The Portal of Dreams

"I'm afraid I shall be denied the privilege of knowing you better," I said slowly, "I leave for the mountains to-morrow morning."

"You won't be there forever," she retorted, "sha'n't we see you on the return trip?"

I shook my head.

"I must hurry back East."

"I'm sorry," she answered with sweet graciousness. Any woman in the country houses about her would probably have spoken in the same fashion, but to me it was a match touched to powder.

"I will quote you a parable," I said, and although I attempted to smile, that the speech might be taken lightly, I had that rigid feeling about the lips and brow which made me conscious that my face was drawn and tell-tale.

"Icarus was the original bird-man, and he came to grief. His wings were fastened on with wax, but they worked fairly well until he soared too close to the sun. Then they melted … and the first aviation disaster was chronicled."

She looked at me frankly and level-eyed, but her face held only mystification.

"I'm afraid," she said, "you must construe the parable."

I shook my head gravely. "I'm glad you don't take its meaning."

"I don't understand," she repeated, yet we both felt that we were standing in the presence of dammed-up emotions which might at any moment break over and inundate us. She might yet have no realization of it, but I knew by an occult assurance, in no way related to egotism, that I could make her love me. My fable was false after all. I had already fallen and been broken; my pinions were trailing and blood-stained. There was yet time to save her. During our silence Weighborne opened the door and our interview was ended.

It had lasted a few minutes, yet during their continuance I had been several times perilously near the brink. I saw her rise and smile and leave the room, and I caught or fancied I caught a glance from her eyes and a miraculous curve of her lips at the threshold. The expression was subtle and challenging, seeming to say to me, "You will tell me many things before I am through with you." Of course, that, too, was my disordered imagination, yet for the moment it was as though she had actually spoken words of self-confidence and conquest. And I knew that if I saw her again I should say many things – forbidden things. Resentment and bitterness and utter heartache possessed me, and I heard my host's voice in a maddeningly matter-of-fact pitch as he commented, "Now I hope our interruptions are over."

As I went to my room at the hotel that night a telegram was handed me. I did not at once open it. I presumed that it was from Keller, and it was all of a piece with my grotesque ill luck that the answer should come just after I had myself in the most painful possible way solved the problem. In my room, however, I read, under a San Francisco date, "Name Weighborne, not Carrington. Keller." It was evidently a telegraphic mistake and should have read "Weighborne née Carrington." Keller had told me who she had been before she married Weighborne, the man whose name, in the words of my fellow unfortunate, Bobby Maxwell, "looked well on a check."

CHAPTER XVII

WE GO TO THE MOUNTAINS

Weighborne was at the station on the following morning when, five minutes before train time, I arrived. He was clad for his mountain environment in high lace boots, corduroy breeches and flannel shirt, and in this guise he loomed bigger and stronger of seeming than in conventional clothing. His level, straight-gazing eyes held the cheery satisfaction of facing, after a good breakfast, a prospect of action. He was meanwhile willing to fill the interim of railroad travel with conversation. I, on the contrary, knew that sleeplessness had left me haggard, and met his advances, I fear, with churlish taciturnity.

In the smoking compartment, when we were under way, I sat gazing out of the car window at fleeting fields still a-sparkle with frost crystals on wood and stubble.

"You and Frances didn't just seem to hit it off," commented my companion with a proffer of his cigar-case, "or rather Frances liked you all right, but you – " He broke off with an amused smile and busied himself with the kindling of a panatella.

A man can hardly explain to his fellow-man, "I was rude to your wife because I love her. I worship her in a way your prosaic little soul can never understand. It is only because civilization is all distorted that I don't murder you and carry her off in triumph to my cave – where she belongs."

So I mumbled some foolish contradiction. I thought her charming; I was merely not a woman's man. I was still part savage. My unfortunate temperament must be my apology.

