During the sitting of the legislature John Spurrier was a sporadic onlooker, and his agents were as vigilant as sentinels in a danger zone. The last day of the term drew to a wintry sunset, and when the clock registered midnight the body would stand automatically adjourned until gavel fall two years hence.

Spurrier, outwardly a picture of serenity, but inwardly tensed for the final issue, sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate chamber. The charter upon which all his hopes hung as upon a fulcrum was all but in his grasp. Seemingly the enemy slept on. Presumably in those last tired hours the authorizing bill would slip through to passage with the frictionless ease of well-oiled bearings.

The needed men had been won over. Carping critics might prate, here and there, of ugly means that savored of bribery, but that was academic. The promise of forth-coming victory remained. Methods may be questionable. Results are not, and Spurrier was interested in results.

A. O. and G. had corrupted and suborned certain public servants. He had discovered their practice and played their own cards to their undoing. His ostensible clients were perhaps little cleaner-handed than their adversaries, but certainly, those other clients who did 243 not even know themselves to be represented stood with no stain on their claims.

Those native men and women had not asked him to safeguard them, and had they been able to see what he was doing they would have guessed only that, after winning their faith, he was bent on swindling them. But Spurrier knew not only the seeming facts but those which lay beneath and he fought with a definite sense of stewardship.

First the coup must succeed, since that success was the foundation of all the rest, and the moment was at hand.

For this he had slaved, faced dangers and deprived himself of the contentment of home and the society of his wife. Now it was about to end in victory.

The enemy had been caught napping, and the victory would be his. Certainly he had been as fair as the foe. What now remained was a perfunctory confirmation by the Senate, and in these final wearied hours it would slip through easily in the general wind-up of uncontested affairs.

Spurrier had not slept for two days—or had slept little. When this ended he would go to his bed and lie there in sunken hours of restoration the clock around—and after that back to Glory. Already he carried in his pocket the brief message which he meant to put upon the wires to Harrison, at the moment of midnight and success. Characteristically it read: “Complete victory. Spurrier.”

Now as the clerk droned through the mass of unfinished matters that burdened the schedule, the clock stood at ten in the evening, and a spirit of disordered peevishness proclaimed itself in the chamber. 244 Seats were vacated. Voices rose in unparliamentary clamor.

From the desk where a mountain senator sat in touseled disarray, a flask was drawn and tipped with scant regard to senatorial dignity. Then the chairman of the committee which had the steering of Spurrier’s affairs arose and handed a paper to the clerk.

Spurrier himself maintained the same unemotional cast of countenance with which, years before, he had watched a horse in the stretch battling for more than he could afford to lose, but Wharton, who sat at his side, chewed nervously on an unlighted cigar. Sleepy reporters yawned at the press tables as the clerk droned out his sing-song, “An act entitled an act conferring charter rights upon the Hemlock Pipe Line Company of Kentucky.”

The reading of the measure seemed devoid of interest or attention. It went forward in confusion, yet when it was ended the mountain man who had taken the swig out of his flask, came slowly to his feet.

“Mr. President of the Senate,” he drawled, “I want to address a few incongruvial remarks to the senators in regards to this here proposed measure.”

With a sudden sense of premonition Spurrier found himself sitting electrically upright.

That man was Senator Chew who had sat in council with him and advised him; his right hand in action and his fox-brain in planning, yet now, with every moment invaluable he was burning up time!

He was a pygmy among small men, and as he drooled on he seemed to urge no pertinent objection. 245 Yet before he had been five minutes on his feet his intent was clear and his success assured.

Out of the hands of their recognized lieutenants A. O. and G. had taken the matter of serving them. Into the hands of this obscure and loutish Solon who was ostensibly pledged to their enemies, they had thrust their commission, and now with the clock creeping forward toward adjournment, he meant to talk the charter measure to death by holding the floor until the opportunity for a vote had elapsed.

Tediously and inanely he meandered along, and no one knew what he was talking about. In extravagant metaphor and florid simile he indulged himself—and the clock worked industriously, an ally not to be unduly hurried.

“Gentlemen of the Senate—” he drooled, “most of us have been raised in a land that knows little of the primitive features that make up life with us, and though it may not at first seem germane or pertinent, I want you to go with me as your guide, while I try to make you see the life of those steep counties that are affected by the measure before you; counties that lie behind the barriers and sleep the ancient sleep of the forgotten.”

