CHAPTER VI
Except in that narrow circle of American life which follows the doingsand interests of the army and navy, the world had forgotten, in theseveral years since its happening, the court-martial and disgrace ofJohn Spurrier--but Spurrier himself had not been able to forget.
His name had become forcefully identified with other things and, inthe employ of Snowdon's company, he had been into those parts of theworld which call to a man of energy and constructive ability of majorcalibre. But the joy of seeing mine fields open to the rush wherethere had been only desert before: of seeing chasms bridged intoroadways had not been enough to banish the brooding which sprung fromthe old stigma. In remote places he had encountered occasional armymen to remind him that he was no longer one of them and, though he wasoften doing worthier things than they, they were bound by regulationswhich branded him.
So Spurrier had hardened, not into outward crustiness of admittedchagrin, but with an inner congealing of spirit which made him look onlife as a somewhat merciless fight and what he could wrest from lifeas the booty of conquest.
One day, in Snowdon's office after a more than usually difficulttask had reached accomplishment, the chief candidly proclaimedjustification for his first estimate of his aide, and Spurriersmiled.
"It's generous of you to speak so, sir," he said slowly, "and I'm gladto leave you with that impression--because with many regrets I _am_leaving you."
The older man raised his brows in surprise.
"I had hoped our association would be permanent," he responded. "Isuppose, though, you have an opening to a broader horizon. If so itcomes as recognition well earned."
"It's an offer from Martin Harrison, sir," came the reply in slowlyweighed words. "There are objections, of course, but the man who gainsHarrison's confidence stands in the temple of big money."
"Yes. Of course Harrison's name needs no amplification." The man whohad opened a door for Spurrier in what had seemed a blank wall, satfor a moment silent then broke out with more than his customaryemphasis of expression. "Objection from me may seem self-interestedbecause I am losing a valuable assistant. But--damn it all, Harrisonis a pirate!"
Spurrier's tanned cheeks flushed a shade darker but he nodded hishead. His fine eyes took on that glint of hardness which, in formertimes, had never marred their engaging candor.
"I'd like to have you understand me, sir. I owe you that much and agreat deal more. I know that Harrison and his ilk of big moneyoperators are none too scrupulous--but they have power and opportunityand those are things I must gain."
"I had supposed," suggested Snowdon deliberately, "that you wanted twothings above all else. First to establish your innocence to theworld, and secondly, even if you failed in that, to make your name sosubstantially respected that you could bear--the other."
"Until recently I had no other thought." The young man rose and stoodwith his fine body erect and as full of disciplined strength as thatof a Praxiteles athlete. Then he took several restless turns acrossthe floor and halted tensely before his benefactor.
"I have let no grass grow under my feet. You know how I have rundown every conceivable clue and how I stand as uncleared as the daythe verdict was brought at Manila. I've begun to despair ofvindication.... I am not by nature a beast of prey.... I preferfair play and the courtesies of sportsmanlike conflict."
He paused, then went forward again in a hardening voice: "But in thisland of ours there are two aristocracies and only two--and I want tobe an aristocrat of sorts."
"I didn't realize we had even so much variety as that," observedSnowdon and the younger man continued.
"The real aristocracy is that of gentle blood and ideals. Our littlearmy is its true nucleus and there a man doesn't have to be rich. Iwas born to that and reared to it as to a deep religion--but I've beencast out, unfrocked, cashiered. I can't go back. One class is stillopen to me; the brazen, arrogant circles of wealth into which adouble-fisted achiever can bruise his way. I don't love them. I don'trevere them, but they offer power and I mean to take my place on theirtawdry eminence. It's all that's left."
"I'm not preaching humility," persisted Snowdon quietly. "I startedyou along the paths of financial combat and I see no fault in yourcontinuing, but may I be candid to the point of bluntness?"
He paused for permission and Spurrier prompted: "Yes, please go on."
"Then," finished Snowdon, "since you've been with me I've watched yougrow--and you _have_ grown. But I've also seen a fine chivalric sensegradually blunting; a generous predisposition hardening out offlexibility into something more implacable, less gracious. It's apity--and Martin Harrison won't soften you."
For a while Spurrier stood meditatively silent, then he smiled andonce more nodded his head.
