Chapter 13

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_ CHAPTER XIII

The conspiracy fathered by Lute Brown and Jase Mallows had its inception in a small coterie whose ambitions had been stirred to avarice by the bait of sharing among them a sum of over four thousand dollars. Ramifications of detail had necessitated the use of a larger force; a force so large, indeed, that anything like an equal distribution of booty would have intolerably eaten into the profits of the principals. Therefore the rank and file of employes were merely mercenaries, working for a flat wage.

But in such an enterprise the danger of mutiny always looms large and the bludgeon of blackmail lies ready to the hand of the mutineer. Therefore the actual handling of the money had been a matter of extreme care to Lute and those in his closest confidence. When the leader had taken most of his men out of the mine he had led away those of whom he had felt least sure--and had left the saddle-bags to the custody of the supposedly reliable minority. His estimate had been seventy-five per cent accurate. One only of the four was untrustworthy.

Lute himself had designated the custodian of the treasure and had fixed a rendezvous at a long abandoned and decaying cabin in a remote and thicketed locality. Shortly before dawn Lute arrived there, unaccompanied and expecting to find his man awaiting him. But complications had developed. When the quartette that left the mine last held a hurried conference outside, the squad leader explained that the very essence of precaution now lay in their separating and seeking individual cover.

Two of them concurred but the fellow who had attacked Alexander had become insurgent through drink, chagrin and cupidity.

"Boys," he darkly suggested, "we warn't hired ter go thro no sich rough times es we've done encountered. I reckon these fellers owes us right smart more then what they agreed ter pay fust oft--moreover what sartainty hev we got thet we're goin' ter get anything a-tall?"

They argued with him but his obduracy stood unaffected.

"Thet small sheer thet I agreed ter tek hain't ergoin' ter satisfy me now," he truculently protested. "I aims ter go along with ther money hitself and git paid off without no sort of dalliance. I aims ter get my own price, too."

Finally, since they could not overlook the menace of disaffection, the leader agreed to take this man with him to Lute Brown for adjustment of the dispute, and the two set off together, while the other two left them at a fork of the trail. On the way to the cabin, the disgruntled one drank more moonshine liquor than was good for him and when they arrived there the place was seemingly empty, for Lute, watching with hawk-like vigilance, had made out that instead of one man two were approaching and he had slipped out through a back door into the void of the darkness. A lantern without a chimney burned in the deserted room and cabin and that was safe enough in a place so screened, but it showed the two newcomers that there was no one waiting there. To the inflamed and suspicious brother this seemed an indication of broken faith. Perhaps after all he had been lured here to be paid off with treachery and murder!

"So ye lied ter me!" he bellowed in passion. "Hit war jest like I thought. Now I aims ter tek hit all myself!" And snatching out a knife he hurled himself on his comrade of an hour ago.

That one dropped the saddle-bags and fumbled for his pistol, but before it cleared the holster they had grappled and were stumbling about the room. Lute, watching from without, considered this the moment for intervention and he appeared in the door with drawn revolver shouting out for an end to the struggle.

Unfortunately it was only his loyal adherent who heeded his voice, and the other, freed from the grip that had so far held him in chancery stabbed twice before the object of his attack collapsed. Then only, Lute fired. Before that moment he must have fired through his loyal man to reach his traitor. The hesitation was fatal, for the shot missed its target and in a moment more, Lute, too fell under the knife.

The traitorous survivor stood for a moment, panting heavily, then, still unsteady of step from his homicidal exertions, picked up the saddle-bags, ransacked them with frenzied haste and plunged out of the door with the package that bore the spots of red sealing wax.

At any time the others might come to investigate and they would find a scene of double murder.

He did not stop to open the package. That could await a more opportune moment. Just now the vital thing was flight.

When, at the end of much panic-stricken haste and the spurring of terror he judged it safe to strike a match, he ripped open the bundle, over which so many men and one woman had fought--and in it discovered only tightly packed newspapers and a few small pieces of broken brick--added to give it the plausibility of weight.

Halloway in accordance with his plan of leaving the stage before his presence lost dramatic effect, did not offer to go all the way back to Shoulder-blade Creek with Alexander. He accompanied her only to a point where there was no longer danger, and then said farewell to her, leaving her still under the escort of Brent, Bud Sellers and O'Keefe.

