"It's generous of you to speak so, sir," he said slowly, "and I'm glad to leave you with that impression--because with many regrets I _am_ leaving you."

The older man raised his brows in surprise.

"I had hoped our a.s.sociation would be permanent," he responded. "I suppose, though, you have an opening to a broader horizon. If so it comes as recognition well earned."

"It's an offer from Martin Harrison, sir," came the reply in slowly weighed words. "There are objections, of course, but the man who gains Harrison's confidence stands in the temple of big money."

"Yes. Of course Harrison's name needs no amplification." The man who had opened a door for Spurrier in what had seemed a blank wall, sat for a moment silent then broke out with more than his customary emphasis of expression. "Objection from me may seem self-interested because I am losing a valuable a.s.sistant. But--d.a.m.n it all, Harrison is a pirate!"

Spurrier's tanned cheeks flushed a shade darker but he nodded his head. His fine eyes took on that glint of hardness which, in former times, had never marred their engaging candor.

"I'd like to have you understand me, sir. I owe you that much and a great deal more. I know that Harrison and his ilk of big money operators are none too scrupulous--but they have power and opportunity and those are things I must gain."

"I had supposed," suggested Snowdon deliberately, "that you wanted two things above all else. First to establish your innocence to the world, and secondly, even if you failed in that, to make your name so substantially respected that you could bear--the other."

"Until recently I had no other thought." The young man rose and stood with his fine body erect and as full of disciplined strength as that of a Praxiteles athlete. Then he took several restless turns across the floor and halted tensely before his benefactor.

"I have let no gra.s.s grow under my feet. You know how I have run down every conceivable clue and how I stand as uncleared as the day the verdict was brought at Manila. I've begun to despair of vindication.... I am not by nature a beast of prey.... I prefer fair play and the courtesies of sportsmanlike conflict."

He paused, then went forward again in a hardening voice: "But in this land of ours there are two aristocracies and only two--and I want to be an aristocrat of sorts."

"I didn't realize we had even so much variety as that," observed Snowdon and the younger man continued.

"The real aristocracy is that of gentle blood and ideals. Our little army is its true nucleus and there a man doesn't have to be rich. I was born to that and reared to it as to a deep religion--but I've been cast out, unfrocked, cashiered. I can't go back. One cla.s.s is still open to me; the brazen, arrogant circles of wealth into which a double-fisted achiever can bruise his way. I don't love them. I don't revere them, but they offer power and I mean to take my place on their tawdry eminence. It's all that's left."

"I'm not preaching humility," persisted Snowdon quietly. "I started you along the paths of financial combat and I see no fault in your continuing, but may I be candid to the point of bluntness?"

He paused for permission and Spurrier prompted: "Yes, please go on."

"Then," finished Snowdon, "since you've been with me I've watched you grow--and you _have_ grown. But I've also seen a fine chivalric sense gradually blunting; a generous predisposition hardening out of flexibility into something more implacable, less gracious. It's a pity--and Martin Harrison won't soften you."

For a while Spurrier stood meditatively silent, then he smiled and once more nodded his head.

"There isn't a thing you've said that isn't true, Mr. Snowdon, and you're the one man who could say it without any touch of offensiveness. I've counted the costs. G.o.d knows if I could go back to the army to-morrow with a shriven record, I'd rather have my lieutenant's pay than all the success that could ever come from moneyed buccaneers! But I can't do that. I can't think of myself as a fighting man under my own flag whose largest pay is his contentment and his honor. Very well, I have accepted Hobson's choice. I will join that group which fights with power, for power; the group that's strong enough to defy the approval they can't successfully court. I _have_ hardened but I've needed to. I hope I shan't become so flagrant, however, that you'll have to regret sponsoring me."

Snowdon laughed.

"I'm not afraid of that," he made hasty a.s.surance. "And my friendliest wishes go with you."

Since that day John Spurrier had come to a place of confidence in the counsels over which Harrison presided with despotic authority.

The man in the street, deriving his information from news print, would have accorded Martin Harrison a place on the steering committee of the country's wealth and affairs, and in such a cla.s.sification he would have been both right and wrong.

There were exclusive coteries of money manipulation to which Harrison was denied an entree. These combinations were few but mighty, and until he won the sesame of admission to their supreme circle his ambition must chafe, unsatisfied: his power, greater than that of many kings, must seem to himself too weak.

It must not be inferred that Harrison was embittered by the wormwood of failure. His trophies of success were numerous and tangible enough for every purpose except his own contentment.

To-night he was smiling with baronial graciousness while he stood welcoming a group of dinner guests in his own house, and as his butler pa.s.sed the tray of canapes and c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses the latest arrival presented himself.

The host nodded. "Spurrier," he said, "I think you know every one here, don't you?"

The young man who had just come was perfectly tailored and self-confident of bearing, and as vigorous of bodily strength as a wrestler in training.