Men yawned while his tediousness spun itself into a tawdry flow of slow words, but the Honorable Mr. Chew talked on.

“Many the day, as a lad, have I lain by a rushing brook,” he declaimed, “where the water gushes with the sparkle of sunlit crystal and watched the deer come down on gingerly lifted feet to drink his fill. Now I reckon mighty few of you gentlemen have seen a deer come down to drink——”

The minute hand of the clock, in comparison with this windy deliberation seemed to be racing between the dial characters.

“In God’s name,” exclaimed Spurrier, “isn’t there any way to shut that fool up? He’s ruining us. Get some of our leaders up here, Wharton. We’ve got to stop him.”

“How?” demanded Wharton with a fallen jaw.

“I don’t give a damn how! Kill him—buy him. Anything!”

“It’s too late,” responded Wharton grimly. “He’s already bought. We’ve walked into their trap. We might as well go home.”

Spurrier sent for his whip, but he had come to the end of his resourcefulness and shook a dejected head.

“If you want to shoot him down as he stands there,” said the gentleman testily, “I dare say it would stop him short. I know no other way. He is having resort to the senatorial privilege of filibuster. We have let them slip up on us. A. O. and G. has outbid you, that’s all.”

“But how in God’s name did they get wise?”

The other laughed grimly. “Wise?” he snorted. “My guess is that they’ve been wise all the time and that hayseed Iscariot has been playing us along for suckers.”

Held by a deadly fascination, Spurrier sank back into his seat. The clock over the speaker’s desk traveled once, almost twice around the dial, and yet that nasal voice wandered on in an endless stream of grotesque bombast—talking the charter to a slow death by strangulation.

Now, reflected Spurrier bitterly, his connection 247 with the enterprise must seem to any eye that viewed it that only of Harrison’s jackal and lobbyist, who had signally failed in his attempt to raid A. O. and G.

To the mountain folk themselves, if the facts ever percolated into the hills, his seeming would be far from heroic and with nothing tangible accomplished, it would do no good to tell them that he had made his fight with their interests at heart. Such a claim would only stamp him in the face of contrary evidence as taking a coward’s refuge in lies.

Then when it seemed to him that he could no longer restrain himself, Spurrier heard the gavel fall. It was a light sound, but it crashed on his brain with thunders of destruction.

“Gentlemen,” declared the presiding officer, “The Senate stands adjourned, sine die.”

Had John Spurrier gone to see the “witch woman” when Mosebury advised it, his course from that point on would have brought him to a different ending.

In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it with consecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shot through with disconnected scraps of recollection. When events began to marshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotel room were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he was sitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Back of that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.

At last he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and that picture of disheveled wildness startled him and brought him back to realization.

Then self-contempt swept in on him. He had been 248 called a man of iron nerve; a plunger who never turned a hair under reversals of fortune—and now he stood looking through the glass at a broken gambler with frenzied eyes. It was such a face as one might see in the circle before the Casino at Monte Carlo—the place of suicides.

The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked last night with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To be outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically, they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns—one rustic and the other urban.

He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of rich prospects, but in the face of defeat a man cannot change his colors.

Had he been able to undertake this fight as his own man and choose his own methods—changing them as he grew in stature—there might have been a man’s zest in the game.

Now, less than ever, could he speak open truth to these simple friends who had trusted him. Now he must fight out a damaged campaign to the end along 249 the lines to which he stood committed, and until the end there was nothing to say.

Perhaps if he could avert total ruin, he might yet have opportunity to reclaim the confidence of these Esaus who had traded for a mess of pottage. Certainly they had nothing to hope for from the myrmidons of Trabue.

John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. He compelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of a smile.

Not only had every resource he could muster gone into the scrapped enterprise, leaving him worse than bankrupt, but through him Martin Harrison had been led into the sinking of a fortune.

Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the money loss, than the thought of the triumphant smile on Trabue’s thin lips, but it was quite in the cards that, with his contempt for failure, he would wash his hands of Spurrier.

That, of course, spelled ruin. The exhibition skater had gone through the thin ice.

Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. He had seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debts he could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent on success. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employee shattered beyond hope of recovery.

But when Spurrier went down to the hotel dining room at breakfast time, a cold bath and a superhuman exertion of will power had transformed him. His bearing was a nice blending of the debonair and the dignified.

