The Tempering Part 43

On the night when Larry Masters had sat until dawn by an unreplenished fire, the physical resistance of his body had ebbed to feebleness. Under the quenching chill of despair his pulse-beat had become as sluggish as the unfed blaze, and the days that followed had called for exertions which would have taxed greater reserves of vitality. They had been days of alternating blizzard and soggy thawing, and Larry Masters had been constantly in the saddle like a commander who seeks to remedy a break in his lines and must not pause to consider personal exposure. A cough wracked him, and shifting pains gnawed at his joints and chest as he rode the slippery roads. He shivered, and his teeth chattered when the sleet lashed his face, and when at last he turned away from the Lexington office where he had reported the matter in hand accomplished, he had need to keep himself studiously in hand because a tide of fever crept hotly along his arteries and blurred his senses into confusion.

When he could not rise from his bed in the bungalow to which he had returned, a message went to Louisville, and his wife, somewhat tight-lipped and silently resentful, yet with a stern sense of duty, made the uncomfortable journey to Marlin Town, accompanied by a trained nurse who would be very expensive. She tarried only until the doctor said that the crisis was over, and then leaving the nurse behind came back to Louisville, feeling that she had virtuously met a most annoying obligation.

To Masters, with a sorry company of memories, which, in delirium, took human shape and gibed at his self-esteem, the bedridden days were irksome. But one morning the sick man awoke from a restive and nightmarish sleep to a grateful impression of sunlight on window panes which had been gray and dripping. Then he realized that it was not, after all, only the sun, but that there was a presence in his room.

There sitting at his bedside, with eyes not austere but smiling and sympathy-br.i.m.m.i.n.g, was Anne, and when he sought to question her she laid a smooth hand on his lips and admonished: "Don't ask any questions now, Daddy. There's lots and lots of time for that. I've come to stay with you until you are well."

There would be some lonely weeks for the girl coming fresh from town, but they would not trouble her until the time arrived when Boone would have to go to Frankfort for the opening of the legislature, and there were ten days yet before that. Now he rode over every evening, and their voices and laughter drifted into the sick room where Larry Masters lay.

Anne had no suspicion that every night Victor McCalloway sat up waiting for Boone's return, for the most part forgetful of the book which lay on his knee, with a crooked finger marking the place. She did not guess the anxiety which kept his brows knit until the rea.s.surance of footsteps at the door relaxed them, or that on more than one occasion the soldier even saddled his own horse and surrept.i.tiously followed the lover with a c.o.c.ked rifle balanced protectingly on his saddle pommel. Once though, when Boone had returned and was unsaddling, his lantern betrayed fresh sweat and saddle marks on McCalloway's horse. McCalloway lay on his cot but was not asleep, and the young man spoke sternly:

"If you're going to follow me as a bodyguard, sir, I sha'n't feel that I can ride over there any more--and while she's there--"

McCalloway had nodded his head.

"I understand," he responded. "You have my promise. I won't do it again.

I grew a bit anxious about you, tonight."

Looking into the fine eyes that, for himself, knew no fear, the young man felt a sudden choke in his throat. He could only mutter, "G.o.d bless you, sir," and take himself off to bed.

One night, though, as Boone was leaving her house, Anne stood with him outside the door. He had taken her in his arms, and they ignored the sweep and snarl of the night wind in their lovers' preoccupation.

Suddenly, as he held her, he bent his head, and her intuition recognized that he was listening with strained intentness to something more remote and faint than her own whispered words. In the abrupt tightening of his arm muscles there was the warning of one abruptly thrown on guard, and she whispered tensely, "What is it, Boone?"

After another moment of silence, he laughed.

"It's nothing at all, dear. I thought I heard a sound."

"What?"

He had not meant to give her any alarming hint of the caution which he must so vigilantly maintain, and now he had to dissemble. It came hard to him to lie, but she must be rea.s.sured.

"That colt I'm riding tonight doesn't always stand hitched. I thought I heard him pulling loose--and it's a long walk home."

"Go and look," she commanded. "If he's broken away, come back and spend the night here."

But a few minutes later he returned and said: "It's all right. I must have been mistaken."

When she had watched him start away and melt almost at once into the sooty darkness, it suddenly struck her as strange that he had come back and spoken in so guarded an undertone instead of calling from the hitching post. It might have been the lover's ready excuse for another good night, but Anne was vaguely troubled and remained standing on the doorstep shivering and listening.

The road itself was so dark that she could rather feel than see the closing in of the laurelled mountainsides, and as for the time of her waiting, it might have been two minutes or five. She could not tell. The wind was like a whispered growl, mounting now and again into a shrieking dissonance, and there was no other sound until, as if in violent answer to her fears, came the single report of a rifle immediately followed by the hoa.r.s.er barking of a pistol.

