The sense of having stepped back into an older century had been growing on John Spurrier ever since he had turned away from the town of Waterfall, and now it possessed him with a singular fascination.

Here was a different world, somber under its shadow of frugality, and breathing out the heavy atmosphere of isolation. The spirit of this strange life looked out from the wearied eyes of d.y.k.e Cappeze as he sat filling his pipe across the hearth, a little later, and it sounded in his voice when he announced slowly:

"It's not for me to withhold hospitality in a land where a ready welcome is about all we have to offer, and yet you could hardly have picked a worse house to come to between the Virginia border and the Kaintuck ridges."

Spurrier raised his brows interrogatively, and at the same moment he noticed matters. .h.i.therto overlooked. The windows were heavily shuttered and his host sat beyond the line of vision from the open door--with a rifle leaning an arm's length away.

"Coming as a stranger," continued Cappeze, "you start without enmities--with a clean page. You might spend your life here and find a sincere welcome everywhere--so long as you avoided other men's controversies. But you come to me and that, sir, is a bad beginning--a very bad beginning."

A contemplative cloud of smoke went up from the pipe, and the voice finished in a tone of bitterness.

"I'm the most hated man in this region where hatreds grow like weeds."

"You mean because you have stood out for the enforcement of law?"

The other nodded, "It has taken me a lifetime," he observed, "to learn that the mountains are stronger, if not more obstinate, than I."

"Is that the only reason they hate you?" inquired the visitor, and the lawyer, removing the pipe stem from his teeth, regarded him for a s.p.a.ce in silence. Then he commented quietly:

"If you knew this country better, you wouldn't have to ask that question. In Athens, I believe, they ostracized Aristides because he was 'too just a man.'"

"Nonetheless, I'm glad I came to you."

Cappeze smiled gravely. He had a rude sort of dignity which Spurrier found beguiling; a politeness that sprang from a deeper rooting than mere formula.

"Merely coming to see me--once in a while--won't d.a.m.n you, I reckon. A man has a license to be interested in freaks. But take my advice, and I sha'n't be offended. Tell every one that you hold no brief for me and listen with an open mind when they blackguard me."

Spurrier laughed. "In a place where a.s.sa.s.sination is said to come cheap, you have at least been able to take care of yourself, sir."

"That," said the other slowly, "is as it happens. My partner was less lucky. My own luck may break some day."

"And yet you go on living here when you'd be safe enough anywhere else."

"Yes, I go on living here. It's a land where a man's mind starves and where the great marching song of the world's progress is silent--and yet----" Again he paused to draw in and exhale a cloud of pipe smoke.

"Yet there's something in the winds that blow here, in the air one breathes, that 'is native to my blood.' Elsewhere I should be miserable, sir, and my daughter----"

He came to an abrupt stop and Spurrier took him up quickly. "She seems young and vital enough to crave all of life's variety."

"But she is contented, sir." The elderly man spoke eagerly as though to convince himself and quiet troubling doubts. "She, too, would rather be here. We know this life and take it as we find it."

Spurrier felt that the conversation was tending into channels too personal for the partic.i.p.ation of a chance acquaintance, and he guided it to a less intimate subject.

"I understand, Mr. Cappeze, that in the campaign just ended, you stumped this district whole-heartedly in behalf of one of the candidates for the circuit judgeship."

Again the hawk-keen blaze flared in the eyes of his host.

"You are mistaken, sir," he declared with heated emphasis. "It was less _for_ a candidate than _against_ one that I worked. The man whom circ.u.mstances compelled me to support was a poor thing, but he was better than his adversary."

"Was it party spirit that prompted you, then?" inquired the guest, feeling that politeness called for some show of interest.

"Sometimes I think," said the lawyer with a grim smile, "that from some men G.o.d withholds the blessed power of riding life's waves. All they can do is to buffet and fight and wear themselves out. Perhaps I'm that sort. The man who won--who succeeded himself on the bench--is an expedientist. So long as he presides, timid juries will return timid verdicts and the law will falter. I took the stump to brand him before the people as an apostate to his oath. I knew he would win, but I meant to make him wear his trade-mark of cowardice along with his smirk of self-righteousness!"

As Spurrier listened, not to a feudist but to a man who had worn himself out fighting feudism, there came to him like a revelation an appreciation of the bitterness which runs in the grim undertow of this blood.

"I believe," he suggested, glancing sidewise at the door beyond which he heard the thrushlike voice of the girl, "that you made an issue of a murder case which collapsed--a case in which you had been employed to prosecute."

