The Tempering Part 8

"I told you that we hermits were dreamers," answered McCalloway. "I've never had a son of my own. I think it would be a pretty experiment, sir, to see how far this young back-woodsman could go."

Strange indeed would have seemed to any prying eye the occurrences within the walls of McCalloway's cabin on those many evenings which Boone Wellver spent there. But of what took place the boy breathed no word, despite the almost feverish eagerness that glowed constantly in his blue eyes. His natural taciturnity would have sealed his lips had he given the "furriner" no pledge of confidence, and even McCalloway never guessed how strict was the censorship of that promise as Boone construed its meaning. Inasmuch as he could not be sure just what details, out of the summary of their conversations, fell under the restrictive ban, he set upon the whole a.s.sociation a seal of Masonic silence. And Victor McCalloway, recognizing that dependable discretion, talked with a freedom which he would have permitted himself with few other companions.

Sometimes he read aloud from books whose pages were, to the young listener, gates swinging open upon gilded glimpses of chivalry, heroism and those thoughts which are not groundling but winged and splendid.

Sometimes through the hills where the distances shimmered with an ashen ghost of brilliance, they tramped together, a peripatetic philosopher and his devoted disciple.

But strangest and most fantastical of all, were the hours they spent before McCalloway's hearth when the man threw off his coat and rolled his sleeves high over scarred forearms while the boy's eyes sparkled with antic.i.p.ation. And at outside mention of these sessions, McCalloway himself might have reddened to the cheekbones, for then it was that the man produced improvised wooden swords and placed himself, feet wide apart and left hand elevated in the att.i.tude of the fencer's salute.

Facing him was a solemn, burning-eyed pupil and adversary of fifteen in a linsey-woolsey shirt and jeans overalls. The lad with his freckled face and his red-brown shock of hair made an absurd contrast with the gentleman whose sword play possessed the exquisite grace and deft elegance of a Parisian fencing master--but Boone had the astonishing swiftness of a panther cub, and a lightning play of wrist and agility of limb. How rapidly he was gaining mastery over his foil he could not, himself, realize because standing over against him was one of the best swords of Europe, but this enthusiasm, which was a very pa.s.sion to learn, was also a thing of which he never spoke outside.

CHAPTER VI

With winter came desolation. The sumac no longer flared vermilion and the flaming torches of the maples were quenched.

Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skies from its pallid dawn to its setting in a bed of inflamed and angry clouds.

And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another spirit came with it--equally grim.

The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater lengths--when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.

As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps, to hinge on the "b.l.o.o.d.y Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats a.s.severated that the "b.l.o.o.d.y Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:

"How much do you need?"

Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.

In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty hors.e.m.e.n were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin Town.

That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as quietly as it had formed.

In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin fluctuated: the outcome wavered.

When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing in the bluegra.s.s. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to make Boone his a.s.sistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road, it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.

He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being waged--he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky, pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the p.a.w.ns.

Victor McCalloway smiled when Boone told him, in a voice shaken with emotion, that the day had come when he could go out and see the world.

Boone and Saul slept, that night, in a mining town with the glare of c.o.ke furnaces biting red holes through the surrounding blackness of the ridges.

To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing bluegra.s.s, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and lofty. Here it seemed to lie p.r.o.ne. The very air tasted flat in his nostrils and, missing the screens of forested peaks, he felt a painful want of privacy--like a turtle deprived of its sh.e.l.l, or a man suddenly stripped naked.

Upon his ears a thousand sounds seemed to beat in tumult--and dissonance. Men no longer walked with a soundless footfall, or spoke in lowered voices.

In the county seat to which they brought their gaunt cattle, his bewilderment mounted almost to vertigo, for about the court house square were congregated men and beasts--all unfamiliar to the standards of his experience.

The native beef here was fat, corn-fed stock, and the hogs were rounder and squatter than the mast-nourished razor-backs he had known at home.

The men, too, who bought and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in soft caution. Upon himself from time to time he felt amused glances, as though he, like his bony steers, stood branded to the eye with the ineradicable mark of something strayed in from a land of poverty.

But when eventually the cattle had been sold, Saul took him on to the capitol of the State, and there, on the twelfth of December, he stood, with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state house and gazed up at the platform upon which the choice of his own people was being inaugurated as Governor.

