The Tempering Part 52

"You've paid me one compliment tonight. You said that I could control men. As for myself, I doubt that, and if I fail--well, that comes later."

From the stairhead she looked down. Boone had gone to the door and stood with his hand on the latch, yet for the moment he did not lift it. To her he seemed bracing himself against a fresh a.s.sault of heavy forces.

CHAPTER XL

With Joe Gregory entered three others, and to Anne, who was walled off from any sight of what went on, every word and intonation came up the enclosed stair well as if from a sounding board. She felt like a blind theatregoer whose ears strain to make amends for the want of eyes while a tense melodrama is building toward its climax.

Her imagination filled in the intervals of silence with heart-straining anxiety, and she felt that she must see the movements, the gestures, the light and shadow in the sombre eyes, when the wrath of the voices broke off in ominous quiet. At the thought of the closed door which must soon be opened to them she shuddered, and she wanted to see Boone; to be able to a.s.sure herself that he was dominating the situation, which, as she listened, seemed blazing beyond control like a fire that outgrows the power of its fighters.

It was difficult to gauge the flow and counterflow of influences in the scene below stairs. Boone's voice came infrequently as though he, too, were only a listener, and in the other voices was a unanimity of violence and hatred. It was a clamour for prompt vengeance unfolding an iliad of long-fostered animosities.

To the girl it seemed an intolerable babel--a dissonance of profane fury and menace--and she could feel her heart pounding like a m.u.f.fled drum.

"We've pa.s.sed out word to the boys and we won't hev need ter delay now ter git 'em gathered together," came a deep-chested voice at whose raising the others fell silent. "They're gathered right now in leetle clumps an' hovers hyar an' thar, whar they kin rally straightway when ye gives ther signal." The ba.s.s fell silent, then supplemented in rea.s.surance to the leader: "Thar hain't a timorous ner a disable feller in ther lot."

"I'm obliged to you, Luther," Boone spoke as one in deep contemplation.

"Then I reckon we're fixed to go over there and take Saul away from the Carrs, aren't we?"

Anne Masters pressed her hands agitatedly to her breast as a chorus of yapping a.s.sent gave answer. Had he so soon, under the pressure of their crowd influence, repudiated his decision to play the hard role of restraint?

"Maybe, though, boys," the representative's voice continued reflectively when he had succeeded in quieting them, "we'd better wait for the other men before we start on any grave errand. I hear some of them out there now."

For an hour the talk ran in a hot freshet, while newcomers augmented the handful, and with the increase of numbers came a fuller-throated mounting of pa.s.sion. Would Boone be able to curb their ferocities? Could any man do it? Did he even mean to try?

As she listened to the feud disciples coming in from creek beds and cove pockets, it appeared to her entirely possible that they were capable of turning on and rending the leader who ventured to cross their strongly fixed purposes.

Saul Fulton's treachery to Asa, Tom Carr's giving sanctuary to the Judas, the affront to the clan; these things made up the inflamed burden of their growing and deepening wrath, and as yet they had not been told of the man who lay dead, a victim freshly justifying their hunger for reprisal!

Anne missed the voice of Joe Gregory who, after a brief consultation with Boone, had gone out again. In Joe's presence she would have felt strong rea.s.surance, but Joe was carrying sorry tidings to the house of the boy who lay dead.

Boone knew his people, and he was adroitly playing a most difficult role, but to her ears came no proof of that. Until the clansmen had opened and aired the festering sores of their grievances there lay in them no hope of amenability. After that--perhaps--but the issue must await its moment, neither antic.i.p.ating nor procrastinating by the part of a minute.

At last Boone's glance measured the crowd and recognized that there was no longer any one for whom to wait. Ahead lay a disclosure, but before its making he must throw his dice and let circ.u.mstances ordain with what faces upward they would roll.

He stood before Victor McCalloway's fireplace and raised his hands.

"Men," he began without haste or excitement, "I've listened to all of you and I've had little to say. I sat with Asa in the court that tried him. I've visited him not once but often in the jail where Saul Fulton's perjury has put him and kept him. I've besieged the Governor to plead for him, and I yield to no man in loyalty to Asa Gregory. Now I claim the right to be heard."

Anne crouched, listening with inheld breath, while the voices below stairs dwindled from clamour to attention. She tried to visualize the speaker, but because the whole world had receded from familiarity he, too, became vague and hard to picture.

But as Boone talked, she knew that his voice and words and the heart which was meeting, full-front, an issue he had been in danger of deserting, were making magic, and along her own scalp went the creep that is the ultimate test of drama. Inconsequentially she fretted because she could not see his eyes. His auditors, though, could see the eyes and respond to their hypnotic fires--respond though the text he taught was hard to stomach.

He was winning them against their prejudices, and so skilfully had he carried them step by step that they were saved from anything like full realization of self-reversal, which means loss of self-esteem. If for the hireling shot from the laurel they had no other response than retaliation in kind, they were only rising to the bait of a lawless and unimaginative enemy. It was better, he a.s.serted, that the efforts to murder him succeed than that they should draw the life essence out of every principle in which his adherents had supported him.

Anne said to herself that Boone had carried the night, but Boone knew otherwise.