"Yes," Cappeze told him. "Because I believe it to be one in which the officers of the court lay down and quit like dogs. The defendant was a red-handed bully, generally feared--and the law was in timid keeping.

I am still trying to have the grand jury call before it the prosecutor, the sheriff, and every deputy who served on that posse. I want to make them tell, on oath, just how hard they sought to apprehend the a.s.sa.s.sin--who still walks boldly and freely among us--unwhipped of justice."

Spurrier rose, deeply impressed by the headstrong, willful courage of this old insurgent, whose daughter's eyes were so full of spring gentleness.

Far up the dwindling thread of a small water course, where the forest was jungle-thick, a log cabin hung perched to a rocky cornfield that tilted like a steep roof, and under its shingles Sim Colby dwelt alone. Since his coming here he had been a.s.similated into the commonplace life of the neighborhood and the question of his origin was no longer discussed. The time had gone by when even an acquaintance of other days would be apt to calculate that his term of enlistment in the army had not run its full course. Moreover, there were no such acquaintances here; none who had known him before he changed his name from Grant to Colby. The shadow of dread which had once obsessed him had gradually and imperceptibly lightened until for weeks together he forgot how poignantly it had once haunted him.

He had painstakingly established a reputation exemplary beyond the tendencies of his nature in this new habitat--since trouble might cause closed pages to reopen.

Now on a November afternoon a deputy sheriff, serving summonses in that neighborhood dismounted at the door where Sim stood with his hand resting on the jamb, and the two mulled over what spa.r.s.e gossip the uneventful neighborhood afforded.

"Old Cappeze, he's a-seekin' ter rake up h.e.l.l afresh an' brew more pestilence fer everybody," announced the deputy glumly.

"What's he projeckin' at now?" asked Sim.

"He's seekin' ter warm over thet ancient Sam Mosebury case afore ther grand jury. Come ter think of hit, Sim, ye rid with ther high sheriff yoreself thet time, didn't ye?"

Moodily the other nodded. That was a matter he preferred to leave buried.

"Waal, Cappeze is claimin' now thet ther possy didn't make no master effort ter lay hands on Sam. He aims ter hev all ye boys tell ther grand jury what ye knows erbout ther matter."

The deputy turned away, but in afterthought he paused, thrashing idly with his switch at the weed stalks, as he retailed an almost forgotten item of news.

"A furriner come ter town yistidday, an' sot out straightway acrost Hemlock Mountain fer old Cappeze's dwellin' house."

"What manner of man war he, Joe?" Sim's interest was perfunctory. Had he been haled into the grand-jury room in those earlier days, the prospect would have bristled with apprehensions, but now he had behind him the background of respectability and Mose Biggerstaff, who alone knew of his craven behavior as a member of the posse, was dead. Sim felt secure in his mantle of virtue.

"He war a right upstandin' sort of feller--ther furriner," enlightened the deputy. "He goes under ther name of Spurrier--John Spurrier."

As though an electric wire of high tension had broken and brushed him in falling, Sim Colby's att.i.tude stiffened and every muscle grew taut from neck to ankles as his jaw sagged.

The deputy, with his foot already in the stirrup, missed the terror spasms of the face gone suddenly putty gray. He missed the gasp that contracted the throat and caused its breath to wheeze, and when he glanced back again from his saddle, the other had, with an effort of sheer desperation, regained his outward semblance of composure. He still leaned indolently against the door frame, but now he needed its support, because all his nerves jumped and a confusion like the swarming of angry bees filled his brain.

Afterward he groped his way inside and dropped down into a low chair by the hearth. For a long time he sat there breathing stertorously while the untended fire died away to ashen dreariness. The sun went down beyond the pine tops and still he sat dully with his hands hanging over his knees, their fingers twitching in panic aimlessness.

Out of a past that he had cut away from the present had arisen a ghost of hideous menace. Here into the laurel which had promised sanctuary his Nemesis had pursued him.

Two men with the guilt of a murder standing between them had come into a radius too small to contain them both. It was as if they had met on a narrow log spanning a chasm where only one could pa.s.s and the other must fall.

If old Cappeze dragged him to the courthouse now, he would be delivered over to Spurrier, waiting there to identify him, as a fox in a trap is delivered to the skinning knife. That must be the meaning of the stranger's visit to the lawyer.

Sim Colby went to an ancient and dilapidated bureau and from a creaking drawer took out a memento which, for some reason, he had preserved from times not treasured in memory. He carried it to the open door and stood looking at it as it lay on the palm of his hand with the light glinting upon it.