The Tempering Part 35

The young mountaineer grinned sheepishly. "I reckon a lion-tamer would say the same thing," he a.s.serted, "about going into the cage. He's used to it."

Anne sat silent for a few moments, and between her eyes came a tiny pucker, as if a thought tinged with pain had p.r.i.c.ked, thornlike, into her reflections.

At last she spoke slowly: "Suppose you couldn't swim, and I had to spend a lot of time in deep water. Wouldn't you learn?"

"That's different," he a.s.sured her. "You might need me in that event."

"You say society frightens you, and it's a thing I can't understand. I could understand its boring you. It bores me. I love informal things. I love my friends and the door that stands open as it always does here, but I hate the dress parades. There's some sense in the Horse Show. It makes a market for expensively bred and trained animals, and it's a sort of fancy advertising; but I don't care for a human application of the same idea."

"I feel that way, too," he responded quickly, "and not being expensively bred or trained, I can't escape feeling like a cart horse would feel in that ring."

"I'm going to make my debut, Boone," she said quietly. "I'm going to do it because both mother and Uncle Tom have their hearts set on it and there's no graciousness in stubborn resistance. There are times coming when I've got to stand out against them, and I don't want to multiply them needlessly. But there's something more than just ordinary dislike back of my feeling as I do about it all, and I think it's a thing you'd be the first to understand."

"I guess I ought to understand, Anne, but I've got so much to learn.

Please make allowances for me and explain." His tone was humble and self-accusing.

"This debut ball is just their way of putting me on the marriage market--duly labelled and proclaimed. I don't fancy being put up at auction, and it doesn't even seem quite honest. It's not a genuine offer of sale, because it's all fixed in their own minds. Morgan is to bid me in when the time comes."

Boone's face grew sombre, and his strong mouth line stiffened over his resolute chin.

"G.o.d knows that arrangement is going to come to grief," he said in a low voice that shook with feeling.

"Not if Lochinvar doesn't come to the party," she retorted with a swift change to the riffle of laughing eyes. "I'm letting sleeping dogs lie for the present, Boone, because it's the best way. There isn't any doubt of you in my heart. You know that, but it will be a long time before you can marry me. Meantime,--" the battle light shone for a flas.h.i.+ng instant in her pupils--"I'm standing out for one thing. They've got to give you full acknowledgment. Everybody that accepts me must accept you--and unless you claim recognition, they won't do it."

Boone rose and came over. He took her hands in his own and looked down at her, and, though he smiled, his voice was full of wors.h.i.+p.

"Lochinvar will come, dearest," he declared. "He'll come in full war-paint, and n.o.body but himself will know how stiff he's scared."

It was the morning after that that Boone sat again as a defendant in the police court, flanked by Morgan and the Colonel. He was on trial for shooting and wounding, and there had been broadly circulated hints that his prosecution would be gruelling enough to dissuade bold and adverse spirits on election day. Yet when the case was reached on the docket, Henry Simpson, whose finger was in every pie as a master pastry cook for the intrenched element, arose from his place at the right hand of the court's prosecutor and sonorously cleared his throat.

"May it please your Honour," he announced, with the rhetorical dignity of a Roman senator--or a criminal lawyer's idea of a Roman senator--"the prosecuting witness harbours no feeling of rancour in this affair, despite the injuries which he sustained. The defendant seems to have been led astray in the hot enthusiasm of his youth by older heads.

Having no wish to punish a cat's-paw for the responsibility of his mentors, we move the dismissal of the accused."

"And we, your Honour," came the uptake of Morgan Wallifarro so swiftly as to leave no margin of pause between statement and retort, "insist upon a trial and a full vindication. This prosecuting witness who would now spread the benign mantle of charity over the conduct of his a.s.sailant, fell face foremost while leading an armed raid on a registration booth. I am prepared to prove that the wounded man who now sits there, an exemplar of Christian forgiveness, was spirited away, after his gang fled, and cared for in a private room at the City Hospital under the tender auspices of certain officials. I am further prepared to prove that the name which this munic.i.p.al favourite now wears is, for him, a new one and that until recently he was known as Kid Repetto whose likeness and Bertillon measurements are preserved in the local rogues' gallery. The profession which he ornamented until the city hall cried out for his skilled aid was burglary and second-story work--"

The judicial gavel fell with an admonitory slam, and the magisterial jaws came warningly together.