"There isn't a thing you've said that isn't true, Mr. Snowdon,and you're the one man who could say it without any touch ofoffensiveness. I've counted the costs. God knows if I could go backto the army to-morrow with a shriven record, I'd rather have mylieutenant's pay than all the success that could ever come frommoneyed buccaneers! But I can't do that. I can't think of myselfas a fighting man under my own flag whose largest pay is hiscontentment and his honor. Very well, I have accepted Hobson'schoice. I will join that group which fights with power, for power;the group that's strong enough to defy the approval they can'tsuccessfully court. I _have_ hardened but I've needed to. I hope Ishan't become so flagrant, however, that you'll have to regretsponsoring me."
Snowdon laughed.
"I'm not afraid of that," he made hasty assurance. "And my friendliestwishes go with you."
Since that day John Spurrier had come to a place of confidence in thecounsels over which Harrison presided with despotic authority.
The man in the street, deriving his information from news print, wouldhave accorded Martin Harrison a place on the steering committee of thecountry's wealth and affairs, and in such a classification he wouldhave been both right and wrong.
There were exclusive coteries of money manipulation to which Harrisonwas denied an entree. These combinations were few but mighty, anduntil he won the sesame of admission to their supreme circle hisambition must chafe, unsatisfied: his power, greater than that of manykings, must seem to himself too weak.
It must not be inferred that Harrison was embittered by the wormwoodof failure. His trophies of success were numerous and tangible enoughfor every purpose except his own contentment.
To-night he was smiling with baronial graciousness while he stoodwelcoming a group of dinner guests in his own house, and as his butlerpassed the tray of canapes and cocktail glasses the latest arrivalpresented himself.
The host nodded. "Spurrier," he said, "I think you know every onehere, don't you?"
The young man who had just come was perfectly tailored and self-confidentof bearing, and as vigorous of bodily strength as a wrestler in training.The time that had passed over him since he had left Snowdon's company forwider and more independent fields had wrought changes in him, and in sofar as the observer could estimate values from the externals of life,every development had been upward toward improvement. Yet, between theman's impressive surface and his soul lay an acquired coat of cynicism anda shell of cultivated selfishness.
John Spurrier, who had renounced the gaming table, was morepassionately and coldly than ever the plunger, dedicated to the singlereligion of ambition. He had failed to remove the blot of thecourt-martial from his name, and, denied the soldier's ethical place,he had become a sort of moss-trooper of finance.
Backed only by his personal qualifications, he had won his way into acircle of active wealth, and though he seemed no more a stranger therethan a duckling in a pool, he himself knew that another simile wouldmore truly describe his status.
He was like an exhibition skater whose eye-filling feats arewatched with admiration and bated breath. His evolutions and dizzypirouettings were performed with an adroit ease and grace, but hecould feel the swaying of the thin ice under him and could neverforget that only the swift
smoothness of his flight stood betweenhimself and disaster.
He must live on a lavish scale or lose step with the fast-movingprocession. He must maintain appearances in keeping with hisassociations--or drop downscale to meaner opportunities and paltrierprizes. The wealth which would establish him firmly seemed always justa shade farther away than the reach of his outstretched grasp.
"We were just talking about Trabue, Spurrier," his host enlightenedhim as he looked across the rim of his lifted glass, with eyeshardening at the mention of that name.
Spurrier did not ask what had been said about Trabue, but he guessedthat it savored of anathema. For Trabue, whose name rarely appeared inthe public announcements of American Oil and Gas, was none the lessthe white-hot power and genius of that organization--its unheraldedchief of staff. Just as A. O. and G. dominated the world of finance,so he dominated A. O. and G.
Harrison laughed. "I'm not a vindictive man," he declared in humorousself-defense, "but I want his scalp as Salome wanted the head of Johnthe Baptist."
The newly arrived guest smiled quietly.
"That's a large order, Mr. Harrison," he suggested, "and yet it's inline with a matter I want to take up with you. My conspiracy won'texactly separate O. H. Trabue from his scalp lock, but it may pullsome pet feathers out of his war bonnet. I'm leaving to-morrow on amission of reconnaissance--and when I come back----"
The eyes of the elder and younger engaged with a quiet interchange ofunderstanding, and Spurrier knew that into Martin's mind, as crowdedwith activities as a busy harbor, an idea had fallen which would growinto interest.
When dinner was announced, the adventurer de luxe--for it was so thathe recognized himself in the confessional of his own mind--took in thedaughter of his host, and this mark of distinction did not escape thenotice of several men.
Spurrier himself was gravely listening to some low-voiced aside fromthe girl who nibbled at an olive, and who merited his attention.
