The Tempering Part 54

Saul had ridden away the night before in the haste of a man whose life is forfeit to delay, yet before he mounted he had penned that letter at Tom Carr's dictation, and the ink of the South American date line was scarce twelve hours dry.

"I'll send it back to you, Tom," he had demurred. "There isn't time now.

They may come any minute to get me!"

"If ye don't write hit--an' thet speedily--they'll find a ready-made corpse when they gits hyar," had been Tom's succinct reply with an eloquent gesture toward his armpit holster. "Ye got me inter this fix--now ye've got ter alibi me outen hit."

Without waste of words, the posse turned and left the house. They were starting on a pursuit which they knew would end in nothing, but Tom, following them to the gate, called out cheerfully: "I hope ye gits him, boys. He left my house without no farewell betwixt sundown an'

sun-up--an' he took ther best nag outen my stable ter go with."

One who would sound the depths of ingenious depravity should lend ear to the tale of the householder whose life has been ravished of tranquillity by that small boy of the neighbourhood who leads and incites the local gang of youthful hooligans.

To such a tale the judge of the Louisville Juvenile Court was listening now, and the defendant, who sat sullen eyed in the essential wickedness of his eleven years, heard witness after witness unfold his record of misdoing. He and his va.s.sal desperadoes, it was averred, broke windows and street light globes, preyed upon the apple barrels of the corner grocery, and used language that scalded and sullied the virginal ears of pa.s.sing wash-ladies and plumber-gentlemen.

"There can't n.o.body live in peace in them two blocks, Judge, your Honour," came the heated a.s.severation of the man in the witness chair.

"He's got more influence over my boys than what I've got myself--and the Reform School's the only place for the likes of him."

"Where do you spend your Sat.u.r.day nights?" inquired the personage on the bench irrelevantly, and the furtive eyes of the witness s.h.i.+fted and lost their self-a.s.surance.

"Here and there, Judge, your Honour. Sometimes I drop in at Mike's place for a gla.s.s of common beer."

"Do you occasionally send your boys--the followers of this dangerous bandit--to Mike's place with a bucket?"

The man hesitated, and his glance savoured of repressed truculence.

"Maybe I do, once in a while," he replied doggedly. "I ain't on trial here, am I?"

"No--not just now." The judge spoke almost gently. "Stand down and let the fellow who _is_ on trial take that chair."

The child with the sullen face slouched forward, and the Judge's eyes engaged his smouldering young pupil's with less austerity perhaps than the description of his turpitude warranted. This man, who sat one day a week to try the cases of delinquent and incorrigible children, presided five days over more mature hearings. From Monday through Thursday he mantled himself in judicial dignity and his language was the decorous speech of the bench. One who observed him only on Friday would hardly have gathered that. Just now he leaned forward and addressed the boy in a conversational tone and an argot that savoured of the alley-playground.

"Willie, haven't you got any other name--I mean amongst those kids that belong to your gang?"

Willie swallowed hard, but inasmuch as he failed to reply, his inquisitor went on:

"Surely those other kids don't call a rough-neck like you just Willie.

You wouldn't stand for that, would you? Haven't you got some professional name like Bulldog Bill--or something?"

A fugitive glint of pride flashed in the boy's eyes under their cultivated toughness and their present alarm, and with a sheepish grin he enlightened this embodiment of the law.

"The other kids calls me 'Apache Bill.'"

The Judge did not smile, but accepted the information with full gravity, and spoke reflectively:

"Officer McGuire tells me that there are about a dozen members in your gang. It looks like a feller that can boss a crew of that size ought to have something in him. Look here, kid, let's talk this over."

After five minutes of low-toned confidences the man on the bench found himself looking into eyes of abated sullenness and listening to a voice that was simply small boy.

"You see it's a sucker play for you to travel the route that ends in the pen."

The Judge made it seem that Apache Bill himself had arrived at this sane conclusion in which his Honour merely concurred.

"And since you realize that yourself, I'm not going to send you to the Reform School this trip. You are going to give me your promise to run that gang differently." He looked up, and his glance fell on a young woman sitting among several others at the back of the room. There was much in her appearance to arrest the attention and challenge interest, but what one noticed most were eyes that held an inner light and a starry brightness. "I'm going to have you report to one of our probation officers every week," continued the Judge to Willie alias "Apache Bill,"

"and come to see me myself occasionally."

Usually for a case of this sort he would have selected a man from that group of volunteers who made effective the machinery of the children's court but this young terrorist would take a bit of understanding in his reclamation, and among the men and women who aided and abetted his efforts no other seemed to see into the intricacies of the boy mind quite so unerringly as that young woman with the starry eyes, who had been a famous belle and before that a tom-boy.

So the Judge nodded to her and said, "Miss Masters, I'm going to have 'Apache Bill' report to you. You two might talk over a boy-scout organization down there in his district."

As the girl rose from her chair, the Judge's face suddenly developed stern lines and his brows knit closely as he turned his attention to the princ.i.p.al complainant.