"Mr. Wallifarro," declared the judge, "the court sustains the prosecution's motion of dismissal. Your unproven statements are highly improper in their innuendo of collusion by an officer of this court. You are seeking to try this case in the newspapers, sir," and Morgan, closing his portfolio, smiled his mocking admission of the charge. He had watched the busy pencils at the press table, and knew that some of them would blossom in flaring headlines. He had seen the cartoonist who had come to make a pencil sketch of Boone himself finish his task, and he enjoyed the judge's resentment. Now he turned away with the irritating jauntiness of one who has scored.

But that evening, at the Horse Show, Boone suffered the embarra.s.sment of that flare-up of publicity which he felt was purely advent.i.tious. Chance had made him a sc.r.a.p in a pattern of ephemeral interest, and to him it seemed that one man in three carried an afternoon paper in his pocket with his own hasty albeit recognizable portrait starkly displayed to the public gaze. On faces which he did not know he caught smiles of amused recognition, and on one which he did know a glower of hate. That was the face of the policeman who had arrested him.

Some of the women in the boxes had him dragged before them for introduction, and he responded with a shyness that was cloaked under the reserve of his half-barbaric dignity.

Anne smiled, and a proprietary pride lurked in her expression.

"Anne looks as docile and amiable as a sweet child," sighed Mrs. Masters to Colonel Wallifarro, as he bade her good night that same evening, "but she's got Larry's British stubbornness in every fibre."

"Added," suggested the Colonel with a truant twinkle, "to the admirable resoluteness of our own family."

"She's absolutely set on having this young protege of yours at her debut ball, and I suppose you know what that signifies. It means that through her whole social career he'll be dangling along frightening off really eligible men!" The lady gave a well-bred little snort of disdain. "He's about as possible as a pet toad!"

The Colonel laughed.

"I'm afraid, my dear, that I like Anne the better for it. We've agreed that Morgan is your choice, and mine--and I don't think Morgan is going to be scared off. Besides, this young man is in my office."

"So is your office cat--if you have one," sniffed the anxious mother.

"We're not sending the cat an invitation, you know."

"I have no cat," observed the lawyer with perfect gravity, and Mrs.

Masters shrugged her shoulders with unconvinced resignation.

When the telephone on Boone's desk rang one afternoon he was quite alone there, and he took up the receiver, to hear Anne's voice. The conversation at first indicated no definite objective, but after a little the girl demanded:

"Boone, you _are_ coming to my party--aren't you?"

For a moment the young man hung hesitantly on the question; then he said: "Anne, I'd go anywhere for the chance of seeing you, but you know 'I hain't nuver run a set in my life. My folks they don't hold hit ter be G.o.dly.'"

Her laughter tinkled back to him, but he had caught the underlying insistence of her tone, and he remembered what she had said about this ball: what it meant to her, and what his being there meant too.

"Take young Lochinvar for instance," he went on banteringly yet with a dubious touch in his voice. "It wasn't the first party of the season that he came to, was it? And even at the finish he was a little late.

Maybe there was some delay in getting his coat of mail ready."

"Oh," the girl's exclamation was one of quick understanding. She knew something of Boone's financial pinch, and how he felt it a point of honour to stretch as far as possible the fund his patron had left him.

"You mean--" she broke off, and the young mountaineer spoke bluntly,

"I mean I haven't a dress suit, and short of stealing one--"

"I understand," she declared, and began talking animatedly of other things, but when she had rung off Boone sat staring at an open law book and making nothing of its text. Then he heard a movement at his back and swung around in his swivel chair, but the next instant he was on his feet with an exclamation that was an outburst of joy.

There, standing just inside the door, tanned like saddle leather, somewhat grayer about the temples and sparer of figure than of old, but with the strong vigour of active months, stood Victor McCalloway.

"I think, my boy," he said, as though he had never been away at all, "we can run to a dress suit."

CHAPTER x.x.x

A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy windfall out of the unexpected.

Never had that other face and figure been far from his thoughts. Never had his ardent hero-wors.h.i.+p waned or tarnished. His speculations and dreams had been haunted by misgivings bred of the fierce chances of war, chances which might make of the features, into which he now looked again, only a memory.

New and varied activities in his life had bulwarked him against actual brooding, and youth is too brightly hopeful to accept grim possibilities, unproven; but the mists of denied fear had hung undissolved, and there had been moments when they had thickened and congealed on the crystal of his thoughts to dark foreboding.

He had not known with what name or rank his beloved preceptor had been serving over there beyond the Pacific. Many officers had fallen, and McCalloway was not one to turn half aside from any danger. If he had been among the lost, Boone might never have known. Even his torture of mind over Asa had been free of this intolerable character of suspense.

Now it was lifted, and without a forerunner of hint the man stood there before him in the flesh, smiling and talking of a dress suit!