The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 22

"How did you do that?" he demanded in a voice blank with astonishment.

"It's a sheer impossibility!"

"Maybe it's witchcraft, Jack," she mocked him.

"Can you change them back?" he asked a little anxiously, and she shook her head.

"No, but they'll change of themselves in a day or two."

"I reckon," commented d.y.k.e Cappeze, looking up from his book by the table, "I oughtn't to give away feminine secrets, but it's a right simple matter, after all. She just put some Jimson-weed juice in her eyes and the trick was done."

"Jimson weed," echoed the visitor, and the elder nodded.

"If you happen to remember your botany, you'll recall that its longer name is _Datura stramonium_--and it's a strong mydriatic. It swells the pupil and obliterates the iris."

It was walking homeward with a low moon overhead that evening that Spurrier's thoughts found time to wrestle with other problems than those affecting himself and Glory. The incident of the black eyes had at first interested him only because they were _her_ eyes, but now he thought also of the episode of the rattlesnakes and the letter from Major Withers.

In his first a.n.a.lysis of what that letter might mean to him he had decided that his man would be recognizable by his mismated eyes. He had recalled Sim Colby's black ones while thinking of unusual eyes in general and had, in pa.s.sing, set him down as one who stood alibied.

Now, in the light of this Jimson-weed discovery, those black eyes took on a new interest. Presumably it was a trick commonly known in these hills. _If_ Colby's eyes had been so altered--and they had seemed unnatural in their tense blackness--it must have been with a deliberate and sufficient motive. Sim Colby was not making his pupils smart and sting as a matter of vanity. A man resorting to disguises seeks first to change the most salient notes of his appearance.

Spurrier recalled, with the force of added importance, the surprised look on Sam Mosebury's face when that genial murderer, upon his arrival, had stifled some impulse of utterance.

Suspicion of Colby was perhaps far-fetched, but it took a powerful hold on Spurrier, and one from which he could not free himself. At all events, he must see this Sim Colby when Colby did not know he was coming--and look at his eyes again.

So he made a second trip across the hills to the head of Little Quicksand, and for the sake of safeguarding against any warning going ahead of him, he spoke to no one of his intention.

This time he went armed with an automatic pistol and a very grim purpose. When they met--if the mountaineer's eyes were no longer black--he would probably need both.

But once again the opportunity hound encountered disappointment. He found a chimney with no smoke issuing from it and a door barred. The horse had been taken out of the stable and from many evidences about the untenanted place he judged that the man who lived alone there had been absent for several days.

To make inquiries would be to proclaim his interest and prejudice his future chances of success, so he slipped back again as surrept.i.tiously as he had come, and the determination which he had keyed to the concert pitch of climax had to be laid by.

At home again he found that the love which he could neither accept nor conquer was demoralizing his moral and mental equipoise. He could no longer fix and hold his attention on the problems of his work. His spirit was in equinox.

The only solution was to go to Glory and tell her the truth, for if he let matters run uncontrolled their momentum would become unmanageable.

It was the simple matter of choosing failure with her or success without her, and he had at last reached his decision. It remained only to tell her so.

It had pleased John Spurrier to find a house upon an isolated site from which he could work un.o.bserved, while he maintained his careful semblance of idleness. His nearest neighbor was a mile away as the crow flew, and d.y.k.e Cappeze almost two miles. Even the deep-rutted highroad, itself, lay beyond a gorge which native parlance called a "master shut-in."

Now that remoteness pleased his enemies as well. Former efforts toward his undoing had been balked by accidents. One must be made that could have no chance to fail and an isolated setting made for success.

Matters that required deft handling could be conducted by daylight instead of under a tricky moon. It was a good spot for a "rat-killing"

and Spurrier was to be the rat.

It was well before sunset on a Thursday afternoon that rifle-armed men, holding to the concealment of the "laurel h.e.l.ls," began approaching the high place above and behind Spurrier's house. They came from varying directions and one by one. No one had seen any gathering, for the plans had been made elsewhere and the details of liaison perfected in advance. Now they trickled noiselessly into their designated posts and slowly drew inward toward the common center of the house itself.

Spurrier who rode in at mid-afternoon from some neighborhood mission commented with pleasure upon the cheery "Bob Whites" of the quail whistling back in the timber.

They were Glory's birds, and this winter he would know better than to shoot them!

But they were not Glory's birds. They were not birds at all, and those pipings came from human throats, establis.h.i.+ng touch as the murder squad advanced upon him to kill him.