"I reckon," he announced abruptly when they stood on the crest of a steep hill, "I'll turn back hyar. I don't dwell over yore way an' thar hain't no use fer me ter fare further. I'll bid ye farewell--an' mebby some day all us fellers'll meet up again."

Alexander was surprised, and a sharp little pang of disappointment shot through her breast. She did not analyze the emotion, but, just then and with no reason that emerged out of the subconscious, she remembered the instant when she had hung to the sycamore branch and he had swept her in and pressed her close. She only nodded her head and spoke gravely. "I reckon we'll all miss ye when ye're gone, but thet hain't no reason fer takin' ye no further offen yore course."

Then for the first time Halloway said anything that might have been construed as a compliment to the girl and he disarmed it of too great significance with a quizzical smile.

"I reckon, Alexander, thar hain't nothin' better then a good man--an' ye've done proved yoreself one--but afore God thar's a mighty outstandin' woman wasted when ye does hit."

Alexander flushed. Perhaps the germ of the awakening that Halloway had predicted was already stirring into unrecognized life, but she was ashamed of the blush and in order to cover it made a retort which was not by any stretch of the imagination a compliment.

"Thar's gals aplenty, Jack"--the people of the hills fall very naturally into the use of the first name--"A feller like you mout find hisself one ef he tried hard enough--an' I'll give ye some mighty good counsel, because atter all I was _borned_ female an' I knows thet much erbout 'em."

"Wa'al?" Halloway smiled inquiringly, and the girl went on.

"Ye won't nuver make no headway with none of 'em whilst ye goes round lookin' es bristly an' es dirty es a razor-back hog thet's done been wallowin' in ther mire. Ef ye ever got clean once hit mout be right diff'rent."

The big fellow roared with laughter as he turned to Brent.

"Kin ye beat thet now, Mr. Brent? Kin ye figger me in a b'iled shirt, with a citified shave an' perfume on me a-settin' out sparkin'."

None of the rest knew why Brent laughed so hard. He was trying to picture the expression that would have come to Alexander's face had she seen Jack Halloway as he himself had seen him, groomed to perfection, with pretty heads turning in theater foyer and at restaurant tables, to gaze at his clean chisseled features and god-like physique.

Bud had little to say and after the parting the girl traveled in a greater silence than before. Both were thinking of the time, now drawing near, when they should reach the house of Aaron McGivins and learn whether or not it was a house of death. Both too were thinking of the man who had turned back, but their thoughts there were widely different.

Then they came to the road that ran by the big house, and before they had reached it Joe McGivins, who sighted them from afar came to meet them. When Alexander saw her brother she found suddenly that she could not walk. She halted and stood there with her knees weak under her and her cheeks pallid. The moment of hearing the life-and-death verdict was at hand and the sorely-tried strength that had carried her so far forsook her.

But Joe, however weak, was considerate and when still at a distance he saw her raise a hand weakly in a gesture of questioning and insufferable suspense and he shouted out his news: "He's gittin' well."

Then the girl groped blindly out with her hands and but for Jerry O'Keefe who caught her elbow, she would have fallen. The taut nerves had loosened to that unspeakable relief--but for the moment it was collapse.

Brent had left the mountains a week after Alexander's safe return, but within two months he had occasion to return and he rode over to the mouth of Shoulder-blade. He had been told that Aaron McGivins, though he had made a swift and complete recovery from his wound, had after all only been reprieved. He had recently taken to his bed with a heart attack--locally they called it "smotherin' spells," and no hope was held out for his recovery.

As Brent rode on from the railroad toward the house he gained later tidings. The old man was dead.

He dismounted at the stile to find ministering neighbors gathered there and, as never before, the unrelieved and almost biblical antiquity of this life impressed itself on his realization. Here was no undertaker, treading softly with skilled and considerately silent helpers. No mourning wreath hung on the door. The rasping whine of the saw and clatter of the hammer were in no wise muted as men who lived nearby fashioned from undressed boards the box which was to be old Aaron's casket. Noisy sympathy ran in a high tide where doubtless the bereaved sought only privacy.

