One afternoon Trabue, the unadvertised dictator of American Oil and Gas, sat with several of his close subordinates in a conference that had to do with Martin Harrison, the man he assumed to ignore.

“Unless some unforeseen thing sends oil soaring,” ventured Oliver Morris, “this fellow Spurrier is having his trouble for his pains. My idea is that he’s seeking to tease us into counter activity—and trail after us in the profits.”

“And if something should send oil soaring,” crisply countered Cosgrove, “he’d have us distanced with a runaway start.”

“Who is this man Spurrier?” demanded Trabue himself. “What does our research department report?”

“He’s a protÉgÉ of Martin Harrison’s.”

Trabue appeared to find the words illuminating, and a shrewd irony glinted in his brief smile.

“If he’s Harrison’s man, he’s out to knife me—and he has resources at his back. Tell me more about him.”

Cosgrove took from his portfolio a neatly typed memorandum, and read from it aloud:

Former army officer who gained the sobriquet of “Plunger” Spurrier: Court-martialed and convicted upon charge of 227 murder, and pardoned through efforts of Senator Beverly. Associated with various enterprises as a general investigator and initiative expert. Rumor has it that Harrison is grooming him as his own successor.

“If his reputation is that of a plunger,” argued Morris, “my guess is that he’s playing a long-shot bet for a killing.”

“And you guess wrong. If Harrison has picked this fellow to wear his own mantle, the man is more than a gambling tout. It is only lunacy to underestimate him or dismiss him with contempt.”

Cosgrove nodded his concurrence and amplified it. “In my judgment he’s something of a genius with a chrome-nickeled nerve, but he’s adroit as well as bold. He has operated only through others and has kept himself inconspicuous. Except for an accident, we should have had no warning of his activities.”

“If he were to get bitten by a rattlesnake,” growled Morris savagely, “it would be a lucky thing for us. Of course, we might beguile him into our own camp.”

Trabue shook his head in a decisive negation.

“That would only notify him that we recognize his effort and fear it. If the game’s big enough, we don’t want him.” He paused, then added with a grim facetiousness: “As for your other suggestion, we have no rattlesnakes in our equipment.”

The dynamic-minded master of strategy sat balancing a pen-holder on his extended forefinger for a few moments, then he inquired as if in afterthought: “By the way, I feel curious as to how the tip came to us that this conspiracy was on foot. You say that 228 except for an accident we should not have known it.”

Cosgrove smiled. “It came to this office through the regular channels of our local agencies—and I didn’t inquire searchingly into the details. I gathered, though, that the trail was picked up by a sort of information tout—a fellow who was hurt and compromised a damage suit against us. It seems that he is supposed to be blind—but he could nonetheless see well enough to read some memoranda that chanced to come his way.” The gentleman cleared his throat almost apologetically as he added: “As I remarked I didn’t learn the particulars. I merely took the information for what it might be worth, and set our men to watching.”

“I see,” Trabue made dry acknowledgment. “And what is being done toward watching him?”

“I understand we have a man there who is assuming an enmity toward us and who is ostensibly helping Spurrier to build up political influence.”

“I see,” said Trabue once more, with even a shade more dryness in his voice.

That conversation had taken place quite a long while before the present, but it set into quiet motion the wheels of a large and powerful organization.

The knowledge that John Spurrier was objectionable to A. O. and G. had filtered through to more local, yet confidential, officials, and through them to “men in the field,” and it is characteristic of such delegations of authority, that each department suits the case referred to it to the practical workings of its own environment.

Gentlemen of high business standing in lower 229 Broadway could permit themselves no violence of language, beyond the intimation that this upstart was a nuisance. Translated into the more candid brutality of camp-following parasites in the wildness of the hills, that mild declaration became: “The man needs killin’. Let’s git him!”

