The Tempering

Once more the red spots swam before Boone Wellver's eyes, but for a hard-held moment he kept his lips tight drawn. There was a tense silence as men held their breath, waiting to see if the old Gregory spirit had become so tamed as to endure in silence that damning implication; but before Blair had begun again Boone was confronting him with dangerously narrow eyes, and their faces inches apart.

Blair was a short, powerfully built man with sandy hair and a red jowl swelling from a bull-like neck. Standing on the step below, Boone's eyes were level with his own.

"Either tell these men what you mean," commanded the younger candidate in a voice that carried its ominous level to the farthest fringe of the small crowd, "or else tell 'em you lied! Wherein have I been disloyal to my blood?"

"You'll hav yore chancet ter talk when I gits through here," bellowed Blair. "Meanwhile, don't break in on me."

"Tell 'em what you mean – or take it back – or fight," repeated Boone, with the same fierce quietness.

It was no longer possible to ignore the peremptory challenge, and the speaker was forced into the open. But he was also enraged beyond sanity and he shouted out to the crowd over the shoulders of the figure that confronted him, "Ef he fo'ces me ter name ther woman I'll do hit. Hit's – "

But the name was never uttered. With a lashing out that employed every ounce of his weight and strength, Boone literally mashed the voice to silence, and sent the speaker bloody-mouthed down the several steps into the dust of the square.

Despite his middle-aged bulk, Jim Blair had lost none of his catlike activity, and while the more timid members of the crowd, in anticipation of gunplay, hastily sought cover or threw themselves prone to the ground, he came to his feet with a revolver ready-drawn and fired point-blank. But, just as of two lightning bolts, one may have a shade more speed than the other, so Boone was quicker than Jim. He struck up the murderous hand, and the two candidates grappled. An instant later, Boone stood once more over a prostrate figure, that was this time slower in recovering its feet. Wellver broke the pistol and emptied it of its cartridges, then contemptuously he threw it down beside its owner in the dust of the court house yard.

But as he turned, Tom Carr was standing motionless at arm's length away, and Boone was looking into Tom's levelled revolver.

"Ye hain't quite done with this matter yet," snarled that partisan, as his eyes snapped malignantly. "Ye've still got me ter reckon with. Throw up them hands, afore I kills ye!"

Boone did not throw them up. Instead, he crossed them on his breast and remained looking steadily into the passionate face of the black-haired leader of Asa's enemies.

"Shoot when you get ready, Tom; I haven't got a gun on me," he said calmly. "But if you shoot – you'll be breaking the truce – that you pledged your men to, when you and Asa shook hands. If the war breaks out afresh, today, it will be your doing." Other hands now were fondling weapons out there in front of the two; men who were mixed between Gregory and Carr sympathies and who were rapidly filtering themselves out of a conglomerate mass into two sharply defined groups.

"Hain't ye a'ready done bust thet truce – jest now?" demanded Tom, and Boone shook his head.

Again there was a purposeful ring in his voice.

"No, by God – I handled a liar – like he ought to be handled – and if there are any Gregories out there that wouldn't do the same – I hope they'll line up with you!"

CHAPTER XXIV

Slowly and grudgingly Tom sheathed his weapon. He knew that to fire on an unarmed man in the tensely overwrought gathering would mean wholesale blood-letting. Black looks told of a tempest brewing; so, with a surly nod, he stepped back and helped Jim Blair to his place again. Blair, dust covered and bruised, with a dribble of blood still trickling from his mashed lip, made an effort to complete his speech which ended in anticlimax. To Boone he said nothing more, and to the interrupted subject he gave no further mention.

That episode had rather strengthened than hurt Wellver's prospects, and he would have gone away somewhat appeased of temper had he not met Cyrus Spradling face-to-face in the court house yard, and halted, with a mistaken impulse of courtesy, to speak to him.

But the old friend, who had become the new enemy, looked him balefully in the eye and to the words of civil greeting gave back a bitter response: "I don't want ye ter speak ter me – never ergin," he declared. "But I'm glad I met up with ye this oncet, though. I promised ye my vote one day – an' I'm not a man thet breaks a pledge. I kain't vote fer ye, now, with a clean conscience, though, and I wants ye ter give me back thet promise."

Boone knew without delusion that this public repudiation of him by the neighbour who had expected to be his father-in-law had sealed his doom. He knew that all men would reason, as he had done, that Cyrus would give no corroboration to belittling gossip concerning his daughter, unless the wound were deep beyond healing and the resentment righteous beyond concealment.