A handful of men keyed for violence now accorded him calm attentiveness.

They could even laugh, on occasion, but he was thinking of the closed door of McCalloway's room. He had need to grapple them to his leaders.h.i.+p more strongly yet, for when he opened that door they would no longer laugh.

Now he drew a deep breath.

"These things that I am saying to you, I say not only with a full knowledge of all that you men have told me but with a knowledge of a harder thing to bear." He paused, and then he told them bluntly:

"'Little' Jim Bartleton lies dead behind that door. He was killed tonight when he rode my horse on an errand for me, and was taken for me."

After an interval of hushed amazement, the commotion broke afresh, and Boone again raised his hands and awaited its subsiding.

"When a man asks his friends to hold their hands, though their hearts are justly hot, he has need to prove his own steadfastness. Here is my promise. Tomorrow Joe Gregory as deputy sheriff, and myself are going to Tom Carr's house. We are going alone in the full light of day and without any force of armed men to bolster up our demands. If any enemy seeks our injury he must do that too in the full light of day. In the name of the law and not of the mob, we will demand that Saul be turned over to us. We will accept no lies and no evasions. We will take Saul to Frankfort and present him to the court that refused to send for him. If they fail, then, it will be time for _you_ to act. Meanwhile you must wait. I have never before asked any test of your trust in me. Now those that believe in me must stand with me, and--" his last words were like the crack of a cattle whip--"and those that don't must fight me."

With eyes that burned and a breast that pounded, Anne awaited the reception of that peroration, and for what seemed an endless time there was no reception at all, except tense silence. The girl closed her eyes and fancied a pendulum swinging in the dark, and as it registered seconds her nerves tautened until the impulse to scream became poignant.

Yet she told herself this long silence meant a.s.sent--must mean a.s.sent.

Then, with an abruptness that made her start, came a voice, not from the room below, but raised from the roadside in a long halloo, and from within sounded the staccato challenge, "Who's thar?"

Once more a silence momentary and taut, a silence that hurt, came like a margin about sound, then the outer voice spoke again:

"Hit's me--Mark Bartleton." That much was steady, but there the intonation altered and mingled challenge with heartbreak. "I've done come with my jolt wagon--ter fotch my dead boy home."

Anne covered her face with her hands and s.h.i.+vered behind the door. She did not need to have her fears confirmed in the growing whisper that raised itself slowly from the sunken levels of silence. Those words with the weighty force of their simplicity had crashed upon trembling scales of indecision, and they trembled no longer. Labour and courage and effort had gone into Boone's upbuilding dam of persuasion. It took a single blow to shatter it.

Now the night belonged to the torch and rifle, unless a miracle intervened, and though Boone would struggle like a shepherd whose flock has been scattered, he would persevere in the face of foredoomed failure. Yet until the death-freighted and ox-drawn wagon had strained and jolted slowly away, and even a little longer, the specious calm held.

The swinging lantern had disappeared around a turn; the sounds of creaking axle and hub had died into the night and the door of the house had been closed, before the hum of low talk gave her any coherent sign.

Below there was only the confused blurring of words such as may come from a locked jury room, until over it sounded the deep ba.s.so that she had heard first that evening.

Its words were not pitched in oratorical effect, but they were contemptuous and final. "Come on along, men," said the voice. "We're wastin' time hyar foolin' with a man thet kain't do nothin' but talk.

What we wants now is a man with guts inside him."

The sentiment of accord declared itself loudly, profanely and indubitably. But as the fickle gathering grew turbulent, Anne heard once again a shout followed by the opening of a door, and after that an outcry of amazement which she could in no wise translate, beyond a realization that something was happening which was both unforeseen and incredible.

Anne's posture, as she listened to the fluttering of her own heart, was one of terror in its most abject and helpless form. She had persuaded him, not only with argument but the taunt of cowardice, to interpose himself between this tidal wave of human savagery and its object. Now the wave had seized him up and tossed him from his precarious foothold.

His career had ended: his influence, crumbled under too severe a strain, and his life itself probably hung on a hair balance while he stood among wolves. She told herself that the responsibility lay with her, and her reason grew palpitant and dizzy. Only a miracle could quench the conflagration now, and a miracle five minutes hence would be too late.

This deadly pause was unendurable. A door had opened and clamour had been breathlessly stilled. What did it mean? Some one had entered--Who was it?

The man who had just made his entrance had boldly pushed his way to the threshold before he called out, and had as boldly thrown wide the door without awaiting a reply. Faces turning with a single impulse toward the invader remained staringly intent as they saw standing there the broad-shouldered figure of Asa Gregory, who should be in jail, who for seven years had not been free to ride or walk the highways.

"I was pardoned out, this morning," he said briefly, "and I met up with some of our boys while'st I was ridin' home. I was right interested in what them boys told me."

"Ye've done come in good season, Asa," shouted an impulsive spokesman.

"We're settin' out ter settle old scores, an' Boone Wellver's done laid down on us."

But Asa turned a cool eye on the informant, and into the sonorous quality of his voice came an acid bite.

"Who's got the best license here to talk about score-settling? Who's been sulterin' in jail for seven years?"