Part 59 (1/2)

Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.

Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.

For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodp.e.c.k.e.r rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the house again, unopened.

Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the sunlight he was thinking of her.

He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville had been an adventure, daring everything.

All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the grat.i.tude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation.

Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud:

”It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!”

But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: ”That's a lie! You love her.... You always will!”

Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast.

But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fas.h.i.+on that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white.

Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leaders.h.i.+p, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands:

”Is it politics, Morgan?”

Wallifarro nodded.

”In part that,” he answered slowly, ”but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane.”

”Hurricane?” Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. ”I don't follow you.”

”My G.o.d, man,” exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, ”don't you know?”

”Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks,”

smiled the hillsman, ”and I haven't seen a paper for ten days.”

Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply:

”The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it--and yesterday England came in.”

The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodp.e.c.k.e.r began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow b.u.t.terflies.

Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: ”What of us?”

Morgan shook his head. ”Two weeks ago,” he said, ”the whole thing was a sheer impossibility.... Now anything is possible.”

Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... ”When that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of peace but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war.”

”You are tired and hot,” he found himself saying. ”Let's go inside.”