The Tempering

It was then the voice of Boone sounded from the rear:

"Yes, hit him – I dare you, too!"

The officer wheeled, to see the tall and physically impressive figure of the mountain man standing the width of the sidewalk away. He held a pistol, not levelled but swinging at his side, and as if in silent testimony that it was not a mere plaything a thin wisp of smoke still eddied about its mouth and the acrid smell of burnt powder came insidiously out through the door.

Boone strolled forward.

"Mr. Wallifarro, get back in that car," he directed. "This blue-belly isn't going to trouble you."

"What the hell have you got to do with this?" bellowed the officer, but the club came down. "You are under arrest."

"Show me your warrant."

"I don't need no warrant."

The crowd, including those who had fled from the registration room, hung back in a yapping but hesitant circle. Blackjacking non-combatants had proven keen sport, but this fellow with the revolver in a hand that seemed used to revolvers, and a gleam in the eye that seemed to relish the situation, gave them pause.

Somewhat blankly the officer reiterated his pronunciamento. "I don't need no warrant."

"This gun says you need one," came the calm rejoinder. "You've got one yourself, and you can whistle up plenty of other harness bulls – all armed, but if you do I'll get you first. My name is Boone Wellver. Now, are you going to get that warrant or not?"

For an instant the policeman hesitated; then he conceded as though he had never contested the point.

"I ain't got no objection in the world to swearing out a warrant for you – since you've told me what your name is. But don't try to make no get-away till I come back."

"I'll be right here – when you come back."

The patrolman turned and walked away, and Boone wheeled briskly to the car.

"Now you gentlemen get out of this – and do a little warrant-swearing yourselves. Be over at Central Station in about forty-five minutes fixed to give bond for me. I reckon I'll be needing it."

Ten minutes later, with a spectacular clanging of gongs, a police patrol clattered up, scattering the crowd and disgorging a wagonload of officers headed by a lieutenant with a drawn pistol.

They handled Boone with unnecessary roughness as they nipped the handcuffs on his wrists and bundled him into the wagon, but he had expected that. It was their cheap revenge, and he gave them no satisfaction of complaint.

In the cage at Central Station into which they thrust him, with more violence, his companions were a drunken negro and one or two other "election offenders" like himself.

It was through the grating that he looked out a half hour later, to see Morgan Wallifarro standing outside.

"Father and the General are arranging bond," announced the visitor. "I wanted a word with you alone."

Boone's only response was an acquiescent nod.

"I lost my head last night, Wellver," Morgan went on shamefacedly. "I was a damned fool, of course, to imagine that I could bully you, and a cad as well. I lied when I intimated that you were – not anybody's equal. If I were you, I'd refuse to accept an apology, but at all events I've got to offer it – abjectly and humbly."

There was no place in the close-netted grating of that door through which a hand could be thrust, and Boone grinned boyishly as he said, "I accept your advice and refuse to shake hands with you – Wallifarro – until the door's opened."

Boone's pistol was held, of course, as evidence, but without it he went back to the registration booth, and as he took his seat the man of the debauched face looked up, with surprised eyes, from his book; but this time he volunteered no comment.

In the police court on the following morning both Boone and his arresting officer were presented, as defendants, and the officer's case was called first on the docket. Taking the stand in his own defence, the officer glibly testified that he had struck General Prince, of whose identity he had been unfortunately ignorant, because that gentleman had seemed to make a motion toward his hip pocket, but that he had, under much goading, refrained from striking Morgan Wallifarro.

"Why," purred the shyster who defended him, "did you so govern your temper under serious provocation?" And the unctuous reply was promptly and virtuously forthcoming: "Because police officers are ordered not to use no more force than what they have to."

General Prince smiled quietly, but Morgan fidgeted in his chair.

The police judge cleared his throat. "It appears obvious to the Court," he ruled, "that a man of General Prince's high character did not intend to threaten or hamper an officer in the proper performance of his sworn duty. But these gentlemen in the heat and passion of political fervour seem to have assumed – unintentionally, perhaps – a somewhat high-handed and domineering attitude. It would be manifestly unjust to exact of a mere patrolman a superior temperateness of judgment. Let the case be dismissed."

