The hermit strode over and laid a hand on the shoulder of his visitor.

Their eyes met and held. "Old comrade," said McCalloway, as the rust of huskiness creaked in his voice, "I know you for the truest steel that ever G.o.d put into the blade of a man's soul--but I must have time to think."

He crossed the room slowly and took up Dinwiddie's sword. Tenderly he drew the blade from the scabbard, and as he looked at it his eyes first glowed with fires of longing, then grew misty with the sadness of remembrance.

After that he laid the scabbard down and handled once more the sheets that had been in the envelope. He did not re-read the written sentences, but let his fingers move slowly along the smooth surface of the paper, while his pupils held as far-away a look as though they were seeing the land from which the communication had come.

But, after a little, McCalloway came out of that half-hypnotized absorption, and his eyes wandered about the room until finally they fell on the rifle that the mountain boy had forgotten to take away with him.

He knew Boone well enough to feel sure that he had not gone far without remembering. He was certain, too, that his young protege would have returned for it before now had he not been inhibited by his deference for the elder's privacy.

Over there across the world was an army to be shaped, disciplined--but an army of alien blood, of yellow skins. Here was the less conspicuous task to which he had set his hand; the shaping of a single life, beset with hereditary dangers, into a worthy edifice of which the timbers and masonry were Anglo-Saxon and the pattern Americanism. He had too far committed himself to that architecture to turn back.

Slowly he shook his head. The struggle had been sharp, but the decision was final.

"No, MacTavish, old comrade and old friend," he said very seriously; "no; I've withdrawn from all that. I'll not deny that my hand sometimes aches for a grip on a sabre-hilt, and my ears are hungry for a bugle--but that's all past. Go out and make an army there, if you can, but I stay here. I needs must stay."

CHAPTER XV

One day McCalloway received a paper, several days old, that contained a piece of news which he was anxious for Boone to see at once, and he straightway set out to find the boy.

Araminta greeted him at the door of the Gregory cabin with apathetic eyes. "Booney's done gone out with his rifle-gun atter squirrels," she said. "I heered him shoot up on ther mountainside thar, not five minutes back."

Before he followed the boy, McCalloway read to her and construed the item in the paper, and for the first time in many weeks the hard wretchedness of her heart softened to tears and a faint ray of hope stole through her misery.

McCalloway began climbing the hillside, searching the thickets for the boy, and at last he saw him while he himself remained unseen. Boone was standing with his gaze turned toward Louisville--and its jail--two hundred and more miles distant. His face was like that of a fanatic in a religious trance, and his right hand gripped his rifle so tightly that the knuckles showed out white splotched against the tanned flesh.

"I failed ye, Asa," came the self-accusing voice in a tight-throated strain. "I bust out and got sent outen ther co'te room, when ye needed me in thar ter give ye countenance, but G.o.d knows I hain't fergot ye."

He paused there, and his chest heaved convulsively. "An' G.o.d, He knows, too, I aims ter avenge ye," he ended up, with a dedication of savage sincerity, while his gaze still seemed to be piercing the hills toward the city where his kinsman lay condemned.

McCalloway came forward then, and while he talked, Boone listened with attentive patience, but an obdurate face.

The man sought to exact a promise that until he was twenty-one, Boone should "hold his hand" so far as Saul Fulton was concerned. Given those plastic years, he could hope to wean the lad gradually away from the tigerish and unforgiving ferocity of his blood, but Boone could only shake his head, unable either to argue or to yield.

Then McCalloway sketched the seemingly irrelevant narrative of what had occurred in China; of the peril of the legations. He talked of an emperor, captive to court intrigue, and slowly the lad's eyes, which had been until now too preoccupied with his own wormwood to think of other matters, began to liven into interest.

"But thet's all plumb acrost ther world from hyar, though," he a.s.serted in a pause, as though he begrudged the arresting of his attention.

"What's. .h.i.t got ter do with me--an' Asa?"

General McCalloway cleared his throat. It came hard for him to talk of himself and of a sacrifice made for another.

"It has this to do with you, my boy," he announced bluntly: "I have been offered a soldier's job over there. I have been invited to aid in work that would help to stabilize China--and I have refused."

Boone Wellver's lips parted in amazement.

"Refused," he gasped. "Fer G.o.d's sake, what made ye do hit!"

"Because of you," was the sober response. "I thought you needed me, and I thought you were worth standing by."

"Fer me!" The lad was trembling again, but this time not with anger. "I reckon I'll be powerful beholden ter ye, all my life, fer thet--but ye hedn't ought ter hev done hit. They needs ye over thar, too--an' thar's monstrous numbers of 'em, from what ye narrates."

"I know it, Boone," McCalloway spoke earnestly. "I've centred some very ambitious dreams about your future. The time is hardly ripe to explain them--but you have a great opportunity--unless you throw it away in vengeful fury. If you won't trust me to guide you--until you come of age, at least--I had much better have gone to China."

The boy turned away, and in his set face McCalloway could read that for him this was an actual moment of Gethsemane. Through his nature as over a hotly embattled field surged contrary and warring emotions--and between them he was cruelly buffeted.

"G.o.d knows I'm wishful," he broke out at length. "An' G.o.d knows, atter what ye've jest told me, I hain't got no license ter deny ye nothin' ye asks--but--" The end of his sentence came like a sob. "But ye wouldn't ask me ter be disloyal ter my own kith an' kin, would ye?"

"No--but I would ask you to have a higher loyalty."

Boone stood trembling like an ague victim. It was no light matter for him to give so binding a pledge.

"No Gregory ner no Wellver hain't nuver died on ther gallows tree yit,"

he faltered. "Thar's two things I'd done swore ter do. One of 'em was ter git Saul. I reckon, though, thet could wait."

"What is the other thing?"

"Thet afore they hangs him--some fashion or other--I've got ter git a gun in thar ter Asa ... so he kin kill hisself. Hit hain't fitten thet he should die by a rope like a common feller!"

The emotion-laden voice became almost shrill. "Even ther Carrs an'

Blairs don't _hang_. They come nigh ter hangin' one oncet, but a kinsman saved him."

"How?" inquired McCalloway, and the boy responded gravely:

"He lay up on ther hillside an' shot his uncle ter death as they was takin' him from the jail-house ter ther gallows."

Truly, reflected the soldier, he was modelling with grim and stiff clay, but he only said:

"Promise me that, as to Saul, you will wait--until you are twenty-one."

Boone did not reply for five full minutes, but at the end of that time he nodded his head. "I kain't deny ye nothin', atter what ye've done fer me," he a.s.sented briefly.

Then McCalloway read from the paper his sc.r.a.p of encouragement. The Court of Appeals had granted the Secretary of State a rehearing.

"But thet hain't Asa," objected the boy. "I don't keer nothin' erbout thet feller."

McCalloway smiled.

"It's a similar case, tried by the same court, and involving the same principles. It indicates that Asa will have a new trial, too."

"Ef he comes cl'ar," announced Boone, with the suddenly rocketing spirits of boyhood, "I reckon Asa kin handle his own affairs."

McCalloway had set himself to preparing Boone within a year from that fall for entrance into the state university. There was but a faint background of prior attainment against which to paint many things, but there was an avidly acquisitive pupil, a tireless teacher, and an intensive plan of education.

Gregory was still in the Louisville jail--where, indeed, a half dozen other years were yet to find him. The Secretary of State had come through his second trial with a second conviction, and had once more been granted a rehearing.