Now, Spurrier found that the visit to Louisville and Lexington, which had promised to be the matter of weeks, must stretch itself into months, and that until the convening and adjournment of the assembly itself, his presence would be as requisite as that of a ship’s officer on the bridge. In one respect he was gratified. American Oil and Gas seemed serenely unsuspicious of any danger. Vigilance seemed lapsed. Those men whose duty it was to watch the corporation’s interest and to hold in line the needed lawmakers, appeared to regard legislative protection as a thing bought and paid for and safe from trespass.

And Spurrier, knowing better, was secretly triumphant, but without Glory he was far from happy.

Had he known what influences were at work with cancerlike corrosions upon her loyalty, what food was nourishing her anxiety, he would have stolen the time to go to her. Hers was an anxiety which she did not acknowledge. Even to herself she denied its existence and against any outside suggestion of inner hurt pride would have risen in valiant resentment.

But in her heart it talked on in whispers that she could not hush. At night she would waken suddenly, wide-eyed with apprehension and seek to reassure herself by the emphasis of her avowals: “He’s not ashamed of me. He’s not leaving me because of that! 230 He’s a big man with big business, and some day he’ll take me with him, everywhere!”

When old Cappeze, a man not given to unreflecting or careless speech, flatly questioned: “Glory—why doesn’t John ever take you with him?” she flinched and fell into exculpations that limped.

The old man was quick to note the pained rawness of the nerve he had touched, and he began talking of something else, but when he was alone once more his old eyes took on that fanatic absorption that came of his deep love for his daughter, and he shook his head dubiously over her future.

One day a neighborhood woman came by Glory’s house and found her standing at the door. Tassie Plumford neither claimed nor was credited with powers of magic, but she, too, might have been called a “witch woman.” In curdled disposition and shrewishness of tongue, she merited the title.

“Waal, waal, Glory Cappeze,” she drawled in her rasping, nasal voice. “Yore man hes done built ye a right monstrous fine house, hyar, ain’t he?”

“Come in and see it, Mrs. Plumford,” invited the young wife. “But my name’s Glory Spurrier now—not Cappeze.”

In the gesture with which the woman drew her shawl tighter about her lean shoulders, she contrived to convey the affront of suspicion and disbelief.

“No, I reckon I ain’t got ther power ter tarry now,” she declined. “I don’t git much time fer gaddin’, an’ be yore name whatsoever hit may, there’s them hyar-abouts es ’lows yore man lavishes everything on ye but his own self. He’s away from ye most of his time, albeit I reckon he’s got car fare aplenty fer two.”

Glory stiffened, and without a word turned her back on her ungracious visitor. She went into the house with the tilted chin of one who disdains to answer insolent slanders, but in the tenderness of her heart the barb had nonetheless sunk deep. So people were saying that!

Over at Aunt Erie Toppitt’s the shrew again halted—and there it seemed that she did have time to “tarry,” and roll the morsel of gossip under tongue.

“Mebby she’s ther furriner’s lawful wife an’ then ergin mebby she ain’t nuthin’ but his woman,” opined Tassie Plumford. “Hit ain’t none of my business nohow, but a godly woman hes call ter be heedful whar she visits at.”

“A godly woman!” Aunt Erie’s tone stung like a hornet attack. “What has godliness got ter do with you, anyhow, Tassie Plumford? The records of ther high cote over at Carnettsville hes got yore record fer a witness thet swears ter perjury.”

Mrs. Plumford trembled with rage but, prudently, she elected to ignore the reference to her legal status.

“Ef they was rightfully married,” she retorted, “hit didn’t come ter pass twell old man Cappeze diskivered her alone with him—in his house—jest ther two of ’em—an’ they wouldn’t nuver hev been diskivered savin’ an’ exceptin’ fer ther attack on ther furriner.” In the self-satisfaction of one who has scored, she added: “I’ll be farin’ on now, I reckon.”

“An’ don’t nuver come back,” stormed Aunt Erie, whose occasional tantrums were as famous as her usual good humor. “Unless ye seeks ter hev ther dawgs sot on ye.”

