"Mr. Mosebury," he said, "I'll be honest with you. I half suspected you--because I'd met you at Colby's and I knew you hated Cappeze. I owe you an apology, and I'm glad to know I was wrong."

"Mr. Spurrier," replied the other, "ef I _hed_ attempted yore life I wouldn't hev failed, an', moreover, I don't hate old Cappeze. Ther man thet wins out don't hev no need ter harbor hatreds. He hates me because he sought ter penitentiary me--an' failed."

"When shall we go to consult the oracle?" asked Spurrier, and Mosebury shook his head.

"I reckon mebby I mout seem over cautious--even timorouslike ter ye, in bein' so heedful erbout keepin' outen sight in this matter," he said. "But them thet knows my record, knows I _ain't_, jest ter say easy skeered. You go home an' wait an' afore long I'll write ye a letter, tellin' ye when ter go an' how ter go. Then ye kin make ther journey by yoreself."

"That looks like common sense to me," declared the other, and he went home, forgetting the witch woman on the way, because of the other and lovelier witchcraft that he knew awaited him in his own house.

Spurrier, despite his dangers, responsibilities, and conflict of purposes, was happy. He was happy in a simpler and less complicated way than he had ever been before, because his heart was in the ascendancy, and Glory, he thought, was "livin' up to her name."

If he could have thrust some other things into the same dark cupboard of half-contemptuous philosophy to which he relegated his own dangers, he might have been even happier. But a mentor who had rarely troubled him in past years became insistent and audible through the silences--speaking with the voice of conscience.

He remembered telling Vivian Harrison, over the consomme, that pearls did not make oysters happy and that these illiterates of the hills might have hidden wealth in the sh.e.l.ls of their isolation and gain nothing more than the oyster. Indeed, he had thought of them no more than the pearl fisherman thinks of the low form of life whose diseased state gives birth to treasure. They inhabited a terrain over which he and the forces of American Oil and Gas were to do battle, and like birds nesting on a battlefield, they must take their chances.

It was no longer possible to maintain that callous indifference. These men, to whom he could not, without disclosing his strategy and defeating his purpose, tell the truth, had befriended him.

They were human and in many ways lovable. If he succeeded, they would, upon his own advice, have sold their birthrights.

However, he gave an anodyne to his conscience with the thought that if victory came to him there would be wealth enough for all to share.

Having won his conquest, he could be generous, rendering back as a gift a part of what should have been theirs by right. The means of doing this he had worked out but he could confide to no one. He had embarked as cold bloodedly as Martin Harrison had ever started on any of the enterprises that had made him a money baron. Indeed it had been Spurrier who had fired the chief with interest in the scheme, and if the thing were culpable the culpability had been his own. Then he had come to realize that in the human equation was a factor that he had ignored: the rights of the ignorant native. He had fought down that recognition as the voice of sentimentality until at last he had no longer been able to fight it down. Between those two states of mind had been a war of mental agony and conflict, of doubt, of vacillation.

The conclusion had not been easily reached. Now he meant to carry on the war he had undertaken unaltered as to its objective of winning a victory for Harrison over Trabue and the myrmidons of A. O. and G., but he meant to bring in that victory in such a guise that the native would share in the division of the spoils. He knew that Harrison, if he had an intimation of such an amendment of plan, would sharply veto it, but when the thing was done it would be too late to object--and meanwhile Spurrier regarded himself no less the trustee of the mountain-land holder than the servant of Martin Harrison. He was willing to shoulder, out of his own stipulated profits, the chief burden of this division, and in the end he would have driven a better bargain for his simple friends than they could have hoped to attain for themselves.

Yet in him was being reborn an element of character, which had long been repressed.

And there in the other section of the State where political connections had to be established and the skids of intrigue greased, much stood waiting to be done. Already most of what could be accomplished here on the ground had progressed to a point from which the end could be seen.

John Spurrier, the seeming idler, could control almost all the territory needful for his right of way--all except a tract belonging to Brother Bud Hawkins, cautiously left for the last because he wished to handle that himself and did not yet wish to appear in the negotiations.

In the intricate workings of such a project by a campaign of secrecy, the matter was not only one of acquiring a certain expanse of a definite sort of property in a given region, but of acquiring holdings that commanded the only practicable route through pa.s.sable gaps. This special lie and trend of ground he thought of and spoke of, in his business correspondence, as "the neck of the bottle." When he held it, it mattered little who else had liquid in the bottle. It could come out only through his neck and, therefore, under his terms. Yet even when that was achieved, there remained the need of the corkscrew without which he himself could make no use of his range-wide jug of crude petroleum. That corkscrew was the charter to be had from a legislature where American Oil and Gas was supposed to have sentinels at the door.

He could not take Glory with him on these trips, because Glory was of the hills, and loyal to the hills--and he could not yet take the natives into his confidence. For the same reason he could give her only business reasons of the most general and evasive character for leaving her behind.

But the work that Spurrier had done so far was only the primary section of a broader design. What he had accomplished affected the oil field on the remote side of Hemlock Mountain, the part of the field that the earlier boom had never touched, and his entire project looked to a totality embracing also the "nigh" side, where his operations still existed only in projection.

