The Tempering Part 49

"Ef she's decent," declared Joe Gregory tensely to himself, "she kain't skeercely do no less."

So after Boone had returned and begun packing his bag, Joe made a plausible excuse and went out to seek a telephone pay-station. Over the long distance he got Colonel Wallifarro's house, with the amused a.s.sistance of an operator who saw only his rustic gaucherie, and who missed entirely the simple, almost biblical, dignity of his bearing.

"Miss Anne? No, sir, she isn't here," replied Moses, the negro butler, and, while Joe's heart sank, that admirable majordomo, recognizing the long-distance call, secured a connection for the speaker with the Country Club.

While the wire buzzed distractingly, Joe Gregory stood in the closed booth and perspired. Outside he watched a travelling salesman who, with a chewed cigar between stout fingers, bent over the switchboard and chatted with the blonde operator. Then finally he heard a voice at the far end. It was a somewhat frightened and faint voice, but even in his anger he admitted that it held a sweet and gentle cadence.

Perhaps the girl half hoped that this ring which called her from guests to whom her engagement was being announced carried a twentieth-century equivalent for the appearance of Lochinvar. Perhaps she only feared bad news. At all events, she spoke low.

"Miss Masters, I'm Joe Gregory," announced an unfamiliar voice which held across the wire a straightforward and determined significance. The name, too, carried its effect, for Anne knew of this man as Boone's most stalwart disciple. "The thing I've got ter tell ye hain't skeercely suited ter speech over a telephone, an' yet thar hain't no other way.

Hit's about him, an' he's in ther direst peril a man kin stand in.

Thar's just one human soul thet hes a chanst ter save him--an' thet's you."

Sometimes the long-distance wire hums with confusion. Sometimes it enhances and clarifies the ghost of a whisper. Now Joe Gregory heard a choking breath, and for an instant there was no other sound; the man, catching the import of the gasping agitation, went on talking to its speechlessness. It was if between them "he" could mean only one man.

"He hain't skeercely in his rightful senses, or I wouldn't hev no need ter call on ye. He's goin' back ter--well, back home tonight. I kain't handily tell ye what ther peril is, but ef I was ter say thet two days hence he'll be past savin'--an' others along with him--I'd only be talkin' text ter ye."

"But how"--there was desperation of panic in the question--"how could I--save him?"

"He needs savin' from hisself, ma'am. Thar's a train of cars leavin'

Looeyville nigh on midnight. Ef ye teks. .h.i.t I'll meet ye at ther station when ye gets _thar_ in ther mornin'. Him an' me is leavin' on one thet starts from hyar an hour from now. Thet's all I kin say afore I sees ye--save thet matters are plumb desperate."

"But I can't--I don't see how--"

Anne had never quite realized such a quietly unbending sternness as that of the voice which interrupted her:

"Ef ye don't aim ter stand by an' see his ruin, ye needs must _find_ a way. Jest _come_, thet's all--an' come alone. No other way won't do.

I'll be at ther deppo."

And the receiver clicked with a finality that brooked no argument, leaving the girl leaning unsteadily against the wall of the booth. She opened the heavy door a little but did not go out. From the dining-room came a sally of laughing voices, and from the dancing floor haunting sc.r.a.ps of the "Merry Widow" waltz. A clock across the pa.s.sage ticked above these sounds, and on its dial the hands stood at eight forty-five.

Upon her ears these impressions fell with a sense of remoteness and lightness as if they could be thrust away, but more oppressive and close was the unnamed something brooding in the hills two hundred miles--yes, and two centuries--away.

She knew that she stood at one of those unequivocal moments that cannot be met with life's ordered deliberation. By tomorrow things might be done which could never be undone. An hour hence, decision would be the harder for newly recognized difficulties. The penalty of faltering might be a life of self-accusation for herself--for Boone a tragedy.

She had a.s.sured herself with pa.s.sionate reiteration that Boone was a character in a chapter torn out of her life, but the heartache remained in stubborn mutiny against that ordaining. It had been first gnawingly, then fiercely, present while she laughed and talked at the table with an effervescence no more natural than that pumped into artificially charged wine, and she had needed no death's-head to sober her against too abandoned a gaiety at that feast. Joe Gregory's words had, for all their want of explicitness, been inescapably definite. They meant ruin--no less--unless she intervened and came at once.

To go meant to stir tempests in teapots--to defy conventions, and perhaps by a vapidly rigid interpretation, to compromise herself. To refuse to go meant to abandon Boone to some undescribed, and therefore doubly terrifying, disaster.

Anne Masters was not the woman to shrink from crises or from the determined action for which crises called. Almost at once she knew that she was going by the midnight train to the hills, and let the problems that sprung from her going await a later solution. But how?

Going unaccompanied from a country-club dinner party to desperate affairs brewing in the c.u.mberlands presented difficulties too tangible to be dismissed. To confide in Colonel Tom or Morgan would mean only that they would insist upon accompanying her. To confide in her mother would mean burning up precious moments in hysteria. The one un.o.bstructed alternative appeared to be the unwelcome one of flight without announcement.