While the spiteful and forked little tongues of 232 gossip were doing their serpent best to poison what had promised to be an Eden for Glory at home in the hills, the husband who was charged with neglecting her was miserable in town.

His work had been the breath of life to him until now, bringing the zestful delight of prevailing over stubborn difficulties, and building bridges that should carry him across to his goal of financial power. Now he found it a necessity that exiled him from a place to which he had come half-contemptuously and to which his converted thoughts turned as the prayers of the true believer turn toward Mecca.

He who had been urban in habit and taste found nothing in the city to satisfy him. The smoke-filled air seemed to stifle him and fill him with a yearning for the clean, spirited sweep of the winds across the slopes. He knew that these physical aspects were trivial things he would have swept aside had they not stood as emblems for a longing of the heart itself—a nostalgia born of his new life and love.

But all the plans that had built one on the other toward a definite end of making an oil field of the barren hills were drawing to a focus that could not be neglected. He could no more leave these things undone than could his idol Napoleon have abandoned his headquarters before Austerlitz, and the sitting of the legislature could not be changed to suit his wishes. Neither could the lining up of forces that were to guide his legislation to its passage be left unwatched.

So the absence that he had thought would be brief, or at worst a series of short trips away from home, was prolonging itself into a winter in Louisville and Frankfort. He found himself as warily busy as a 233 collie herding a panicky flock, and as soon as one danger was met and averted, a new one called upon him from a new and unsuspected quarter.

Much of the deviousness of playing underground politics disgusted him, and yet he knew he would have regarded it only as an amusing game for high stakes before his change of heart. But now that it was to be a battle for the mountain men as well as for Martin Harrison and for himself, it could be better stomached.

The effort to pick out men who could be trusted in an enterprise where they had to be bought, was one which taxed both his insight into human nature and his self-esteem.

Senator Chew, himself a mountaineer, who had come from a ragged district to the state assembly and who seemed to harbor a hatred against A. O. and G. of utter malevolence, was almost as his other self, furnishing him with eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear, and familiarity with all the devious, unlovely tricks of lobby processes.

But Senator Chew, a countryman, who had capitalized his shifty wits and hard-won education, bent his knee to the brazen gods of cupidity and ambition.

“I don’t just see,” he demurred petulantly to Spurrier, “why you go about this thing the way you do. You’ve got unlimited capital behind you and yet in going after these options you ain’t hardly got hold of any more land than just enough to let your pipe line through. You could get all a man’s property just as cheap per acre as part of it—and when I’ve sweated blood to give you your charter and you’ve sweated 234 blood to grab your right-of-way, that God-forsaken land will be a Klondike.”

“I hope so,” smiled Spurrier, and his ally went on.

“All right, but why have nothing out of it except a pipe-line? Why not have the whole damn business to split three ways, among Harrison’s crowd, yourself—and the crowd I’ve got to handle?”

“You’re a mountain man, Senator,” the opportunity hound reminded him. “You know that in every other section of the hills to which development has come, the native has reaped only a heart-ache and an empty belly. I am purposely taking only a part of each man’s holding, so that when the oil flows there what he has left will be worth more to him than all of it was before.”

“Hell,” growled the politician. “The men you ought to think about making money for, are the men you need—like me, and the men who back you, like Harrison. These local fellows won’t thank you, and in my opinion you’re a fool, if you’ll permit me to talk plain.”

“Talk as plain as you like, Senator,” smiled the other. “But I think I’m acting with right sound sense. Our field can be more profitably developed among friends than among enemies—even if no consideration other than the practical enters into the problem.”

It was not until Christmas time that Spurrier broke away from his activities in Louisville, and then he came bearing gifts and with a heart full of eagerness. He came elated, too, at the fair promise of his prospects, and confident of victory.

So Glory hid the fears that had been growing in her heart and, because of the tidal power of personal fascination and contact, she found it an easy task. While Spurrier was with her, those fears seemed to lose their substance and to stand out as absurdities. They were delirious miasmas dissipated by the sun and daylight of companionship.

