The Law of Hemlock Mountain

by Hugh Lundsford

  CHAPTER XVIII

  During the sitting of the legislature John Spurrier was a sporadiconlooker, and his agents were as vigilant as sentinels in a dangerzone. The last day of the term drew to a wintry sunset, and when theclock registered midnight the body would stand automatically adjourneduntil gavel fall two years hence.

  Spurrier, outwardly a picture of serenity, but inwardly tensed for thefinal issue, sat in the visitors' gallery of the Senate chamber. Thecharter upon which all his hopes hung as upon a fulcrum was all but inhis grasp. Seemingly the enemy slept on. Presumably in those lasttired hours the authorizing bill would slip through to passage withthe frictionless ease of well-oiled bearings.

  The needed men had been won over. Carping critics might prate, hereand there, of ugly means that savored of bribery, but that wasacademic. The promise of forth-coming victory remained. Methods may bequestionable. Results are not, and Spurrier was interested inresults.

  A. O. and G. had corrupted and suborned certain public servants. Hehad discovered their practice and played their own cards to theirundoing. His ostensible clients were perhaps little cleaner-handedthan their adversaries, but certainly, those other clients who didnot even know themselves to be represented stood with no stain ontheir claims.

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

  First the _coup_ must succeed, since that success was the foundationof all the rest, and the moment was at hand.

  For this he had slaved, faced dangers and deprived himself of thecontentment of home and the society of his wife. Now it was about toend 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 aperfunctory confirmation by the Senate, and in these final weariedhours it would slip through easily in the general wind-up ofuncontested affairs.

  Spurrier had not slept for two days--or had slept little. Whenthis ended he would go to his bed and lie there in sunken hours ofrestoration the clock around--and after that back to Glory. Alreadyhe carried in his pocket the brief message which he meant to putupon 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 thatburdened the schedule, the clock stood at ten in the evening, and aspirit of disordered peevishness proclaimed itself in the chamber.Seats were vacated. Voices rose in unparliamentary clamor.

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

  Spurrier himself maintained the same unemotional cast of countenancewith which, years before, he had watched a horse in the stretchbattling for more than he could afford to lose, but Wharton, who satat his side, chewed nervously on an unlighted cigar. Sleepy reportersyawned at the press tables as the clerk droned out his sing-song, "Anact entitled an act conferring charter rights upon the Hemlock PipeLine Company of Kentucky."

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

  "Mr. President of the Senate," he drawled, "I want to address a fewincongruvial remarks to the senators in regards to this here proposedmeasure."

  With a sudden sense of premonition Spurrier found himself sittingelectrically upright.

  That man was Senator Chew who had sat in council with him and advisedhim; 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 urgeno pertinent objection. Yet before he had been five minutes on hisfeet his intent was clear and his success assured.

  Out of the hands of their recognized lieutenants A. O. and G. hadtaken the matter of serving them. Into the hands of this obscure andloutish Solon who was ostensibly pledged to their enemies, they hadthrust their commission, and now with the clock creeping forwardtoward adjournment, he meant to talk the charter measure to death byholding the floor until the opportunity for a vote had elapsed.

  Tediously and inanely he meandered along, and no one knew what he wastalking about. In extravagant metaphor and florid simile he indulgedhimself--and the clock worked industriously, an ally not to be undulyhurried.

  "Gentlemen of the Senate--" he drooled, "most of us have been raisedin a land that knows little of the primitive features that make uplife with us, and though it may not at first seem germane orpertinent, I want you to go with me as your guide, while I try to makeyou see the life of those steep counties that are affected by themeasure before you; counties that lie behind the barriers and sleepthe ancient sleep of the forgotten."

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

  "Many the day, as a lad, have I lain by a rushing brook," hedeclaimed, "where the water gushes with the sparkle of sunlit crystaland watched the deer come down on gingerly lifted feet to drink hisfill. Now I reckon mighty few of you gentlemen have seen a deer comedown to drink----"

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

  "In God's name," exclaimed Spurrier, "isn't there any way to shut thatfool 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'vewalked into their trap. We might as well go home."

