It was a sharpshooter's medal, for, whatever his military shortcomings, Private Grant had been an efficient rifleman, and as he looked at it now his lips twisted into a grim smile. Then he took his rifle from its corner and, sitting on the doorstep, polished it with a fond particularity, oiling its mechanism and burnishing its bore.

Already Spurrier had made arrangements to ensconce himself under the roof of a house he had rented. Already the faces that he met in the road were, for the most part, familiar, and without exception they were friendly. Quick on the heels of his first disgust for the squalor of this lapsed and r.e.t.a.r.ded life, had succeeded an exhilaration born of the wine-like sparkle of the air and the majestic breadth of vistas across ridge and valley. As he watched mile-wide shadows creep between sky-high lines of peaks, his dreams borrowed something of their vastness.

Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken s.p.a.ces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power.

One afternoon Spurrier started over to the house he had rented, but into which he had not yet moved. The way lay for a furlong or more through a gorge deeply and somberly shaded. Even now, at midday, the sunlight of the upper places left it cloistered and the bowlders trooped along in ferny dampness, where the little waters whispered.

Beside a bulky hummock of green-corroded sandstone the man halted and stood musingly, with eyes downcast and thoughts uplifted--uplifted to the worship of his one G.o.d: Ambition. At his feet was an oily sediment along the water's edge and the gravel was thick with "sand blossom"--tiny fossil formations that are prima facie evidence of oil. Then, without warning, he felt a light sting along his cheek and the rock-walled fissure reverberated under what seemed a volley of musketry.

But the magnified and crumbling effect of the echo struck him with a less poignant realization than a slighter sound and a sharper one. As if a taut piano wire had been sharply struck, came the clear whang that he recognized as the flight song of a rifle bullet, and, whatever its origin it called for a prompt taking of cover.

Spurrier side-stepped as quickly as a boxer, and stood, for the moment at least, bulwarked behind the rock that was so providentially close.

"I'm John Spurrier--a stranger in these parts," he sung out in a confident voice of forced boldness and cheerfulness. "I reckon you've made a mistake in your man."

There was no answer and Spurrier cautiously raised his hat on the end of a stick with the same deliberation that might have marked his action had it been his own head emerging from cover.

Instantly the hidden rifle spoke again and the hat came down pierced through its band, while the rocks once more reverberated to multiplied detonations.

"It would seem," the man told himself grimly, "that after all there was no mistake."

He was unarmed and in no position to pursue investigations of the mystery, but by crawling along on his belly he could keep his body shielded behind the litter of broken stone that edged the brook until he reached the end of the gorge itself and came to safer territory.

Slowly, Spurrier traveled out of his precarious position, flattening himself when he paused to rest and listen, as he had made his men flatten themselves over there in the islands when they were going forward without cover under the fire of snipers.

CHAPTER VIII

Spurrier was not frightened, but he was deeply mystified, and when he reached the cabin which he was preparing for occupancy he sat down on the old millstone that served as a doorstep and sought enlightenment from reflection and the companionship of an ancient pipe.

In an hour or two "Uncle Jimmy" Litchfield, under whose smoky roof he was being temporarily sheltered, would arrive with a jolt wagon and yoke of oxen, teaming over the household goods that Spurrier meant to install. Already the new tenant had swept and whitewashed his cabin interior and had let the clear winds rake away the mildew of its long vacancy. Now he sat smoking with a perplexity-drawn brow, while a tuneful sky seemed to laugh mockingly at the absurd idea of riflemen in ambush.

Every neighbor had manifested a spirit of cordiality toward him. To many of them he was indebted for small and voluntary kindnesses, and he had maintained a diplomatic neutrality in all local affairs that bore a controversial aspect.

Certainly, he could not flatter himself that as yet any premonition of danger had percolated to those distant centers of industry against which he was devising a campaign of surprise. One explanation only presented itself with any color of plausibility.

That trickle of water might come to the gorge from a spot back in the laurel where, under the shelter of a felled hemlock top, some one tended a small "blockade" distillery; some one who resented an invasion of his privacy.

Yet even that inference was not satisfactory. Only yesterday a man had offered him moonshine whisky, declaring quite unsuspiciously: "Ef ye're vouched fer by Uncle Jimmy, I ain't a'skeered of ye none. I made thet licker myself--drink hearty."

Of the real truth no ghostly glimmer of suspicion came in even the most shadowy fashion to his mind.

His efforts to trace to definite result some filament of fact that might prove the court-martial to have reached a conclusion at variance with the truth, had all ended in failure. That the matter was hopeless was an admission which he could not afford to make and which he doggedly denied, but with waning confidence.

This state of mind prevented him from suspecting any connection between this present and mysterious enmity and those things which had happened across the Pacific.

He had kept himself informed as to the movements of Private Severance and when that time-expired man had stepped ash.o.r.e at San Francisco, John Spurrier had been waiting to confront him, even though it involved facing men who had once been brother officers and who could no longer speak to him as an equal.