Spurrier kept most of his valuable papers in a safety vault in Louisville, but for purposes of reference here, he maintained a complete system of carbon copies, and these must be stored in some place where he could feel sure they were immune from any prying eye. The entire record of his proceedings would be clear to any reader of those memoranda.

While Glory was away one day, he removed a section of the living-room wall and fashioned something in the nature of a secret cabinet, upon which he could rely for these purposes. Before he went away again he shared that secret with her, since in certain exigencies it might be needful that some one should be able to act on wired instructions. He showed her the bit of molding that was removable and which gave entrance to the hidden recess.

“In that strong box,” he told her, “are papers of vital importance. If I haven’t taken you entirely into my confidence about them all, dear, it’s because they concern other people more closely than myself. All my own affairs are yours—but in the service of others, I must obey instructions and those instructions are rigid.”

He took out one envelope, though, plainly marked.

“This,” he said, “is a paper to be used only in case of extreme emergency. It is an order on the safety-deposit 236 people in Louisville to open my vault to the bearer. In the event of my death, or if I should wire you from a distance, I would want you to use it.”

Even that admittance into the veiled sanctum of his business life pleased Glory, and she nodded her head gravely.

She did not tell him, and he did not guess, that tongues were wagging in his absence, and that people said she was good enough only for that part of his life in which he shed his white collar and his “fine manners” and donned the rougher habiliments of the backwoods.

Even when she learned that his coming back had been only to spend the holidays with her and that he must leave again to be gone for weeks, at least, she let none of the disquiet that smouldered in her find an utterance in words.

On a fine old Blue Grass estate, which exhaled the elegance and ease of the Old South, lived Colonel Merriwell, a life-long friend of Dyke Cappeze. In years long gone he had more than once sought to have Cappeze transfer his activities to a wider field. Now, timber interests called him to the mountains, and though the cold weather had set in, his daughter chose to come with him. She had heard much of the strange and retarded life of the mountains, and because it was so different from the refinements with which she had always been surrounded, she wanted to see it.

When they arrived after traveling conditions that warranted every conception of quaintness, but violated 237 every demand of comfort, the girl from the Bluegrass found Glory a discovery.

At once she recognized that into any drawing-room this wilderness-bred girl could be safely dropped, and that even though she stood in a corner, she would soon become its center.

Helen Merriwell was fascinated by the anomaly of an inherent aristocracy in an encompassing life which was almost squalid, and a bond of sympathy sprang into instant being. The Bluegrass woman knew by instinct, though through no utterance from the loyal lips, that the other was lonely, and when Colonel Merriwell announced his intention of returning home, the daughter decided to continue her visit and its companionship.

To Spurrier’s house, too, during the crisp, clear weather of late winter came, without announcement or expectation another visitor. They were two other visitors to be exact, but one so overshadowed his companion in importance that the second became negligible.

At the Carnettsville station the daily train drew up one morning and uncoupled, on a siding, the first private car that had ever run over that piece of roadbed. Its chef and valet gazed superciliously down upon the assembled loungers, but the two gentlemen who alighted and gave their names as Martin Harrison and his secretary, Mr. Spooner, were to all appearances “jest ordinary folks.”

Glory was housecleaning on the day of Harrison’s coming, and, in neatly patched gingham and dust-protected crown, she came nearer seeming the typical mountain woman than she had for many days before. 238 Her fresh beauty was hard to eclipse, but she was less presentable than she wished to be when her husband’s great patron saw her for the first time and contrasted her with such women as his own daughter.

When she heard the name, without previous warning, a sort of panic possessed her and for once she became tongue-tied and awkward, so that after the first, Helen Merriwell stepped into the breach and did the talking.

“My name is Martin Harrison,” said the great man with simple cordiality. “I thought John Spurrier lived here—but I seem to be mistaken.”