She was tall and undeniably handsome, and if her mentality sparkledwith a cool and brilliant light rather than a warm and appealing glow,that was because she had inherited the pattern of her father's mind.
If, notwithstanding her wealth and position, she was still unmarriedthree seasons after her coming-out, it was her own affair andpossibly his good fortune. For when the Jack Spurrier of these dayscontemplated marriage at all, he thought of it as an aid to his careerrather than a sentimental adventure.
"I'm leaving in the morning," he was saying in a low voice, "for theKentucky Cumberlands, where I'm told life hasn't changed much sincethe pioneers crossed over their divide. It's the Land of Do-Without."
"The Land of Do-Without?" she repeated after him. "It's an expressivephrase, Jack. Is it your own or should there be quotation marks?"
Spurrier laughed as he admitted: "I claim no credit; I merely quote,but the land down there in the steeps is one, from all I hear, to stirthe imagination into terms more or less poetic."
He leaned forward a little and his engaging face mirrored his owninterest so that the girl found herself murmuring: "Tell me somethingabout it, then."
"It is," he assured her, "a stretch of unaltered mediaevalism entirelysurrounded by modernity--yet holding aloof. Though the country hasspread to the Pacific and it lies within three hundred miles ofAtlantic tidewater, it is still our one frontier where pioneers liveunder the conditions that obtained in the days of the Indian."
"That seems difficult to grasp," she demurred, and he nodded hishead, abstractedly sketching lines on the damask cloth with his oysterfork.
"When the nation was born," he enlightened, "and the questing spiritof the overland voyagers asserted itself, the bulk of its human tideflowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through Cumberland Gap laytheir one discovered gate in the wall that nature had built to the skyacross their path. It was a wall more ancient than that of the Alpsand between the ridges many of them were stranded."
"How?" she demanded, arrested by the vibrant interest of his ownvoice, and he continued with a shrug of the shoulder.
"Many reasons. A pack mule fallen lame--a broken wagon-wheel; smallthings were enough in such times of hardship to make a family settlewhere it found itself balked. The more fortunate won through to 'takethe west with the axe and hold it with the rifle.' Then came railroadsand steamboats, going other ways, and the ridges were swallowed againby the wilderness. The stranded brethren remained stranded and theydid not alter or progress. They remained self-willed, fiercelyindependent and dedicated to the creed 'Leave us alone.' Their lifeto-day is the life of two centuries ago."
The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require nopenciling.
"That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought youthe most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? Ididn't know you ever ran on cold trails." She spoke with a delicatelyshaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own viewpoint, yethe knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldlyattainment.
He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon,the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind hadharked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now heonly smiled with diplomatic suavity.
"Pearls," he said, "don't feed oysters into robustness. They make'em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in thesehills, where I'm going, might starve for centuries over buriedtreasure--which some one else might find."
The girl nodded.
"In the stories," she answered, though she did not seem disturbed atthe thought, "the stranger in the Cumberlands always arouses the ireof some whiskered moonshiner and falls in a creek bed pierced by ashot from the laurel."
Spurrier grinned.
"Or he falls in love with a barefoot Diana and teaches her to adorehim in return."
Miss Harrison made a satirical little grimace. "At least teach her toeat with a fork, too, Jack," she begged him. "It will contribute toyour fastidious comfort when you come back here to sell your pearls atTiffany's or in Maiden Lane, or wherever it is that one wholesales histreasure-trove."
* * * * *
If John Spurrier had presented the picture of a man to the manner bornas he sat with Martin Harrison's daughter at Martin Harrison's table,he fitted into the ensemble, too, a week later, as he crossed thehard-tramped dirt of the street from the railway station at Waterfalland entered the shabby tavern over the way--for the opportunity houndmust be adaptable.
Here he would leave the end of the rails and travel by mule into awilder country, for on the geological survey maps that he carried withhim he had made tracings of underground currents which it had not beeneasy to procure.
These red-inkings were exact miniatures of a huge wall chart in theheadquarters of American Oil and Gas, and to others than a trusted fewthey were not readily accessible. How Spurrier had achieved hispurpose is a separate story and one over which he smiled inwardly,though it may have involved features that were not nicely ethical.
The tavern had been built in the days when Waterfall had attracted menanswering the challenge of oil discovery. Now it had fallen wretchedlyinto decay, and over it brooded the depression of hopes and dreamslong dead. Gladly Spurrier had left that town behind him.
