John Spurrier stepped from the train at Carnettsville into a life that had been revolutionized. At last he had succeeded in leaving his German exile. His own country was in the war but he, with the equipment of a soldier, bore a dishonored name, which would bar him from a commission. Here he found the development of his dreams realized, but by other hands than his own.

Above all, he must see Glory. He had cabled her and written her, so she would be expecting him. Now he gazed about streets through which teemed the new activity.

Here was the thing he had seen in his dreams when he stood on wooded hills and thought in the terms of the future. Here it stood vivid and actual before the eyes that had visioned it.

With a groan he turned into the road homeward on a hired horse. He still meant to fight, and unless the Bud Hawkins property had escaped him, he would still have to be accounted with—but great prizes had slipped away.

At the gate of his house, his heart rose into his throat. The power of his emotion almost stifled him. Never had his love for Glory flickered. Never had he thought or dreamed of anything else or any one else so dearly and so constantly as of her.

He stood at the fence with half-closed eyes for a 288 moment, steadying himself against the surges of up-welling emotion, then, raising his eyes, he saw that the windows and the door were nailed up. The chimney stood dead and smokeless.

Panic clutched at his throat as with a physical grasp. Before him trooped a hundred associations unaccountably dear. They were all memories of little things, mostly foolish little things that went into the sacred intimacy of his life with Glory.

Now there was no Glory there.

He rode at the best speed left in his tired horse over to old Cappeze’s house, and, as he dismounted, saw the lawyer, greatly aged and broken, standing in the door.

One glance at that face confirmed all the fears with which he had been battling. It was a face as stern as those on the frieze of the prophets. In it there was no ghost of the old welcome, no hope of any relenting. This old man saw in him an enemy.

“Where is Glory?” demanded Spurrier as he hurried up to the doorstep, and the other looked accusingly back into his eyes and answered in cold and bitterly clipped syllables.

“Wherever she is, sir, it’s her wish to be there alone.” Suddenly the old eyes flamed and the old voice rose thin and passionate. “If I burned in hell for it to the end of eternity, I would give you no other word of her.”

“She—she is not dead, then?”

“No—but dead to you.”

“Mr. Cappeze,” said Spurrier steadily, “are you sure that I may not have explanations that may change her view of me?”

“We know,” said the lawyer in a voice out of which the passion had passed, but which had the dead quality of an opinion inflexibly solidified, “that since your marriage, you never made her the companion of any hour that was not a backwoods hour. We know that you never told us the truth about yourself or your enterprises—that you came to us as a friend, won our confidence, and sought to exploit us. Your record is one of lies and unfaithfulness, and we have cast you out. That is her decision and with me her wish is sacred.”

The returned exile stood meeting the relentless eyes of the old man who had been his first friend in these hills and for a few moments he did not trust himself to speak.

The shock of those shuttered windows and that blankly staring front at the house where he had looked for welcome; the collapse of all the dreams that had sustained him while a prisoner in an internment camp and a refugee hounded across the German border were visiting upon him a prostration that left him trembling and shaken.

Finally he commanded his voice.

“To me, too, her wish is sacred—but not until I hear it from her own lips. She alone has the right to condemn me and not even she until I have made my plea to her. Great God, man, my silence hasn’t been voluntary. I’ve been cut off in a Hun prison-camp. I’ve kept life in me only because I could dream of her and because though it was easier to die, I couldn’t die without seeing her and explaining.”

“It was from her own lips that I took my orders,” came the unmoved response. “Those orders were 290 that through me you should learn nothing. You had the friendship of every man here until you abused it—now I think you’ll encounter no sympathy. I told you once how the wolf-bitch would feel toward the man who robbed her of her young. You chose to disregard my warning—and I’ll ask you to leave my house.”

John Spurrier bowed his head. He had lost her! If that were her final conclusion, he could hardly seek to dissuade her. At least he could lose the final happiness out of his life—from which so much else had already been lost—as a gentleman should lose.

And he knew that however old Cappeze might feel, he would not lie. If he said that was Glory’s deliberately formed decision, that statement must be accepted as true.

“I have never loved any one else,” said Spurrier slowly. “I shall never love any one else. I have been faithful despite appearances. The rest of your charges are true, and I make no denial. I gambled about as fairly as most men gamble. That is all.”

A stiffening pride, made flinty by the old man’s hostility, shut into silence some things that Spurrier might have said. He scorned the seeming of whine that might have lain in explanations, even though the explanations should lighten the shadow of his old friend’s disapproval. He offered no extenuation and breathed nothing of the changes that had been wrought in himself by the tedious alchemy of time and reflection.

