The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 36

"A man whom you selected," Harrison caught him up. "You understood, in advance, the chances of your game. It was agreed upon your own insistence that your hand should be absolutely free--and freedom of method carries exclusiveness of responsibility. Traitors exist. They don't furnish excuses."

"Nor am I making them. I am merely stating facts which you seem inclined to confuse. I grant the failure but I also claim the partial success."

Harrison seated himself, and as the interview stretched Spurrier's nerves stretched with it under the placid surface of his plunger's camouflage. He had, as yet, no way of guessing how the verdict would go, and now the capitalist's face was hardened in discouragement. It was a face of merciless inflexibility. The sentence had been prepared in the judge's mind. There remained only its enunciation.

"Nothing is to be gained by mincing my words, Spurrier," declared Spurrier's chief. "We know precisely where you stand."

Harrison extended his hand with its fingers spread and closed it slowly into a clenched fist. "I hold you--there! I can crush you to a pulp of absolute ruin. You know that. The only question is whether I want, or not, to do it."

"And whether, or not, you can afford to do it," amended the other with an audacity that he by no means felt. "You must decide whether you can afford to accept tamely and as a final defeat, a mere reversal, which I--and no one else--can turn into eventual victory."

"I have duly considered that. I had implicit confidence in your abilities. You have struck at my personal feeling for you by a silence that was not frank. You have allied yourself with the mountain people by marriage, and we stand on opposite sides of the line of interest.

You have all the while been watched by our enemies, and I regard you as a defeated man. If I choose to cast you aside, you go to the sc.r.a.p heap. You will never recover."

That was an a.s.sertion which there was neither health nor wisdom in contradicting and Spurrier waited. His last card was played.

"And I am going to cast you aside--bankrupt you--ruin you!" blazed out Harrison, "unless you absolutely meet my requirements during a period of probation. That period will engage you in a very different matter.

For the present you are through with the Kentucky mountains. The new task will be a difficult one, and it should put you on your mettle. It is one that can't be accomplished at all unless you can do it. You have that one chance to retrieve yourself. Take it or leave it."

"What are your terms?"

"You will sail to-morrow for Liverpool. I will give you explicit instructions to-night. Go prepared for an extended stay abroad."

For the first time Spurrier's face paled and insurrection flared in his pupils.

"Sail for Europe to-morrow!" he exclaimed vehemently. "I'll see you d.a.m.ned first! Doesn't it occur to you that a man has his human side? I have a wife and a home and when I am ordered to leave them for an indefinite time I'm ent.i.tled to a breathing s.p.a.ce in which to set my own affairs in shape. I am willing enough to undertake your bidding--but not to-morrow."

Spurrier paused at the end of his outbreak and stood looking down at the seated figure, which to all intents and purposes might have been the G.o.d that held, for him, life and death in his hand.

And as he looked Spurrier thought he had never seen such glacial coldness and merciless indifference in any human face. He had known this man in the thundering of pa.s.sion before which the walls about him seemed to tremble, but this manifestation of adamant implacability was new, and he realized that he had invited destruction in defying it.

"As you please," replied Harrison crisply, "but it's to-morrow or not at all. I've already outlined the alternative and since you refuse, our business seems concluded. Next time you feel disposed to talk or think of what you're ent.i.tled to, remember that my view is different.

All your claims stand forfeit in my judgment. You are ent.i.tled to just what I choose to offer--and no more."

The chief glanced toward the door with a glance of dismissal, and the door became to Spurrier the emblem of finality. Yet he did not at once move toward it.

"I appreciate the need of prompt obedience, where there is an urge of haste," he persisted, "but if a few days wouldn't imperil results, I want those days to make a flying trip to Kentucky and to my wife."

The face of the seated man remained obdurately set but his eyes blazed again with a note of personal anger.

"At a time when I was reasonably interested, you chose to leave me unenlightened about your domestic arrangements. Now I can claim no concern in them. Most wives, however, permit their husbands such lat.i.tude of movement as business requires. If yours does not it is your own misfortune. I think that's all."

Spurrier knew that the jaws of the trap were closing on him. He had been too hasty in his outburst and he turned toward the door, but as his hand fell on the bronze k.n.o.b Harrison spoke again.

