The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 31

Those men whose duty it was to watch the corporation's interest and to hold in line the needed lawmakers, appeared to regard legislative protection as a thing bought and paid for and safe from trespa.s.s.

And Spurrier, knowing better, was secretly triumphant, but without Glory he was far from happy.

Had he known what influences were at work with cancerlike corrosions upon her loyalty, what food was nouris.h.i.+ng her anxiety, he would have stolen the time to go to her. Hers was an anxiety which she did not acknowledge. Even to herself she denied its existence and against any outside suggestion of inner hurt pride would have risen in valiant resentment.

But in her heart it talked on in whispers that she could not hush. At night she would waken suddenly, wide-eyed with apprehension and seek to rea.s.sure herself by the emphasis of her avowals: "He's _not_ ashamed of me. He's not leaving me because of that! He's a big man with big business, and some day he'll take me with him, everywhere!"

When old Cappeze, a man not given to unreflecting or careless speech, flatly questioned: "Glory--why doesn't John ever take you with him?"

she flinched and fell into exculpations that limped.

The old man was quick to note the pained rawness of the nerve he had touched, and he began talking of something else, but when he was alone once more his old eyes took on that fanatic absorption that came of his deep love for his daughter, and he shook his head dubiously over her future.

One day a neighborhood woman came by Glory's house and found her standing at the door. Ta.s.sie Plumford neither claimed nor was credited with powers of magic, but she, too, might have been called a "witch woman." In curdled disposition and shrewishness of tongue, she merited the t.i.tle.

"Waal, waal, Glory Cappeze," she drawled in her rasping, nasal voice.

"Yore man hes done built ye a right monstrous fine house, hyar, ain't he?"

"Come in and see it, Mrs. Plumford," invited the young wife. "But my name's Glory Spurrier now--not Cappeze."

In the gesture with which the woman drew her shawl tighter about her lean shoulders, she contrived to convey the affront of suspicion and disbelief.

"No, I reckon I ain't got ther power ter tarry now," she declined. "I don't git much time fer gaddin', an' be yore name whatsoever hit may, there's them hyar-abouts es 'lows yore man lavishes everything on ye but his own self. He's away from ye most of his time, albeit I reckon he's got car fare aplenty fer two."

Glory stiffened, and without a word turned her back on her ungracious visitor. She went into the house with the tilted chin of one who disdains to answer insolent slanders, but in the tenderness of her heart the barb had nonetheless sunk deep. So people were saying that!

Over at Aunt Erie Toppitt's the shrew again halted--and there it seemed that she did have time to "tarry," and roll the morsel of gossip under tongue.

"Mebby she's ther furriner's lawful wife an' then ergin mebby she ain't nuthin' but his woman," opined Ta.s.sie Plumford. "Hit ain't none of my business nohow, but a G.o.dly woman hes call ter be heedful whar she visits at."

"A G.o.dly woman!" Aunt Erie's tone stung like a hornet attack. "What has G.o.dliness got ter do with _you_, anyhow, Ta.s.sie Plumford? The records of ther high cote over at Carnettsville hes got _yore_ record fer a witness thet swears ter perjury."

Mrs. Plumford trembled with rage but, prudently, she elected to ignore the reference to her legal status.

"Ef they was rightfully married," she retorted, "hit didn't come ter pa.s.s twell old man Cappeze diskivered her alone with him--in his house--jest ther two of 'em--an' they wouldn't nuver hev _been_ diskivered savin' an' exceptin' fer ther attack on ther furriner." In the self-satisfaction of one who has scored, she added: "I'll be farin' on now, I reckon."

"An' don't nuver come back," stormed Aunt Erie, whose occasional tantrums were as famous as her usual good humor. "Unless ye seeks ter hev ther dawgs sot on ye."

While the spiteful and forked little tongues of gossip were doing their serpent best to poison what had promised to be an Eden for Glory at home in the hills, the husband who was charged with neglecting her was miserable in town.

His work had been the breath of life to him until now, bringing the zestful delight of prevailing over stubborn difficulties, and building bridges that should carry him across to his goal of financial power.

Now he found it a necessity that exiled him from a place to which he had come half-contemptuously and to which his converted thoughts turned as the prayers of the true believer turn toward Mecca.

He who had been urban in habit and taste found nothing in the city to satisfy him. The smoke-filled air seemed to stifle him and fill him with a yearning for the clean, spirited sweep of the winds across the slopes. He knew that these physical aspects were trivial things he would have swept aside had they not stood as emblems for a longing of the heart itself--a nostalgia born of his new life and love.

But all the plans that had built one on the other toward a definite end of making an oil field of the barren hills were drawing to a focus that could not be neglected. He could no more leave these things undone than could his idol Napoleon have abandoned his headquarters before Austerlitz, and the sitting of the legislature could not be changed to suit his wishes. Neither could the lining up of forces that were to guide his legislation to its pa.s.sage be left unwatched.

So the absence that he had thought would be brief, or at worst a series of short trips away from home, was prolonging itself into a winter in Louisville and Frankfort. He found himself as warily busy as a collie herding a panicky flock, and as soon as one danger was met and averted, a new one called upon him from a new and unsuspected quarter.