"John Vaster," he announced, this time with no softening of tone, "a probation officer is coming to your house, too. If those boys of yours go to Mike's place after this with a bucket, or if you don't find a way to keep them off the streets at night, you're coming back here, not as a prosecuting witness but as a defendant."

Anne Masters had turned to this work of volunteer probation officer as to a refuge from herself. Perhaps in her own mind it stood also for a sort of penance for sins with which she stood self-charged.

Her marriage with Morgan had been set for June, and somehow it seemed to her that when the ceremony had been gone through with her besetting doubts and struggles would end, if not in happiness, at least in resignation. Then she would acknowledge the abdication of Romance and accept her allegiance to Duty.

But meanwhile, until the solemn seal of the Church's ritual had been set upon that resolve, bringing, as she sought to convince herself it would, a steadied feeling of solace and of perplexities resolved, she seemed to hang like a Mahomet's coffin in suspended disquiet and misery.

Boone had said he would never explain--and she accepted his a.s.sertion as final. But for that explanation which she had once silenced, and which, when she was receptive, he had refused, she now burned with anxiety.

Unless she had work to do while she fought back the insurgency and revolt of her heart, she would not be able to endure the pictures with which her imagination filled the future. Through this period of heartache she missed the essential, in that she did not discern the artificiality of the whole situation or the cure that would have lain in a repudiation of false pride.

Whatever mistakes she had made, she was now bound by her promise to Morgan, and doubly bound by the tyranny of her mother's dependence which, having been once accepted, could no longer be repudiated.

Colonel Wallifarro, bending over his desk one forenoon some two months after he had given the dinner to announce his son's engagement, had chokingly fallen forward with his face on his elbows.

When the physicians arrived, he was lying on his office lounge under the age-yellowed engraving of President Jefferson Davis and the grouped cabinet of the erstwhile Confederate States of America, and it was there that he died within the half hour.

"Acute indigestion," said the doctors, "His blood pressure was high and he refused to ease up on the work. He had often been warned that this might occur."

His will showed that in one respect at least he had heeded the warning, for its date was recent. The estate, much shrunken below the estimate of public supposition, was devised entirely to his son except for a bequest of a few thousand dollars to Anne's mother. There was mention, too, of a note, as yet unpaid, for twenty thousand dollars "loaned and hereby released, to my friend Lawrence Masters, Esq."

"In leaving my whole estate to my beloved son Morgan," read an explanatory clause of the doc.u.ment, "I do so happy in the knowledge that I likewise provide for my niece, Anne Masters, to whom he is engaged to be married, and for whom my love and affection is that of a father."

And Boone Wellver, who had still hoped against hope to receive from Anne the word that would restore to him at least a fighting chance, heard nothing. It all seemed to his gloomy a.n.a.lysis relentlessly logical that the girl, who for a long while had fought for her choice of an alien in her own world, should go back to her kind. After all she was not for him, and his dream had only been a fantasy long indulged but no longer possible of indulgence. So Boone plodded on, and in the more obvious manifestations of life was not greatly changed. The zest of the game was gone, but its realities remained to be met, and for him there was a coward memory to be lived down--the memory of a relapse from which a woman had saved him.

The ordeal of waiting was almost over for Anne, and the wedding preparations were under way. From the bed which she had not been able to leave since the day of Colonel Wallifarro's burial, Mrs. Masters injected a more fervent enthusiasm into these preliminaries than did the bride to be.

After the fas.h.i.+on of one who has been embittered and enjoys a belated triumph, the mother lived in a sort of fantasy which could see no clouds in the sky of her daughter's future. A fact.i.tious gaiety animated her, even though the death of her mainstay had crushed her into invalidism.

The haunted misery in Anne's face, and the lids that closed as if against a painful glare when Mrs. Masters forecast the happiness to be, were things that had no recognition or acknowledgment from the lady in the sick bed. It was as if her own joy in a dream achieved were comprehensive enough to embrace and a.s.sure the life-long happiness of her daughter, as the whole includes the part.

But when Anne sat down at her desk one afternoon to address some of the wedding invitations, she was out of sight of the maternal eye and her sensitive lips dropped piteously.

On the list before her, made out by herself and augmented by Morgan and her mother, she had come upon the name of Boone Wellver, and suddenly the things on her desk swam through a mist of tears.

Anne Masters sat there for a long while, then with a white face she drew a line through the name on the list. At least he should be spared that heartlessness of reminder.

She and Morgan were going abroad. Morgan had foreign business which made the journey imperative, and it was only when the courts adjourned and political matters fell quiet with the coming of summer that he could so long be away from his practice and his public affairs, but Anne could not think of Europe now. Her thoughts turned mutinously to imagined vistas seen from a rock at the lop of Slag-face across valleys where sunset cast the shadows of mountains: where just now the dogwood was in a foam of blossom and the laurel would soon be in pink flowering.