“He—he does live here,” stammered Glory, catching the swiftly stifled amazement of the magnate’s disapproving eyes.

“Here?” He put the question blankly as if only politeness prevented a greater vehemence of surprise. “But I expected to find a bachelor establishment. There are ladies here.”

Glory fell back a step as if in retreat under attack. If this statement were true, Spurrier had never acknowledged her to the employer with whom his relations were intimately close. In her own eyes, she stood as one who had lost caste and been repudiated—and all self-confidence abandoned her, giving way to trepidation.

Harrison stood bewilderedly looking at this country girl who had turned tremulous and pale, and Helen Merriwell stepped forward.

“Then you didn’t know that Mr. Spurrier was married?” she smilingly inquired.

The money baron transferred his glance to her as his shadowed face lightened into relief. This young 239 woman had the poise and ease of his own world, which made communication facile. If Spurrier had not been candid with him, at all events he had, perhaps, not unclassed himself. The other was presumably a local servant of whom he need think no more.

“Mr. Spurrier,” he answered easily, “had not mentioned his marriage, probably because our recent correspondence has all related to business. However, I hold it unhandsome of him not to have done so.” He paused, then added deferentially: “Of course, I am better prepared now to felicitate him—since I have seen you.”

But Helen Merriwell laughed and laid a hand on Glory’s shoulder.

“You do me too much honor, Mr. Harrison,” she assured him. “This is Mrs. Spurrier.”

The financier’s ingrained politeness for once failed him. It was not for long, but in the breached instant he stiffened arrogantly as his eyes went back to Glory, and betrayed themselves in half-contemptuous hostility. The lieutenant whom he had chosen as his own successor in the world of lofty affairs had not only deceived him but had thrown himself wantonly away upon a stammering daughter of illiterates!

Martin Harrison bowed again, but this time with a precise formality.

“I didn’t notify Mr. Spurrier of my coming, since I felt sure I would find him here,” he explained briefly, directing himself pointedly to Helen Merriwell. “I am on my way south, so now I’ll defer seeing him until another time—unless you expect him back shortly?”

Helen turned inquiringly to Glory and Glory shook 240 her head. The episode, confirming her own anxieties, had unnerved her steadfast courage into collapse.

Had any warning come to her in advance of the event her bearing toward this stranger would have been a different one. The pride that bowed submissively to no one except in love, would have sustained her. The natural dignity which was the gift of her blood would have been the thing that any observer must have first and last recognized. With a chance to have shaped her attitude, Glory would have received Harrison as a Barbarian princess might have met an ambassador from Rome, but no such chance had been afforded her and she stood as distraught and as panicky as a stage-struck child whose speech fails.

She even slid back into the rough-hewn vernacular that had been so completely banished from her lips and custom.

“I ain’t got ther power ter say,” she faltered, “when he’ll git back. He’s goin’ ter Frankfort first.”

“I’ll write to him there,” said the capitalist.

Harrison departed with the stiff dignity of an affronted sachem, and Helen Merriwell, looking after him, smiled with amusement for the incident which she so well understood, until she turned and saw Glory.

The girl had wilted back against the wall and stood there as if she had been stricken. Her great, violet eyes were brimming with the spirit of tragedy and held the despair of one who has blithely returned home—to find his house in ruin and ashes.

Glory stole away to her own room, escaping the embrace of sympathetic arms, as soon as she could. “He’s done denied me ter his friends,” she told herself 241 wildly. “He dast’n’t acknowledge me ter fine folks!”

Then through the first, torpid misery of hurt pride, crept a more terrifying thought. Spurrier had been practically engaged to this man’s daughter. He had been diverted from his purpose by motives of pity, and now that Harrison knew, he might be ruined—probably would be ruined. If so disaster would come to him because of her—and at last she rose from the chair where she had dropped down, collapsed, with a light of new resolution in her eyes.

“If that’s all I’m good for,” she declared tempestuously, “he’s got to be rid of me.”