But when Boone was called to the dock, the magistrate eyed him severely not through, but over, his glasses, putting into that silent scrutiny the stern disapproval of a man looking down his nose.

"I find three charges against this defendant," he announced. "The first is shooting and wounding; the second, carrying concealed a deadly weapon, and the third, interference with an officer in the discharge of his duty."

The wounding of the flying squadron's leader was a matter for the future, since the victim of the bullet lay in a hospital, and that case had already been continued under a heavy bond. After hearing the evidence on the other accusations, the judge again cleared his throat.

"The 'pistol-toter' is a constant menace to the peace of the community, and there seems to be no doubt of guilt in the present case – but since the defendant has recently come from a section of the State which condones that offence, the Court is inclined to be lenient. The resistance to the officer was also a grave and inexcusable matter, but because of the character testimony given by General Prince and Colonel Wallifarro, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will, on my own motion, amend these charges to disorderly conduct. Mr. Clerk, enter a fine of $19 and a bond of $1,000 for a year."

Morgan Wallifarro was, at once, on his feet.

"May it please your Honour, such a punishment is either much too severe or much too lenient. I move, your Honour, to increase the fine."

"Motion overruled," came the laconic judgment. "Mr. Clerk, call the next case."

"Your Honour has fixed a punishment," protested Colonel Wallifarro's son with a deliberately challenging note in his voice, "which is the highest fine in your power to inflict without opening to us the door of appeal. Had you added one dollar, we could have carried it to the Circuit Court – and we believe that it was only for the purpose of denying us that right that you amended the charges. In the court of public opinion, before which even judges must stand judgment, I shall endeavour to make that unequivocally clear."

"Fine Mr. Wallifarro twenty dollars for contempt of Court!" This time the voice from the bench rasped truculently, forgetting its suavity. "And commit him to jail for twenty-four hours."

That evening Boone Wellver paid two calls behind the barred doors of the city prison. One was to Asa Gregory, who still languished there, and the other to the lawyer who had been willing to pay for his last word.

"I'm sorry you lashed out, Wallifarro," said Boone. "But I'd be willing to change places with you, for the satisfaction of having said it."

Morgan grinned with a strong show of white teeth.

"It's cheap at the price," he declared, "and as for lashing out, I haven't begun yet. From now on I'm going to work regularly at this contempt of court job, unless I can put some of these gentry behind bars or make them swim the river. I've hung back for a long while but now I've enlisted for the war."

As Judge McCabe had said, Morgan lacked the diplomatic touch.

CHAPTER XXVIII

One morning of frosty tang, that touched the pulses with its livening, found Boone's eyes and thoughts wandering discursively from the papers massed on his desk. His customary concentration had become a slack force, though these were days of pressing hours and insistent minutes in the Wallifarro offices. The reception room was crowded with waiting figures that savoured of the motley, and this was one of the new things brought to pass by the strange bedfellowship of politics. Yonder in a corner sat with fidgeting restiveness a young man whose eyes, despite his obvious youth, were mature in guile and pouched with that pasty ugliness with which unwholesome night life trade-marks its own.

He was one of that crew imported from elsewhere to register, re-register and vanish, but he had lingered, and now a grievance had sent him skulking to the enemy's camp with vengeance in his heart. In an interval of political inaction he had picked a pocket and had been locked up by a "harness bull" who had never liked him and who chose to disregard his present and special prerogative. In court he had been dismissed with an admonition, it is true, but his dignity was affronted. This morning he sat in the anteroom of Morgan Wallifarro, ready, in the inelegant but candid parlance of his ilk, to "spit up his guts."

Not far from him sat a woman whose profession was one of the most ancient and least revered. The vivid colouring of her lips and cheeks shone out through thickly laid powder in ghastly simulation of a coarse beauty long fled. "I lodged a good half-dozen of those beer-drinking loafers, though they roistered and drove away my respectable trade – and then the cops had the nerve to raid me," she inwardly lamented. Now she, too, sat among the informers.

Morgan had complained that reformers always failed through their dreamy impracticability. Now he was being as practical as the foes he sought to overthrow. From the dribble of small leaks come the breaks that wreck dams, and Morgan was neglecting none of them.