"Of course," responded the young candidate gravely, "I give back your promise. I don't want any vote that isn't a willing one." But he mounted his horse with a sickened heart, and it was no surprise to him, when the results of the primaries were tallied, to find that he was not only a beaten man but so badly beaten that, as one commiserating friend mournfully observed to him, "Ye mout jest as well hev run on ther demmycrat ticket."

Boone went back to McCalloway's house that afternoon and sat uncomforted for hours before the dead hearth.

His eyes went to the closet wherein was locked the sword which Victor McCalloway had entrusted to his keeping, but he did not take it out. In the black dejection of his mood he seemed to himself to have no business with a blade that gallant hands had wielded. He could see only that he had messed things and proven recreant to the strong faith of a chivalrous gentleman and the love of two girls.

On the mantle-shelf was a small bust of Napoleon Bonaparte in marble – the trifle that Anne had brought across the "ocean-sea" to be an altar-effigy in his conquest of life! Boone looked at it, and laughed bitterly.

"That's my pattern – Napoleon!" he said, under his breath. "I'm a right fine and handsome imitation of him. The first fight I get into is my Waterloo!"

He met Happy in the road a few days later, and she stopped to say that she was sorry. She had heard, of course, of how decisively he had been beaten, but he drew a tepid solace from reading in her eyes that she did not know the part her father had played in his undoing. He hoped that she would never learn of it.

It was early in September when Boone set the log house in order, nailed up its windows and put a padlock on the door. He carried the key over to Aunt Judy's, and then on his return he sat silently on the fence gazing at its square front for a long while in the twilight.

Before him lay new battles in the first large city he had yet seen – a city which until now he had seen only once when he went there to visit its jail. But his preternaturally solemn face at length brightened. Anne was there, and Colonel Wallifarro had said, "A warm welcome awaits you."

In due course Boone presented himself at the office door in Louisville with the three names etched upon its frosted glass, and was conducted by a somewhat supercilious attendant to the Colonel's sanctum.

The Colonel came promptly from his chair with an outstretched hand.

"Well, my boy," he exclaimed heartily, "I'm right glad to see you."

Morgan sat across the desk from his father. Some matter of consultation had brought him there, and the fact that the Colonel had permitted young Wellver's arrival to interrupt it annoyed him.

"So you lost your race up there, didn't you?" Colonel Wallifarro laughed. "I wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. After all, it's not the only campaign you'll ever make."

But the eyes of the young mountaineer held the sombreness of his humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he said. "I hate to have to tell him – that the first fight I ever went into was a – Waterloo."

"Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your Austerlitz later – but I know General Prince will want to see you." The lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office."

As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne – Miss Masters?"

At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin."

"Yes, sir, I'll miss her."

So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.

The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer example of the Old South – which was now the New South as well; but one friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange world of its loneliness.

At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize – only the bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and others – that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to conceal – until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.

He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and manners.

Morgan was consistently polite – but it was a detached politeness which often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat. Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated people – though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness. As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as "the conduct of a gentleman reduced to its simplest and most natural terms."

But for the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed men who should, they were assured, if life stood on all fours with justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary existence of unalleviated obscurity.

But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window and a gas jet.

The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and out.

At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked.

Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books.

So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster, Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his "Lives of the Caesars," with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch, Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling.

Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance. But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief.

As the train took him back through flat beargrass and swelling bluegrass, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first log booms in the rivers – his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before.

Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the assurance of a courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself before he crossed the stile.

To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friendship which, on one side, had been love.

"It's Boone Wellver. Can I come in?" he shouted from the road, and Cyrus, who looked aged and hunched his shoulders more dejectedly than of old, rose slowly from his hickory-withed chair on the porch and stood upright.

At first he did not speak. Indeed, he did not speak at all until he had come with deliberate steps down to the stile, where he faced the visitor across the boundary fence, as a defending force might parley over a frontier. Then raising a long arm and a pointed finger down the road, he spoke the one word, "Begone!"

"I came to see Happy," said the visitor steadily. "I don't think she is nursing any grudge."

"No," the old fellow's eyes flashed dangerously; "women folks kin be too damn fergivin', I reckon. Hit war because she exacted a pledge from me to keep hands off thet I ever let matters slide in ther first place. I don't know what come ter pass. She hain't nuver told me – but I knows you broke her heart some fashion. Many a mountain war has done been started fer less."

