The Tempering

The judicial gavel fell with an admonitory slam, and the magisterial jaws came warningly together.

"Mr. Wallifarro," declared the judge, "the court sustains the prosecution's motion of dismissal. Your unproven statements are highly improper in their innuendo of collusion by an officer of this court. You are seeking to try this case in the newspapers, sir," and Morgan, closing his portfolio, smiled his mocking admission of the charge. He had watched the busy pencils at the press table, and knew that some of them would blossom in flaring headlines. He had seen the cartoonist who had come to make a pencil sketch of Boone himself finish his task, and he enjoyed the judge's resentment. Now he turned away with the irritating jauntiness of one who has scored.

But that evening, at the Horse Show, Boone suffered the embarrassment of that flare-up of publicity which he felt was purely adventitious. Chance had made him a scrap in a pattern of ephemeral interest, and to him it seemed that one man in three carried an afternoon paper in his pocket with his own hasty albeit recognizable portrait starkly displayed to the public gaze. On faces which he did not know he caught smiles of amused recognition, and on one which he did know a glower of hate. That was the face of the policeman who had arrested him.

Some of the women in the boxes had him dragged before them for introduction, and he responded with a shyness that was cloaked under the reserve of his half-barbaric dignity.

Anne smiled, and a proprietary pride lurked in her expression.

"Anne looks as docile and amiable as a sweet child," sighed Mrs. Masters to Colonel Wallifarro, as he bade her good night that same evening, "but she's got Larry's British stubbornness in every fibre."

"Added," suggested the Colonel with a truant twinkle, "to the admirable resoluteness of our own family."

"She's absolutely set on having this young protégé of yours at her début ball, and I suppose you know what that signifies. It means that through her whole social career he'll be dangling along frightening off really eligible men!" The lady gave a well-bred little snort of disdain. "He's about as possible as a pet toad!"

The Colonel laughed.

"I'm afraid, my dear, that I like Anne the better for it. We've agreed that Morgan is your choice, and mine – and I don't think Morgan is going to be scared off. Besides, this young man is in my office."

"So is your office cat – if you have one," sniffed the anxious mother. "We're not sending the cat an invitation, you know."

"I have no cat," observed the lawyer with perfect gravity, and Mrs. Masters shrugged her shoulders with unconvinced resignation.

When the telephone on Boone's desk rang one afternoon he was quite alone there, and he took up the receiver, to hear Anne's voice. The conversation at first indicated no definite objective, but after a little the girl demanded:

"Boone, you are coming to my party – aren't you?"

For a moment the young man hung hesitantly on the question; then he said: "Anne, I'd go anywhere for the chance of seeing you, but you know 'I hain't nuver run a set in my life. My folks they don't hold hit ter be godly.'"

Her laughter tinkled back to him, but he had caught the underlying insistence of her tone, and he remembered what she had said about this ball: what it meant to her, and what his being there meant too.

"Take young Lochinvar for instance," he went on banteringly yet with a dubious touch in his voice. "It wasn't the first party of the season that he came to, was it? And even at the finish he was a little late. Maybe there was some delay in getting his coat of mail ready."

"Oh," the girl's exclamation was one of quick understanding. She knew something of Boone's financial pinch, and how he felt it a point of honour to stretch as far as possible the fund his patron had left him. "You mean – " she broke off, and the young mountaineer spoke bluntly,

"I mean I haven't a dress suit, and short of stealing one – "

"I understand," she declared, and began talking animatedly of other things, but when she had rung off Boone sat staring at an open law book and making nothing of its text. Then he heard a movement at his back and swung around in his swivel chair, but the next instant he was on his feet with an exclamation that was an outburst of joy.

There, standing just inside the door, tanned like saddle leather, somewhat grayer about the temples and sparer of figure than of old, but with the strong vigour of active months, stood Victor McCalloway.

"I think, my boy," he said, as though he had never been away at all, "we can run to a dress suit."

CHAPTER XXX

A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy windfall out of the unexpected.

Never had that other face and figure been far from his thoughts. Never had his ardent hero-worship waned or tarnished. His speculations and dreams had been haunted by misgivings bred of the fierce chances of war, chances which might make of the features, into which he now looked again, only a memory.

New and varied activities in his life had bulwarked him against actual brooding, and youth is too brightly hopeful to accept grim possibilities, unproven; but the mists of denied fear had hung undissolved, and there had been moments when they had thickened and congealed on the crystal of his thoughts to dark foreboding.

He had not known with what name or rank his beloved preceptor had been serving over there beyond the Pacific. Many officers had fallen, and McCalloway was not one to turn half aside from any danger. If he had been among the lost, Boone might never have known. Even his torture of mind over Asa had been free of this intolerable character of suspense. Now it was lifted, and without a forerunner of hint the man stood there before him in the flesh, smiling and talking of a dress suit!

