Part 48 (2/2)
Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the mysterious words, ”I'm ruined now,” filled out with meaning as a sagging and formless sail rounds into shape under the livening breath of wind.
He, too, had in those few moments seen an idol at least totter on its pedestal. He had been a hill boy famis.h.i.+ng for advancement, and before his eyes Boone Wellver, distantly his relative, had been an exemplar.
Now Boone was in some unaccountable vortex and talking wildly of inciting men who needed to be calmed. Into Joe Gregory's mind flashed an instinct of resentment against Anne Masters, whom he had often seen there in the hills. In some fas.h.i.+on, he divined, she was to blame for this situation.
The representative wheeled and left his bewildered visitor standing in the room alone. Below in the bas.e.m.e.nt bar of the hotel a noisily laughing crowd jostled at the counter, and the white-ap.r.o.ned Ganymedes were busy. From the door Boone Wellver cast smouldering eyes about the place, searching for a certain partisan Democrat.
Yonder, talking in loud voice, stood a colleague from a neighbouring mountain district. He was nursing, in fingers more used to the gourd-dipper, the stem of a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s, and his cheap wit, couched in an affected drawl and garbed with exaggerated colloquialisms, was being acclaimed with encouraging mirth. The fellow fancied himself a _raconteur_, appreciated. In reality he was a sorry clown being baited.
At another time that sight, trivial in itself, would have steadied Boone with a realization of his own self-duty to represent another type of mountain man. Now he was past such realization.
He found the man of whom he had come in search and drew him hastily aside.
”You said this afternoon you wanted to get away from Frankfort for a week.”
”Why, yes, Wellver, I've got a sick child at home; but this deadlock's got me tied up. A man must stick to his colours.”
Boone nodded. ”You can go,” he said briefly. ”I've come to pair with you. I've got to go home, too. Do you agree not to vote in the house for one week's time?”
The opponent extended his hand. ”It's a go, and thank you. Let's have a drink on it.” But Boone had already turned. He was hastening up the stairs, and five minutes later found him throwing things into a bag.
”Now,” he said in a savage voice to Joe Gregory who still waited, ”let's get away from here. There's going to be a snake killing in Marlin.”
CHAPTER x.x.xVIII
Left alone in Wellver's bedroom, Joe Gregory had been thrown back on the companions.h.i.+p of his own thoughts, and they told him that a tide and a wind were mounting which, unless they could he swiftly stemmed, would leave a trail of wreckage along the heights and valleys of Marlin, like drift in the wake of a spring flood-tide; but this would be human wreckage.
None of Boone's adherents at home had supported his program of progress more whole-heartedly than young Joe Gregory, and the infamous perfidy of Saul Fulton was a hateful thing to him, burning in his heart with need of reprisal, for Asa was his ”blood-relation.”
But as things had shaped themselves, Saul Fulton no longer stood alone, and so long as he was sheltered under the wing of Tom Carr, no blow could be struck him without reopening the ”war.” Joe knew what that meant. The hills again would redden; again men would ride in fear of death, and that fear would verify itself in murders; as Joe had put it, in ”mortal mischief.” The whole archaic d.a.m.nation would rear its head over the new-taught security of peace. The sum of effort toward a stabilized order which men like Boone and himself had built tediously upon patience, would go the collapsing way of land behind a broken d.y.k.e.
If a human being lived who could stay that catastrophe it was Boone, so to Boone he had come and found the single available mediator hot-blooded for violence.
Now he shuddered. If Boone Wellver had the power to dissuade those tempestuous clansmen and hold them in abeyance, how much more easily and mightily could he spur them forward! If he, the apostle of peace, breathed the one word, ”war,” they would be the wild-eyed followers of a Geronimo cast loose on the blood trail.
And Boone's own future, the deputy sheriff mournfully reflected, when this storm was past would be a bright bubble pin-p.r.i.c.ked and ended. The man whom local pride proclaimed a statesman to be reckoned with would stand a relapsed son of the vendetta with blood-soiled hands and an inconsistency-smirched record. Even the men whom he could so easily inflame now would, in the end, turn on him, and his career would be as brief as it was floridly picturesque.
They followed feud leaders--but they did not send them to Was.h.i.+ngton!
Yet Joe was of that blood, too, and could understand Boone's reversion--a reversion willing in a moment to cast aside the armour which he had served his term of years for the right to wear. The thing now was to bring him back in time out of the crimson fog that blinded him. Joe's eyes dwelt absently on the over-turned frame as he stood there thinking, and the articles on the table were photographed on his gaze with a pictorial accuracy of detail, yet because of his abstraction, without meaning of their own.
So mechanically and without at first realizing what he was doing, he read two outspread sheets of paper: Anne's note and McCalloway's telegram. Then abruptly the messages became an integral part of his thought.
Anne Masters, whom Boone loved, was going to marry another man--there was the key to Boone's wild mood, and Victor McCalloway, his friend, had gone away!
If it was Anne who had led Boone to the brink of this peril, it was her duty to lead him back. So ran his elementally simple logic.
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