Boone straightened a little and his chin came up, but still there was no resentment in his voice:

"Then I can't see your daughter – at your house? Will you tell her that I sought to?"

In a hard voice Cyrus answered: "No – ef she war hyar I wouldn't give her no message from ye whatsoever – but since she ain't hyar thet don't make no great differ."

"Where is she?"

"Thet's her business – and mine. Hit hain't none o' yourn – . An' now, begone!"

Boone turned on his heel and strode away, but it was only from other neighbours that he learned that a second school, similar to the one which the girl herself had attended, was being started some forty miles away in a district that had heard of the first, and had sent out the cry, "Come over into Macedonia and help us!"

To that school Happy had gone – this time as a teacher of the younger children.

But before the summer ended Anne came to Marlin Town, and though she had been at an Eastern college Boone found no change in her save that her beauty seemed more radiant and her graciousness more winning. He had been a trifle afraid of meeting her, this time, because he felt more keenly than in the past how many allowances her indulgence must make for his crudities.

But Anne knew many men who had the superficial qualities that Boone coveted – and little else. What she did see in her old playmate was a fellow superbly fitted for companionship out under the broad skies, and, above all, she loved the open places and the freedom of the hills where the eagles nested in their high eyries.

"I love it all," she exclaimed one day, with an outsweep of her arms. "I believe that somewhere back in my family tree there must have been an unaccounted-for gipsy. I've not been here so very much, and yet I always think of coming here as of going home."

"God never made any other country just like it, I reckon," Boone answered gravely. "It's fierce and lawless, but it's honest and generous, too. Men kill here, but they don't steal. They are poor, but they never turn the stranger away. It's strange, though, that you should love it so. It's very different from all you've known down there."

"I guess there's a wild streak in me, too," she laughed. "Those virtues you speak of are the ones I like best. When I go home I feel like a canary hopping back into its cage, after a little freedom."

CHAPTER XXV

When he went back to Louisville, early in September, Boone found the office of Colonel Wallifarro humming with a suppressed excitement, tinctured with indignation. A municipal campaign was on, and on the day of his arrival General Prince and Colonel Wallifarro were deep in its discussion. Seeing the earnest gleam in their eyes, Boone wondered a little at the contrasting indifference in Morgan's manner whenever the political topic was broached. He fancied that the Colonel himself was disappointed, and one morning that gentleman said with a tone as nearly bordering on rebuke as Boone had ever heard him employ with his son, "Morgan, I don't understand how you can remain so unmoved by a situation which makes an imperative demand upon a man's sense of citizenship."

Morgan laughed. "Father," he said easily, "it is law that interests me – not politics. Take it all in all, I don't think it's a very clean business."

The elder man studied his son thoughtfully for a space, and then he said quietly, "General Prince and myself take a different view. We think that at certain times – like the present – citizenship may mean a call to the colours… A failure to respond to such a summons seems to me a surrender of civil affairs into the hands of avowed despoilers – it seems almost desertion."

"And yet, sir," smiled the unruffled Morgan, "we rarely see permanent reforms result from crusading patriots. The ward heelers are usually the victors, because professionals have the advantage of amateurs."

That same evening Boone stood in a small downtown hall, crowded to the doors, and heard Colonel Wallifarro lay the stinging lash of denunciation across the shoulders of the city hall oligarchy. He heard him charge the police and the fire departments with fostering a perpetuation of machine abuses in the hands of machine hirelings – of maintaining a government by intimidation and force, and he too wondered how, if these charges were tinctured with any colour of truth, a free-hearted man could stand aside from the combat. He knew too that Colonel Wallifarro did not indulge in unconsidered libels.

At the door, when the sweltering meeting ended, he noticed close behind him a man talking to a policeman.

"These here silk-stocking guys buttin' in gives me a pain," announced that heated critic. "They spill out an earful of this Sunday-school guff before election day, but when the strong-arm boys get busy they fade away – believe me, the poor boobs fade out!"

"They ain't practical," agreed the patrolman judicially, and Boone made a mental note of his badge number. "They think one and one make two – but we know that if you fix a couple of ones right it's just as easy to make an eleven with 'em."

Boone and Anne had gone horseback riding one afternoon that September, and it was a different sort of excursion from those that they had taken together in the mountains.

