So all that winter while John Spurrier was away as the amba.s.sador, practicing in Moscow and Odessa the adroit arts of financial diplomacy, the fixed idea of his a.s.sa.s.sination was festering in the mind of the man who lived, under an a.s.sumed name, at the head of Little Quicksand.

That obsession took fantastic shapes and wove webs of grotesque patterns of hate as Colby, who had been Grant, sat brooding before his untidy hearth while the winter winds wailed about the eaves and lashed the mountain world into forlorn bleakness.

And while Colby meditated unendingly on the absentee and built ugly plans against his return, so in another house and in another spirit, the ex-officer was also remembered.

Winter in these well-nigh roadless hills meant a blockade and a siege with loneliness and stagnation as the impregnably intrenched attackers. The victims could only wait and endure until the rescue forces of spring should come to raise the chill and sodden barricade, with a flaunting of blossom-banners and the whispered song of warm victory.

Glory Cappeze, for the first time in her life, suffered from loneliness. She had thought herself too used to it to mind it much, but John Spurrier had brought a new element to her existence and left behind him a void. She had been hardly more than an onlooker to his occasional visits with her father, but she had been a very interested onlooker. When he talked a vigorous mind had spoken and had brought the greater, unknown, outer world to her door. The striking face with its square jaw; the ingrained graces and courtesies of his bearing; the quickness of his understanding--all these things had been a light in the gray mediocrity of uneventful days and a flame that had fired her imagination to a splendid disquiet.

The infectious smile and force of personality that had been a challenge to more critical women, had been almost dazzling qualities to the mountain girl of strangled opportunities.

But it was that last meeting in which he had thawed her shyness into friendliness that Glory remembered most eagerly. That had seemed to make of Spurrier not only a hero admired from a distance but a hero who was also a friend, and she was hungry for friends.

So it came to pa.s.s that to these two widely variant welcomes, neither of which he suspected, John Spurrier was returning from Russia when spring had lightly brushed the c.u.mberland slopes with delicate fragrance and the color of blossoming.

In Louisville, in Frankfort, and in other Kentucky towns along his way the returning man had made stops and investigations, to the end that he came primed with certain information of an ex-cathedra sort.

The fruits of this research included an abstract of the personnel of the legislature and the trend of oil influences in State politics, and he studied his notebook as he traveled from the rolling, almost voluptuous fertility of the bluegra.s.s section to the piedmont where the foothills began to break the sky.

On the porch of the dilapidated hotel at Waterfall a spa.r.s.e crowd centered about a seated figure, and when he had reached the spot Spurrier paused, challenged by a sense of the medieval, that gripped him as tangibly as a hand clapped upon his shoulder.

The seated man was blind and shabby, with a beggar's cup strapped to his knee, and a "fiddle" nestling close to the stubbled chin of a disfigured face. He sang in a weird falsetto, with minors that rose thin and dolorous, but he was in every essential the ballad singer who improvised his lays upon topical themes, as did Scott's last minstrel--a survival of antiquity.

Now he was whining out a personal plaint in the words of his "song ballet."

"I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an' green, I used ter work a standard rig an' drill fer kero_sene_."

The singer's lugubrious pathos appeared to be received with attentive and uncritical interest. Beyond doubt he took himself seriously and sadly.

"I used ter know a woman's love, an' read a woman's eyes, An' look into my baby's face an' dwell in paradise, Until a comp'ny foreman, plum' heedless in his mind Let nitroglycer_een_ explode an' made me go stone blind."

Spurrier, half-turning, saw a traveling salesman standing at his elbow with a repressed grin of amus.e.m.e.nt struggling in his glance.

"Queer card, that," whispered the drummer. "I've seen him before; one of the wrecks left over from the oil-boom days. A 'go-devil' let loose too soon and blinded him." He paused, then added as though by way of apology for his seeming callousness: "Some people say the old boy is a sort of a miser and has a snug pile salted away."

Spurrier nodded and went on into the office, but later in the day he sought out the blind fiddler and engaged him in conversation. The man's blinding had left him a legacy of hate for all oil operators, and from such relics as this of the active days Spurrier knew how to evoke sc.r.a.ps of available information. It was not until later that it occurred to him that he had answered questions as well as asked them--but, of course, he had not been indiscreet.

