spurrier as nearly approached the absolute in physical fearlessness as it is given to man to come--but the mystery of a pursuing hatred which could not be openly faced, filled him with a sense of futility, and the futility inspired rage which was unsettling and must be combated.

That night he lay long awake, and after he had fallen asleep he came often to a sudden and wide-eyed wakefulness again at the sound of an owl's call or the creaking of a tree limb.

The next morning found him restless of spirit, and it occurred to him that his secret enemy might be lurking near to inspect the results of his handiwork, so he went down to the road and hung the three dead rattlesnakes along the fence where no pa.s.ser-by could miss seeing their twisted and mutilated lengths. That should be his retort to any inquiring and hostile eye, that he was alive and the creatures put there to destroy him had paid with their lives.

From a place screened from view he meant to watch that gruesome exhibit and mark its effect upon any one who paused to inspect it.

Possibly in that way a clew might be vouchsafed--but he did not at once take cover in the thickets.

It was a glorious morning. The sun had ripped away the mists that, in the mountains, always hang damp and veillike between gray dawning and colorful day. The cool forest recesses were vocal with the twitterings and song from feathered throats.

Spurrier sat down by the road and gave himself up to thoughts that it was safer to banish: thoughts that came with those sights and sounds and that made long-stilled pulses awaken and throb in him.

This morning made him feel Glory's presence and gave him a fine recklessness as to responsibility and consequence. Suddenly he came to himself and seemed to hear the cool cynicism of Martin Harrison's voice inquiring, as it had once actually inquired: "Growing sentimental?"

He pulled himself together and stiffened his expression into one more suitable upon the face of a man who has taken the severe vows of service to a cold ambition.

But a little later he heard a sound and looked up sidewise to see Glory herself standing near him in the road; a materialization of the truant dreams he had been entertaining.

She wore a dress whose simplicity accentuated the slender erectness of her young body and the litheness of her carriage. Her hair hung in braids and the sunbonnet had fallen back from the brightness of her hair. In her eyes played the violet lights of a merriment that lifted and curved her lips beguilingly.

Spurrier came to his feet, and perhaps Glory, who had succ.u.mbed to her moment of self-revelation there on the twilight porch, had her revenge now. For that first startled moment as their glances met, the eyes that looked into hers were lover's eyes, and their unspoken message was courts.h.i.+p. If he maintained the stoic's silence forever, as to words, at least his heart had spoken.

"Before Heaven," said the man slowly, and the tremor of his voice was out of keeping with the ingrained poise of his usual self-command, "when they called you Glory, they didn't misname you!"

The girl flushed pink, and he took a step toward her with the absorbed intensity of a sleep-walker.

Glory stood there--watched him coming and did not move. To her, though she had sought to hide it, he had become the One Man. Her unconfessed love had magnified and deified him--and now his own eyes were blazing responsively with love for her!

Suddenly she was shaken by a rapturous tremor that seemed almost like swooning or being lifted on some powerful wave that swept her clear of the earth, so that she made no effort at disguise, but let the laughing light in her eyes become softer, yet more glowingly intense.

It was as if they had met in the free realm of dreams where there are no hamperings of impossibility. As he drew near her, his arms came out, and he halted so that, under that same delightful sense of irresponsibility, it seemed to her quite natural to step into their welcome.

Possibly the happenings of yesterday and the sleepless hours of last night had left Spurrier momentarily light-headed. Certainly had one of the rattlers stung him and poisoned his reason, he could not be doing a thing more foreign to his program of intention.

He felt his arms close about her; felt the fragrance of her breath, found himself pressing his kisses on lips that welcomed them, and forgot everything except that this was a moment of ecstasy and pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER XII

For a while they stood there together in the narrow road to whose edges the dense greenery came down ma.s.sed and dewy. Their breath was quick with the excitement of that moment when the hills and the rocks that upheld them seemed to them palpitant and gloriously shaken. Then they heard the lumbering of wheels, and with one impulse that needed no expression in words they turned through a gorge which ran at right angles into the stillness of the woods--and away from interruption.

Spurrier had, it seemed to him, stepped through a curtain in life and found beyond it a door of which he had not known. It seemed natural that he and Glory should be going hand in hand into that place of dreams like children at play and hearing joyous voices that were mute and nonexistent in the world of commonplace and fact.

He did not even pause to reflect that this was a continuation of the same ravine in which an a.s.sa.s.sin's bullet had once so narrowly missed him. Yesterday, too, was forgotten.

Just now he was young in his heart again, and had love for his talisman. Actuality had been dethroned by some dream wizardry and left him free of obligation to reason. Then he heard Glory's voice low-pitched and a little frightened.

"It kain't--can't--be true. It's just a dream!"

A flash of sanity, like the shock of a cold plunge, brought the thought that, from her lips, had sounded a warning. This was the moment, if ever, to draw back and take counsel of common sense. Now it would be easier than later to abase himself and confess that in this midsummer's madness was no substance or color of reality--that he stood unalterably pledged to her renunciation.

But the earthquake does not still itself at the height of its tremor and the cyclone does not stop dead with its momentum unspent. Years of calculated and nerve-trying self-command were exacting their toll in the satisfaction of outbreak. Spurrier's emotional self was in volcanic eruption, the more molten and lava-hot for the prolonged dormancy of a sealed crater.

He caught the girl again and pressed her so close that the commotion of her heart came throbbing against him through the yielding softness of her breast; and the agitation of her breath on his face was a little tempest of acquiescent sweetness.

"Doesn't it seem real, now?" he challenged as he released her enough to let her breathe, yet held her imprisoned, and she nodded, radiant-eyed, and answered in a voice half bewildered and more than half burdened with self-reproach.

"I didn't even hang back," she made confession. "I just walked right into your arms the minute you held them out. I didn't seem able to help myself."

Suddenly her eyes, impenitent once more, danced with mischief and her smile broke like a sun flash over her face.