The boy was mounted on Colonel Wallifarro's saddle mare, and the girl on a high-headed four-year-old from the same stable. They were not picking their way now through tangled trails that led upward, but were cantering along the level speedway toward the park set on a hill five miles south of the city. There, at the fringe of a line of knobs, was the only approach to be found in this table-flat land to the heights which they both loved.

These hills were only little brothers to the loftier peaks of the Cumberlands – but the air was full of Indian summer softness, and the horses under them were full of mettle – and they themselves were in love.

"Boone," demanded the girl, drawing down to a sedate pace, after a brisk gallop that had lathered the flanks and withers of their mounts, "what is it that interests you so in this campaign? You can't even vote here, can you?"

The young man shook his head, and now the smile of humour which had once been rare upon his face flashed there – because he had reached a point where his development was beginning to take some account of perspectives and balances.

"No, I can't vote here – but I can get as bitter over their fights as if they were my own. I couldn't explain why I'm interested any more than a hound could tell why he wants to run with the pack. It's just that the game calls a man."

"Morgan calls politics the sport of the great unwashed," observed Anne. "He says it gives the lower class a substitute for mental activity and demagogues a chance to exploit them."

"Does he?" inquired Boone drily.

"Boone" – Anne's eyes filled suddenly with a grave anxiety – "aren't you really working so hard about all this business – because Uncle Tom is so deeply involved in it and because you think he's in some danger?"

Boone leaned forward to right a twisted martingale, and when he straightened up he answered slowly: "I suppose any prominent man in a hard fight may be in – some danger, but he doesn't seem to take it very seriously."

"Why," she demanded, "can't men oppose each other in politics without getting rabid about it?"

"They can – when it's just politics. This is more than that, according to the way we feel about it."

"Why?"

"Because we charge that the city hall is in the hands of plunderers and that for tribute they give criminals a free hand in preying on the citizens."

"And yet," demurred the girl, with puzzled brow, "men like Judge McCabe laugh at all this 'reform hysteria,' as they call it. They aren't criminals."

Boone nodded. "There are good men in the city hall, too, but they belong to the old system that puts the party label above everything else."

They reached the brow of the hill and stood, their horses breathing heavily from the climb, looking off across the country where on the far side other knobs went trooping away to meet the sky.

The bridles hung loose, and the girl sat looking off over leagues of landscape with grave eyes, while Boone of course looked at her. The beauty of the green earth and blue sky was to his adoration only a background for her nearer beauty.

The boy, as he gazed at the delicate modelling of her brow and chin, wondered what was going on in her thoughts, for there was a wistful droop at the corner of her lips; yet presently, even while it lingered there, a twinkle riffled in her eyes.

"I ought to be all wrought up, I suppose, over this crusade on wickedness," she announced, though with no sense of guilt in her voice, "and yet if it weren't for my friends being in it, I doubt whether it would mean much to me – . I've got too much politics of my own to worry about."

"Politics of your own?" he questioned. "Why, Anne, your monarchy is absolute; there isn't a voice of anarchy or rebellion anywhere in your gracious majesty's realm – and your realm is your whole world."

Boone, the bluntly direct of speech, was coming on in the less straitened domain of the figurative. Anne was teaching him the bright lessons of gaiety.

She laughed and drew back her shoulders with a mock hauteur. "Our Viceroy from the Mountain Dominions flatters us. We have, however, the Mother Dowager – and we approach the age for a suitable alliance."

The two horses were standing so close together that the riders were almost knee to knee, and just then they had the hilltop to themselves. The humorous smile that had been on the lips of the young mountaineer vanished as characters on a slate are obliterated under a sponge. His cheeks, still bronzed from a mountain summer, went suddenly pale – and he found nothing to say. What was there to say, he reflected? When the mentor of a man's common sense has forewarned him that he is being shadowed by an inevitable spectre, and when that spectre steps suddenly out into his path, he should not be astonished. Boone only sat there with features branded under the shock of suffering. His fine young shoulders, all at once, seemed to lose something of their straight vigour and to grow tired. His palms rested inertly on his saddle pommel.

But the girl leaned impulsively forward and laid one of her gloved hands over his. Her voice was a caress – touched with only a pardonable trace of reproach.

"Do you doubt me, dear?" she asked. "In those politics that you are playing, I don't see anybody giving up – because there is opposition ahead."

Then the momentary despair altered in his manner to a grim expression of determination.

"Forgive me, Anne," he begged. "It's not that I doubt you – or ever could doubt you; but I know right well what a big word 'suitable' is in your mother's whole plan of life."