Alexander's face, as she met Brent at the door, was pale with the waxen softness of a magnolia petal and though the vividness of her lips and eyes were emphasized by contrast, suffering seemed to have endowed her remarkable beauty with a sort of nobility--an exquisite delicacy that was a paradox for one so tall and strong.

The appeal of her wistfully sad eyes struck at his heart as she greeted him in a still voice.

"I heard--and I wanted to come over," he said and her reply was simple. "I'm obleeged ter ye. I wants ye ter look at him. He war a godly man an' a right noble one. Somehow his face----" she spoke slowly and with an effort, "looks like he'd done already talked with God--an' war at rest."

At once she led him into the room where, upon the four-poster bed lay the sheeted figure, and with a deeply reverent hand, lifted the covering.

To Brent it seemed that he was looking into features exemplifying all the wholesome virtues of those men who built the Republic. It was a face of rugged strength and unassuming simplicity. Its lines bespoke perils faced without fear and privations endured without complaint. Here in a pocket of wilderness which the nation had forgotten survived many others of those unaltered pioneers. But in the expression that death had made fixed, as well as in facial pattern, Brent recognized that simple kindliness to which courtesy had been a matter of instinct and not of ceremony and the rude nobility of the man to whom others had brought their tangled disputes, in all confidence, for adjustment.

"I understand what you mean," he declared as his eyes traveled from the father to the daughter, "and I'm glad you let me see him."

Moving unobtrusively about, engaged in many small matters of consideration, Brent recognized Bud Sellers and Jerry O'Keefe. He himself remained until the burial had taken place, and was one of those who lowered the coffin into the grave. But when those rites had been concluded and another day had come Brent sought for Alexander to make his adieus.

She was nowhere about the house and he went in search of her. He could not bear to remain longer where he must endure the pain of her stricken face. Of all the women he had ever known she stood forth as the most unique--and in some ways the most impressive. She was undoubtedly the most beautiful. He realized now that, though they were of different and irreconcilable planes of life, there had never been a moment since he had first seen her when he would not, save for his dragging on the steady curb of reason, have fallen into a headlong infatuation. Now he wished only to prove himself a serviceable friend.

When he had vainly sought her about the farm, it occurred to him to go to the ragged "buryin' ground" and though he found her there he did not obtrude upon her solitary vigil.

For Alexander was abandoning herself to one of those wild and nerve-wracking tempests of weeping that come occasionally in a lifetime to those who weep little. She had thrown herself face-down on the ground beneath which Aaron McGivins slept, with arms outflung as though seeking to reach into the grave and embrace him. As she had been both son and daughter to him, he had been, to her, both father and mother. Spasmodically her hands clenched and unclenched, and her fingers dug wildly into the earth.

Brent turned away and left her there and it was a full two hours later before he met her and led her, passive enough now, to a place from which they overlooked that river that, not long ago, they had ridden together. Under his gently diplomatic prompting she found relief in unbosoming herself.

"He war all I hed----" she rebelliously declared. "An' whilst he lived thet war enough--but now I hain't got nothin' left."

After a little she broke out again. "I hain't a woman--an' hain't a man. I hain't nuthin'."

"Alexander," said Brent gently, "when I looked at your father's face in there, I was thinking of what Parson Acup once told me. He said that if your father had been a wishful man,"--he used the hill phrase for ambition quite unconsciously, "he could have gone to the Legislature. Perhaps to Congress."

"I reckon he mout ef hed any honors he craved," she replied. "Folks was always pesterin' him ter run fer office."

The man looked off across the valley which was so desolate now and which would soon be so tenderly green; so tuneful with leaf and blossom.

His eyes were seeing a vision and some of it he tried to voice.

"Suppose, Alexander, he _had_ gone. Suppose he had taken his seat in Congress, instead of staying here. He would have become a figure trusted there, too--but how different your life would have been. There would have been schools and--well, many things that you have never known."

"I hain't hankerin' fer none of them things," she said. Then with a sudden paroxysm of sobs that shook her afresh, she added, "All I wants is ter hev him back ergin!"

But Brent was thinking of things that could mean little to her because she lacked the background of contrast and comparison. He was seeing that beauty and that personality in the social life of official Washington; seeing the triumph that would have been hers--and wondering what it would have meant to her in the balance of contentment or unhappiness.