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

  "If you want to shoot him down as he stands there," said the gentlemantestily, "I dare say it would stop him short. I know no other way. Heis having resort to the senatorial privilege of filibuster. We havelet 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 thatthey've been wise all the time and that hayseed Iscariot has beenplaying us along for suckers."

  Held by a deadly fascination, Spurrier sank back into his seat. Theclock over the speaker's desk traveled once, almost twice aroundthe dial, and yet that nasal voice wandered on in an endlessstream of grotesque bombast--talking the charter to a slow death bystrangulation.

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

  To the mountain folk themselves, if the facts ever percolated into thehills, his seeming would be far from heroic and with nothing tangibleaccomplished, it would do no good to tell them that he had made hisfight with their interests at heart. Such a claim would only stamp himin 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 onhis brain with thunders of destruction.

  "Gentlemen," declared the presiding officer, "The Senate standsadjourned, _sine die_."

  Had John Spurrier gone to see the "witch woman" when Mosebury advisedit, his course from that point on would have brought him to adifferent ending.

  In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it withconsecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shotthrough with disconnected scraps of recollecti
on. When events began tomarshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotelroom were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he wassitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Backof that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.

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

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

  The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked lastnight with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To beoutwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apartfrom the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came therealization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuatingwires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men whosat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greatercaliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared tothis backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth andsophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically,they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns--onerustic and the other urban.

  He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of richprospects, 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 hisown methods--changing them as he grew in stature--there might havebeen a man's zest in the game.

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

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

  John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. Hecompelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of asmile.

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

  Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the moneyloss, 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, hewould wash his hands of Spurrier.

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

  Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. Hehad seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debtshe could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent onsuccess. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employeeshattered beyond hope of recovery.

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

  To no eye of observation was there any trace of 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 whomSpurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that ofthe man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.

  Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a sceneof recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than oneoccasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened intotruculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swepttentatively toward his hip.

  But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it wasno part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim,by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of thepolitician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled,and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only bythe man who knew its cause.

  Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he hadexpected 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, afterbeing decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.

  Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thoughttruculently of that nearby office in which Trabue was also receivingtelegraphic 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 themountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this finalordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could bracehimself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.

  As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and somethingabout his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in allthe world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veinsrose 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 abackground, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. Hehad learned to know these people and to revise his first, false viewsof them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak andhickory.

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

  But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the blackshadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters andmade final victory only the brighter for its contrast with luridmisfortune?

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

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

  Before he had had time to speak of the necessity that called him Eastshe was telling of the visit of Martin Harrison and his indignantdeparture.

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

  "In God's name," he demanded in a numbed voice, "why didn't you writeme about that?"

  "He said," responded the wife simply, "that _he_ would write to you atFrankfort. I thought you knew."

  "But I should have thought you'd have spoken of his coming andgoing--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 withoutaccusation. "I didn't want to talk to you about it until you wereready to suggest it. It might have seemed--disloyal."

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

  "Glory, my sweetheart, I've been playing a game for big stakes. I'vehad to do some things I didn't relish. I've got to do another now. I'msummoned to Harrison's office in New York, at once--and I have nochoice."

  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. Iswear that. I am always wretched without you."

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

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

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

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

  Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because ineverything it was reflection of Glory's own spirit and to him Glorystood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him thanhimself.

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

  The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands fromrocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him abeautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at thesaw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfiedthe eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East wereall landscapes that meant something to each of them--lyric bits ofcanvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attacheditself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.

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

  And that was the thought that was chilling Glory's heart and mutingthe song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place whichhad been founded with all the promise of home and companionship wasbeginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and somethinglike abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, butshe had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of sharedhappiness.

  And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessaryunless, as she had told herself in panic moments and denied sopersistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom hecould enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison withothers?