To Boone, whom he no longer quarantined behind a manner of aloofness, he had confided, "We have no illusions about the courts. Their judgments will bear the label of party, not justice; but when they turn us down I mean to make them do it in the face of a record that will damn them before the public."

So, together with gentlemen like General Prince and ministers of the Gospel bearing sworn narratives of police browbeating, came the backwash of the discontented riffraff: deserters who were willing to disclose their secrets to appease their various resentments.

Boone, who had played simple and direct politics in the backwoods, found himself in the midst of a more intricate version of the game – and into it he had thrown all the weight of his energies – until this morning.

Now, as he sat gazing out over roofs and chimney-pots, a messenger boy, impatient of anteroom delays, burst officiously into his office.

"Are you Mr. Morgan Wallifarro?" he demanded, scanning a label on the package he bore, and, as Boone shook his head, he heard Morgan's voice behind him: "I'm the man you're looking for."

Then as the younger Wallifarro took the package from the snub-nosed Mercury, he opened it, revealing a gold-knobbed riding crop. Once before that morning the young attorney had halted the all-but-congested tide of business to telephone to a florist, and through the open door Boone had heard the order given. Then Morgan had directed that violets and orchids be sent that evening to Miss Anne Masters. Presumably the riding crop was bound for the same destination.

"Anne's riding some of those Canadian hunters tonight at the Horse Show," was Morgan's casually put remark as he felt Boone's eyes upon him. "I thought she might like this."

It was the first time that Anne's name had passed conversationally between them since the evening when, in that same office, Morgan's pistol had clicked harmlessly, and upon each face fell a faint shadow of embarrassment. Then Wellver admitted, "It's a very handsome one," and the other passed on into his own office.

Already Boone had been thinking of those Canadian hunters. It was that which had lured his mind away from his littered desk and filled him with the spirit of truancy.

Tonight would see the opening of the Horse Show with the fanfare of its brass bands and the spreading of its peacock plumes of finery.

Following upon it, as musical numbers follow an overture, would come the dances for the débutantes, and Anne would be a débutante. In that far, tonight would be a sort of door closing against himself as one holding no membership in that circle whose edicts were written by Fashion. It was, however, of another phase of the matter that his present restiveness was born. Yesterday afternoon he had slipped into the emptiness of the Horse Show building for an inquisitive half hour, and had seen a hard bitten stable boy trying to rehearse a stubborn roan over the jumps.

The heavy white bars stretching between the wings of the hurdle had looked to him – thinking then, as now, of Anne – disquietingly formidable and full of bone-breaking possibilities. This morning she was to acquaint herself with her mounts. She might even now be at the hazardous business. Suddenly Boone pushed back his papers, locked the drawer of his desk, and took down his hat and overcoat. He was playing hookey.

Steps hurried by anxiety carried him to the building, where the great roof was festively draped with bunting and where the smell of tanbark came up fresh to the nostrils. A stretch of empty galleries and vacant tiers of boxes gave an impression of roofed vastness, and he searched the spacious arena, dotted here and there with knots of stable boys and blanketed horses, until he caught sight of Anne.

The mount to whose saddle she was at the moment being lifted was not reassuring to his mood. To its bit rings hung a stable boy by both hands, and the boy's dogged set of countenance bespoke hostile distrust for his charge, whose nostrils were distended and ember red. Boone noted, too, as he hurried across the tanbark, that one of the animal's eyes showed that wicked patch of white which bespeaks, for a horse, a lawless predilection. As the girl settled herself, the beast flinched and shivered, and the stable boy seemed about to be lifted clear of the earth where he hung, anchoring the splendidly shaped but vicious head.

Just then Boone came up and heard a fellow, whom he took to be a trainer, speaking near his elbow.

"There ain't no jump that will stop him. He can skim six foot like a swallow and cop every ribbon at the show – if he's a mind to. And if he ain't got a mind to, he'll just raise merry hell and tear up the place."

Then the groom cast loose, and the horse launched himself upward, plunging violently and lashing out with his fore-feet.