Weighborne studied me for a moment in some perplexity. He knew I was lying, but he had no suspicion why I lied and he could hardly argue in her defense with me, a stranger. He changed the topic, but there was a hurt expression in his face as though he were unable to understand my subtle hostility, as he construed it, for a person entirely lovely. If I did not like Frances there must be something abnormal about me, and the expression was quite eloquent though wordless. I had no difficulty in reading it. It was as though he wanted to say to me and was saying to himself, "After all, our relations are those of business, and your personal preferences and prejudices do not concern me, but we won't speak of Her again. It shall be a prohibited topic between us." In this tacit attitude I found an element of relief. If I were to be forced into his daily companionship I must not be specifically reminded at every turn that he was the husband of his wife. I had stepped knee-deep into this miserable Rubicon of financial venture as the agent of others, and turning back was impossible. Afterward… But at this point I stopped. I could not yet bring myself to think of any afterward.

Inasmuch as Weighborne and I were for a time to travel the same trail and since, as my reason insisted, he was guilty of no injury to me except an injury so fantastic that only destiny could be blamed, and since, too, he was all unconscious even of that, there must be truce between us.

Yet there rose insistently before me the lissom beauty of his wife. The light that tangled itself in her hair blinded and tortured me.

The deity I had built out of fancy and under the influence of the tropics, laid itself in parallel with the woman I had seen last night. The goddess I knew. The woman I loved and doubted. Was she only the coquette who wanted to lead me chained at her chariot wheel for the cheap joy of conquest? My goddess had not been that sort. What had she to offer me in return for such a tribute to her vanity? Was I merely to flit in the background of her life giving all that the heart has, receiving nothing but the occasional condescension of a smile? Does great beauty so preëmpt a woman's soul as to drive out even the homely virtues?

These questions bored insistently into my brain until it ached with perplexity. Then came the memory of her momentary wistfulness; her craving for something more than life had given her, or something different.

What was that? At all events, I knew that to fall again within the scope of her personality would mean to be swept rudderless from my moorings. Whatever her object, be it exalted or petty, I must inevitably bow to it, in unconditional surrender, if such were her good or evil pleasure. Consequently the one end of all my thinking was the resolve that I should not again see her.

The journey was progressing with more surety than my reflections. It whisked us through the richness of Bluegrass pasture lands, and the opulent ease of Bluegrass life into a barer country where the color of the soil grew mean and outcropping rocks lay bare. The landscape, as though in keeping with my mood, dropped down a scale of bleakness.

The cleanliness of dignified mansions, spacious barns and whitewashed fences gave place to less pretentious farm-houses in disrepair, and these in turn dwindled to log cabins that were hardly better than shanties, and choking undergrowth instead of clean meadows.

We roared through foothills where the vivid green of young cedars dashed the gray tangle of naked timber and scrub. At last we climbed into the mountains themselves, lying in dreary ramparts of isolation under skies that had grown sodden and raw. Here were the barriers of the Cumberland heaping up gigantic piles of raggedness under bristling needle points of timber.

We passed through anomalous villages where the nation's most primitive and quarantined life was rubbing shoulders with the outriders of capital's invasion. Shaggy men ridden in from distant cabins on shaggier horses; men who probably nursed guilty knowledge of illicit stills, gazed at the passing train out of humorless and illiterate eyes.

At last we left the train at a station over which the November dusk was closing, where the coke furnaces glared in red spots along the shadowed ridges. A four-mile drive brought us to the tawdry hotel, and after attacking our eggs and ham we went to our rooms. I on a feather bed, with the reek of a low-turned lamp in my nostrils, lay for hours gazing at the patched and dirty wall-paper, and at last fell asleep to dream of a wonderful lady who opened a door in a wall of rock, and led me through it to things which could never be.

The next morning as we waited for the wagon which was to take us twenty miles into the hills, Weighborne showed me the dingy court-house whose weatherbeaten walls had in other days been penetrated by the gatling guns of the militia. He pointed out boyish-looking figures whose eyes were young and mild, yet who had more than once "notched their guns." He showed me spots where this marked man or that had fallen, shot to death from the court-house windows, by assassins who had never been apprehended or prosecuted.

"That is all changing," he said. "When capital comes the feud must go."

