Perhaps old Cappeze had spoken too late when he sounded his sharp warning to the newcomer against unsettling the simple contentment of his daughter’s mind. Always realizing his transient status in the aloofness of this life, Spurrier had scrupulously guarded his contact with the girl who belonged to it and who had no prospect of escaping it. He had sought to behave to her as he might have behaved to a child, with grave or gay friendliness untouched by those gallantries that might have been misunderstood, yet treating her intelligence with full and adult equality.

But his inclination to see more of her than formerly was one that he indulged because it gave him pleasure and because a failure to do so would have had the aspect of churlishness.

Those self-confessed traces of snobbery that adhered to this courtier at the throne of wealth, were attributes of which the girl saw nothing. Neither did she see the shell of cynicism which Spurrier had cultivated and this was not because her insight failed of keenness, but because in these surroundings they were dormant qualities.

The self that he displayed here was the self of the infectious smile, of the frank boldness and good humor that had made him beloved among his army 139 mess-mates before these more gracious qualities had been winter-killed by misfortune.

So he was the picturesque and charming version of himself, and he became to Glory an object of hero worship, whose presence made the day eventful and whose intervals of absence were filled with dreams of his next coming.

It was about this time that John Spurrier, the “opportunity hound,” made a disquieting discovery. It came upon him one night as he sat on the porch of Dyke Cappeze’s log house at twilight, with pipes glowing and seductive influences stealing into the senses. Daylight color had faded to the mistiness of tarnished silver except for a lemon afterglow above western ridges that were violet-gray, and the evening star was a single lantern hanging softly luminous, where soon there would be many others.

Cadenced and melodious as a lullaby fraught with the magic of the solitudes, the night song of frog and whippoorwill rose stealingly out of silence, and the materialist who had been city bound so much since conviction of crime had shadowed his life discovered the thing which threatened danger.

It came to him as his eyes met those of Glory, who sat in the doorway itself—since she, at least, need not fear to show her face to any lurking rifleman.

The yellow lamplight from within outlined the lovely contour of her rounded cheek and throat and livened her hair, but it was not only her undeniable beauty that caused Spurrier sudden anxiety. It was the eyes and what he read in them. Instantly as their gazes engaged she dropped her glance but, in the moment before she had masked her expression, Spurrier 140 knew that she had fallen in love with him. The eyes had said it in that instant when he had surprised them. They had immediately seized back their secret and hidden it away, but not in time.

The opportunity hound rose and knocked the ash from his pipe. He wondered whether old Dyke Cappeze, sitting there inscrutable and dimly shaped in the shadows, had shared his discovery—that grizzled old watchdog who was not too far gone to fight for his own with the strength of his yellowed fangs.

The visitor shook hands and walked moodily home, and as he went he sought to dismiss the matter from his mind. It was all a delusion, he assured himself; some weird psychological quirk born of a man’s innate vanity; incited by a girl’s physical allurement. He would go to sleep and to-morrow he would laugh at the moonshine problem. But he did not find it so easy to sleep. He remembered one of those men in the islands who had become a melancholiac. The fellow had been normal at one moment; then without warning something like an impenetrable shadow had struck across him. He had never come out of the shadow. So this disquiet—though it was abnormal elation rather than melancholy, had suddenly become a fact with himself, and instead of dismissing it Spurrier found himself reacting to it. Not only was Glory Cappeze in love with him but—absurdity of absurdities—he was in love with Glory!

It was as irreconcilable with all the logic of his own nature as any conceivable thing could be, yet it was undeniably true.

But Spurrier had been there in the hills when summer had overcome winter. He had seen trickles of 141 water grow into freshets and feed rivers. He had seen clouds as large as one’s hand swell abruptly into tempests that cannonaded mightily through the peaks, with the lashing of torrents, the sting of lightnings, and the onsweep of hurricanes. He had seen the pink flower of laurel and rhododendron make fragrant magic over wastes of chocolate and slag-gray mountain sides, and in himself something akin to these elemental forces had declared itself. He found himself two men, and though he swore resolutely that his brain should dominate and govern, he also recognized in himself the man of new-born impulses who drew the high air into his chest with a keen elation, and who wanted to laugh at the artificial things that life has wrought into its structure of accepted civilization.

That insurgent part of himself found a truer congeniality in the company of grizzled old Dyke Cappeze than that of Martin Harrison; a stronger comradeship in the frank laugh of Glory than in the cool intelligence of Vivien’s smile.