He had begun under the spur of greedy ambition, but changes had been wrought in him by Glory’s love.

He was still ambitious, but in a different way. He 291 wanted to salvage something for the equitable beneficiaries. He wanted to stand, not among the predatory millionaires, but to be his own man, with a clean name and solvent.

Before he could attain that condition he must render unto Harrison the things that were Harrison’s and wipe out his own tremendous liabilities—but his heart was in the hills.

John Spurrier went slowly and heavy heartedly back to the house which he had refashioned for his bride; the house that had become to him a shrine to all the dear, lost things of life.

The sun fell in mottled luminousness across its face of tempered gray and from the orchard where the lush grass grew knee-high came the cheery whistle of a Bob-white.

At the sound the man groaned with a wrench of his heart and throat, and his thoughts raced back to that day when the same note had come from the voices of hidden assassins and when Glory had exposed her breast to rifle-fire to send out the pigeon with its call for help.

The splendid oak that had shaded their stile had grown broader of girth and more majestic in the spread of its head-growth since he had stood here before, and in the flower beds, in which Glory had delighted, a few forlorn survivors, sprung up as volunteers from neglected roots, struggled through a choke of dusty weeds.

The man looked about the empty yard and his breath came like that of a torture victim on the rack. The desolation and ache of a life deprived of all that 292 made it sweet struck in upon him with a blight beside which his prison loneliness had been nothing.

“If she knew the whole truth—instead of only half the truth,” he groaned, “she might forgive me.”

He ripped the padlock from the door and let himself in. He flung wide a shutter and let the afternoon sun flood the room, and once inside a score of little things worked the magic of memory upon him and tore afresh every wound that was festering.

There hung the landscapes that he and she had loved and as he looked at them her voice seemed to sound again in his ears like forgotten music. From somewhere came the heavy fragrance of honeysuckle and old nights with her in the moonlight rushed back upon him.

Then he saw an apron on a peg—hanging limp and empty, and again he saw her in it. He went and opened a drawer in which his own clothes had been kept—and there neatly folded by her hand were things of his.

John Spurrier, whose iron nerve had once been cafÉ talk in the Orient, sat down on a quilted bed and tearless sobs racked him.

“No,” he said to himself at last. “No, if she wants her freedom I can’t pursue her. I’ve hurt her enough—and God knows I’m punished enough.”

Unless he were tamely to surrender to the despair that beset him, John Spurrier had one other thing to do before he left the hills. He must come to such an agreement with Bud Hawkins as would give him a right of way over that single tract and complete his chain of holdings. Thus fortified the field beyond the ridge would be safe against invasion by his enemies 293 and even the other field would have readier outlet to market by that route. In the Hawkins property lay the keystone of the arch. With it the position was impregnable. Without it all the rest fell apart like an inarticulated skeleton.

It happened that Spurrier met Hawkins as he went away from his lonely house, and forcing his own miseries into the background, he sought to become the business man once more. He began with a frank statement of the facts and offered fair and substantial terms of trade.

Both because his affection for the old preacher would have tolerated nothing less and because it would have been folly now to play the cheaper game, he spoke in the terms of generosity.

But to his surprise and discomfiture, Brother Hawkins shook a stubborn head.

“Thar ain’t skeercely no power on ’arth, Mr. Spurrier,” he declared, “thet could fo’ce me inter doin’ no business with ye.”

“But, Brother Hawkins,” argued the opportunity hound, “you are cutting your own throat. You and I standing together are invincible. Separate, we are lost. I’m almost willing to let you name the terms of agreement—to write the contract for yourself.”

“I’ve done been pore a right long while already,” the preacher reminded him as his eyes kindled with the zealot’s fire. “Long afore my day Jesus Christ was pore an’ ther Apostle Paul, an’ other righteous men. I ain’t skeered ter go on in likewise ter what I’ve always done.” He paused and laid a kindly hand on the shoulder of the man who offered him wealth.

“I ain’t seekin’ ter fault ye unduly, John Spurrier. 294 Mebby ye’ve done follered yore lights—but we don’t see with no common eye, ner no mutual disc’arnment. Ye’ve done misled folk thet swore by ye, ef I sees hit a’right. Now ye offers me wealth, much ther same as Satan offered hit ter Jesus on a high place, an’ we kain’t trade—no more then what they could trade.”