Stolid groups of mountaineers, clad in butternut and jeans, eyed us with mild curiosity. Here and there a father whose face was as stupid and uneducated as that of a Russian peasant, walked side by side with a son dressed in the season's ready-made styles. Between parent and child yawned the gulf of schooling, which the younger generation had acquired in a college "down below" or in the new schools at home, presided over by "fotched on" teachers.

We traveled at snail's pace over twisting roads where our wagon strained and creaked in tortuous ruts almost hub-deep, and where the scraggly horses lay against their collars and tugged valiantly at the traces. Quail started up before us with their whir of softly drumming wings and disappeared into the thick cover of timber. Squirrels barked and scampered to hiding at our coming. Occasionally a fox whisked out of sight with a contemptuous flirt of its brush. Once only in twenty miles we encountered another traveler. An old man, riding bareback on a mule, drew up in the road and awaited us. Despite the cold, a gap of sockless, dust-covered ankle showed between his rough brogan uppers and the wrinkled legs of his butternut breeches. Across his mule's withers balanced a rifle. His face was bearded and sad.

"Mornin' Rat-Ankle," drawled our driver, halting the team for converse.

"Mornin', Pate," came the nasal reply.

There was a long interval of silence while the mounted man contemplated us with an unabashed stare. Finally he spoke again.

"Mornin', strangers," he said.

There followed a protracted series of questionings between the native born as to the health and well being of their respective families.

I thought I saw the mountaineer's eyes glitter with sudden interest when Weighborne's name was given him, but the light died quickly out of his pupils, leaving only the weariness and sadness of his dull life.

At times the climbs were so steep that we had to trudge alongside, lending a hand at the wheels. The last two miles of the journey, said our driver, would be impassable for a wheeled vehicle. He would have to deposit us and our luggage at Chicken-Gizzard Creek. A little later, while we were walking up a steep incline, Weighborne drew me back out of earshot of the teamster.

"I'd better post you on a few details," he said. "Ever hear of the Keithley assassination?"

I shook my head.

"Keithley was the prosecuting attorney in some rather celebrated murder trials. He was shot to death one afternoon as he came out of the court-room."

"Yes?" I questioned.

"Six months later Con Hoover was shot from the laurel on this road. He had allied himself with those who sought to avenge Keithley."

I nodded my head.

"There were Cale Springer, Bud Dode – I could enumerate other victims, but that is all unnecessary detail. What concerns us is this. Jim Garvin is county judge. In a rough way he is the political boss of the region and he has built up a fortune. His own gun is unnotched, but a half-dozen men who have incurred his displeasure have come to abrupt ends. The newspapers in Louisville and Lexington have intimated that besides being at the head of fiscal affairs and operating a general store the judge also issues his orders to a murder syndicate."

"Why," I demanded in some disgust, "hasn't it been proven?"

"It is difficult to prove things of this sort – when the defendant is more powerful than the law and when juries walk in terror," Weighborne reminded me. "He has twice been tried for complicity. A company of state guards patrolled the court-house yard to reassure venire-men and witnesses. The only result was the defeat, at the next election, of the judge and prosecutor who had made themselves obnoxious."

"Why," I inquired, "aren't such malefactors taken into a civilized circuit, on a change of venue, and tried where jurors are not intimidated?"

"They have been – with the same result," affirmed my informant. "You see, while the jurors were freed from fear, the witnesses knew they must return home."

"Shall we be likely to meet this highly interesting character?" I questioned.

"The store where our wagon turns back," said Weighborne, "is his place."

"Then I am to be careful not to form or express any opinion adverse to judicious homicide? Is that the point?"

Weighborne smiled.

"Our plans involve bringing a branch railroad along the way we have been traveling," he replied, "and the coming of that railroad means the death knell of Jim Garvin's power. What is still more to the point, our attorney here and the man for whose house we are bound is the Hon. Calloway Marcus. He was Keithley's law partner, and he is a marked man. He it was who prosecuted Garvin – and lost his official head. His actual head he keeps on his shoulders by riding at the center of a bodyguard. I tell you these matters so that you may watch your words."

"Shall we encounter open hostility at this place?" I inquired.