Anne, acting with a speed that sacrificed nothing to the fl.u.s.ter of panic, turned back into the house, caught up the rifle that leaned near the door and an electric flash-torch from the table. Outside again, she found the road wet and rutty, and through the gust-driven clouds filtered no help from the stars, but remnants of snow along the edges of the way gave a low hint of visibility.

Several hundred yards brought her to an abrupt turning, and to her ears there came an uncertain sound as of something heavy being thrashed about in the mud. The girl's pupils, dilated now until the darkness was no longer so all-concealing, could make out a shapeless ma.s.s, and it seemed to her that the bulk--too large for a human body--stirred. Her finger was on the b.u.t.ton of the torch, but an impulse of caution deterred her, and she left it unlighted. If Boone lay there wounded, her flash would make of him a clear target for any lurking a.s.sa.s.sin.

As she stood nerve-taut and with straining eyes, a furious indignation mounted in her. The vague shape that lay p.r.o.ne had become still now, and when she had almost stepped on it, she knew it for a fallen and riderless horse. It must be Boone's, because she would have heard the approach of another, but the man himself was nowhere in sight. So far as outward indications went, she was herself the only human thing within the range of her vision or the sound of her voice.

Her suspense stretched until her knees grew weak, and the wind, momentarily subsiding, left her in a stillness that was like bated breath. Then she felt a touch on her elbow, and a voice barely audible commanded, "Come back along the edge."

Under the reflex of that relief-wave her tight-keyed nerves threatened to collapse, but for a little longer she commanded them, and when the two stood again in her own yard, she wilted and lay limp in her lover's arms.

"Thank G.o.d, you are safe," she whispered. "What was it?"

He pressed her close and spoke rea.s.suringly:

"It may have been that I was mistaken for another man," he said. "The most serious thing is that I'll have to walk home. My colt has been killed."

"And be a.s.sa.s.sinated on the way! No, you'll stay here!"

Boone thought of the veteran sitting by the hearth waiting for his return. He laughed.

"If I go through the woods all the way, I'll be safe enough. In the laurel it would take bloodhounds to find me, and Mr. McCalloway," he added somewhat lamely, "wasn't very well when I left."

Finally he succeeded in rea.s.suring her. He was not apt, twice in one night, to get another fellow's medicine, and he would avoid the highway, but while he was fluent and persuasive for her comforting he could not deceive himself. He could not take false solace in the thought that his anonymous enemy's resolve, once registered, would die abornin' because of its initial thwarting. The night had confirmed his ugly suspicion that he was marked for death, and though he had escaped the first attack it was not likely to be the end of the story.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

It was almost a relief to Anne when she stood on the platform of the dingy little station and waved her farewell to Boone, leaving for the state capitol and his new duties. Of course, as she turned back to the squalid vistas of the coal-mining town, a sinking loneliness a.s.sailed her heart, but for Boone's safety she felt a blessed and compensating security.

Her father's recovery was slow and his convalescence tedious, and Anne's diversion came in tramping the frost-sparkling hills and planning the future that seemed as far away and dream-vague as the smoky mists on the horizon rim.

One morning as she walked briskly beyond the town she encountered an old man who, after the simple and kindly custom of the hills, "stopped and made his manners."

"Howdy, ma'am," he began. "Hit's a tol'able keen an' nippy mornin', hain't hit?"

"Keen but fine," she smilingly replied, as her eyes lit with interest for so p.r.o.nounced a type. Had she seen him on the stage as representing his people, she would have called the make-up a gross exaggeration. He was tall and loose-jointed, and his long hair and beard fell in barbaric raggedness about a face seamed with deep lines. But his eyes were shrewd and bold, and he carried himself with a sort of innate dignity despite the threadbare poorness of patched trousers and hickory shirt, and he tramped the snowy hills coatless with ankles innocent of socks. The long hickory with which he tapped the ground as he walked might have been the staff of a biblical pilgrim, and they chatted affably until he reached the question inevitable in all wayside meetings among hillmen.

"My name's Cyrus Spradling, ma'am. What mout your'n be?"

"Anne Masters," she told him. "My father is the superintendent of the coal mine here."

She was unprepared for the sudden and baleful transformation of face and manner that swept over him with the announcement. A moment before he had been affable, and her own eyes had sparkled delightedly at the mother-wit of his observations and the quaint idiom and metaphor of his speech. Now, in an instant, he stiffened into affronted rigidity, and made no effort to conceal the black, almost malignant, wave of hostility that usurped the recent mildness of his eyes.

"Ye're ther same one that used ter be Boone Wellver's gal," he declared scornfully; and the girl, accustomed to local idiosyncrasies, flushed less at the direct personality of the statement than at the accusing note of its delivery.

"Used to be?" The question was the only response that for the instant of surprise came to her mind.

Cyrus Spradling spat on the ground as his staff beat a tattoo.

"Wa'al, thet war y'ars back, an' ye hain't nuver wedded with him yit."

The old man stood there actually trembling with a rage induced by something at which she had no means of guessing.