Boone was dazzled by the gold-laced uniforms of all the colonels on the retiring executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of the winter afternoon, his soul was all but satiated with the heady intoxication of full living.

On a brilliantly frosted morning, when the weed stalks by the roadside were crystal-rimmed, and the sky was an illimitable arch of blue sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth stone walls and well-kept fences. Yet for all his enthusiasm of admiration, a new sense of misgiving and vague trouble began to settle heavily at his heart.

No one, along the way, halted to "meet an' make their manners."

Vehicles, drawn by horses that lifted their hocks and knees high, pa.s.sed swiftly and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably obtruded itself upon realization. At home, where every man was poor, there had been no sense of inferiority, but here was a regime of disquieting contrasts.

When they at last turned through a gate with stone pillars, he caught sight of a long maple and oak-flanked avenue, and at its end a great brick house. Against the age-tempered facade stood out the trim of white paint and the dignity of tall, fluted columns. He marvelled that Saul Fulton had been able in so short a time to buy himself such a palace.

But while he still mulled over his wonderment in silence, Saul led him by a detour around the mansion and its ivory-white out-buildings, and continued through back pastures and fields, disfigured by black and sharp tobacco stubble. Boone followed past fodder-racks and pig-sties, until they brought up at a square, two-roomed house with blank, unpainted walls, set in a small yard as barren as those of the hills, but unrelieved by any background of laurel or forest. About this untempered starkness of habitation stretched empty fields, snow-patched and desolate, and the boy's face dropped as he heard his kinsman's announcement, "This hyar's whar I dwells at."

"Who--who dwells over yon at t'other house?" came Boone's rather timid query. "Ther huge brick one, with them big white poles runnin' up in front."

Saul laughed with a rasping note in his voice, "Hit b'longs ter Colonel Tom Wallifarro, ther lawyer, but he don't dwell thar hisself, save only now an' then."

Fulton paused, and his face took on the unpleasant churlishness of cla.s.s hatred. "Ther whole kit and kaboodle of 'em will be hyar soon, though.

They all comes back fer Christmas, an' holds dancin' parties, and carousin's, d.a.m.n 'em!"

A seriously puzzled expression clouded the boy's eyes, and he asked simply, "Hain't ye friendly with 'em, Saul?"

"No," was the short rejoinder, "I hain't friendly with no rich lowlander that holds scorn fer an honest man jest because he's poor."

On subsequent occasions when Boone pa.s.sed the "great house" it seemed almost as quiet as though it were totally untenanted, but with the approach of Christmas it awoke from its sleep of inactivity.

The young mountaineer was trudging along one day through a gracious woodland, which even, in the starkness of winter, hinted at the n.o.bility that summer leaf.a.ge must give to its parklike s.p.a.ces. His way carried him close to the paddocks flanking the ample barns, and he could see that the house windows were ruddy from inner hearth fires, and decked with holly wreaths.

In the paddocks themselves were a dozen persons, all opulent of seeming, and what interested the pa.s.ser-by, even more than the people, were the high-headed, gingerly stepping horses that were being led out by negro boys for their inspection.

In the group Boone recognized the man whom Asa had identified that day in Marlin as Mr. Masters, a "mine boss," and the gentleman who had come with him out of the mountain hotel. The boy surmised that this latter must be Colonel Tom Wallifarro himself, the owner of all these acres.

There was a small girl too, whom Masters called "daughter." Boone had for girls the fine disdain of his age, and this one he guessed to be some four or five years younger than himself. But she was unlike any other he had ever seen, and it puzzled him that so much attention should be squandered on a "gal-child," though he acknowledged to himself--"but she's plum purty." He went by with a casual glance and a high chin, but in his brain whirled many puzzling thoughts, springing from a first glimpse of wealth.

CHAPTER VII

It was Christmas eve night, and General Basil Prince, who had hurriedly changed to evening dress after his arrival by a late train, halted for a moment at the stairhead to look down. On his distinguished face played a quiet smile. In these rapidly changing times, pride of lineage and deference for tradition were things less openly voiced than in other days which he could remember.

Probably that was as it should be, he reflected, yet an elderly fellow might enjoy the fragrance of old lavender or the bouquet of memory's vintage.

When he came here to the country house of his friend Wallifarro, it seemed to him that he stepped back into those days when gracious ceremonies held and dancers trod the measured figures of the minuet.