"Think it over, Spurrier. I can--and will ruin you--unless you yield.

It is no time for maudlin sentiment, but until five-thirty this afternoon, I shall not consider your answer final. Up to that hour you may reconsider it, if you wish."

"I will notify you at five," responded the lieutenant as he let himself out and closed the door behind him.

That day the opportunity hound spent in an agony of conflicting emotions. That the other held a bolt of destruction and was in the mood to launch it he did not pretend to doubt. If it were launched even the land upon which his cottage stood would no longer be his own.

He must either return to Glory empty-handed and bankrupt, or strain with a new tax, the confidence he had asked of her, with the pledge that he would return soon and for good.

But if, even at the cost of humbled pride and Glory's hurt, he maintained his business relations, the path to eventual success remained open.

As long as the cards were being shuffled chance beckoned and at five o'clock Spurrier went into a cigar-store booth and called a downtown telephone number.

"You hold the whip hand, sir," he announced curtly when a secretary had put Harrison on the wire. "When do I report for final instructions?"

"Come to my house this evening," ordered the master.

Most of the hours of that evening, except the two in Harrison's study, Spurrier spent in writing to Glory, tearing up letter after letter while the nervous moisture bedewed his brow. It was so impossible to give her any true or comprehensive explanation of the pressing weight of compulsion. His messages must have the limp of unreason. He was crossing the ocean without her and she would read into it a sort of abandonment that would hurt and wound her. He had taxed everything else in life, and now he was overtaxing her loyalty.

Yet he believed that if in his depleted treasury of life there was one thing left upon which he could draw prodigally and with faith, it was that love; a love that would stand staunch though he were forced to hurt it once again.

So Spurrier sailed and, having arrived on European soil, took up the work that threw him into relations with men of large caliber in Capel Court and Threadneedle Street. His mission carried him to the continent as well; from Paris to Brussels and from Brussels to Hamburg and Berlin, where the quaint customs of the Kentucky c.u.mberlands seemed as remote as the life of Mars--remote but, to Spurrier, as alluring as the thought of salvation to a recluse who has foresworn the things of earth.

In terms of dead reckoning, Berlin is as far from Hemlock Mountain as Hemlock Mountain is from Berlin, but in terms of human relations Glory felt the distance as infinitely greater than did her husband. To him the Atlantic was only an ocean three thousand miles wide; often crossed and discounted by familiarity. To her it was a measureless waste separating all she knew from another world. To him continental dimensions were reckoned in hours of commonplace railway journeying, but to her the "measured mile" was both lengthwise and perpendicular, and when she pa.s.sed old friends she fancied that she detected in their glances either pity for her desertion or the smirk of "I-told-you-so"

malevolence.

It even crept to her ears that "some folks" spoke of her as "the widder Spurrier" and that Ta.s.sie Plumford had chuckled, "I reckon he's done gone off an' left her fer good an' all this time. Folks says he's fled away cl'ar acrost ther ocean-sea."

Glory told herself that she had promised faith and that she was in no danger of faltering, but as the weeks lengthened into months and the months followed each other, her waiting became bitter.

In Berlin John Spurrier pa.s.sed as a British subject, bearing British pa.s.sports. That had been part of the careful plan to prevent discovery of what American interests he represented and it had proven effective.

He had almost accomplished the difficult task of self-redemption, set him by the man whose confidence he had strained.

Then came the bolt out of heaven. The inconceivable suddenness of the war cloud belched and broke, but he remained confident that he would have a chance to finish up before the paralysis cramped bourse and exchange.

England would not come in, and he, the seeming British subject, would have safe conduct out of Germany.

Now he must get back. This would mean the soaring of oil prices, and along new lines the battle must be pitched back there at home, before it was too late.

So Spurrier finished his packing. He was going out onto the streets to watch the upflame of the war spirit and to make railway reservations.

There was a knock at the door and the man opened it. Stiffly erect, stood a squad of military police and stiffly their lieutenant saluted.

"You are Herr John Spurrier?" he inquired.

The man nodded.

"It is, perhaps, in the nature of a formality, which you will be able to arrange," said the officer. "But I am directed to place you under arrest. England is in the war. You are said to be a former soldier."

CHAPTER XX