The Tempering Part 50

"Boone," said the girl softly, and he started back with astonishment for the unaccountable. Then as his gaze swung incredulously upon her, still wraith-like beyond the shaft of the door's outpouring, he moved to the side, and she stepped into the room.

"But you're in Louisville," he declared in the low voice of one whose reason resents the trickery of apparitions, and his pupils burned with an abnormal brightness. "You're announcing your engagement."

"Not tonight," she reminded him; and then his brain, like his eyes, having readapted its perception to reality, he slowly nodded his head.

"No. That was--_last_ night," he answered, with a bitter change of tone.

"I'd forgotten.... Things are moving so rapidly, you see."

"I came," she said, with direct gravity, "because some one told me that you were in danger--of wrecking your life. I came to speak ... for the thought in time."

While her eyes held his, he returned her gaze with a steady inscrutability, and the two stood there with a long silence between them.

Then the man announced in a dead tone:

"It's too late. Come here!"

He led the way to the bedroom door and threw it open with an emotionless gesture. The girl flinched as she looked in and succeeded in stifling a scream only by bringing both her hands swiftly to her lips. But Boone took a step over to the cot where Victor McCalloway had slept and lifted the sheet from something that lay there.

"That's 'Little' Jim Bartleton--or was," he added slowly. "I folded his hands there on his breast such a little while ago that they're hardly cold yet." He paused a moment; then the flat quality went out of his bearing and his voice, though no louder than before, became transformed.

It held the throbbing intensity of distant drums beating for action and battle.

"He was trying to serve me by watching the enemies that plotted my murder. He was riding my horse--and was mistaken for me. You see, you come too late."

"But, Boone--when--did this--?"

"About an hour ago," the man interrupted her. "He fell just about where you dismounted, drilled through by a bullet hired by Saul Fulton and Tom Carr. I found him there--and brought him in."

"Do--do his people know?"

"Not yet. Only you and I know it--yet." Again the voice leaped tumultuously: "But soon his people are coming here--his people and mine.

They are coming for my counsel, and, by G.o.d, it's ready for them!"

"And you'll tell them?"

"I'll tell them that I've come back from following after new G.o.ds. I'll tell them that the blood of my forefathers hasn't grown cold in me, and that if they follow me, tonight they will see 'Little' Jim avenged." He paused an instant before adding pa.s.sionately, "Not by a single man or a couple, but with as many filthy lives as it takes to balance one decent life."

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on modernity and to stand a hostage to the forces and emotions of the mediaeval.

The fire rose and fell and flickered. It snapped and sighed, roared and whispered, and with it the shadow of the sheeted figure and silhouette of the uncovered face grew and lessened in grotesque fluctuation.

Before she could begin her struggle with the man whose face wore little promise of conversion, she must conquer the struggle in herself, for suddenly she had need to defend her own feelings against the currents of thought that swayed him, and the role of righteous avenger no longer seemed so indefensible.

"Boone," she said, with an effort at convincing steadiness, yet feeling weak of will beside the set determination of his bearing, "I've come a long way to talk with you. Will you listen?"

His bow was that of compulsory a.s.sent, but his eyes showed defiant through their enforced courtesy.

"I'm listening," he said, "though when I asked you to listen, and everything we'd planned our lives for depended on your hearing me, you refused. Yet that was different, I suppose. After all, I'm only partly educated in the ways of polite society. I haven't learned to be casual in such things."

"If you're a barbarian now," she told him quietly, "it's from pure choice. Gentlemen have taught you their code. You've been a gentleman yourself."

Boone laughed.

"Cleopatra, I believe, had pet leopards that were allowed to purr on the steps of her throne. But they were only a part of the picture and they didn't quite become gentlemen. You let me be a pet leopard, too--for a while. Now I've gone back to the jungle."

She ignored the reference to herself. That way lay endless dispute, and this battle to avert feudal tragedies, she thought, was not a thing to be fought on a field of personalities. She spoke slowly and with a dignity that made his cheeks redden to the realization of his own bitter facetiousness. "I came," she said, "only to bring a warning--while there was time."

"Warning of what?" The question was ominously quiet.

"Against confusing black hallucinations with all the saner, bigger things that you know. Warning against betraying a confidence you have won by stampeding people who believe in you and follow you blindly."

The eyes of Boone Wellver narrowed and hardened defensively under this arraignment from lips that had once shaped for him softer responses.

Then as they fell again upon the man who had died in his cause, a baleful light reawoke in them. From that spokesman came a silent argument which needed no voice: "Here I am, not a theory but a fact. I died for you!"

He spoke to her as one who makes an explanation, not of obligation but as a concession to the motives which had brought her.

"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law.

Blackstone says that before a man takes human life--even in defence of his own--he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate, and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and then only, I a.s.sumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then, and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight lips.

"You _have_ come a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is--you must pardon the candour of saying it--a sermon of plat.i.tudes. They have lost their virtue with me--because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts and thinking naked thoughts."

"Just what are you going to do?"

"Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first, though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong crew."

He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened up and his eyes again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he had been trying to repress.

They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery.

Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once wors.h.i.+pped, who, after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf, inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love.

Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying.

"What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with the sort of calm a.s.surance that can speak without faltering or misgiving against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. You _couldn't_ do it, except in a moment of delirium--"

Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate.

Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a battle of wills with a dead man lying between them--and the dead man had been murdered for him.

"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"

Anne's chin came up a little.

"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them; but murder's not good enough for you!"