To no eye of observation was there any trace of 250 collapse or reversal. He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.

At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.

Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a scene of recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than one occasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened into truculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swept tentatively toward his hip.

But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it was no part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim, by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of the politician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled, and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only by the man who knew its cause.

Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he had expected to say, yet in it went no whine of despair:

Have suffered a temporary reversal.

Those were the words that the capitalist read when the message, after being decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.

Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thought truculently of that nearby office in which 251 Trabue was also receiving telegraphic information, and he writhed in the wormwood of chagrin.

The curtness of his response scorched the wires:

Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.

So John Spurrier packed his bag and caught the first train for the mountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this final ordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could brace himself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.

As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and something about his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in all the world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veins rose an intoxicating tumult like that of wine.

Back of that emotional wave though lurked a misery of self-reproach. Glory had made the magic of his brief happiness, but there was a background, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. He had learned to know these people and to revise his first, false views of them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak and hickory.

First he had striven to plunder them, then sought to lift the yoke of poverty from their long-bowed shoulders. In both efforts he had failed.

But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the black shadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters and made final victory only the brighter for its contrast with lurid misfortune?

He had been the plunger who seemed strongest 252 when he was weakest, and these enduring hills spoke their message of steadfastness to him as he stood surrounded by their lofty crests of spruce and pine.

Then he had reached the door and flung it open and Glory was in his arms, but unaccountably she had burst into a tempest of tears.

Before he had had time to speak of the necessity that called him East she was telling of the visit of Martin Harrison and his indignant departure.

Despite his all-consuming absorption of a moment before, Spurrier drew away, chilled by that announcement, and Glory read in his eyes a momentary agony of apprehension.

“In God’s name,” he demanded in a numbed voice, “why didn’t you write me about that?”

“He said,” responded the wife simply, “that he would write to you at Frankfort. I thought you knew.”

“But I should have thought you’d have spoken of his coming and going—like that.”

Her head came up with a brief little flash of hurt pride.

“You hadn’t ever told him—about me,” she said, though without accusation. “I didn’t want to talk to you about it until you were ready to suggest it. It might have seemed—disloyal.”

Spurrier again braced his shoulders. After a moment he took her in his arms.

“Glory, my sweetheart, I’ve been playing a game for big stakes. I’ve had to do some things I didn’t relish. I’ve got to do another now. I’m summoned to Harrison’s office in New York, at once—and I have no choice.”

Glory drew away and looked with challenging directness into his eyes.

“I suppose—you’ll go alone?”

“I must. Business affairs are at a crisis, and I need a free hand. But, God granting me a safe return, it’s to be our last separation. I swear that. I am always wretched without you.”

Always before when disappointment or disquiet had riffled the deeps of her eyes, it had taken only a word and a smile from this man to dispel them and bring back the serenity of content. Her moments of panic when she had seemed to drop down, down into pits of foreboding until she had plumbed the depth of despair, had been moments to which she had surrendered in his absence and of which he had been given no hint.

Now with a gravity that was bafflingly unreadable she stood silent and looked about the room, and the man’s eyes followed hers.

Why was it, he almost fiercely demanded of himself, that this cottage set in remote hills shed about him a feeling of soul-satisfaction that he had never encountered in more luxurious places?

Now as he looked at it the thought of leaving it cramped his heart with a sort of breathless agony.

Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because in everything it was reflection of Glory’s own spirit and to him Glory stood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him than himself.

The simplicity and good taste of the small house, standing in a land of squalid cabins like a disciple of quiet elegance among beggars, had been the result 254 of their collaboration. Glory had had the instinct of artistic perception and true values and he had been able to guide her from his sybarite experience.

The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands from rocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him a beautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at the saw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfied the eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East were all landscapes that meant something to each of them—lyric bits of canvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attached itself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.

But now Glory, too, was looking at all these things as though she as well as himself were leaving them. There was something of farewell in the glance that lingered on them and caressed them, as if of leave-taking and into Spurrier’s heart crept the intuition that despite his declaration just made that this should be their last separation, she was seeing in it a threat of permanence.

And that was the thought that was chilling Glory’s heart and muting the song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place which had been founded with all the promise of home and companionship was beginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and something like abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, but she had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of shared happiness.

And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessary unless, as she had told herself in 255 panic moments and denied so persistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom he could enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison with others?