Except in that narrow circle of American life which follows the doings and interests of the army and navy, the world had forgotten, in the several years since its happening, the court-martial and disgrace of John Spurrier—but Spurrier himself had not been able to forget.

His name had become forcefully identified with other things and, in the employ of Snowdon’s company, he had been into those parts of the world which call to a man of energy and constructive ability of major calibre. But the joy of seeing mine fields open to the rush where there had been only desert before: of seeing chasms bridged into roadways had not been enough to banish the brooding which sprung from the old stigma. In remote places he had encountered occasional army men to remind him that he was no longer one of them and, though he was often doing worthier things than they, they were bound by regulations which branded him.

So Spurrier had hardened, not into outward crustiness of admitted chagrin, but with an inner congealing of spirit which made him look on life as a somewhat merciless fight and what he could wrest from life as the booty of conquest.

One day, in Snowdon’s office after a more than usually difficult task had reached accomplishment, the 65 chief candidly proclaimed justification for his first estimate of his aide, and Spurrier smiled.

“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 association 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 assistant. But—damn 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 66 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 grass 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 class 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 67 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. God 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 assurance. “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 classification 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 passed the tray of canapes and cocktail glasses 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 passed 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 69 development had been upward toward improvement. Yet, between the man’s impressive surface and his soul lay an acquired coat of cynicism and a shell of cultivated selfishness.

John Spurrier, who had renounced the gaming table, was more passionately 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 associations—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 glass, 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 71 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 Cumberlands, 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 assured her, “a stretch of unaltered mediÆvalism 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 72 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 asserted itself, the bulk of its human tide flowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through Cumberland 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.”

The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require no penciling.

“That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought you the most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? I didn’t know you ever ran on cold trails.” She spoke with a delicately shaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own 73 viewpoint, yet he knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldly attainment.

He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon, the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind had harked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now he only smiled with diplomatic suavity.

“Pearls,” he said, “don’t feed oysters into robustness. They make ’em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in these hills, where I’m going, might starve for centuries over buried treasure—which some one else might find.”

The girl nodded.

“In the stories,” she answered, though she did not seem disturbed at the thought, “the stranger in the Cumberlands always arouses the ire of some whiskered moonshiner and falls in a creek bed pierced by a shot from the laurel.”

Spurrier grinned.

“Or he falls in love with a barefoot Diana and teaches her to adore him in return.”

Miss Harrison made a satirical little grimace. “At least teach her to eat with a fork, too, Jack,” she begged him. “It will contribute to your fastidious comfort when you come back here to sell your pearls at Tiffany’s or in Maiden Lane, or wherever it is that one wholesales his treasure-trove.”

If John Spurrier had presented the picture of a man to the manner born as he sat with Martin Harrison’s daughter at Martin Harrison’s table, he fitted into the ensemble, too, a week later, as he crossed the hard-tramped dirt of the street from the railway station 74 at Waterfall and entered the shabby tavern over the way—for the opportunity hound must be adaptable.

Here he would leave the end of the rails and travel by mule into a wilder country, for on the geological survey maps that he carried with him he had made tracings of underground currents which it had not been easy to procure.

These red-inkings were exact miniatures of a huge wall chart in the headquarters of American Oil and Gas, and to others than a trusted few they were not readily accessible. How Spurrier had achieved his purpose is a separate story and one over which he smiled inwardly, though it may have involved features that were not nicely ethical.

The tavern had been built in the days when Waterfall had attracted men answering the challenge of oil discovery. Now it had fallen wretchedly into decay, and over it brooded the depression of hopes and dreams long dead. Gladly Spurrier had left that town behind him.

Now, on a crisp afternoon, when the hill slopes were all garbed in the rugged splendor of the autumn’s high color, he was tramping with a shotgun on his elbow and a borrowed dog at his heels. He had crossed Hemlock Mountain and struck into the hinterland at its back.

Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but he had discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning at Hell’s Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for a hundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet into the sky. Along this entire 75 length it offered only a few passes over which a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.