Weighborne shook his head. "On the contrary, we shall be most courteously received. Politeness is highly esteemed hereabouts. The fact that a man means to 'lay-way' you to-night, with a squirrel gun, is not deemed sufficient reason for relaxing his courtesy this afternoon."

An hour later our conveyance drew up at the junction of two ragged roads where thin, outcropping ledges of limestone went down to the rim of a shallow stream. Beyond the water rose a beetling bluff. One could imagine that when summer brought to this hollow in the hills its richness of green, and its profusion of trumpet flower and laurel and rhododendron, there must be an eye-filling beauty, but now it was unspeakably raw and desolate.

Two houses were in sight and both were of depressing ugliness. In the fork of the road where the ground was trodden hard stood the "store." It was a one-room shack built of logs and boarded over, but innocent of paint. A leanto porch, disfigured by a few advertising signs, gave entrance to a narrow door. The second house set back and higher up the slope of the mountain. Its solidity was that of mortised logs and its windows were protected behind solid shutters. Inside there was plainly an abundance of space, as befitted the dwelling-place of the district's overlord. A clump of white-armed sycamores partly masked its front, but through the naked branches one could see that for a hundred yards about it, in every direction, lay unbroken clearing, and that for all its civilian seeming it might, if need arose, stand siege against anything less formidable than gatling guns.

Stamping the cold and cramp from our feet, we settled our score with the liveryman, and turned into the store.

CHAPTER XVIII

A CHAT WITH A DICTATOR

Inside Judge Garvin's store we came upon a group of slovenly loungers. Had my mind been free enough of its own troubling thoughts to spare a remnant of interest, I should have found this new and strange scheme of things engrossing. I was in a scrap of America which the onrushing tide of world advancement had left stranded and forgotten. Here a people of unmixed British stock lived primitive lives, fought feudal wars, and shrined every virtue high except regard for human life.

These four narrow walls in part epitomised that life. The shelves back of the counters displayed what things they held essentials: rough crockery, coarse calicoes, canned goods, barrels of brown sugar, brogans, stick candy and ammunition.

About a small stove loafed some eight or ten men and several "hound-dogs." The shoulders of these men slouched; their hands were chapped and coarse; their clothes muddied, but when they walked it was with something of the catamount's softness, and their eyes were alert.

Behind the counter stood a man of fifty. I knew, without waiting for Weighborne's greeting, that this must be Garvin. There was something pronounced yet hard to define which gave him the outstanding prominence of a master among minions.

He was a large man and inclined to stoutness. His hair and moustache were sandy and his florid face was marked with a purplish tracery of veins in which the blood appeared to bank and stand currentless. His neck was grossly heavy and bovine, but his forehead was broad and his eyes disarmingly frank and blue. His mouth, too, fell into the kindly lines of a perpetual smile.

His clothing was rough and his neck collarless, but one forgot this and noted only the suavity of his bearing and the ingratiating quality of his voice. Such was the man who should have gone long ago to death or imprisonment for the orders he had issued to his assassins.

"Judge Garvin," said my companion, "my name's Weighborne. I met you once in the court-house. You probably don't remember me."

The gigantic reprobate smiled affably.

"Sure, I remember you," he affirmed. "I mighty seldom forget a man." He came out from his place of office behind the counter and proffered his hand. It was not, like those of his henchmen, a calloused hand.

I had leisure to glance about the faces of the group as this colloquy occurred. They had been stolidly silent, gazing at us with unconcealed curiosity. When Weighborne introduced himself there was no overt display of interest, and yet unless I was allowing my imagination to run away with me I sensed from that moment forward that the lazy indolence of the atmosphere was electrified. The men lounged about in unchanged attitudes and from time to time spat on the hot stove, yet each of them was carefully appraising us.

"I reckon you gentlemen came up to look over this here coal and timber project?" Garvin's voice seemed to hold only a politely simulated interest in our affairs.

Weighborne nodded.

"Do you think, Judge, as a man in good position to gauge the sentiment of the people, that we shall have their sympathy in our efforts?"

I studied Garvin's face closely, but if there was a spark of interest in his eyes, my eyes could not detect it. He smiled noncommittally and shook his head.