It was while this situation stood that there came to him one day two letters calling upon him for two irreconcilable courses of action. One was from Louisville, urging him to return there at once to busy himself with political plannings; the other was a rude scrawl from Sam Mosebury setting an appointment with the "witch woman."

Spurrier was reluctant to go to Louisville. It meant laying aside the little paradise of the present for the putting on of heavy harness. It necessitated another excuse to Glory, and more than that, being away from Glory. Yet that was the bugle call of his mission, and he fancied that whatever threatened him here in the hills was a menace of local effect. If that were true he would not need the warning which the unaccountable desperado, Sam Mosebury, meant to relay to him through channels of alleged magic, until he came back.

Therefore, the witch could wait. But in that detail Spurrier erred, and when he answered the summons that called him to town without his occult consultation, he unwittingly discarded a warning which he needed there no less than in the hills.

He was called upon to choose a turning without pause, and he followed his business instincts. It happened that instinct misled him.

CHAPTER XVII

One afternoon Trabue, the unadvertised dictator of American Oil and Gas, sat with several of his close subordinates in a conference that had to do with Martin Harrison, the man he a.s.sumed to ignore.

"Unless some unforeseen thing sends oil soaring," ventured Oliver Morris, "this fellow Spurrier is having his trouble for his pains. My idea is that he's seeking to tease us into counter activity--and trail after us in the profits."

"And if something _should_ send oil soaring," crisply countered Cosgrove, "he'd have us distanced with a runaway start."

"Who is this man Spurrier?" demanded Trabue himself. "What does our research department report?"

"He's a protege of Martin Harrison's."

Trabue appeared to find the words illuminating, and a shrewd irony glinted in his brief smile.

"If he's Harrison's man, he's out to knife me--and he has resources at his back. Tell me more about him."

Cosgrove took from his portfolio a neatly typed memorandum, and read from it aloud:

Former army officer who gained the sobriquet of "Plunger"

Spurrier: Court-martialed and convicted upon charge of murder, and pardoned through efforts of Senator Beverly. a.s.sociated with various enterprises as a general investigator and initiative expert. Rumor has it that Harrison is grooming him as his own successor.

"If his reputation is that of a plunger," argued Morris, "my guess is that he's playing a long-shot bet for a killing."

"And you guess wrong. If Harrison has picked this fellow to wear his own mantle, the man is more than a gambling tout. It is only lunacy to underestimate him or dismiss him with contempt."

Cosgrove nodded his concurrence and amplified it. "In my judgment he's something of a genius with a chrome-nickeled nerve, but he's adroit as well as bold. He has operated only through others and has kept himself inconspicuous. Except for an accident, we should have had no warning of his activities."

"If he were to get bitten by a rattlesnake," growled Morris savagely, "it would be a lucky thing for us. Of course, we might beguile him into our own camp."

Trabue shook his head in a decisive negation.

"That would only notify him that we recognize his effort and fear it.

If the game's big enough, we don't want him." He paused, then added with a grim facetiousness: "As for your other suggestion, we have no rattlesnakes in our equipment."

The dynamic-minded master of strategy sat balancing a pen-holder on his extended forefinger for a few moments, then he inquired as if in afterthought: "By the way, I feel curious as to how the tip came to us that this conspiracy was on foot. You say that except for an accident we should not have known it."

Cosgrove smiled. "It came to this office through the regular channels of our local agencies--and I didn't inquire searchingly into the details. I gathered, though, that the trail was picked up by a sort of information tout--a fellow who was hurt and compromised a damage suit against us. It seems that he is supposed to be blind--but he could nonetheless see well enough to read some memoranda that chanced to come his way." The gentleman cleared his throat almost apologetically as he added: "As I remarked I didn't learn the particulars. I merely took the information for what it might be worth, and set our men to watching."

"I see," Trabue made dry acknowledgment. "And what is being done toward watching him?"

"I understand we have a man there who is a.s.suming an enmity toward us and who is ostensibly helping Spurrier to build up political influence."

"I see," said Trabue once more, with even a shade more dryness in his voice.

That conversation had taken place quite a long while before the present, but it set into quiet motion the wheels of a large and powerful organization.

The knowledge that John Spurrier was objectionable to A. O. and G. had filtered through to more local, yet confidential, officials, and through them to "men in the field," and it is characteristic of such delegations of authority, that each department suits the case referred to it to the practical workings of its own environment.

Gentlemen of high business standing in lower Broadway could permit themselves no violence of language, beyond the intimation that this upstart was a nuisance. Translated into the more candid brutality of camp-following parasites in the wildness of the hills, that mild declaration became: "The man needs killin'. Let's git him!"

Now, Spurrier found that the visit to Louisville and Lexington, which had promised to be the matter of weeks, must stretch itself into months, and that until the convening and adjournment of the a.s.sembly itself, his presence would be as requisite as that of a ship's officer on the bridge. In one respect he was gratified. American Oil and Gas seemed serenely unsuspicious of any danger. Vigilance seemed lapsed.