Of course had Aaron McGivins begun his political career young enough, every trace of mountain illiteracy would long ago have been shed away by the growing girl. As for her blood, there is in all America no other so purely Anglo-Saxon.

"I rather think it's a pity he didn't go," Brent mused aloud. Then he added, "Now that he's--not with you any more--Alexander, there is something you must let me say. You've never thought about it much, but you have such a beauty as would make you famous in any city of the world. Men will come--and they won't be turned back."

For the first time since Aaron's death the old militant fire leaped into her eyes and her chin came up as she flared into vehemence.

"Like hell they won't be turned back!"

But Brent smiled. "You think that now, but Alexander, nature is nature and there must be something in your life. You've played at being a man and done it better than many men--but men can marry women, and you can't. Along that road lies a heart-breaking loneliness. Sometime you'll see that, since you can't be a man, you'll want to be a man's mate."

She shook her head with unconvinced obduracy.

"I knows ye aims ter give me kindly counsel, Mr. Brent, but ye're plum wastin' yore breath."

The man rose. "After all, I only came to say good-bye," he told her. "You aren't going to keep men from loving you. I know because I've tried to keep myself from doing it--and I've failed. But this is really my message. If you do change your ideas, for God's sake choose your man carefully--and if you ever reach a point where you need counsel, send for me."

Along Fifth Avenue from Washington Arch to the Plaza, Spring was in the air. Trees were putting out that first green which, in its tenderness of beauty, is all hope and confidence. With the tide of humanity drifted Will Brent, whom business had brought from Kentucky to New York, but his thoughts were back there in the hills where the almost illiterate Diana, who knew nothing of life's nuances of refinement and who yet had all of life's allurements, was facing her new loneliness.

He reached a bookstore and turned in, idly looking through volumes of verse, while he killed the hour before his appointment. His hand fell upon a small volume bearing the name of G. K. Chesterton, and opening it at random he read those lines descriptive of the illuminated breviary from which Alfred the Great, as a boy, learned his spiritual primer at his mother's knee:

"It was wrought in the monk's slow manner of silver
and sanguine shell,
And its pictures were little and terrible keyholes of
Heaven and Hell."

Brent closed the covers with a snap. "That's what my memories of it all come to," he mused, "'--little and terrible keyholes of Heaven and Hell.'"

But that evening he went to dine with Jack Halloway at his club which looked out across the Avenue and the Park. He had written to Halloway in advance of his coming and by wire had received an invitation couched in terms of urgency not to be denied.

This was not Appalachia but Manhattan yet, when Halloway met him, Brent could but smile at life's contrasts. The huge fellow rose from his chair to greet him, as splendid a physical thing as human eyes could look upon. There was no stubble now on the face that seemed cast in smooth bronze. In lieu of that calculatedly slovenly disguise which he had affected in the hinter-land, he was immaculate in the fineness of his linen and the tailoring of his evening clothes. But as he held out his hand, he drawled, "Wa'al, stranger, how fares matters back thar on Shoulder-blade?"

Brent sketched briefly the occurrences that had taken place there; the death of Old Aaron and the fact that Jerry O'Keefe had been trying to sell his farm near Coal City in order, he surmised, that he might take up his abode nearer the McGivins' place.

Talk ran idly for a time, then Halloway rose and stood towering in the Fifth Avenue window. Across Park and Plaza the sky was still rosy with the last of the afterglow. Under the loftily broken roof-lines of the great hotel multitudinous window panes were gleaming. Over it all was the warm breath of spring.

The big man's hands, idly clasped behind his back, began to twitch and finally settled into a hard grip. His shoulders heaved and when he spoke there was a queer note in his voice.

"See the rhododendron over there in the park? Soon now it will be in flower--not only _that_ rhododendron but----" He ended it abruptly, and then broke out, low-voiced but tense. "This atmosphere is stifling me--God! It's horrible--

"Send your path be straight before you,
When the old spring fret comes o'er you,
And the Red Gods call to you.'"

Into Brent's tone came something almost savage.

"I know what you're thinking. Quit it. It won't do!"

Slowly Halloway turned. For a moment his fine face was drawn with actual suffering. Then he added:

"You're quite right, Will, it won't do. But it's hard to forget--when one has seen a comet. Touch that button if you don't mind. It's time for the cocktails." _

Read next: Chapter 14

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