The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 33

That man was Senator Chew who had sat in council with him and advised him; his right hand in action and his fox-brain in planning, yet now, with every moment invaluable he was burning up time!

He was a pygmy among small men, and as he drooled on he seemed to urge no pertinent objection. Yet before he had been five minutes on his feet his intent was clear and his success a.s.sured.

Out of the hands of their recognized lieutenants A. O. and G. had taken the matter of serving them. Into the hands of this obscure and loutish Solon who was ostensibly pledged to their enemies, they had thrust their commission, and now with the clock creeping forward toward adjournment, he meant to talk the charter measure to death by holding the floor until the opportunity for a vote had elapsed.

Tediously and inanely he meandered along, and no one knew what he was talking about. In extravagant metaphor and florid simile he indulged himself--and the clock worked industriously, an ally not to be unduly hurried.

"Gentlemen of the Senate--" he drooled, "most of us have been raised in a land that knows little of the primitive features that make up life with us, and though it may not at first seem germane or pertinent, I want you to go with me as your guide, while I try to make you see the life of those steep counties that are affected by the measure before you; counties that lie behind the barriers and sleep the ancient sleep of the forgotten."

Men yawned while his tediousness spun itself into a tawdry flow of slow words, but the Honorable Mr. Chew talked on.

"Many the day, as a lad, have I lain by a rus.h.i.+ng brook," he declaimed, "where the water gushes with the sparkle of sunlit crystal and watched the deer come down on gingerly lifted feet to drink his fill. Now I reckon mighty few of you gentlemen have seen a deer come down to drink----"

The minute hand of the clock, in comparison with this windy deliberation seemed to be racing between the dial characters.

"In G.o.d's name," exclaimed Spurrier, "isn't there any way to shut that fool up? He's ruining us. Get some of our leaders up here, Wharton.

We've got to stop him."

"How?" demanded Wharton with a fallen jaw.

"I don't give a d.a.m.n how! Kill him--buy him. Anything!"

"It's too late," responded Wharton grimly. "He's already bought. We've walked into their trap. We might as well go home."

Spurrier sent for his whip, but he had come to the end of his resourcefulness and shook a dejected head.

"If you want to shoot him down as he stands there," said the gentleman testily, "I dare say it would stop him short. I know no other way. He is having resort to the senatorial privilege of filibuster. We have let them slip up on us. A. O. and G. has outbid you, that's all."

"But how in G.o.d's name did they get wise?"

The other laughed grimly. "Wise?" he snorted. "My guess is that they've been wise all the time and that hayseed Iscariot has been playing us along for suckers."

Held by a deadly fascination, Spurrier sank back into his seat. The clock over the speaker's desk traveled once, almost twice around the dial, and yet that nasal voice wandered on in an endless stream of grotesque bombast--talking the charter to a slow death by strangulation.

Now, reflected Spurrier bitterly, his connection with the enterprise must seem to any eye that viewed it that only of Harrison's jackal and lobbyist, who had signally failed in his attempt to raid A. O. and G.

To the mountain folk themselves, if the facts ever percolated into the hills, his seeming would be far from heroic and with nothing tangible accomplished, it would do no good to tell them that he had made his fight with their interests at heart. Such a claim would only stamp him in the face of contrary evidence as taking a coward's refuge in lies.

Then when it seemed to him that he could no longer restrain himself, Spurrier heard the gavel fall. It was a light sound, but it crashed on his brain with thunders of destruction.

"Gentlemen," declared the presiding officer, "The Senate stands adjourned, _sine die_."

Had John Spurrier gone to see the "witch woman" when Mosebury advised it, his course from that point on would have brought him to a different ending.

In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it with consecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shot through with disconnected sc.r.a.ps of recollection. When events began to marshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotel room were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he was sitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Back of that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.

At last he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and that picture of disheveled wildness startled him and brought him back to realization.

Then self-contempt swept in on him. He had been called a man of iron nerve; a plunger who never turned a hair under reversals of fortune--and now he stood looking through the gla.s.s at a broken gambler with frenzied eyes. It was such a face as one might see in the circle before the Casino at Monte Carlo--the place of suicides.

The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked last night with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To be outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically, they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns--one rustic and the other urban.

He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of rich prospects, but in the face of defeat a man cannot change his colors.

Had he been able to undertake this fight as his own man and choose his own methods--changing them as he grew in stature--there might have been a man's zest in the game.

Now, less than ever, could he speak open truth to these simple friends who had trusted him. Now he must fight out a damaged campaign to the end along the lines to which he stood committed, and until the end there was nothing to say.

Perhaps if he could avert total ruin, he might yet have opportunity to reclaim the confidence of these Esaus who had traded for a mess of pottage. Certainly they had nothing to hope for from the myrmidons of Trabue.

John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. He compelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of a smile.

Not only had every resource he could muster gone into the sc.r.a.pped enterprise, leaving him worse than bankrupt, but through him Martin Harrison had been led into the sinking of a fortune.

Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the money loss, than the thought of the triumphant smile on Trabue's thin lips, but it was quite in the cards that, with his contempt for failure, he would wash his hands of Spurrier.

That, of course, spelled ruin. The exhibition skater had gone through the thin ice.

Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. He had seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debts he could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent on success. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employee shattered beyond hope of recovery.

But when Spurrier went down to the hotel dining room at breakfast time, a cold bath and a superhuman exertion of will power had transformed him. His bearing was a nice blending of the debonair and the dignified.

To no eye of observation was there any trace of collapse or reversal.

He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.

At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.

Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a scene of recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than one occasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened into truculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swept tentatively toward his hip.

But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it was no part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim, by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of the politician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled, and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only by the man who knew its cause.

Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he had expected to say, yet in it went no whine of despair:

Have suffered a temporary reversal.

Those were the words that the capitalist read when the message, after being decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.

Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thought truculently of that nearby office in which Trabue was also receiving telegraphic information, and he writhed in the wormwood of chagrin.

The curtness of his response scorched the wires:

Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.

So John Spurrier packed his bag and caught the first train for the mountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this final ordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could brace himself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.

As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and something about his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in all the world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veins rose an intoxicating tumult like that of wine.

Back of that emotional wave though lurked a misery of self-reproach.

Glory had made the magic of his brief happiness, but there was a background, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. He had learned to know these people and to revise his first, false views of them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak and hickory.