Boone halted and caught his breath with a nervous intake. He knew that Anne rarely and most reluctantly used a whip on a horse, and as he saw her lash fall twice, three times, with resolute sweeps that brought out welts upon the satin flanks, he realized that she had been warned upon what manner of horse she was to mount. It was a brief conflict of wills, then the red-nostrilled gelding came down to all fours and answered amenably to rein and bit. Round the arena he swept with the rhythm of his rapid gallop, breaking to a speedy dash as he neared the obstacles, rising upon a flawless and seemingly winged arc that skimmed the fences with swallow-like ease. Anne rode back flushed and triumphant, and as Boone came up, with breathing that was still quick, he heard the trainer voicing his commendation:

"You handled him like a professional, Miss Masters, and he takes a bit of handling, too. There ain't many ladies I'd be willin' to put up on him." Then the practical Canadian added, as Anne slid down and laid her gloved hand on the steaming neck: "He's a classy-looking individual, ain't he now? You'd never guess that I took him out of a plough, would you?"

"Out of a plough!" echoed the girl. "Why, he's a picture horse! His lines are almost perfect!"

The horseman nodded and grinned. "He's all of that, ma'am, but just the same when I first saw him he was pulling a plough – or, rather, he was trying to run away with one. Of course he must of had the breeding somewhere way off. I reckon he's a throw-back, but if I hadn't come along and seen him he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the hills. As it is, he's took blues and reds all through Canada and the East – and I've a notion you're going to ride him out the gate with a championship tie on his brow-band tonight."

As Boone turned away with Anne, the words seemed to ring in his ears: "If I hadn't come along and seen him, he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the hills." It fitted his own case precisely, but it made him think, too. He wondered if the time would ever come when people would look at him in public places and find it hard to realize that his youth had been like that magnificent show horse's colthood – a life close to the clods.

Nothing could have kept Boone Wellver away from the Horse Show that evening, but he went with a self-confessed trepidation hard to conceal. In the wide, barnlike foyer of the building, a vertigo of stage fright obsessed him. Never had he seen such a massed and bewilderingly colourful display of evening dress, nor heard such a confused chorus of bright laughter, light talk and blaring orchestration. In the first dizziness of the impression he had the sense of intruding on Fashion vaunting itself unabashed to the trumpetings of heralds, and there swept back over him the positive pain of diffidence which he had felt that other time, when he stood in the open doorway of Colonel Wallifarro's house and announced that he had come to the party.

Inside, as he forced himself onward, his disquiet increased as the blaze of colour heightened and bloomed in the flower-like tiers of the boxes. The glistening shoulders of women in filmy gowns, the sparkle of jewellery, the flash of silk hats and the nodding of pretty faces, all confused him as dry land things might confuse a fish, and he felt unintentionally impertinent when his sleeve of decent black brushed a soft arm white gloved to the shoulder.

Boone Wellver would have fled incontinently from that place had he not been held there by his anxiety for Anne, which would not be allayed until the ladies' hunters had been judged, the ribbons pinned on the fortunate head-stalls and the exit gates swung open and closed. And the jumping class, with its spectacular dash of danger, was held for the last, as the climax is held for the curtain of the act.

CHAPTER XXIX

But while Boone waited for Anne to come into the ring he made no assiduous search for her in the boxes, because, like many other men whose outward seeming is one of boldness, he was fettered by an inordinate shyness in this heavy atmosphere of the unaccustomed. Later Anne accused him of snubbing her. "You passed right by me a half dozen times," she teased with violet mischief shimmering in her eyes. "You wouldn't even look at me."

"I was plain scared," he made candid admission; "but when you went into the ring I looked at you every minute."

"You're jolly well right you did," she laughed. "You were glued to the rail, tramping down women and small children. Every time I came round I saw you there and your face haunted me like a spirit in purgatory. Your eyes were positively bulging with terror."

"That's what you get," Boone retorted calmly, "for making a chicken-hearted fellow fall in love with you. I had to hang 'round and wait. I could no more pursue you through the roses and diamonds than a cat could follow you into water."

The girl shook her head with a bewildered indulgence. "I can't understand it," she protested. "There is nothing to be frightened about."

