The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 39

"My G.o.d, if I were a younger man," broke out the father pa.s.sionately, rising from his chair and clenching the damaging papers in his talon-like fingers, "I'd learn the oil game. I'd take this information and use it against both their gangs--and I believe I could force them both to their knees."

He paused and the momentary fire died out of his eyes.

"I'm too old a dog for new tricks though," he added dejectedly, "and there's no one else to do it."

"How could it be done?" demanded Glory rousing herself from her trance. "Between them they hold all the power, don't they?"

"As far as I can make out," Cappeze explained with the interest of the legalistic mind for tackling an abstruse problem, "Spurrier had completed his arch as to one of his two purposes--all except its keystone. He had yet to gain a pa.s.sage way through Brother Hawkins'

land. With that he would have held the completed right-of-way--and it's the only one. The other gang of pirates hold the ability to get a charter but no right of way over which to use it. Now the man who could deliver Brother Hawkins' concession would have a key. He could force Spurrier's crowd to agree to almost anything, and with Spurrier's crowd he could wring a compromise from the others. Bud Hawkins is like the delegate at a convention who can break a deadlock. G.o.d knows I'd love to tackle it--but it's too late for me."

Glory had come to her feet, and stood an incarnation of combat.

"It's not too late for me," she said quietly. "Perhaps I'm too crude to go into John Spurrier's world of cultivated people but I'm shrewd enough to go into his world of business!"

"You!" exclaimed the father in astonishment, then after a moment an eager light slowly dawned in his eyes and he broke out vehemently: "By G.o.d in Heaven, girl, I believe you're the man for the job!"

"Call Brother Hawkins in," commanded Glory. "We need his help."

Before he reached the door old Cappeze turned on his heel.

"Glory," he said, "we've need to move out of this house and go back to my place. Here we're dwelling under a dishonest roof."

"I'm going to leave it," she responded quickly, "but I'm going farther away than that. I'm going to study oil and I'm going to do it in the Bluegra.s.s lowlands."

CHAPTER XXI

John Spurrier stepped from the train at Carnettsville into a life that had been revolutionized. At last he had succeeded in leaving his German exile. His own country was in the war but he, with the equipment of a soldier, bore a dishonored name, which would bar him from a commission. Here he found the development of his dreams realized, but by other hands than his own.

Above all, he must see Glory. He had cabled her and written her, so she would be expecting him. Now he gazed about streets through which teemed the new activity.

Here was the thing he had seen in his dreams when he stood on wooded hills and thought in the terms of the future. Here it stood vivid and actual before the eyes that had visioned it.

With a groan he turned into the road homeward on a hired horse. He still meant to fight, and unless the Bud Hawkins property had escaped him, he would still have to be accounted with--but great prizes had slipped away.

At the gate of his house, his heart rose into his throat. The power of his emotion almost stifled him. Never had his love for Glory flickered. Never had he thought or dreamed of anything else or any one else so dearly and so constantly as of her.

He stood at the fence with half-closed eyes for a moment, steadying himself against the surges of up-welling emotion, then, raising his eyes, he saw that the windows and the door were nailed up. The chimney stood dead and smokeless.

Panic clutched at his throat as with a physical grasp. Before him trooped a hundred a.s.sociations unaccountably dear. They were all memories of little things, mostly foolish little things that went into the sacred intimacy of his life with Glory.

Now there was no Glory there.

He rode at the best speed left in his tired horse over to old Cappeze's house, and, as he dismounted, saw the lawyer, greatly aged and broken, standing in the door.

One glance at that face confirmed all the fears with which he had been battling. It was a face as stern as those on the frieze of the prophets. In it there was no ghost of the old welcome, no hope of any relenting. This old man saw in him an enemy.

"Where is Glory?" demanded Spurrier as he hurried up to the doorstep, and the other looked accusingly back into his eyes and answered in cold and bitterly clipped syllables.

"Wherever she is, sir, it's her wish to be there alone." Suddenly the old eyes flamed and the old voice rose thin and pa.s.sionate. "If I burned in h.e.l.l for it to the end of eternity, I would give you no other word of her."