But back to the table she carried little outward agitation. If her heart pounded it was with a sort of exaltation born of impending moments of action. If her face had paled it gave a logical basis for the plea of violent headache upon which she persuaded Morgan to drive her home as soon as the guests rose, and to make the necessary explanations only after she had gone.

When Mrs. Masters returned she found a note entreating her not to give way to undue anxiety. Anne was gone, and the hurriedly written lines said she would telegraph tomorrow from her father's house, but that it was not illness which had called her there.

In such a situation, provided one approach it in the mood of Alexander toward the Gordian knot, the greater complexities appear in retrospect.

It was looking back on those pregnant hours that their various enormities were made plain to her, chiefly through the expounding of _ex-post-facto_ wisdom operating cold-bloodedly and without the urge of a peril to be met.

With much the same acceptance of the bizarre as that which marks the fantasy of dreams, she endured the discomforts of that night's journey and found herself at daybreak looking into gravely welcoming eyes on the station at Marlin Town.

Her own eyes felt sunken and hot with fatigue, but to Joe Gregory, who had also spent a sleepless night, she seemed a picture of the fresh and dauntless.

They went first to her father's bungalow, and there a new difficulty presented itself. Larry Masters had gone away to some adjacent town and had left his house tight locked.

"Boone's on the move today," Joe Gregory informed her, "but matters'll come to a head ternight. Twell then things won't hardly bust, but when ther time comes, whatever ye kin do hes need ter be done swiftly. When I talked with ye last night I mis...o...b..ed we'd hev even this much time ter go on."

Then as they sat on the doorstep of the closed house, which no longer afforded her the conventional sanction of paternal presence, the deputy sheriff outlined for her with admirable directness and vigour the situation which had driven him to her for help. To clear away all mystification he sketched baldly the little episode of the down-turned photograph and the bitterness of the three words, "I'm ruined now."

"Thet's how come me ter know," he enlightened simply, "thet Boone war sort of crazed-like--an' thet _you_ mout cure him, ef so be ye _would_."

Then with a sterner note he added: "Whatever took place betwixt ther two of ye air yore own business, but thar's some of us thet would go down inter h.e.l.l ter save Boone Wellver. I needed ye, an', despite yer bein' a woman, ef ye're a man in any sense at all, ye'll stand by me right now."

Anne rose from the doorstep where she had been dejectedly sitting and held out a hand.

"You see, I came," she said briefly; "and I aim to be man enough to do my best."

From the door of the wretched hotel as the morning grew to noon, she watched the streets, and it seemed to her that, quite aside from the usual gloom of the winter's day and the scowl of the heavy sky, there was a new and intangible spirit of foreboding upon the town. That, she argued, could be only the creative force of imagination.

She wished for Joe Gregory, but among many busy people that day he was the busiest, and it was not until near sunset that he came for her, leading a saddled horse. Riding along the steep and twisting ways, a sense of sinister forces oppressed her.

It seemed to her that the dirge through the brown-gray forests and the shriek of blasts along the gorges were blended into an untamable litany.

"We are the ancient hills that stand unaltered! We and our sons refuse to pa.s.s under the rod. Wild is our breath and fierce our heritage. Let the plains be tamed and the valleys serve! Here we uphold the law of the lawless, the nihilism of ragged freedom!"

Once Joe halted her with a raised band. "Stay hyar," he ordered, "twell I ride on ahead. Folks hain't licensed ter pa.s.s hyar terday ontil they gives ther right signal."

He went forward a few rods, and had Anne not been watching his lips she would have sworn that it was only the caw of a crow she heard; but soon from a cliff overhead and then from a thicket at the left came the response of other cawing. Then with a nod to her to follow, her guide flapped his reins on the neck of his mule, and again they moved forward.

It was dark when they came to the road that pa.s.sed in front of Victor McCalloway's house, and there Joe drew rein.

"I've still got some sev'ral things ter see to," he informed the girl, "so I won't stop hyar now. Boone's inside thar, an' like as not hit'll be better fer ther two of ye ter talk by yoreselves. I'll give ther call afore I rides on, so thet ther door'll open for ye. Hit hain't openin'

ter everybody ternight."

Then for the first time Anne faltered.

"Must I go in there--alone?" she demanded, and Gregory looked swiftly up.

"Ye hain't affrighted of him, be ye? Thar hain't no need ter be."

Anne stiffened, then laughed nervously. "No," she said, "I'll go in."

The deputy sitting sidewise in his saddle, watched her dismount, and when she reached the doorstep he sung out: "Boone, hit's Joe Gregory talkin'. Open up!"

Anne's knees were none too steady, nor was her breath quite even as the door swung outward and Boone stood against its rectangle of light peering out with eyes unaccommodated to the dark. He was flannel shirted and corduroy breeched, and since yesterday he had not shaved. But his face, drawn and strained as he looked out, not seeing her because he was studying the stile from which the voice had come, was the face of one who has been in purgatory and who has not yet seen the light of release.