The time that had pa.s.sed over him since he had left Snowdon's company for wider and more independent fields had wrought changes in him, and in so far as the observer could estimate values from the externals of life, every development had been upward toward improvement. Yet, between the man's impressive surface and his soul lay an acquired coat of cynicism and a sh.e.l.l of cultivated selfishness.

John Spurrier, who had renounced the gaming table, was more pa.s.sionately and coldly than ever the plunger, dedicated to the single religion of ambition. He had failed to remove the blot of the court-martial from his name, and, denied the soldier's ethical place, he had become a sort of moss-trooper of finance.

Backed only by his personal qualifications, he had won his way into a circle of active wealth, and though he seemed no more a stranger there than a duckling in a pool, he himself knew that another simile would more truly describe his status.

He was like an exhibition skater whose eye-filling feats are watched with admiration and bated breath. His evolutions and dizzy pirouettings were performed with an adroit ease and grace, but he could feel the swaying of the thin ice under him and could never forget that only the swift smoothness of his flight stood between himself and disaster.

He must live on a lavish scale or lose step with the fast-moving procession. He must maintain appearances in keeping with his a.s.sociations--or drop downscale to meaner opportunities and paltrier prizes. The wealth which would establish him firmly seemed always just a shade farther away than the reach of his outstretched grasp.

"We were just talking about Trabue, Spurrier," his host enlightened him as he looked across the rim of his lifted gla.s.s, with eyes hardening at the mention of that name.

Spurrier did not ask what had been said about Trabue, but he guessed that it savored of anathema. For Trabue, whose name rarely appeared in the public announcements of American Oil and Gas, was none the less the white-hot power and genius of that organization--its unheralded chief of staff. Just as A. O. and G. dominated the world of finance, so he dominated A. O. and G.

Harrison laughed. "I'm not a vindictive man," he declared in humorous self-defense, "but I want his scalp as Salome wanted the head of John the Baptist."

The newly arrived guest smiled quietly.

"That's a large order, Mr. Harrison," he suggested, "and yet it's in line with a matter I want to take up with you. My conspiracy won't exactly separate O. H. Trabue from his scalp lock, but it may pull some pet feathers out of his war bonnet. I'm leaving to-morrow on a mission of reconnaissance--and when I come back----"

The eyes of the elder and younger engaged with a quiet interchange of understanding, and Spurrier knew that into Martin's mind, as crowded with activities as a busy harbor, an idea had fallen which would grow into interest.

When dinner was announced, the adventurer de luxe--for it was so that he recognized himself in the confessional of his own mind--took in the daughter of his host, and this mark of distinction did not escape the notice of several men.

Spurrier himself was gravely listening to some low-voiced aside from the girl who nibbled at an olive, and who merited his attention.

She was tall and undeniably handsome, and if her mentality sparkled with a cool and brilliant light rather than a warm and appealing glow, that was because she had inherited the pattern of her father's mind.

If, notwithstanding her wealth and position, she was still unmarried three seasons after her coming-out, it was her own affair and possibly his good fortune. For when the Jack Spurrier of these days contemplated marriage at all, he thought of it as an aid to his career rather than a sentimental adventure.

"I'm leaving in the morning," he was saying in a low voice, "for the Kentucky c.u.mberlands, where I'm told life hasn't changed much since the pioneers crossed over their divide. It's the Land of Do-Without."

"The Land of Do-Without?" she repeated after him. "It's an expressive phrase, Jack. Is it your own or should there be quotation marks?"

Spurrier laughed as he admitted: "I claim no credit; I merely quote, but the land down there in the steeps is one, from all I hear, to stir the imagination into terms more or less poetic."

He leaned forward a little and his engaging face mirrored his own interest so that the girl found herself murmuring: "Tell me something about it, then."

"It is," he a.s.sured her, "a stretch of unaltered mediaevalism entirely surrounded by modernity--yet holding aloof. Though the country has spread to the Pacific and it lies within three hundred miles of Atlantic tidewater, it is still our one frontier where pioneers live under the conditions that obtained in the days of the Indian."

"That seems difficult to grasp," she demurred, and he nodded his head, abstractedly sketching lines on the damask cloth with his oyster fork.

"When the nation was born," he enlightened, "and the questing spirit of the overland voyagers a.s.serted itself, the bulk of its human tide flowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through c.u.mberland Gap lay their one discovered gate in the wall that nature had built to the sky across their path. It was a wall more ancient than that of the Alps and between the ridges many of them were stranded."

"How?" she demanded, arrested by the vibrant interest of his own voice, and he continued with a shrug of the shoulder.

"Many reasons. A pack mule fallen lame--a broken wagon-wheel; small things were enough in such times of hardship to make a family settle where it found itself balked. The more fortunate won through to 'take the west with the axe and hold it with the rifle.' Then came railroads and steamboats, going other ways, and the ridges were swallowed again by the wilderness. The stranded brethren remained stranded and they did not alter or progress. They remained self-willed, fiercely independent and dedicated to the creed 'Leave us alone.' Their life to-day is the life of two centuries ago."