The Tempering Part 53

"You have, Asa," came the chorused response. "We're hearkenin' ter ye, Asa."

"All right," snapped back the new arrival. "What I have need to say I kin say right speedily. Quit it! Go home and leave me to pay off my own scores!" He crossed to Boone and laid a hand on his shoulder, and standing that way, he added: "The man that says this boy lays down is a liar. As for me, I stands by what _he_ says! Ef our own folks don't know who their strong men are, our enemies know--an' seek to hire 'em kilt.

Go home an' wait till we calls on ye!"

An hour later Boone stood alone with Anne in the room where he had been overthrown and rehabilitated.

"I ought to take you across to Aunt Judy's house," he told her in a weary voice. "I don't suppose you should be left here--with me--like this--for what's left of the night. Until now there's been company enough."

The girl shook her head wearily. "I'd fall off of a horse," she said.

"I'm too tired to ride. I'm going back up those stairs--"

The man moved a step forward.

"Joe Gregory is coming back," he explained, "but it will probably be near to dawn before he gets here."

As she reached the stairway she halted impulsively with her hand on the latch, and stood poised there with an expression of baffling, half-eager expectancy. The sensitive beauty of her face and the slender grace of her body seemed for a moment to cast aside their fatigue and to invite him, but Boone stood resolutely the width of the room away.

Had he known it, that was a moment in which he might have grasped a more vital rehabilitation. Had he then offered again the explanation for which he had once been denied opportunity, her readiness to hear him would have been eager. At that moment she was once more his for the taking. He need only have extended his arms and said, "Come!" and she would have responded instantly and gladly. She was receptive, stirred, but one thing her pride still inhibited. She could not make the advances.

Boone let his moment pa.s.s; let it pa.s.s unrecognized with the blindness of life's perverse coincidence. At that precise instant, a mood was upon him which was no intrinsic reflection of his own spirit, but rather the reflection of all the stormy transitions of the night.

She had seen him at a crisis when he had been on the verge of collapse like a bridge whose centre rests upon a span of flawed steel. True, he had not actually collapsed, but, save for her intervention, he would have done so. Now his mortification withered him and perversely expressed itself in resentment against her--for having witnessed his shame.

He owed her everything--so much that his self-respect was bankrupted--and if he could have hated her, he would have hated her just then. He even fancied that he did. He saw in her a cold, impersonal deity, consciously superior to himself and secretly triumphant over his weakness. So he not only let the moment pa.s.s, but he rebuffed its unspoken invitation.

"I owe you everything," he said with the cold ungraciousness of a grudging confession. "If you hadn't come, I'd have had a h.e.l.l in my conscience tomorrow. I'd have been a murderer. I even tried to force you to admit that it was for me, myself, that you cared enough to do it. I'm ashamed of that.... It won't happen again." He paused and his voice was bitterly edged when he went on. "I begged for the chance to explain things--when there was still time. You refused to hear me. Now I wouldn't explain if _you_ begged _me_ to--That's over, but I acknowledge the debt I owe you--for tonight. It's a heavier debt than any man can stand in and keep his self-respect."

Morgan and Anne had been to the theatre, and when they came back to the house the lawyer had drawn from his pocket a small package, and while Anne opened it he looked on. It was an engagement ring, and quite worthy of his connoisseur's selection. But when he put out his hand to take hers, she drew it back and spoke impulsively:

"Before you put that on--Morgan--there's something I must tell you."

He smiled his acquiescence and waited with the emerald set emblem in his fingers, while, in the manner of one who has determined upon a recital that does not flow easily, she began. She filled in for him the events of the two days of her recent and somewhat mysterious absence, and its cause.

Morgan had learned to accept with a certain philosophy the impulse-governed life of the girl who had promised to marry him. If Anne had been less uniquely her own unstereotyped self, she would not have been the fascinating person who had captured his fastidious admiration.

While she talked, his face grew sober, but he refrained from any interruption, and at last she looked up and said simply: "I thought it was best to tell you all about it now. I went--and that's where I was--and for hours of that ghastly night--there was no one else there--but just the two of us."

"I see," said Morgan slowly. She waited for him to supplement the two words, and when he failed to do so, she went on:

"I thought maybe that--knowing about that--you might not want to--" She broke off, and her eyes falling on the ring, finished the sentence.