"She--she is not dead, then?"

"No--but dead to you."

"Mr. Cappeze," said Spurrier steadily, "are you sure that I may not have explanations that may change her view of me?"

"We know," said the lawyer in a voice out of which the pa.s.sion had pa.s.sed, but which had the dead quality of an opinion inflexibly solidified, "that since your marriage, you never made her the companion of any hour that was not a backwoods hour. We know that you never told us the truth about yourself or your enterprises--that you came to us as a friend, won our confidence, and sought to exploit us.

Your record is one of lies and unfaithfulness, and we have cast you out. That is her decision and with me her wish is sacred."

The returned exile stood meeting the relentless eyes of the old man who had been his first friend in these hills and for a few moments he did not trust himself to speak.

The shock of those shuttered windows and that blankly staring front at the house where he had looked for welcome; the collapse of all the dreams that had sustained him while a prisoner in an internment camp and a refugee hounded across the German border were visiting upon him a prostration that left him trembling and shaken.

Finally he commanded his voice.

"To me, too, her wish is sacred--but not until I hear it from her own lips. She alone has the right to condemn me and not even she until I have made my plea to her. Great G.o.d, man, my silence hasn't been voluntary. I've been cut off in a Hun prison-camp. I've kept life in me only because I could dream of her and because though it was easier to die, I couldn't die without seeing her and explaining."

"It was from her own lips that I took my orders," came the unmoved response. "Those orders were that through me you should learn nothing. You had the friends.h.i.+p of every man here until you abused it--now I think you'll encounter no sympathy. I told you once how the wolf-b.i.t.c.h would feel toward the man who robbed her of her young. You chose to disregard my warning--and I'll ask you to leave my house."

John Spurrier bowed his head. He had lost her! If that were her final conclusion, he could hardly seek to dissuade her. At least he could lose the final happiness out of his life--from which so much else had already been lost--as a gentleman should lose.

And he knew that however old Cappeze might feel, he would not lie. If he said that was Glory's deliberately formed decision, that statement must be accepted as true.

"I have never loved any one else," said Spurrier slowly. "I shall never love any one else. I have been faithful despite appearances. The rest of your charges are true, and I make no denial. I gambled about as fairly as most men gamble. That is all."

A stiffening pride, made flinty by the old man's hostility, shut into silence some things that Spurrier might have said. He scorned the seeming of whine that might have lain in explanations, even though the explanations should lighten the shadow of his old friend's disapproval. He offered no extenuation and breathed nothing of the changes that had been wrought in himself by the tedious alchemy of time and reflection.

He had begun under the spur of greedy ambition, but changes had been wrought in him by Glory's love.

He was still ambitious, but in a different way. He wanted to salvage something for the equitable beneficiaries. He wanted to stand, not among the predatory millionaires, but to be his own man, with a clean name and solvent.

Before he could attain that condition he must render unto Harrison the things that were Harrison's and wipe out his own tremendous liabilities--but his heart was in the hills.

John Spurrier went slowly and heavy heartedly back to the house which he had refas.h.i.+oned for his bride; the house that had become to him a shrine to all the dear, lost things of life.

The sun fell in mottled luminousness across its face of tempered gray and from the orchard where the lush gra.s.s grew knee-high came the cheery whistle of a Bob-white.

At the sound the man groaned with a wrench of his heart and throat, and his thoughts raced back to that day when the same note had come from the voices of hidden a.s.sa.s.sins and when Glory had exposed her breast to rifle-fire to send out the pigeon with its call for help.

The splendid oak that had shaded their stile had grown broader of girth and more majestic in the spread of its head-growth since he had stood here before, and in the flower beds, in which Glory had delighted, a few forlorn survivors, sprung up as volunteers from neglected roots, struggled through a choke of dusty weeds.

The man looked about the empty yard and his breath came like that of a torture victim on the rack. The desolation and ache of a life deprived of all that made it sweet struck in upon him with a blight beside which his prison loneliness had been nothing.

"If she knew the whole truth--instead of only half the truth," he groaned, "she might forgive me."