From the former soldier, who brought a flush to his cheeks by saluting him and calling him "Lieutenant," he had learned nothing. There had been no reason to hope for much. It was unlikely that he would be able to shake into a damaging admission of complicity--and any statement of value must have amounted to that--the witness who had come unscathed out of the cross-examination of two courts-martial.

Indeed Spurrier had expected to encounter unveiled hostility in the att.i.tude of the mountaineer, who had been doing sentry duty at the door through which the prisoner, Grant, had escaped. It might have followed logically upon the officer's defense, which had sought to involve that sentinel as an accomplice in the fugitive's flight, and even in the murder itself.

But Severance had greeted him without rancor and with the disarming guise of candid friendliness.

"I'd be full willin' ter help ye, Lieutenant--ef so be I could," he had protested. "I knows full well yore lawyers was plum obliged ter seek ter hang ther blame wharsoever they was able, an' I ain't harborin' no grudge because I happened ter be one they sought ter hurt. But I don't know nothin' that kin aid ye."

"Do you think Grant escaped alive?" demanded Spurrier, and the other shook his head.

"I feels so plum, dead sartain he died," came the prompt response, "thet when I gits back home I'm goin' ter tell his folks he did. Bud Grant was a friend of mine, but when he went out inter thet jungle he was too weakly ter keer fer hisself an' ef he'd lived they would hev done found him an' brought him back."

Spurrier had come to embrace that belief himself. The one man whose admission, wrung from him by persuasion or compulsion, could give him back his clean name, must have perished there in the _bijuca_ tangles. The hope of meeting the runaway in life had died in the ex-officer's heart and consequently it did not now occur to him to think of the deserter as a living menace.

At length he rose and stood against the shadowy background of his door, which was an oblong of darkness behind the golden outer clarity.

Off in the tangle of oak and poplar and pine a ruffed grouse drummed and a "c.o.c.k of the woods" rapped its tattoo on a sycamore top.

Once he fancied he heard a stirring in the rhododendron where its large waxen leaves banked themselves thickly a hundred yards distant, and his eyes turned that way seeking to pierce the impenetrable screen--but unavailingly. Perhaps some small, wild thing had moved there.

Then, as had happened before that afternoon, the stillness broke to a rifle shot--this time clean and sharp, unclogged by echoes.

Spurrier stood for an instant while a surprised expression showed in his out-staring eyes, then he swayed on his feet. His hands came up and clutched spasmodically at his left breast, and with a sudden collapse he dropped heavily backward, and lay full length, swallowed in the darkness that hung beyond the door.

Over the rhododendron thicket quiet settled drowsily again, but through the toughness of interlaced branches stole upward and outward an acrid powder smell and a barely perceptible trickle of smoke.

Crouched there, his neutral-hued clothing merging into the earth tones about him, a man peered out, but he did not rise to go forward and inspect his work. Instead, he opened the breech block of his piece and with unhurried care blew through the barrel--cleansing it of its vapors.

"I reckon thar ain't no needcessity to go over thar an' look at him,"

he reflected. "When they draps down _thet_-away, they don't git up no more--an' some person from afar mout spy me crossin' ther dooryard."

So he edged backward into the tangle, moving like a crawfish and noiselessly took up his homeward journey.

When the slow plodding ox team came at last to the dooryard and Uncle Billy stood shouting outside the house, Sim Colby, holding to tangles where he would meet no chance wayfarer, was already miles away and hurrying to establish his alibi against suspicion, in his own neighborhood--where no one knew he had been absent.

Though it be an evil thing and shameful to confess, ex-private Bud Grant, alias Sim Colby, traveled light-heartedly, roweled by no tortures of conscience, but blithe in the a.s.surance of a ghost laid, and a peril averted.

He would have been both amazed and chagrined had he remained peering from his ambuscade, for when Uncle Billy's shadow fell through the open door the man to whom he had come rose from a chair to meet him, and he presented no mangled or blood-stained breast to the eyes of his visitors.

"Ye ain't jest a-quippin' with me, be ye?" demanded the old mountaineer incredulously when he had heard the story in all its detail. "This hyar's a right serious-soundin' matter--an' ye ain't got no enemies amongst us thet I've heered tell of."

Spurrier pointed out the spot in the newly whitewashed wall where the bullet lay imbedded with its glint of freshly flattened lead.

"After the first experience," he explained, "I'd had some time to think. I was standing in the door so I fell down--and played dead." He added after a pause quietly: "I've seen men shot to death, and I happened to know how a man drops when it's a heart hit. I fell inside where I'd be out of sight, because I was unarmed, and all I could do was to wait for you. I watched through the door, but the fellow never showed himself."

"Come on, boys," commanded the old mountaineer in a determined voice.

"Let's beat thet la'rel while ther tracks is still fresh. Mebby we mout l'arn somethin' of this hyar monstrous matter."