Glory’s brain was as alert as quicksilver, and her heart as high and clean as the hills. Yet in his own world these two would be as unplaced as gypsies strayed from their dilapidated caravan. Moreover, it was ordained that he was to win his game and upon him was to be conferred an accolade—the hand, in marriage, of his principal’s daughter.

Spurrier laughed a little grimly to himself. Of the woman whose hand had been half-promised him he could think dispassionately and of this other, whom he could not take with him into his world of artificial values, he could not think at all without a pounding 142 of pulses and a tumult which he thought he had left behind him with his early youth.

In character and genuine metal of mind, Glory was the superior of most of those women he knew, yet because she was country bred and trained to a code that did not obtain elsewhere, she could no more be removed from her setting than a blooming eidelweiss could be successfully transplanted in a conservatory. He himself was fixed into a certain place which he had attained by fighting his way, in the figurative sense at least, over the bodies of the less successful and the less enduring. It was too late for him to transplant himself, and he and she were plants of differing soil, as though one were a snow flower and one a tropic growth.

Also there were immediate things of which to think, such as an unexpired threat upon his life.

Already he had escaped the assassin’s first effort, and he had no guess where the enmity lay which had actuated that attack. That it still existed and would strike again he had a full realization. He was not walking in the shadow of dread but, because he knew of the menace lurking where all the faces were friendly, he had begun to feel that companionship of suspense: that nearness of something in hiding under which men lived here; and under which women grew old in their twenties.

And it is not given to a man to live under such conditions, and remain the man who fights only across mahogany tabletops in offices. Yet John Spurrier scornfully reasoned that if he could not remain himself even in a new and altered habitat, he was a weakling, and he had no intention of proving a weakling.

His hand had grasped the plow-haft and, for the present, at least, his loyalty belonged to his undertaking.

This inward conflict went with him as he rode across the singing hills to gather up his mail at the nearest post office and he told himself, “I am a fool to ponder it.”

Then his thoughts ran on: “It is dwelling on factitious things that gives them force. Life presents a Janus aspect of the double-faced at times, but a man must choose his way and ignore the turnings. Glory has pure charm. She has a quick mind and a captivating beauty, but so far as I’m concerned, she is simply out of the picture. I could be mad about her, if I let myself—but presumably I am not adrift on a gulf stream of emotionalism.”

When he had spent an hour in the dusty little town and turned again into the coolness of the hills, he dismounted under the shade of a “cucumber tree” and glanced through those letters that were still unopened. One envelope was addressed in a hand that tantalized memory with a half sense of the familiar, and Spurrier’s brow contracted in perplexity.

Then his face grew abruptly grave. “By heavens!” he exclaimed. “It’s Withers—Major Withers! What can he be writing about?”

He opened it and drew out the sheet of paper, and, as he read, his expression went through the gamut of surprise and incredulity to a settled sternness of purpose that made his face stony.

“If it’s true,” he exclaimed, “the man is mine to kill! No, not to kill, either, but to take alive at all costs.”

He stood for a moment, his sinewy body answering to a tremor of deeply shaken emotion. Had he been mountain-bred and feud-nurtured, the sinister glitter of his eyes could have been no more relentless. He was for that moment a man dedicating himself to the blood oath of vengeance.

Then he composed his features and smoothed out the letter that his clenched fingers had unconsciously crumpled. Again he read what Major Withers had to say:

I am writing because though I infer that you have succeeded in material ways, I have heard nothing of your progress in clearing your name and I know that until that is accomplished, no success will be complete for you.

Quite recently I have had as my striker a fellow named Wiley, who used to be in your platoon—and I have talked with him a good bit. Not long ago he declared to me his belief that Private Grant who is listed as officially dead, did not die in the Islands.

He seems to think that Grant made a clean getaway and went back to the Kentucky mountains from which he came. He confesses that he gets this idea from nothing more tangible than casual hints dropped by Private Severance, whose discharge came shortly after you left us, yet his impression is so strong as to amount to conviction. Possibly if you could trace Severance you might learn something. It’s a vague clew, I admit, but I pass it along to you for whatever it may be worth.

Slowly, as though his tireless limbs had grown suddenly old, Spurrier mounted and rode on with reins hanging. He was so deep in thought that he forgot the other unopened letters in his pocket.

Grant might be in these same hills with himself; Grant upon whom his counsel had sought to place the 145 blame for the murder of Captain Comyn. If they could meet alone for the period of a brief interview, either that question would be finally answered or in the reckoning one of them would have to die.

