The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 37

Over the ragged lands that lay on the "nigh side" of Hemlock Mountain breathed a spirit of excitement and mighty hope. It had been two years since John Spurrier had left the field he had planned to develop, and in those years had come the transition of rebirth.

Along muddy streets the hogs still wallowed, but now they were deeply rutted by the teaming of ponderous oil gear, and one saw young men in pith helmets and pig-skin puttees; keen-faced engineers and oil prospectors drawn in by the challenge of wealth from the far trails of Mexico and the West. One heard the jargon of that single business and the new vocabulary of its devotees. "Wild-catters" following surface indications or hunches were testing and well-driving. Gushers rewarded some and "dry holes" and "dusters" disappointed others. Into the mediaeval life of hills that had stood age-long unaltered and aloof came the infusion of hot-blooded enterprise, the eager questing after quick and miraculous wealth.

In Lexington and Winchester oil exchanges carried the activity of small bourses. In newspapers a new form of advertis.e.m.e.nt proclaimed itself.

Oil was king. Oil and its by-product, gasoline, that the armies needed and that the thousands of engines on the earth and in the air so greedily devoured.

But over on the far side of the ridge men only fretted and chafed as yet. They had the oil under their feet, but for it there was no outlet. Like a land without a seaport, they looked over at neighbors growing rich while they themselves still "hurted fer needcessities."

American Oil and Gas had locked them in while it milked the other cow.

It had its needed charters for piping both fields, but a man who was either dead or somewhere across the world held the way barred in a stalemate of controlled rights of way.

Glory thought less about the wonderful things that were going forward than did others about her, because she had a broken heart. No letters came from Spurrier, and the faith that she struggled to hold high like a banner nailed to the masthead of her life, hung drooping. In the end her colors had been struck.

If John Spurrier returned in search of her now she would go into hiding from him, but it was most unlikely that he would return. He had married her on impulse and under a pressure of excitement. He had loved her pa.s.sionately--but not with a strong enough fidelity to hold him true--and now she believed he had turned back again to his old idols. She was repudiated, and she ought to hate him with the bitterness of her mountain blood, yet in her heart's core, though she would never forgive him and never return to him, she knew that she still loved him and would always love him.

She no longer feared that she would have hampered him in the society of his more finished world. She had visited Helen Merriwell and had come to know that other world for herself. She found that the gentle blood in her veins could claim its own rights and respond graciously.

Hers had been a submerged aristocracy, but it had come out of its chrysalis, bright-winged.

Then one day something happened that turned Glory's little personal world upside down and brought a readjustment of all its ideas.

Sim Colby owned a little patch of land beside his homestead place, over cross the mountain, and he was among those who became rich. He was not so rich as local repute declared him, but rich enough to set stirring the avarice of an erstwhile friend, who owned no land at all.

So ex-Private Severance came over to the deserter's house with a scheme conceived in envy and born of greed. He was bent on blackmail.

When he first arrived, the talk ran along general lines, because "Blind Joe," the fiddler, was at the house, and the real object of the visit was confidential. Blind Joe had also been an oil beneficiary, and he and Sim Colby had become partners in a fashion. During that relationship Blind Joe had told Sim some things that he told few others.

But when Joe left and the pipes were lighted Severance settled himself in a back-tilted chair and gazed reflectively at the crest of the timber line.

"You an' me's been partners for a right long spell, Bud Grant, ain't we?"

Colby started. The use of that discarded name brought back the past with its ghosts of fear. He had almost forgotten that once he had been Bud Grant, and a deserter from the army. It was all part of a bygone and walled-in long ago. Though they were quite alone he looked furtively about him and spoke in a lowered voice:

"Don't call me by thet name. Thar ain't no man but you knows erbout--what I used to be."

"Thet's what I've been studyin' erbout. n.o.body else but me."

Severance sat silent for a while after that announcement, but there was a meaning smile on his lips, and Colby paled a shade whiter.

"_I_ reckon I kin trust ye; I always hev," he declared with a specious confidence.