With John Spurrier, riding across hills afoam with dogwood blossom and tenderly vivid with young green, went persistently the thought of the blind beggar who seemed almost epic in his symbolism of human wreckage adrift in the wake of the boom. Yet he was honest enough to admit inwardly that should victory fall to his banners there would be flotsam in the wake of his triumph, too; simple folk despoiled of their birthright. He came as no altruist to fight for the native born. He, no less than A. O. and G., sought to exploit them.

When he went to the house of d.y.k.e Cappeze he did not admit the curiosity, amounting to positive anxiety, to see again the little barbarian, who slurred consonants, doubled her negatives, split her infinitives and retorted in the Latin of Blackstone. Yet when Glory did not at once appear, he found himself unaccountably disappointed.

"There's been another stranger in here since you went away," the old man smilingly told him. "What is he doing here? That's the one burning question debated along the highways when men 'meet and make their manners.'"

"Well," laughed Spurrier, "what _is_ he doing here?"

Cappeze shrugged his bent shoulders as he knocked the rubble from his pipe and a quizzical twinkle came into his eyes.

"So far as I can make out, sir, he's as much a gentleman of leisure as you are yourself."

Spurrier knew what an excellent subterfuge may sometimes lie in frankness, and now he had recourse to its concealment.

"Good heavens, Mr. Cappeze, I'm no idler!" he declared. "I'm a.s.sociated with capitalists who work me like a mule. Since I saw you, for example, I've been in Russia and I've been hard-driven. That's why I come here. If I couldn't get absolutely away from it all now and then, I'd soon be ready for a madhouse. Here I can forget all that and keep fit."

Cappeze nodded. "That's just about the way I sized you up. At first, folks pondered about you, too, but now they take you on faith."

"I hope so--and this new man? Has he stepped on anybody's toes?"

"Not yet. He hasn't even bought any land, but there have been some several transfers of property, in other names, since he came. He _may_ be some man's silent partner."

"What sort of partnership would it be?"

"G.o.d knows." For an instant the shrewd eyes leaped into a glint of feeling. "These poor benighted devils suspect the Greeks bearing gifts. Civilization has always come here only to leave its scar. They have been stung once--over oil. G.o.d pity the man who seeks to sting them again."

"You think," Spurrier responded lightly, as one without personal interest, "they wouldn't take it kindly?"

Once again the sonorous and kindly voice mounted abruptly to vehemence.

"As kindly, sir, as a wolf b.i.t.c.h robbed, the second time, of her whelps. It's all a wolf b.i.t.c.h has."

That evening as he walked slowly homeward with a neighbor whom he had met by the way, Spurrier came face to face with Wharton, the other stranger, and the mountaineer performed the offices of introduction.

The two men from the outer world eyed each other incuriously and parted after an exchange of commonplaces.

When Spurrier separated from his chance companion, the hillsman drawled: "Folks _says_ thet feller's buyin' land. G.o.d knows what fer he wants. .h.i.t, but ef he _does_ hone fer hit, hit's kinderly probable thet hit's wuth holdin' on to."

When the brook trout began to leap and flash Cappeze delegated Glory to act for him as Spurrier's guide, and as the girl led the way to the likeliest pools, the young, straight-growing trees were not more gracefully slender.

The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had no delicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair.

The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighter than her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom and like the hills she was wild of beauty.

Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to the pagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged to rigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ring within him as a tuning fork rings to its note.

Since the days of Augusta Beverly's ascendency, he had never felt the need of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. At first he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-hater and more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, an expedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, and Vivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades so long as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been sn.o.bs in a sense, and in a sense he too was a sn.o.b.

But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things in their primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politer usage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his proffered comradeship for the att.i.tude of the lover--and that would have been most disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanations that would wound her, embarra.s.s him and arouse the old man's just ire.

For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yet prouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own ground there was no common meeting place between their standards of living.

Yet Glory's presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich and lyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would have believed in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stood fast when Augusta had cut loose.

This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally--and perhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased him to humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made him step more elastically as she went on ahead.

When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored, Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in gra.s.s that waved knee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she moved about crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself, herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.

"Glory," he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the first time and in a mood of experiment.

As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, she turned toward him and answered in kind.

"What air hit, Jack?"