The young mountaineer grinned sheepishly. "I reckon a lion-tamer would say the same thing," he asserted, "about going into the cage. He's used to it."

Anne sat silent for a few moments, and between her eyes came a tiny pucker, as if a thought tinged with pain had pricked, thornlike, into her reflections.

At last she spoke slowly: "Suppose you couldn't swim, and I had to spend a lot of time in deep water. Wouldn't you learn?"

"That's different," he assured her. "You might need me in that event."

"You say society frightens you, and it's a thing I can't understand. I could understand its boring you. It bores me. I love informal things. I love my friends and the door that stands open as it always does here, but I hate the dress parades. There's some sense in the Horse Show. It makes a market for expensively bred and trained animals, and it's a sort of fancy advertising; but I don't care for a human application of the same idea."

"I feel that way, too," he responded quickly, "and not being expensively bred or trained, I can't escape feeling like a cart horse would feel in that ring."

"I'm going to make my début, Boone," she said quietly. "I'm going to do it because both mother and Uncle Tom have their hearts set on it and there's no graciousness in stubborn resistance. There are times coming when I've got to stand out against them, and I don't want to multiply them needlessly. But there's something more than just ordinary dislike back of my feeling as I do about it all, and I think it's a thing you'd be the first to understand."

"I guess I ought to understand, Anne, but I've got so much to learn. Please make allowances for me and explain." His tone was humble and self-accusing.

"This début ball is just their way of putting me on the marriage market – duly labelled and proclaimed. I don't fancy being put up at auction, and it doesn't even seem quite honest. It's not a genuine offer of sale, because it's all fixed in their own minds. Morgan is to bid me in when the time comes."

Boone's face grew sombre, and his strong mouth line stiffened over his resolute chin.

"God knows that arrangement is going to come to grief," he said in a low voice that shook with feeling.

"Not if Lochinvar doesn't come to the party," she retorted with a swift change to the riffle of laughing eyes. "I'm letting sleeping dogs lie for the present, Boone, because it's the best way. There isn't any doubt of you in my heart. You know that, but it will be a long time before you can marry me. Meantime, – " the battle light shone for a flashing instant in her pupils – "I'm standing out for one thing. They've got to give you full acknowledgment. Everybody that accepts me must accept you – and unless you claim recognition, they won't do it."

Boone rose and came over. He took her hands in his own and looked down at her, and, though he smiled, his voice was full of worship.

"Lochinvar will come, dearest," he declared. "He'll come in full war-paint, and nobody but himself will know how stiff he's scared."

It was the morning after that that Boone sat again as a defendant in the police court, flanked by Morgan and the Colonel. He was on trial for shooting and wounding, and there had been broadly circulated hints that his prosecution would be gruelling enough to dissuade bold and adverse spirits on election day. Yet when the case was reached on the docket, Henry Simpson, whose finger was in every pie as a master pastry cook for the intrenched element, arose from his place at the right hand of the court's prosecutor and sonorously cleared his throat.

"May it please your Honour," he announced, with the rhetorical dignity of a Roman senator – or a criminal lawyer's idea of a Roman senator – "the prosecuting witness harbours no feeling of rancour in this affair, despite the injuries which he sustained. The defendant seems to have been led astray in the hot enthusiasm of his youth by older heads. Having no wish to punish a cat's-paw for the responsibility of his mentors, we move the dismissal of the accused."

"And we, your Honour," came the uptake of Morgan Wallifarro so swiftly as to leave no margin of pause between statement and retort, "insist upon a trial and a full vindication. This prosecuting witness who would now spread the benign mantle of charity over the conduct of his assailant, fell face foremost while leading an armed raid on a registration booth. I am prepared to prove that the wounded man who now sits there, an exemplar of Christian forgiveness, was spirited away, after his gang fled, and cared for in a private room at the City Hospital under the tender auspices of certain officials. I am further prepared to prove that the name which this municipal favourite now wears is, for him, a new one and that until recently he was known as Kid Repetto whose likeness and Bertillon measurements are preserved in the local rogues' gallery. The profession which he ornamented until the city hall cried out for his skilled aid was burglary and second-story work – "