Morgan shook his head. His usual self-possession was a shade shaken, but he responded definitely, "I do."

"Of course," she conscientiously explained, "when I went, I didn't know what lay ahead, but I took the chances and--that's what it's important for you to understand, Morgan--even if it were to do over--and I knew it all, I'd go again."

"Yes," said her fiance slowly, "I suppose so." He paused a moment before he finished. "Naturally, it's not a thing that I'd have chosen to have occur, but it was the only thing you could do--and be yourself."

"And you have no--questions to ask me?"

Once more he shook his head. He even smiled faintly.

"No," he said without hesitancy, "I have no questions to ask you."

Anne rose from her chair and laid a hand on his arm.

"Morgan," she exclaimed, "you know how to be generous. I've got to be honest with you. I'll stand by my agreement--but I guess I'll always love him. If you marry me, you're taking that chance. I can't give you my heart because it's not mine."

He slipped the ring on her finger, and across his serious features came a slow smile.

"I suppose it's what a thousand fools have said before, Anne, and a thousand more may say it again, but all I ask is the chance to make you love me. I'll succeed because I can't afford to fail."

CHAPTER XLI

Had Tom Carr chosen to sit in a penitential spirit, reviewing his life, he might, perhaps, have been forced to acknowledge a record tarnished with misdeeds, but his conscience would have remained clear of that most depressing sin--bungling the undertaking to which he had set his hand.

Even his delegated murders had been accomplished with tidy and praiseworthy dispatch. Now he had collaborated with a bungler and harvested a dilemma. Saul Fulton had selected an executioner whose rifle ball had targeted itself in a breast not marked for death--yet one which would none the less cry out for vengeance. Above all, the _contretemps_ had proven most ill-timed, since it coincided with Asa's pardon and return.

Word of his coming had reached the house of Tom Carr before Asa himself had ridden away from the livery stable, and that same hour found Saul, like the general discredited by a _debacle_, an outcast from the support of his late allies and a refugee in full flight.

Tom conceived that he was doing enough by way of generosity when he supplied Saul with a horse and a lantern and set him on his way toward the Virginia boundary. Asa's recrudescence from the burial of prison walls to the glamour of a delivered martyr brought him to a choice between standing siege or throwing his Jonah to the whales, and Tom had not hesitated.

So when the party that rode with the deputy sheriff dismounted at the door of the Carr house, they found it unreservedly open to them. Tom did not even waste a lie when he met eyes as uncompromising as though they were looking across rifle-sights.

"You boys hev come jest a leetle too late," he tranquilly informed them.

"Yore man spent some sev'ral days an' nights with me--but he hain't hyar now."

"Then,"--it was Boone who put the question, while Asa maintained the stony-faced silence of a graven image--"then you admit that you took him in and sheltered him?"

The eyes of the Carr leader had held the open light of candour. Now they mirrored that of guileless surprise, and both expressions were master achievements of deceit.

"Why wouldn't I take him in, Boone," he inquired with admirable gravity.

"He 'peared ter be mighty contrite erbout ther way he'd done acted at Asa's trial. He 'lowed he'd come back home a' purpose ter put sartain matters before ther new governor thet mout holp Asa git his pardon. Thet was p'intedly what he said--or words ter thet amount."

Boone smiled his open and ironic disbelief. "And you swallowed that lie, Tom? It doesn't stand on all fours with your repute for keen wits."

The face of the intriguer remained steadfast save that the unblinking eyes became a little pained. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and from among the few dirty envelopes that came out sheafed in his hands, selected a crumpled page of letter paper.

"Thet's whut I went on," he said simply. "I've done lost ther envellup hit come in, but thar hit is in Saul's own hand-write."

Boone took the missive which bore a South American date line and, after reading it, handed it without comment to Asa.

"Dear Tom," it ran. "I swore to a volume of lies at Asa Gregory's trial to save my own neck. It's been haunting me until I've got to come back and help to get him a pardon. I'm indicted myself, and I've got to come in secret or go to jail without getting results. I'm coming to your house, and until the time is ripe it mustn't be known that I'm there. You don't love Asa, but we're all mountain men together, and that trial was a trial of the mountains. Resp. Saul Fulton."