But how to trace him in this ragged territory covering a great and broken area—a territory which God had seemed to build, as a haven and a hiding place for men who sought concealment? Grant would in all likelihood see him first and—he entertained no illusions as to the result—the deserter would kill him on sight. On the other hand, it would do Spurrier no good to kill Grant. If Grant were to serve him it must be with a confession wrung from living lips, and on oath.

Of course, too, the years would have changed Grant so that if they came face to face he would probably fail to recognize the man he had known only in khaki.

The scarred chin? A beard would obliterate that. The stature? Added weight or lost weight would make it seem another man’s.

By processes of elimination Spurrier culled over the possibilities until at length his glance brightened.

In one particular Private Grant could scarcely disguise himself. His eyes were in a fashion mismated. One was light gray and one pale blue. Yes, if ever they met he would have his clew in that.

And that memory reminded him that he had recently been impressed to an unusual degree by a pair of eyes. Whose were they? Oh, yes, he remembered now. It was the man at whose house he had met Sam Mosebury—Sim Colby who dwelt over beyond Clubfoot Branch.

But Colby’s eyes had been noticeable by reason of 146 their extraordinary blackness. So that only helped him in so far as it enabled him to eliminate from all the thousands of possible men the one man, Sim Colby.

The afternoon had spent itself toward sunset as he dismounted and stabled his horse, and it was with a face still somberly thoughtful that he fitted his key into the padlock which held his door and entered.

The interior was dusky in contrast with the outer light, but from one window a shaft of golden radiance slanted inward and in it the dust motes danced.

Spurrier paused and glanced about him, but before he had thrown down the hat he had taken from his perspiring forehead, a sound hideously unmistakable caused his heartbeat to miss its rhythm and pound in commotion.

Every man has his one terror, or, at least, one antipathy which he is unable to treat with customary calmness. With Spurrier it was everything reptilian. In the islands he had dreaded the snake menace more than fever or head hunters. Now, from the darkened floor near his feet came the vicious whir of rattles, and as his eyes flashed toward the sound he saw coiled there a huge snake with its flat, arrow-shaped head sinuously waving from side to side.

With an agility made lightning-quick by necessity, he leaped aside and, at the same instant, the snake launched itself with such venomous force that the sound of its striking and falling on the puncheon floor was like the lashing of a mule whip. The man had felt the disturbed air of its passing as of a sword stroke that had narrowly missed him.

But he had no leisure to regain the breath that had 147 caught startled in his throat, before, from his left, he heard again the ominous note of warning, and felt his scalp creep with horror. The place which he had left locked and believed to be mosquito proof, now seemed alive with the loathsome trespassers.

As Spurrier leaped for his couch he heard again the sound of a living coil released and its hawserlike lashing of the floor. Now he could see more plainly and, calculating his distance, he jumped for the table from which he could reach the loaded shotgun that hung on his wall. If he fell short, he would come down at their mercy—but he landed securely and without capsizing his support. His elevation gave him a precarious sort of safety, but on the floor below him he counted three rattlesnakes, crawling and recoiling; their cold-blooded eyes following his movements with baleful intentness.

Spurrier was conscious of his trembling hands as he leveled the weapon, and of a crawling sensation of loathing along his spine.

Twice the gun roared, splintering the flooring and spattering its ricochetting pellets, and two of the rattlers twisted in convulsive but harmless writhings. But the third head—and it seemed the largest of the three—had withdrawn under the cot. He was not even sure that these three made up the total. There might be others.

With painstaking care Spurrier came down and armed himself with a stout hickory flail which had been used in other days by some housewife in her primitive laundry work as a “battling stick.”

Then he advanced to the battle, swinging one end of the cot wide and shiftily sidestepping. The rattler 148 which lay in piled circles of coppery length regarded him with steely venom, turning its swaying head deliberately as its enemy circled. With the startling abruptness of an electric buzzer it warned and sprang. He escaped by an uncomfortable margin and attacked it with the flail before it could rearrange its coils. Finally he stood panting with exertion over the scene of slaughter.

As he searched the place with profoundest particularity his mind was analyzing the strange invasion. His house was as tight as he had thought it. There was no cranny that would have let in three large rattlers. How had they come there?

Spurrier went out and studied his door. The hasps that held his padlock were in place, but the woodwork about them had been recently scarred. The lock fastenings had been pulled out and replaced.

With a nervous moisture on his brow the man recognized the fiendish ingenuity of his mysterious enemy. These slithering creatures had come here by human agency as brute accomplices in the murder that had failed from the rifle muzzle. The pertinacity and cunning of the scheme’s anonymous author gave promise of eventfulness hereafter.

