The Tempering Part 36

"I can't believe it, sir," Boone stammered, and McCalloway's ruddy face became quizzical.

"Had you made up your mind to lose me, then?" he inquired.

Much they had in common at that moment of reunion, and one thing in ant.i.thesis. Boone thought of his lost race and was smitten with a pang of failure to report, but McCalloway was reading the clarity of bold and honest eyes: of a face to which it was given to wear the karat-mark of dauntlessness and integrity, and at the end of his gaze he gave an unuttered summary of what he had read: "Clean as a hound's tooth--and as strong."

"They beat me to a pulp down there, sir," Boone made prompt and rueful confession, "but there's time to tell about that later. I guess for a while I'm going to keep you busy declining to answer questions about yourself."

"There may be some uncensored pa.s.sages," smiled the Scot. "I sha'n't have to walk in total darkness."

"The important question is already answered, sir. You are safely back.

You were with Kuroki, weren't you?" There Boone halted and grinned as he added: "'Don't answer that thar question onlessen ye've a mind ter.'"

"I was with him for a time. Why do you ask?"

"Because," came the instant and confident response, "where he went there were the signs of genius."

"Genius went with Kuroki quite independently of his subordinates,"

McCalloway a.s.sured him gravely, "but a few moments back I heard you tell some one over the telephone that you couldn't come to her party because you had no evening clothes. The Russian war is over, but the matter of that dress suit retains the force of present crisis."

A half hour later, while the elder man displayed a sartorial knowledge which surprised him, Boone was being measured for his first evening clothes.

"For the Lord's sake, sir," he besought with sudden realization as they left the tailor's shop, "don't ever breathe a word about that spade-tail coat back there in Marlin. I'm going to run for the legislature next time, you know. The man that licked me before had patches on his pants."

McCalloway nodded his head. "I'll tell it not in Gath, speak it not in Ascalon," he promised. "That suit of clothes might prove your political shroud."

Boone saw Anne that evening and with a thrilling voice told her of McCalloway's return--but of the visit to the tailor he said nothing, and she refrained from reverting to the topic of the party.

Anne was sensitive on the point of an invitation urgently given and not eagerly accepted. That is what her consciousness registered, and she told herself that it was petulant and unworthy to attach so much importance to a minor disappointment. But without full realization, other and graver thought elements hung with ponderous weight from the peg of that lesser circ.u.mstance. Boone's inability to buy a dress suit was a measure of his poverty and of the great undertaking which lay ahead of him; of the length and steepness of the road he must travel before he could come to her and say, "I have made a home for you."

She herself was to be presented to society with expensive display, and her pride shivered fastidiously at the realization that all this outlay came from a purse not their own, and entailed an undeclared obligation.

She had never been told just how far she and her mother depended on the Colonel's bounty. That had been carefully left enveloped in a hazy indefiniteness that revealed no sharp or embarra.s.sing angle of detail.

Had she known it all, her shiver of distaste would have been a shudder of chagrin. But Anne was enough in love with Boone to feel that by his absence from her social launching the sparkle of her little personal triumph would be dulled.

But when at last she stood in her receiving line, radiant in her young loveliness, she glanced up and her violet eyes took on a sudden sparkle, while her cheeks flushed with surprised pleasure, for there, making his way through the door, came Boone.

He came with his stage fright as invisible as the secrets of Bluebeard's closet, so that even Mrs. Masters, looking up with equal surprise though not an equal delight, admitted that in appearance, at least, he was no liability to her company of guests.

The clothes that Victor McCalloway had supervised were tailored as they should have been, with every requisite of conservative elegance, and they set off a figure of a man well sculptured of line and proportion.

As he took Anne's hand he said in a lowered voice and with a twinkle in his eyes, "I came in through the front door--but there wasn't any arch.

My legs are shaking."

Anne glanced down. "They are doing it very quietly," she rea.s.sured. "No fuss at all."

Because of a straight-eyed sincerity and a candid vigour which endowed him with a forcefulness beyond his years, and because a certain deliberate humour played in his eyes and flashed occasionally into his ungarrulous speech, he found himself smiled upon with the tolerant approval of the older ladies and the point-blank delight of the younger.

Back at his desk the next morning he was again the grave-eyed and industrious young utility man, but in his breast pocket was a crumpled rosebud which to him still had fragrant life. In his mind were certain rich memories and in his veins raced hot currents of love--pitched to a new exhilaration.

Victor McCalloway had become again the lone man of the mountains, and Boone burned with anxiety to go to him there, but the soldier had prohibited that just now. The boy had put his hand to the plough of a virulent city campaign, and until the furrow was turned he must stay there with the men who were making the fight.