Severance nodded. "I was on guard duty an' I suffered ye ter escape,"

he went reminiscently on. "I knows thet ye kilt Captain Comyn, an'

I've done kept a close mouth all these years. Now ye're a rich man an'

I'm a pore one. Hit looks like ter me ye owes me a debt an' ye'd ought ter do a leetle something for me."

So that was it! Colby knew that if he yielded at all, this man's avarice and his importunities would feed on themselves increasingly and endlessly. Yet he dared not refuse, so he sought to temporize.

"I reckon thar's right smart jestice in what ye says," he conceded, "but I don't know jest yit how I stands or how much money I'm wuth.

Ye'll have ter give me a leetle time ter find out."

But when Severance mounted his mule and rode away, Sim Colby gave him only a short start and then hurried on foot through the hill tangles by a short cut that would intercept his visitor's course.

He knew that Severance would have to ride through the same gorge in which Sim had waylaid Spurrier, and he meant to get there first, rifle-armed.

It was sunset when, quite unsuspecting of danger, at least for the moment, Severance turned his mule into the gorge. He was felicitating himself, since without an acre of land or a drop of oil he had "declared himself in" on another's wealth. His mule was a laggard in pace, and the rider did not urge him. He was content to amble.

Back of the rock walls of the great cleft, the woods lay hushed and dense in the closing shadows. An owl quavered softly, and the water among the ferns whispered. All else was quiet.

But from just a little way back, a figure hitched forward as it lay belly-down in the "laurel h.e.l.l." It sighted a rifle and pressed a finger.

The mule snorted and stopped dead with a flirt of ears and tail and with no word, without even a groan, the rider toppled sidewise and slid from the saddle.

The man back in the brush peered out. He noted how still the crumpled figure lay between the feet of the patient, mouse-colored beast, that switched at flies with its tail. It lay twisted almost double with one arm bent beneath its chest.

So Colby crept closer. It would be as well to haul the body back into the tangle where it would not be so soon discovered, and to start the beast along its way with a slap on the flank.

But just as the a.s.sa.s.sin stooped, Severance's right hand darted out and, as it did so, there was a quick glint of blue steel, and three instantly successive reports.

Colby staggered backward with a sense of betrayal and a horrible realization of physical pain. His rifle dropped from a shattered hand and jets of blood broke out through his rent clothing. Each of those three pistol b.a.l.l.s had taken effect at a range so close that he had been powder-burned. He knew he was mortally hurt, and that the other would soon be dead if he was not so already.

Colby began crawling. He was mangled as if by an explosion, but instinct drove him. Twice he fainted and recovered dim consciousness and still dragged himself tediously along.

Glory was alone in her house. Her father, who had been living with her of late, had gone to the county seat overnight.

The young woman sat in silence, and the sewing upon which she had been busied lay in her lap forgotten. In her eyes was the far-away look of one who eats out one's heart in thoughts that can neither be solved nor banished.

Then she heard a faint call. It was hardly more than a gasped whisper, and as she rose, startled, and went to the door she saw striving to reach it a shape of terrible human wreckage.

Sim Colby's clothes were almost torn from him and blood, dried brown, and blood freshly flowing, mingled their ugly smears upon him. His lips were livid and his face gray.

Glory ran to him with a horrified scream. She did not yet recognize him, and he gasped out a plea for whisky.

With the utmost effort of her young strength she got him in, and managed to straighten out the mutilated body with pillows under its head.

But after a little the stimulant brought a slight reviving, and he talked in broken and disjointed phrases.

"Hit war Severance," he mumbled. "I fought back--I reckon I kilt him, too."

Glory gazed in bewildered alarm about the house. Brother Bud Hawkins was at Uncle Jimmy Litchfield's place, and she must get medical help, though she feared that the wounded man would be dead before her return.

When she came back with the preacher, who also "healed human bodies some," Colby was still alive but near his pa.s.sing.

"Ef thar's aught on your conscience, Sim," said the old preacher gently, "hit's time ter make yore peace with Almighty G.o.d, fer ye're goin' ter stand afore him in an hour more. Air ye ready ter face Him?"

The dying man looked up, and above the weakness and the suffering that filled his eyes, showed a dominating expression of terror. If ever a human being needed to be shriven he thought it was himself.