"I can't believe it, sir," Boone stammered, and McCalloway's ruddy face became quizzical.

"Had you made up your mind to lose me, then?" he inquired.

Much they had in common at that moment of reunion, and one thing in antithesis. Boone thought of his lost race and was smitten with a pang of failure to report, but McCalloway was reading the clarity of bold and honest eyes: of a face to which it was given to wear the karat-mark of dauntlessness and integrity, and at the end of his gaze he gave an unuttered summary of what he had read: "Clean as a hound's tooth – and as strong."

"They beat me to a pulp down there, sir," Boone made prompt and rueful confession, "but there's time to tell about that later. I guess for a while I'm going to keep you busy declining to answer questions about yourself."

"There may be some uncensored passages," smiled the Scot. "I sha'n't have to walk in total darkness."

"The important question is already answered, sir. You are safely back. You were with Kuroki, weren't you?" There Boone halted and grinned as he added: "'Don't answer that thar question onlessen ye've a mind ter.'"

"I was with him for a time. Why do you ask?"

"Because," came the instant and confident response, "where he went there were the signs of genius."

"Genius went with Kuroki quite independently of his subordinates," McCalloway assured him gravely, "but a few moments back I heard you tell some one over the telephone that you couldn't come to her party because you had no evening clothes. The Russian war is over, but the matter of that dress suit retains the force of present crisis."

A half hour later, while the elder man displayed a sartorial knowledge which surprised him, Boone was being measured for his first evening clothes.

"For the Lord's sake, sir," he besought with sudden realization as they left the tailor's shop, "don't ever breathe a word about that spade-tail coat back there in Marlin. I'm going to run for the legislature next time, you know. The man that licked me before had patches on his pants."

McCalloway nodded his head. "I'll tell it not in Gath, speak it not in Ascalon," he promised. "That suit of clothes might prove your political shroud."

Boone saw Anne that evening and with a thrilling voice told her of McCalloway's return – but of the visit to the tailor he said nothing, and she refrained from reverting to the topic of the party.

Anne was sensitive on the point of an invitation urgently given and not eagerly accepted. That is what her consciousness registered, and she told herself that it was petulant and unworthy to attach so much importance to a minor disappointment. But without full realization, other and graver thought elements hung with ponderous weight from the peg of that lesser circumstance. Boone's inability to buy a dress suit was a measure of his poverty and of the great undertaking which lay ahead of him; of the length and steepness of the road he must travel before he could come to her and say, "I have made a home for you."

She herself was to be presented to society with expensive display, and her pride shivered fastidiously at the realization that all this outlay came from a purse not their own, and entailed an undeclared obligation. She had never been told just how far she and her mother depended on the Colonel's bounty. That had been carefully left enveloped in a hazy indefiniteness that revealed no sharp or embarrassing angle of detail. Had she known it all, her shiver of distaste would have been a shudder of chagrin. But Anne was enough in love with Boone to feel that by his absence from her social launching the sparkle of her little personal triumph would be dulled.

But when at last she stood in her receiving line, radiant in her young loveliness, she glanced up and her violet eyes took on a sudden sparkle, while her cheeks flushed with surprised pleasure, for there, making his way through the door, came Boone.

He came with his stage fright as invisible as the secrets of Bluebeard's closet, so that even Mrs. Masters, looking up with equal surprise though not an equal delight, admitted that in appearance, at least, he was no liability to her company of guests.

The clothes that Victor McCalloway had supervised were tailored as they should have been, with every requisite of conservative elegance, and they set off a figure of a man well sculptured of line and proportion.

As he took Anne's hand he said in a lowered voice and with a twinkle in his eyes, "I came in through the front door – but there wasn't any arch. My legs are shaking."

Anne glanced down. "They are doing it very quietly," she reassured. "No fuss at all."

Because of a straight-eyed sincerity and a candid vigour which endowed him with a forcefulness beyond his years, and because a certain deliberate humour played in his eyes and flashed occasionally into his ungarrulous speech, he found himself smiled upon with the tolerant approval of the older ladies and the point-blank delight of the younger.

Back at his desk the next morning he was again the grave-eyed and industrious young utility man, but in his breast pocket was a crumpled rosebud which to him still had fragrant life. In his mind were certain rich memories and in his veins raced hot currents of love – pitched to a new exhilaration.

Victor McCalloway had become again the lone man of the mountains, and Boone burned with anxiety to go to him there, but the soldier had prohibited that just now. The boy had put his hand to the plough of a virulent city campaign, and until the furrow was turned he must stay there with the men who were making the fight.

