The Tempering Part 39

"Have I complained?" she asked.

"Anne,"--the man bent forward and spoke with the fervent earnestness of invincible resolve--"I have a long way to go. I'm still down on the ground level and you are still the evening star! Stars and groundlings, dear heart! They're very far apart, but there's a beacon burning before me and there's a magic in your love!" His expression had grown as tender as it had a little while before been elemental, yet it was not less purposeful. "In time, by G.o.d's grace I shall climb up to you, but it's a steep journey, and it's asking a good deal of you to mark time while I travel it."

"It's asking so much," declared the girl, "that I wouldn't do it if it wasn't the one thing in the world I want to do--if my heart wasn't set on that and nothing else."

"Thank G.o.d!" he breathed, "and thank _you_!"

After a little Anne spoke speculatively:

"I've missed you rather terribly this time. You've seemed to be away so long."

"I've been building political fences, but to me it's been exile," he told her. "This race for the legislature seems a trivial thing to keep me away from you. If I win it--and G.o.d knows I've _got_ to win--it's still a petty victory. But it's the first stage of the journey, and after the legislature comes Congress. You see, small as it is, it's vital."

Anne studied the gossamer building about which a spider was busying itself, and Boone knew that in her mind some matter was demanding discussion. He waited for her to broach it and soon she began.

"Morgan held politics in contempt until he went too far into the game to abandon it, but even now he's seeking to make it lead to something else."

"What?" inquired Boone, wondering what topic Anne was approaching by this path of indirection.

"I can tell you without abusing a confidence," she laughed, "because he's never told me. I've only guessed it, but I'm sure I'm right. His goal is a European emba.s.sy with a life near the trappings of a throne.

And since Morgan is Morgan, he'll get it. He never fails."

"In one thing," announced Boone shortly, "he's going to fail."

Anne nodded, "In one thing he is," she agreed. "But if he goes into the diplomatic service, Boone, there'll be a place left vacant in the firm.

Have you thought of that? Wouldn't your own future lie smoother that way? You could take your place here at the bar instead of struggling to herd wild sheep, and in the end you'd be Uncle Tom's logical successor."

Boone's face became sober, almost, Anne thought, distressed. The easy swing of his shoulders stiffened, and Anne intuitively knew that instead of suggesting a new thought she had broached a subject of painful deliberation, already mulled over with a heavy heart.

Into the young lover's mind flashed the picture of a rough hill evangelist exhorting rougher hearers, and of scriptural words: ...

"taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them."

Finally he spoke: "I _have_ thought of it, Anne.... The Colonel has even suggested it.... Of course he hasn't said anything about Morgan's going away; he only intimated that there might be a place for me in the practice."

"You didn't refuse? It's a good law firm, you know--old and honoured."

Suddenly he spread his hands in a gesture almost of appeal, as though he hoped she might understand and yet hardly dared to expect it.

"Anne, those wild sheep you just spoke of are my people. Perhaps with all their faults they have a few virtues too, and, if they have, loyalty to their own blood is chief of them. The world knows most about their murders, their moonshining and their abysmal ignorance, but you know that their blood is the most undiluted and purest American blood in America. You know that their children grow up illiterate only because they have no alternative. You know that those people are wild, lawless, but, thank G.o.d, generous to a fault, and as honest as the sun is bright. You know that even in their law-breaking they don't follow a base criminality so much as a perverted code of ethics. I was one of them. I inherited their blood-hatreds and their squalor, and because of generous friends I was rescued. If I am worth the effort spent on me at all, I owe it to those men, who saved me from what I might have been, to do my utmost for my 'wild sheep.'"

The girl was counting the iridescent threads of the spider's web, but her eyes caught the fixity with which his hand had unconsciously clenched itself. All that he said was undoubtedly true and creditable.

She would not, in theory, have had him feel or speak otherwise, yet, since it is as impossible to eliminate one's ego from thought as to see through one's reflection in a mirror, she felt suddenly sick at heart.

If the effect of his liberation from the squalid things of his origin meant, after all, only to bind him the more strongly to them; if a quixotic sense of obligation barred him from the broader world he had won to, wherein lay the virtue of salvation? She loved the majestic wildness of the hills and the sweep of their free winds, but of the people in general she had thought as one gently bred and nurtured might naturally think of the less fortunate and more vulgar of the world.

Then she heard his words going on again but seeming to sound from a distance:

"Except for what generous friends did for me, I might--I would in all probability have grown as rank and wild as many other boys up there. The feud would perhaps have claimed me. For human life and human rights, I might have had the same contempt, and instead of standing here free and fortunate I might even now be wearing stripes in the penitentiary. If I've escaped, I think my people are ent.i.tled to what little I can offer them."

Anne felt a weight of foreboding on her heart, but she laid her hands on his shoulders. "Of course, dear," she said softly, "it's not just getting to the place, after all, is it? One must travel the right road, too."

On the deck-rail of a coast-wise fruit steamer beating down from equatorial waters leaned two men, whose ages were seemingly about forty.