Now, on a crisp afternoon, when the hill slopes were all garbed in therugged splendor of the autumn's high color, he was tramping with ashotgun on his elbow and a borrowed dog at his heels. He had crossedHemlock Mountain and struck into the hinterland at its back.
Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but hehad discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning atHell's Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for ahundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet intothe sky. Along this entire length it offered only a few passes overwhich a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.
He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-chinked log-cabin,where he had shared the single room with six human bei
ngs and twodogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which wassegregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding withscraps simplified the problem of stock raising.
His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retiredlawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he hadstopped along the railroad.
Cappeze was a "queer fellow," a recluse who had quit the villages anddrawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neitherwin nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and,having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke ofCappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, andSpurrier meant to know him.
So he pretended to hunt quail--in a country where a covey rose andscattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow.One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficientlycareless of the things which were really the core and center of hisinterest. And now Cappeze's place ought to be near by.
Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble,and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle withdistended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking awayinto the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.
Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: "He's made a standon a rabbit. That dog's a liar and the truth is not in him!"
But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesquepose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save forthe black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.
Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder ofwhirring wings with which quail break cover.
The ground seemed to burst with a tiny drumming eruption of up-surgingfeathery shapes, and Spurrier's gun spoke rapidly from both barrels.Save for the two he had downed, the covey crossed a little rise beyonda thicket of blackberry brier where he marked them by the tips of afew gnarled trees, and the man nodded his head in satisfaction as thedog he had libeled neatly retrieved his dead birds and cast off againtoward the hummock's ridge.
Spurrier, following more slowly, lost sight of his setter and, beforehe had caught up, he heard a whimpering of fright and pain. Puzzled,he hastened forward until from a slight elevation, which commanded aburial ground, choked with a tangle of brambles and twisted foxgrapes, he found himself looking on a picture for which he wasentirely unprepared.
His dog was crouching and crawling in supplication, while above him,with eyes that snapped lightning jets of fury, stood a slender girlwith a hickory switch tightly clenched in a small but merciless hand.
As the gunner came into sight she stood her ground, a little startledbut obdurately determined, and her expression appeared to transferher anger from the animal she had whipped to the master, until healmost wondered whether she might not likewise use the hickory uponhim.
He tried not to let the vivid and unexpected beauty of the apparitioncloud his just indignation, and his voice was stern with offendeddignity as he demanded:
"Would you mind telling me why you're mistreating my dog? He's thegentlest beast I ever knew."
The girl was straight and slim and as colorful as the landscape whichthe autumn had painted with crimson and violet, but in her eyes flameda war fire.
"What's that a-bulgin' out yore coat pocket, thar?" she demandedbreathlessly. "You an' yore dog air both murderers! Ye've beenshootin' into my gang of pet pa'tridges."
"Pet--partridges?" He repeated the words in a mystified manner, asunder the compulsion of her gaze he drew out the incriminating bodiesof the lifeless victims.
The girl snatched the dead birds from him and laid their soft breastsagainst her cheek, crooning sorrowfully over them.
"They trusted me ter hold 'em safe," she declared in a grief-strickentone. "I'd kept all the gunners from harmin' 'em--an' now they've donebeen betrayed--an' murdered."
"I'm sorry," declared Spurrier humbly. "I didn't know they were pets.They behaved very much like wild birds."
The dog rose from his cowering position and came over to shelterhimself behind Spurrier, who just then heard the underbrush stirat his back and wheeled to find himself facing an elderly man with aruggedly chiseled face and a mane of gray hair. It was a face thatone could not see without feeling a spirit force behind it, and whenthe man spoke his sonorous voice, too, carried a quality ofimpressiveness.
"He didn't have no way of knowin', Glory," he said placatingly to thegirl. "Bob Whites are mostly wild, you know." Then turning back to theman again he courteously explained: "She fed this gang through lastwinter when the snows were heavy. They'd come up to the door yard an'peck 'round with the chickens. She's gifted with the knack of gentlin'wild things." He paused, then added with a grim touch of irony. "It'sa lesson that it would have profited me to learn--but I never couldmaster it. You're a furriner hereabouts, ain't you?"
"My name is John Spurrier," said the stranger. "I was looking for DykeCappeze."
"I'm Dyke Cappeze," said the elderly man, "an' this is my daughter,Glory. Come inside. Yore welcome needs some mendin', I reckon."