"For you, my boy," he had declared, with a live interest that ran to emphasis, "this is an opportunity not to be missed. It is a phase of transition, not only in your own development but in that of your State and your country. Through all of it sounds the insistent message of the future: whoever takes into his hands public affairs must give to the public a conscientious accounting. This is a declaration of war on the old, slothfully accepted dogma that to the victor belongs the spoils. It is Humanity's plea for a place in government."

When McCalloway had gone, Boone carried into the steps and developments of that autumn's activities a freshly galvanized sense of romance and of high adventure. Through the labour of each day thrilled the thought of Anne, and the quiet triumph of being no longer "poor white trash."

In the forces of the political enemy clinging doggedly to the spoils of long possession and sticking at no desperate effort, the boy discovered much that was not mean – rather was it picturesque with a sort of Robin Hood flavour and the drama of a passing order. Here were the twentieth-century counterparts of the gentlemen-gamblers of the old Mississippi steamboat days, a gentry bold and mendacious, unable to perceive that what had been must not for that reason continue to be.

Often Boone went to hear Morgan delivering his philippics to street corner audiences, and often too he dropped around inconspicuously to listen as that administration orator popularly called "The Bull" exhorted "the pure in heart." He liked the extremes between the edged satire and nervous force of the young lawyer whose dress and appearance was always point-device, and whose message was always "Carthago delenda est," and the great sonorous voice of the rougher man who knew the hearts of the mob and how to reach them.

At the end of a white-hot campaign came an election day that eclipsed in violence the period of registration, and out of its confusion emerged, as bruised victors, the forces of the city hall.

But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens attended mass meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings, the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with the confidence reposed in him – and the older with a quiet light of satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed.

"How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country has followed?"

Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about caught up with the Mexican War."

After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went reflectively on again:

"Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us – in your own time. You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere; as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man, like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation cannot – and I still feel that when that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of the peace dove but belched from the mouths of guns – riding the gales of war."

CHAPTER XXXI

Boone Wellver walked into the office of the police chief one spring morning when the trees along the streets were youthfully green. Somewhere outside a band, parading with transparencies, was summoning all horse-lovers and devotees of chance to the track and paddocks of Churchill Downs.

Inside the office of the chief sat Morgan Wallifarro, point-device as ever, and over his desk the chief bent, listening with an attitude of deference to what he said. It was a new department head who occupied that swivel chair. New officials occupied every office under that clock-towered roof, and behind each placarded door the suggestions of Morgan Wallifarro held some degree of authoritative force and sanction.

For almost two years the courts had laboured to the grind of the contest cases. Again, shoulder to shoulder with the Nestors of the bar and their younger assistants, Boone had played his minor but far from trivial part. Almost a year before he had listened in the joint sessions room as the decisive utterances of the two chancellors fell upon a taut and expectant stillness. Those arbiters had read long and learned disquisitions as befitted the final chapter to months of hearings. That day had been a Waterloo for attempted Reform. With dignity of manner and legalistic verbiage Boone had heard it adjudged that behind the physical results of the elections the interference of the courts might not penetrate, and he had turned away disheartened but not surprised.

Then had come a new beginning; the final issue in the Court of Appeals, and finally out of that ultimate mill had been ground a reversal and a decision that upon a government seated by such devious and fraudulent methods the cloak of responsibility rested "like the mantle of a giant upon the withered shoulders of a pigmy."

Now as Boone shook hands with the new chief, a patrolman entered the place and stood silently on the threshold. In his eyes was the sullen but unaggressive resentment of the whipped bully. This was the officer who had brandished a club over Morgan Wallifarro's head and who had dragged Boone out of the registration booth under arrest. Gone now was his domineering truculence, gone all but the smouldering of his old, self-confident ferocity. Morgan glanced up without comment, and the chief recognized the new arrival with a curt nod.

"Keefe," he said shortly, "you were under grave charges and failed to appear before the Board of Safety at the designated time."

The uniformed man glowered around the room. One vestige of satisfaction remained to him; that of a truculent exit and of it he meant to avail himself.

"What the hell was the use, Chief. I knew they'd railroad me. I quit right now."

"It's too late. You can't quit!" The words were sharp and incisive, and under the chief's forefinger an electric buzzer rasped. As an orderly appeared, his direction was snapped out: "Call in the lieutenants and captains from the officers' room."

Keefe took a step forward as if in protest, then realizing his helplessness, he halted and stood on braced legs, breathing heavily.

He foresaw what was coming, yet there was no escape, for the hour had struck. He listened stolidly to the ticking clock until several officers in shoulder straps trooped in and lined up, also waiting, then his superior's voice again sounded:

"Keefe, your club!"

The officer laid it on the desk.

"Your revolver." The weapon followed the night-stick. Then the chief rose from his seat.