Much of the deviousness of playing underground politics disgusted him, and yet he knew he would have regarded it only as an amusing game for high stakes before his change of heart. But now that it was to be a battle for the mountain men as well as for Martin Harrison and for himself, it could be better stomached.

The effort to pick out men who could be trusted in an enterprise where they had to be bought, was one which taxed both his insight into human nature and his self-esteem.

Senator Chew, himself a mountaineer, who had come from a ragged district to the state a.s.sembly and who seemed to harbor a hatred against A. O. and G. of utter malevolence, was almost as his other self, furnis.h.i.+ng him with eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear, and familiarity with all the devious, unlovely tricks of lobby processes.

But Senator Chew, a countryman, who had capitalized his s.h.i.+fty wits and hard-won education, bent his knee to the brazen G.o.ds of cupidity and ambition.

"I don't just see," he demurred petulantly to Spurrier, "why you go about this thing the way you do. You've got unlimited capital behind you and yet in going after these options you ain't hardly got hold of any more land than just enough to let your pipe line through. You could get all a man's property just as cheap per acre as part of it--and when I've sweated blood to give you your charter and you've sweated blood to grab your right-of-way, that G.o.d-forsaken land will be a Klondike."

"I hope so," smiled Spurrier, and his ally went on.

"All right, but why have nothing out of it except a pipe-line? Why not have the whole d.a.m.n business to split three ways, among Harrison's crowd, yourself--and the crowd I've got to handle?"

"You're a mountain man, Senator," the opportunity hound reminded him.

"You know that in every other section of the hills to which development has come, the native has reaped only a heart-ache and an empty belly. I am purposely taking only a part of each man's holding, so that when the oil flows there what he has left will be worth more to him than all of it was before."

"h.e.l.l," growled the politician. "The men you ought to think about making money for, are the men you need--like me, and the men who back you, like Harrison. These local fellows won't thank you, and in my opinion you're a fool, if you'll permit me to talk plain."

"Talk as plain as you like, Senator," smiled the other. "But I think I'm acting with right sound sense. Our field can be more profitably developed among friends than among enemies--even if no consideration other than the practical enters into the problem."

It was not until Christmas time that Spurrier broke away from his activities in Louisville, and then he came bearing gifts and with a heart full of eagerness. He came elated, too, at the fair promise of his prospects, and confident of victory.

So Glory hid the fears that had been growing in her heart and, because of the tidal power of personal fascination and contact, she found it an easy task. While Spurrier was with her, those fears seemed to lose their substance and to stand out as absurdities. They were delirious miasmas dissipated by the sun and daylight of companions.h.i.+p.

Spurrier kept most of his valuable papers in a safety vault in Louisville, but for purposes of reference here, he maintained a complete system of carbon copies, and these must be stored in some place where he could feel sure they were immune from any prying eye.

The entire record of his proceedings would be clear to any reader of those memoranda.

While Glory was away one day, he removed a section of the living-room wall and fas.h.i.+oned something in the nature of a secret cabinet, upon which he could rely for these purposes. Before he went away again he shared that secret with her, since in certain exigencies it might be needful that some one should be able to act on wired instructions. He showed her the bit of molding that was removable and which gave entrance to the hidden recess.

"In that strong box," he told her, "are papers of vital importance. If I haven't taken you entirely into my confidence about them all, dear, it's because they concern other people more closely than myself. All my own affairs are yours--but in the service of others, I must obey instructions and those instructions are rigid."

He took out one envelope, though, plainly marked.

"This," he said, "is a paper to be used only in case of extreme emergency. It is an order on the safety-deposit people in Louisville to open my vault to the bearer. In the event of my death, or if I should wire you from a distance, I would want you to use it."

Even that admittance into the veiled sanctum of his business life pleased Glory, and she nodded her head gravely.

She did not tell him, and he did not guess, that tongues were wagging in his absence, and that people said she was good enough only for that part of his life in which he shed his white collar and his "fine manners" and donned the rougher habiliments of the backwoods.

Even when she learned that his coming back had been only to spend the holidays with her and that he must leave again to be gone for weeks, at least, she let none of the disquiet that smouldered in her find an utterance in words.

On a fine old Blue Gra.s.s estate, which exhaled the elegance and ease of the Old South, lived Colonel Merriwell, a life-long friend of d.y.k.e Cappeze. In years long gone he had more than once sought to have Cappeze transfer his activities to a wider field. Now, timber interests called him to the mountains, and though the cold weather had set in, his daughter chose to come with him. She had heard much of the strange and r.e.t.a.r.ded life of the mountains, and because it was so different from the refinements with which she had always been surrounded, she wanted to see it.

When they arrived after traveling conditions that warranted every conception of quaintness, but violated every demand of comfort, the girl from the Bluegra.s.s found Glory a discovery.

At once she recognized that into any drawing-room this wilderness-bred girl could be safely dropped, and that even though she stood in a corner, she would soon become its center.

Helen Merriwell was fascinated by the anomaly of an inherent aristocracy in an encompa.s.sing life which was almost squalid, and a bond of sympathy sprang into instant being. The Bluegra.s.s woman knew by instinct, though through no utterance from the loyal lips, that the other was lonely, and when Colonel Merriwell announced his intention of returning home, the daughter decided to continue her visit and its companions.h.i.+p.