"For you, my boy," he had declared, with a live interest that ran to emphasis, "this is an opportunity not to be missed. It is a phase of transition, not only in your own development but in that of your State and your country. Through all of it sounds the insistent message of the future: whoever takes into his hands public affairs must give to the public a conscientious accounting. This is a declaration of war on the old, slothfully accepted dogma that to the victor belongs the spoils.

It is Humanity's plea for a place in government."

When McCalloway had gone, Boone carried into the steps and developments of that autumn's activities a freshly galvanized sense of romance and of high adventure. Through the labour of each day thrilled the thought of Anne, and the quiet triumph of being no longer "poor white trash."

In the forces of the political enemy clinging doggedly to the spoils of long possession and sticking at no desperate effort, the boy discovered much that was not mean--rather was it picturesque with a sort of Robin Hood flavour and the drama of a pa.s.sing order. Here were the twentieth-century counterparts of the gentlemen-gamblers of the old Mississippi steamboat days, a gentry bold and mendacious, unable to perceive that what had been must not for that reason continue to be.

Often Boone went to hear Morgan delivering his philippics to street corner audiences, and often too he dropped around inconspicuously to listen as that administration orator popularly called "The Bull"

exhorted "the pure in heart." He liked the extremes between the edged satire and nervous force of the young lawyer whose dress and appearance was always point-device, and whose message was always "_Carthago delenda est_," and the great sonorous voice of the rougher man who knew the hearts of the mob and how to reach them.

At the end of a white-hot campaign came an election day that eclipsed in violence the period of registration, and out of its confusion emerged, as bruised victors, the forces of the city hall.

But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens attended ma.s.s meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings, the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with the confidence reposed in him--and the older with a quiet light of satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed.

"How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country has followed?"

Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about caught up with the Mexican War."

After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went reflectively on again:

"Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us--in your own time.

You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere; as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man, like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation cannot--and I still feel that when that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of the peace dove but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Boone Wellver walked into the office of the police chief one spring morning when the trees along the streets were youthfully green.

Somewhere outside a band, parading with transparencies, was summoning all horse-lovers and devotees of chance to the track and paddocks of Churchill Downs.

Inside the office of the chief sat Morgan Wallifarro, point-device as ever, and over his desk the chief bent, listening with an att.i.tude of deference to what he said. It was a new department head who occupied that swivel chair. New officials occupied every office under that clock-towered roof, and behind each placarded door the suggestions of Morgan Wallifarro held some degree of authoritative force and sanction.

For almost two years the courts had laboured to the grind of the contest cases. Again, shoulder to shoulder with the Nestors of the bar and their younger a.s.sistants, Boone had played his minor but far from trivial part. Almost a year before he had listened in the joint sessions room as the decisive utterances of the two chancellors fell upon a taut and expectant stillness. Those arbiters had read long and learned disquisitions as befitted the final chapter to months of hearings. That day had been a Waterloo for attempted Reform. With dignity of manner and legalistic verbiage Boone had heard it adjudged that behind the physical results of the elections the interference of the courts might not penetrate, and he had turned away disheartened but not surprised.

Then had come a new beginning; the final issue in the Court of Appeals, and finally out of that ultimate mill had been ground a reversal and a decision that upon a government seated by such devious and fraudulent methods the cloak of responsibility rested "like the mantle of a giant upon the withered shoulders of a pigmy."

Now as Boone shook hands with the new chief, a patrolman entered the place and stood silently on the threshold. In his eyes was the sullen but unaggressive resentment of the whipped bully. This was the officer who had brandished a club over Morgan Wallifarro's head and who had dragged Boone out of the registration booth under arrest. Gone now was his domineering truculence, gone all but the smouldering of his old, self-confident ferocity. Morgan glanced up without comment, and the chief recognized the new arrival with a curt nod.

"Keefe," he said shortly, "you were under grave charges and failed to appear before the Board of Safety at the designated time."

The uniformed man glowered around the room. One vestige of satisfaction remained to him; that of a truculent exit and of it he meant to avail himself.

"What the h.e.l.l was the use, Chief. I knew they'd railroad me. I quit right now."

"It's too late. You can't quit!" The words were sharp and incisive, and under the chief's forefinger an electric buzzer rasped. As an orderly appeared, his direction was snapped out: "Call in the lieutenants and captains from the officers' room."

Keefe took a step forward as if in protest, then realizing his helplessness, he halted and stood on braced legs, breathing heavily.