"You have failed to meet the charges preferred against you. You have used the city's uniform as a protection for law-breaking and violence. Now in the presence of these officers I publicly break you." He ripped the shield from the patrolman's breast and the disgraced man stood a moment unsteadily – almost rocking on his feet as his lips stirred without articulate sound. Then he turned away. His lowering eyes fell upon Morgan Wallifarro, who sat without a word or a change of expression in his chair against the wainscoted wall. For an instant the patrolman seemed on the point of bursting into a valedictory of abuse – even of attack – but he thought better of it, and as he went out there was a shamble in the step that had swaggered.

Colonel Wallifarro's country place had been opened for the summer, and a series of house parties were to follow in Anne's honour, but as yet the season was young and, except for Boone, Victor McCalloway was the family's only guest.

One evening near to sunset the soldier was sitting alone with Anne under the spread of tall pines that swayed and whispered in the light breeze. Before them, graciously undulating to the white turnpike a quarter of a mile distant, went the woodland pasture where the bluegrass lay dappled with the shadows of oak and walnut. It was a land of richness and tranquil charm: the first reward of the pioneers in their great nation-building adventure beyond the unknown ranges. McCalloway's eyes were full of appreciation. They dwelt lingeringly on blooded mares nibbling at rich pasturage, with royally sired foals nuzzling at their sleek flanks. Filling in the distance of a picture that seemed to sing under a singing sky, were acres of wheat waving greenly and of the young hemp's plumed billowing: of woodland stretches free of rock or underbrush. In the branches of the pines a red cardinal flitted, and from a maple flashed the orange and black gorgeousness of a Baltimore oriole. Then the man's eyes came back to the girl.

The figure in its simple summer dress was gracefully lissome. The features, chiseled to a pattern of high-bred delicacy, were yet instinct with strength. As Boone was the exponent of the hills of hardship, which had been the barriers the pioneers had to conquer, so, he thought, was she the flower of that nurture that had bloomed in the places of their victory.

Just now the violet eyes were brimming with grave thoughtfulness, like the shadow of a cloud upon living colour. When McCalloway looked at those eyes he recalled the water in the Blue Grotto, whose scrap of vividness transcends all the other high-keyed colour of Naples Bay – Naples Bay, which is itself a saturnalia of colour!

Without doubt his protégé had set his heart on a patrician – but at the moment there was more wistfulness than joyousness in her face, causing the subtle curvature of her lips to droop where so often a smile flashed its brightness.

"Anne," he slowly asked, "would it be impertinence for an old fellow to question that look of dream – almost of anxiety – that seems an alien expression on your face?"

The preoccupation vanished, and she turned her smile upon him.

"Was I looking as dismal as all that?" she demanded. "I guess it was the unaccustomed strain of thinking."

"You remind me," he went on thoughtfully, "of a woman I once thought – and I have never changed my mind – the most charming in Europe. Of course that means no more nor less than that I loved her."

Anne flushed at the compliment and, quickly searching the gray eyes for a quizzical twinkle, found them entirely grave.

"How do I remind you of her, Mr. McCalloway?" The question was put gently.

"I've been asking myself that question, and an exact answer eludes me." He paused a moment, then went soberly on: "Your hair is a disputed frontier, where brown and gold contend for dominion, and hers is midnight black. Your eyes are violet and hers are dark, flecked, in certain lights, with amber. Your colour is that of an old-fashioned rose garden – and hers that of a poppy field."

"It must be only by contrast, then, that I make you think of her," mused the girl. "We are absolute opposites."

"In detail, yes; in essentials, no," protested the man who was old enough to compliment boldly and directly. "You share the quality of goodness, but in itself that's as requisite to character and as externally uninteresting as bones in a body. You share a rarer gift, too. It's not so essential, but it crowns and enthrones its possessor and is life's rarest gift: pure charm. Relative charm we find now and again, but sheer, unalloyed charm is a flower that blooms only under the blue moon of magic."

The pinkness of Anne's cheeks grew deeper.

"Where is she now, sir?"

"For many years she has been where magic is the common law: in Paradise."

"Oh, forgive me. You spoke of her – "

"In the present tense," interrupted the soldier. "Yes, I always do. It is so that I think of her." He broke off, then went on in a changed voice, "But the gravity in eyes that laugh by divine right calls for explanation."

For an instant a tiny line of trouble showed between her brows, and the seriousness returned.

"I think perhaps, Mr. McCalloway, you are the one person I can tell." She paused as though trying to marshal the sequences of a difficult subject, then spoke impulsively:

"Boone doesn't realize it," she said slowly. "I don't want him to know, because there's nothing he can do about it – yet. Since I made my début – and that was almost three years ago – I've been under a pressure that's never relaxed. It hasn't been the sort of coercion one can openly fight, but the harder, more insidious thing. It's in mother's eyes – in everything – the unspoken accusation that I'm an ingrate: that I'm selfishly thinking only of myself and not at all of my family."