Had he been struck, according to the evident intention, as he entered his house, he would probably have died there, unsuccored, leaving the door open. The rattlers would either have found their way out after that, or, when his body was discovered, the open door would have explained their presence inside, and no suspicion of a man’s conspiracy would have remained.

One thing stood out clear in Spurrier’s summing-up. 149 Whatever the source of the enmity which pursued him, it had its nerve center in an ingenious brain and it threw about itself that element of mystery which a timid man would have found terrifying and unendurable. Also it operated with a patience which was a manifest of its unswerving determination. Effort might be expected to follow effort until success came—or the unknown plotter were discovered and disposed of.

Yet the author of these malignant attempts worked with an unflurried deliberation, allowing passive intervals to elapse between activities, like the volcano that rests in the quiet of false security between fatal eruptions.

Of course, the letter with the mention of Private Grant might be a clew of identity, yet calm reflection discounted that assumption as a wild and unconfirmed grasping out after something tangible.

Perhaps Spurrier as nearly approached the absolute in physical fearlessness as it is given to man to come—but the mystery of a pursuing hatred which could not be openly faced, filled him with a sense of futility, and the futility inspired rage which was unsettling and must be combated.

That night he lay long awake, and after he had fallen asleep he came often to a sudden and wide-eyed wakefulness again at the sound of an owl’s call or the creaking of a tree limb.

The next morning found him restless of spirit, and it occurred to him that his secret enemy might be lurking near to inspect the results of his handiwork, so he went down to the road and hung the three dead rattlesnakes along the fence where no passer-by could 150 miss seeing their twisted and mutilated lengths. That should be his retort to any inquiring and hostile eye, that he was alive and the creatures put there to destroy him had paid with their lives.

From a place screened from view he meant to watch that gruesome exhibit and mark its effect upon any one who paused to inspect it. Possibly in that way a clew might be vouchsafed—but he did not at once take cover in the thickets.

It was a glorious morning. The sun had ripped away the mists that, in the mountains, always hang damp and veillike between gray dawning and colorful day. The cool forest recesses were vocal with the twitterings and song from feathered throats.

Spurrier sat down by the road and gave himself up to thoughts that it was safer to banish: thoughts that came with those sights and sounds and that made long-stilled pulses awaken and throb in him.

This morning made him feel Glory’s presence and gave him a fine recklessness as to responsibility and consequence. Suddenly he came to himself and seemed to hear the cool cynicism of Martin Harrison’s voice inquiring, as it had once actually inquired: “Growing sentimental?”

He pulled himself together and stiffened his expression into one more suitable upon the face of a man who has taken the severe vows of service to a cold ambition.

But a little later he heard a sound and looked up sidewise to see Glory herself standing near him in the road; a materialization of the truant dreams he had been entertaining.

She wore a dress whose simplicity accentuated the 151 slender erectness of her young body and the litheness of her carriage. Her hair hung in braids and the sunbonnet had fallen back from the brightness of her hair. In her eyes played the violet lights of a merriment that lifted and curved her lips beguilingly.

Spurrier came to his feet, and perhaps Glory, who had succumbed to her moment of self-revelation there on the twilight porch, had her revenge now. For that first startled moment as their glances met, the eyes that looked into hers were lover’s eyes, and their unspoken message was courtship. If he maintained the stoic’s silence forever, as to words, at least his heart had spoken.

“Before Heaven,” said the man slowly, and the tremor of his voice was out of keeping with the ingrained poise of his usual self-command, “when they called you Glory, they didn’t misname you!”

The girl flushed pink, and he took a step toward her with the absorbed intensity of a sleep-walker.

Glory stood there—watched him coming and did not move. To her, though she had sought to hide it, he had become the One Man. Her unconfessed love had magnified and deified him—and now his own eyes were blazing responsively with love for her!

Suddenly she was shaken by a rapturous tremor that seemed almost like swooning or being lifted on some powerful wave that swept her clear of the earth, so that she made no effort at disguise, but let the laughing light in her eyes become softer, yet more glowingly intense.

It was as if they had met in the free realm of dreams where there are no hamperings of impossibility. As he drew near her, his arms came out, and he 152 halted so that, under that same delightful sense of irresponsibility, it seemed to her quite natural to step into their welcome.

Possibly the happenings of yesterday and the sleepless hours of last night had left Spurrier momentarily light-headed. Certainly had one of the rattlers stung him and poisoned his reason, he could not be doing a thing more foreign to his program of intention.

He felt his arms close about her; felt the fragrance of her breath, found himself pressing his kisses on lips that welcomed them, and forgot everything except that this was a moment of ecstasy and passion.