He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-chinked log-cabin, where he had shared the single room with six human beings and two dogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which was segregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding with scraps simplified the problem of stock raising.

His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retired lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had stopped along the railroad.

Cappeze was a “queer fellow,” a recluse who had quit the villages and drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and, having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and Spurrier meant to know him.

So he pretended to hunt quail—in a country where a covey rose and scattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow. One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficiently careless of the things which were really the core and center of his interest. And now Cappeze’s place ought to be near by.

Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble, and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle with distended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking away into the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.

Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: “He’s made a stand on a rabbit. That dog’s a liar and the truth is not in him!”

But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.

Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder of whirring wings with which quail break cover.

The ground seemed to burst with a tiny drumming eruption of up-surging feathery shapes, and Spurrier’s gun spoke rapidly from both barrels. Save for the two he had downed, the covey crossed a little rise beyond a thicket of blackberry brier where he marked them by the tips of a few gnarled trees, and the man nodded his head in satisfaction as the dog he had libeled neatly retrieved his dead birds and cast off again toward the hummock’s ridge.

Spurrier, following more slowly, lost sight of his setter and, before he had caught up, he heard a whimpering of fright and pain. Puzzled, he hastened forward until from a slight elevation, which commanded a burial ground, choked with a tangle of brambles and twisted fox grapes, he found himself looking on a picture for which he was entirely unprepared.

His dog was crouching and crawling in supplication, while above him, with eyes that snapped lightning jets of fury, stood a slender girl with a hickory switch tightly clenched in a small but merciless hand.

As the gunner came into sight she stood her ground, a little startled but obdurately determined, and her 77 expression appeared to transfer her anger from the animal she had whipped to the master, until he almost wondered whether she might not likewise use the hickory upon him.

He tried not to let the vivid and unexpected beauty of the apparition cloud his just indignation, and his voice was stern with offended dignity as he demanded:

“Would you mind telling me why you’re mistreating my dog? He’s the gentlest beast I ever knew.”

The girl was straight and slim and as colorful as the landscape which the autumn had painted with crimson and violet, but in her eyes flamed a war fire.

“What’s that a-bulgin’ out yore coat pocket, thar?” she demanded breathlessly. “You an’ yore dog air both murderers! Ye’ve been shootin’ into my gang of pet pa’tridges.”

“Pet—partridges?” He repeated the words in a mystified manner, as under the compulsion of her gaze he drew out the incriminating bodies of the lifeless victims.

The girl snatched the dead birds from him and laid their soft breasts against her cheek, crooning sorrowfully over them.

“They trusted me ter hold ’em safe,” she declared in a grief-stricken tone. “I’d kept all the gunners from harmin’ ’em—an’ now they’ve done been betrayed—an’ murdered.”

“I’m sorry,” declared Spurrier humbly. “I didn’t know they were pets. They behaved very much like wild birds.”

The dog rose from his cowering position and came over to shelter himself behind Spurrier, who just then heard the underbrush stir at his back and wheeled to 78 find himself facing an elderly man with a ruggedly chiseled face and a mane of gray hair. It was a face that one could not see without feeling a spirit force behind it, and when the man spoke his sonorous voice, too, carried a quality of impressiveness.

“He didn’t have no way of knowin’, Glory,” he said placatingly to the girl. “Bob Whites are mostly wild, you know.” Then turning back to the man again he courteously explained: “She fed this gang through last winter when the snows were heavy. They’d come up to the door yard an’ peck ’round with the chickens. She’s gifted with the knack of gentlin’ wild things.” He paused, then added with a grim touch of irony. “It’s a lesson that it would have profited me to learn—but I never could master it. You’re a furriner hereabouts, ain’t you?”

“My name is John Spurrier,” said the stranger. “I was looking for Dyke Cappeze.”

“I’m Dyke Cappeze,” said the elderly man, “an’ this is my daughter, Glory. Come inside. Yore welcome needs some mendin’, I reckon.”