Off the starboard bow lay the island of San Lorenzo, yellow in the sun, with its battered crown of broken fortress. Ahead lay Callao, yellow, too, with its adobe walls, and rust-red where its corrugated iron roofs caught and husbanded the heat which needed no husbanding. Far off, between terraces of sand and the slopes of San Cristobal, one could make out the church towers of Lima.

The two travellers looked idly, somewhat contemptuously, on a sh.o.r.e line that had fired the imagination of Pizarro and his conquistadores. They were not of those to whom historic a.s.sociations lend glamour, neither were they themselves precisely objects of romantic interest. One was dark of hair and skin and saturnine of expression. The other was blond, floridly blond, and unmistakably Teutonic.

"Know anything about oil, mein friendt?" inquired the fair-haired traveller, and the other laughed.

"Oil? My middle name's oil. I've drilled it in Mexico and--" abruptly the speaker became less expansive as he added, "and elsewhere."

The German smiled. "Elsewhere?" he observed. "It is a large place--nein?

Has oil been always your business?"

From Guayaquil they had been travelling companions, but they had shared no personal confidences. The reply came non-committally.

"I've followed some several things."

The Teuton did not press his interrogations, and a silence fell between the two. While it lasted, the face of Saul Fulton settled into a frown of discontent.

At Lima there would perhaps be mail, and upon the answer to a letter written long ago his future plans depended.

"Shall we dine together in Lima?" The suggestion came at last from the German. "So perhaps we shall be less bored."

Saul Fulton nodded. "Why not? I'll meet you at the American cafe at six, but the dinner'll be on me."

Fulton could afford to entertain if the spirit moved him, and if his news was good he would have the wish to celebrate. These years of his wanderings since he had left home with an indictment hanging above his head had not all been lean, but prosperity in exile had of late become bitter on his tongue with the ashiness of dead-sea fruit. Saul was homesick. He wanted to shake from his feet for ever this dry dust of the rainless west coast. He wanted to see the stars come up out of a paling lemon afterglow, across peaks ragged with hardwood and fringed with pine.

He had tasted the bread and wine of many lat.i.tudes, and perhaps in all of them life had been more kindly than in the mountains of his birth, yet no child could be more homesick. He wanted to parade before the pinch of his neighbour's poverty the little prizes of his ign.o.ble success--and, more than that, he wanted something else.

But when the sun was dropping back of San Cristobal's cone he stood on a cobble-stoned street on the outskirts of Lima, cursing under his breath with a torn envelope in his hand. His letter had not brought him good news.

The communication, in the first place, had not come from the man to whom he had written, though he grudgingly admitted that perhaps this vicarious reply was essential to caution.

"To come back here now would be the most heedless thing in the world, he says." That had been the hateful gist culled from the detail. The "he says" must refer to the unnamed attorney, to whom Saul had made the confession which gave value to his evidence against Asa Gregory.

If Asa were free, of course he knew that to return to Marlin County would be to ask insistently for death--and not to ask in vain. But Asa lay securely immured behind jail walls which would not be apt to open for him unless to let him pa.s.s into the still safer walls of the penitentiary or out into the cemented yard where the gallows stood.

The forces of the prosecution owed him something. They owed him so much that he had walked in no terror of extradition, or even, after a prudent absence, molestation at home. Technically of course he still stood charged as an accomplice to murder who had forfeited his bond, but there may be divergences between a technical and an actual status. The attorney who preferred now not to be quoted had doubtless discussed the matter with the Commonwealth, and that the Commonwealth had no wish to hound him was indicated by this pa.s.sing on of the advice "ride wide."

Who then stood between him and a safe return to the State he had served with vital testimony? This letter told him in the none too elegant phrasing of a friend from the hills.

"Asa himself won't bother you unless the Governor pardons him out--and the Governor ain't likely to do that. He's the man that went in when Goebel died. I say he ain't likely to pardon Asa--but still there has been some changes here. The Democrat party has had some quarrels inside itself. The Louisville crowd has been kicked out by this same governor, and the lawyers that helped get it done were the Wallifarro crowd. You may not remember much about Boone Wellver, because he was a kid when you left, but he thinks Asa's a piece of the moon, and he's a lawyer now hisself in Wallifarro's offices. Those men stand close to the Governor, and this Boone Wellver has wore out the carpet at Frankfort, tramping in to argue for Asa's pardon. But that ain't all. He's talked hisself blue in the face trying to have you brought back and hung. Back in Marlin he's aimin' to go to the legislature and he's buildin' up influence. If he wins out he's goin' to be a power there, and, if he gets to be, you can't never come home."

At that point Saul lowered the pages of the letter and cursed again under his breath. Then he read on again though by now he knew the contents by heart.

"It was heedless for you to write to Jim Beverly. Wellver heard of that through some tattle-talk and went to the Commonwealth attorney and told where you was at. He'll hound you as long as he lives, and if you come back here you'll walk into his trap--unless you can contrive to get him out of the way. He stands across your path, and you've got either to lay low or get rid of him. If you came back here, one of you would have to die as sure as G.o.d sits on high."