"Well, now, as to that," he replied judicially, "I couldn't hardly say."

"We want to develop the coal and timber interests of the section," summarized Weighborne briefly. "It will mean railroad facilities, better schools and fuller enforcement of the law."

Garvin nodded in a fashion of reserved approval. There was no betrayed hint of his perfect understanding that it meant other things as well: an end of "Garvinism," a period to his baronial powers; the imminent danger which lurked for him in courts no longer afraid to try, and witnesses no longer terrified into perjury.

"That sounds purty promisin'," he agreed. "It sounds purty good."

"Then why would the people not coöperate?"

Garvin gave the question deliberate consideration.

"Well, now," he finally said, "that ain't such an easy question to answer just right off. The people hereabouts have been livin' purty much the same way fer nigh onto a hundred years. They're satisfied."

"Are they satisfied with a reign of terror?" Weighborne was treading the thin ice of local conditions. I fancied he was trying to force Garvin into committing himself, but it was a dangerous experiment.

"What's anybody terrified about?" inquired the Judge with entire blindness.

Weighborne, totally checkmated by this childlike query, changed ground and laughed.

"Oh, we hear a good deal of talk down below," he explained, "about the shot from the laurel and all that sort of thing."

Judge Garvin laughed heartily.

"Oh, pshaw!" he exclaimed in high good-humor. "There ain't nothin' in all that. Them newspapers down below's jest obliged to have somethin' to talk about. We're all neighbors up here. We're simple sort of folks. Sometimes we has our little arguments, but – " the lips still smiled genially; he paused and his voice was like a benediction as he went on – "but I hope we ain't got in no such serious fix that we needs regulatin' from outside. They do say that most of them fellers that got killed needed killin' pretty bad. I've lost two brothers, but I ain't kickin'."

Weighborne saw that a withdrawal from debate would be advisable, but that this withdrawal must not seem precipitate.

"However, as a matter of argument," he suggested, "is any man competent to decide that his enemy needs killing?"

The judge went into his trousers-pocket and produced a twist of tobacco into which he bit generously before replying.

"Well," he drawled, "your enemy's the man that's goin' to decide whether you need killin'. Why don't it work both ways?"

Weighborne made no reply. One cannot argue with a set opinion. The loungers were saying nothing, but their eyes dwelt admiringly on their spokesman. At last Garvin smilingly inquired:

"You'd have to condemn rights-of-way, I reckon?"

"Only where we couldn't make individual trades," answered my companion.

"That procedure ain't apt to be no ways popular," reflected Judge Garvin.

"You gentlemen understand I ain't criticisin'," he assured us when we made no reply. "If condemnation suits are brought in my co'te I ain't got no personal interests to serve. I'm jest namin' it to you, because you asked about the people's notions, that's all."

"At least," fenced Weighborne, "you yourself see the advantages of development?"

It was putting a question which was almost a challenge to this leader of the old, lawless order whose baronial power we threatened. He answered it with no flicker of visible interest in his pleasant drawl.

"Well, as to that, what little property I've got would be benefited, but as an officer of the law, I reckon it wouldn't hardly be proper for me to take no sides." A moment later he hospitably added, "If there's any courtesy I can show you gentlemen just call on me. Where are you goin' to stop at?"

I gazed on this lord of lies with compelled fascination. Under a crude exterior and a suavity which gave the impression of stupid good-nature he was masking bitter and intense feeling. Here was a tyrant talking with men who represented the new order and he knew as well as we that if we succeeded his carefully built scheme must topple. Our success and his could not both have life. One must perish. The power that had enriched him, a power built on murder and stealth, must go from him, leaving him only the contempt of his fellows – or he must thwart our designs. One might have expected such dissimulation in a polished diplomat moving the strategic pieces of the chessboard of some European power, but here it seemed inconceivable.

"We are on our way over to the Calloway Marcus place," explained my companion in a casual voice.

There was no change of expression on the face of the storekeeper, though the name was one he venomously hated. One or two of the more unguarded loungers scowled in silence.