The man opened a package which had come by mail and drew from its wrappings the portrait of a girl in evening dress with a rope of pearls at her throat. Its silver frame was a counterpart of the one which had stood on Martin Harrison's desk that night when Spurrier had lifted it and Vivien's father had so meaningly said: "Make good in this and _all_ your ambitions can be fulfilled."

Now Spurrier set the framed picture on the table at the center of the room and it seemed to look out from that point of vantage with the amused indulgence of well-bred condescension upon the Spartan simplicity of his house--the rough table and hickory-withed chairs, the cot spread with its gray army blanket.

The man gave back to the pictured glance as little fire of eagerness as was given out from it.

Just now Vivien seemed to him the deity and personification of a creed that was growing hateful, yet one to which he stood still bound. He was like the priest whose vows are irrevocable but whose faith in his dogma has died, and to himself he murmured ironically, "'The idols are broke in the temple of Baal'--and yet I've got to go on bending the knee to the debris!"

But when he turned on his heel and looked through the door his face brightened, for there, coming over the short-cut between Aunt Erie Toppit's and her own home, was Glory, carrying a basket over which was tied a bit of jute sacking.

She came on lightly and halted outside his threshold.

"I'm not comin' visitin' you, Mr. John Spurrier," she announced gravely despite the twinkle in her eyes. "I'm bent on a more seemly matter, but I'm crossin' your property an' I hope you'll forgive the trespa.s.s."

"Since it's you," he acceded in the same mock seriousness, "I'll grant you the right of way. You paid the toll when you let me have a glimpse of you."

"And this is your house," she went on musingly. "And I've never seen inside its door. It seems strange, somehow, doesn't it?"

Spurrier laughed. "Now that you're here," he suggested, "you might as well hold an inspection. It's daylight and we can dispense with a chaperon for ten minutes."

She nodded and laughed too. "I guess the granny-folk would go tongue wagging if they found it out. Anyhow, I'm going to peek in for just a minute."

She stepped lightly up to the threshold and looked inside, and the slanting shaft from the window fell full on the new photograph of Vivien Martin, so that it stood out in the dim interior emphasized by the flash of its silver frame.

Glory went over and studied the face with a somewhat cryptic expression, but she made no comment and at the door she announced:

"I'll be goin' on. You can have three guesses what I've got in this basket."

But Spurrier, catching sight of a bronze tail-quill glinting between the bars of the container, spoke with prompt certainty.

"One guess will be enough. It's one of those carrier pigeons that Uncle Jimmy Litchfield gave you."

"You peeped before you guessed," she accused. "I'm going to leave it with Aunt Erie and let her take it to Carnettsville with her to-morrow and set it free."

"Compare your watches," advised the man, "and get her to note the time when she opens the basket. Then you can time the flight."

Glory shook her head and laughed. "I don't own any watch," she reminded him. "And even if I did I mis...o...b.. if Aunt Erie would have anything to compare it with--unless she carried her alarm clock along with her."

"Wait a minute," admonished the man, as he loosened the strap of his wrist watch, "I've two as it happens--and a clock besides. You keep this one and give Aunt Erie my other. I'll get it for you and set it so that they'll be together to the second."

He wheeled then and went into the room at the back and for a few minutes, bachelor-like he rummaged and searched for the time-piece upon which he had supposed he could lay his fingers in the dark.

Yet Spurrier's thought was not wholly and singly upon the adventure of timing the flight of a carrier pigeon. In it there lurked a sense of half-guilty uneasiness, which would have been lighter had Glory asked some question when she gazed on the picture which sat in a seeming place of honor at the center of his room. Her silence on the subject had seemed casual and unimportant, yet his intuition told him that had it been genuinely so, she would have demanded with child-like interest to be told who the woman might be with the high tilted chin and the rope of pearls on her throat. The taciturnity had sprung, he fancied, less from indifference than from a fear of questioning, and when he came quietly to the door, he stood there for a moment, then drew back where he would not be so plainly visible.

For Glory had returned to the table and stood with her eyes riveted on the framed portrait. Unconscious of being observed her face was no longer guarded of betrayal, and in the swift expressiveness of her delicate features the man read a gamut and vortex of emotion as eloquent as words. The jealousy which her pride sought to veto, the doubt which her faith strove to deny, the realization of her own self-confessed inferiority in parallel with this woman's aristocratic poise and cynical smile, flitted in succession across the face of the mountain girl and declared themselves in her eyes.

For an instant the small hands clenched and the lips stirred and the pupils blazed with hot fires, so that the man could almost read the words that she shaped without sound: "He's mine--he ain't your'n--an'

I ain't goin' ter give him up ter ye!"