The old preacher’s attitude held the trace of kindliness that sought to drape reproof in gentleness and to him, as had been impossible with Cappeze, Spurrier poured out his confidence. At the outset, he confessed, he had deliberately dedicated himself to the development of wealth for himself and his employers, with no thought of others. Later, in a fight between wary capitalists where vigilance had to be met with vigilance, the seal of secrecy had been imperative. Frankness with the mountain men would have been a warning to his enemies. Now, however, his sense of responsibility was awake. Now he wanted to win back his status of confidence in this land where he had known his only home. Now what weight he had left to throw into the scales would be righteously thrown. Even yet he must move with strict, guarded secrecy.

But the old circuit rider shook his head.

“Hit’s too late, now, ter rouse faith in me, John,” he reiterated. “Albeit I’d love ter credit ye, ef so-be I could. What’s come ter pass kain’t be washed out with words.” He paused before he added the simple edict against which there was no arguing.

“Mebby I mout stand convinced even yit ef I didn’t know thet ther devil was urgin’ me on with prospects of riches.”

One thing remained to him; the pride that should 295 stiffen him in the presence of his accusers and judges. When he went into the eclipse of ruin, at least he would go with unflinching gallantry.

And it was in that mood that Spurrier reached his club in New York and prepared himself for the ordeal of the next day’s interview.

He had wired Harrison of his coming, but not of his hopelessness, and when his telephone jangled and he heard the voice of the financier, he recognized in it an undercurrent of exasperation, which carried omen of a difficult interview.

“That you, Spurrier? This is Harrison. Be at my office at eleven to-morrow morning. Perhaps you can construe certain riddles.”

“Of what nature, sir?”

“Of a nature that won’t bear full discussion over the wire. We have had an anonymous letter from some mysterious person who claims to come with the situation in a sling. It may be a crank whom we’ll have to throw out—or some one we dare not ignore. At all events, it’s up to you to dispose of him. He’s in your province. If you fail, we lose out and, as I said once before, you go to the scrap heap.”

Spurrier hung up the phone and sat in a nerveless trepidation which was new and foreign to his nature. This interview of to-morrow morning would call for the tallest bluffing he had ever attempted, and the chances would, perhaps, turn on hair-trigger elements of personal force.

He must depend on his coolness, audacity, and adroitness to win a decision, and, except by guesswork, he could not hope to formulate in advance the terrain 296 of battle or the nature of counter-attack with which he must meet his adversary.

That evening he strolled along Broadway and found himself yielding to a dangerous and whimsical mood. He wondered how many other men outwardly as self-assured and prosperous as himself were covertly confessing suicide as one of to-morrow’s probabilities.

Over Longacre Square the incandescent billboards flamed and flared. The darning-wool kitten disported itself with mechanical abandon. The woman who advertised a well-known corset and the man who exploited a brand of underwear brilliantly made and unmade their toilets far above the sidewalk level. Motors shrieked and droned and crowds drifted.

Before a moving-picture theater, his introspective eye was momentarily challenged by a gaudy three-sheet. The poster proclaimed a popular screen star in a “fight fuller of punch than that of ‘The Wreckers.’”

What caused Spurrier to pause was the composition of the picture—and the mental comparison which it evoked. A man crouched behind a heavy table, overthrown for a barricade—as he had once done.

Fallen enemies lay on the floor of a crude Western cabin. Others still stood, and fought with flashing guns and faces “registering” desperation, frenzy, and maniac fury. The hero only, though alone and outnumbered, was grimly calm. The stress of that inferno had not interfered with the theatric pose of head and shoulders—the grace and effect of gesture that was conveyed in the two hands wielding two smoking pistols.

Spurrier smiled. It occurred to him that had a director 297 stood by while he himself had knelt behind a table he would have bawled out many amendments which fact had overlooked. Apparently he and his attackers had, by these exacting standards of art, missed the drama of the situation.

Over him swept a fresh flood of memory, and it brought a cold and nervous dampness to his temples. Again he saw Glory rising at the broken window with a pigeon to release—and a life to sacrifice, if need be. On her face had been no theatric expression which would have warranted a close-up.

Spurrier hastened on, turning into a side street where he could put the glare at his back and find a more mercifully dark way.

He was seeing, instead of dark house fronts, the tops of pine trees etched against an afterglow, and Glory standing silhouetted against a hilltop. Above the grind of the elevated and the traffic, he was hearing her voice in thrushlike song, happy because he loved her.

The agony of loss overwhelmed him, and he actually longed, as for a better thing, for that moment to come back when behind an overturned table he had endured the suspense which death had promised to end in an instant filled and paid for with revenge.

Then through his disturbed brain once more flashed lines of verse:

“I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,

The best and the last!

I should hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forebore,

And bade me creep past.”