Spurrier

“ Glory was numb except for a dull, very present ache that started in her heart and filled her to her finger tips, and she made no answer.
“Her father,” Spurrier forced himself on, “is a great financier. I’m his man. I’m a little cog in a big machine. It’s been practically understood that I was to become his son-in-law—his successor. I’m too deep in, to pull out. It’s like a soldier in the thick of a campaign. ”

“ Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken spaces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power. ”

“ The opportunity hound began his argument. His demeanor of unruffled calm and entire confidence began to exercise its persuasive force. Harrison cooled somewhat, but Spurrier was fighting, beneath his pose, as a man who has cramps in deep water fights for his life. ”

“ Then Harrison rose and paced the room.
“You know something about me, Spurrier,” he began. “When I came East they laughed at me—if they deigned to notice me at all. They said: ‘Here comes a bushleaguer who thinks he’s good enough for the big game. It’s one more lamb to the shearing shed.’ That’s the East, Spurrier! That’s cocksure New York! They sneer at a Western-bred horse—or a Western-trained prize fighter—and when the newcomer licks the best they’ve got they straightway let out a holler that they taught him all he knows. ”

“ Those native men and women had not asked him to safeguard them, and had they been able to see what he was doing they would have guessed only that, after winning their faith, he was bent on swindling them. But Spurrier knew not only the seeming facts but those which lay beneath and he fought with a definite sense of stewardship. ”

“ It was the figure of a very young man clad in the tunic of a graduating West Point cadet and it was a figure that bore itself with the prideful erectness of one who regards his right to wear his uniform as a privilege of knighthood. For Spurrier was fancying himself confronted by the man he had been in those days of eager forward-looking, and of almost religious resolve to make of himself a soldier in the best meaning of the word. ”

“ And he knew that however old Cappeze might feel, he would not lie. If he said that was Glory’s deliberately formed decision, that statement must be accepted as true.
“I have never loved any one else,” said Spurrier slowly. “I shall never love any one else. I have been faithful despite appearances. The rest of your charges are true, and I make no denial. I gambled about as fairly as most men gamble. That is all.”
A stiffening pride, made flinty by the old man’s hostility, shut into silence some things that Spurrier might have said. ”

“ Wharton lighted a fresh cigar and turned toward Spurrier.
“Mr. Spurrier here, is a man you all know and trust——” he hazarded. “I understand that he’s seen oil fields in the West and Mexico. I wonder what he thinks about it all.” ”

“ Spurrier, half-turning, saw a traveling salesman standing at his elbow with a repressed grin of amusement struggling in his glance.
“Queer card, that,” whispered the drummer. “I’ve seen him before; one of the wrecks left over from the oil-boom days. A ‘go-devil’ let loose too soon and blinded him.” He paused, then added as though by way of apology for his seeming callousness: “Some people say the old boy is a sort of a miser and has a snug pile salted away.”
Spurrier nodded and went on into the office, but later in the day he sought out the blind fiddler and engaged him in conversation. ”

“ Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: “He’s made a stand on a rabbit. That dog’s a liar and the truth is not in him!”
But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous. ”

“ So much is certainly known, and many names of such spies are set down. But, as is always found in these devil's hucksterings, there is as it were a frayed edge and doubtful margin of disloyalty, upon which a man may stand in question how to appraise it; and of this quality is our Master for this voyage, I mean Captain Spurrier. Something that the Governor of Biscay hath let fall (that lies now in the Tower) inclines their lordships of the Council to attach this Spurrier instantly for a traitor ”

“ Spurrier, despite all he had heard of Sam Mosebury, was reluctant to entertain the thought. The man might be, as Cappeze painted him, the head and front of an infamously vicious system, yet there was something engaging and likable about him, which made it hard to believe that for hire or any motive not nearly personal he would have conspired to do murder. ”

“ Perhaps old Cappeze had spoken too late when he sounded his sharp warning to the newcomer against unsettling the simple contentment of his daughter’s mind. Always realizing his transient status in the aloofness of this life, Spurrier had scrupulously guarded his contact with the girl who belonged to it and who had no prospect of escaping it. He had sought to behave to her as he might have behaved to a child, with grave or gay friendliness untouched by those gallantries that might have been misunderstood, yet treating her intelligence with full and adult equality. ”

“ Yet when he turned on his heel and passed from the lighted area he unconsciously walked out of range of a revolver aimed at his breast—thereby temporarily settling for the man who fingered the trigger his question, “to shoot or not to shoot.”
For Private Grant, a fleeing deserter, convalescent from fever and lunacy, had been casting up the chances of his own life just then and debating the dangers and advantages of letting Spurrier live. Recognizing his former officer as he himself looked out of his hiding, his first impulse had been one of panic terror and in Spurrier he had seen a pursuer. ”

“ The man who had been a plunger at gaming table and race track, who had succeeded as an imitator of schemes that attracted major capital, was of necessity one of imagination. Perhaps had life dealt him different cards, Spurrier would have been a novelist or even a poet, for that imagination which he had put into heavy harness was also capable of flights into phantasy and endowed with something almost mystic. ”

“ John Spurrier sought to speak but the best he could do was to indicate with a gesture half appealing and half despairing to the door of the other room, where she lay on his army cot. The father crossed its threshold ahead of him and dropped to his knees there with agonized eyes, and Bud Hawkins, the preacher and physician, not sure yet in which capacity he must act, was bent at his shoulder, while Spurrier exhorted him with a recovered but tortured voice, “In God’s name, make haste. There’s only a spark of life left.” ”

“ When she was pulled up and stood in the usual position after the "show" had been given, Laurence stepped up, eyed her critically all over, and passed his hand down her legs. Spurrier laughed.
"All right there, Colonel. Fine as silk; not a sign of a puff, I'll guarantee, and strong as steel. Perfect animal., I call her, for a park-hack." A horse was never a "horse," but always an "animal" with Mr. Spurrier, as with the rest of his fraternity. "Will you get on her, Colonel? Just give her a turn in the Park.--Here, take this mare in, and put a saddle and bridle on her for Colonel Alsager." ”

“ Spurrier’s tensity of expression relaxed into something like amusement for the anticlimax. “That accusation can be stomached, I suppose.”
“Too damned lucky,” went on the other with a gathering momentum of rancor, “and too continuously lucky for a game that’s not professional. When a man is so proficient—or lucky if you prefer—that the card table pays him more than the government thinks he’s worth, it’s time——”
Spurrier stepped forward. ”

“ In this experiment Spurrier must not startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfy himself that his sight was genuinely dead.
“I thought,” said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchingly studied the other face through narrowed lids, “that when sight went, the enjoyment of tobacco went with it.” As he spoke he raised and leveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into the staring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the baleful stamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly as a gargoyle of hatred. ”

“ Spurrier looked across at the strange companion whom chance had thrown across his path with a commotion of pulses which his face in no wise mirrored into outward expression. It had begun to occur to him that if a man is born for an adventurous life even the Articles of War cannot cancel his destiny. ”

“ That was the direction, Spurrier silently reflected, of Sim Colby’s house, but he made no comment.
Brother Hawkins, who was leaving that afternoon, laid a kindly hand on Spurrier’s shoulder.
“Thet’s bad news,” he said. “But I kin give ye better. I kin almost give ye my gorrantee thet ther gal’s goin’ ter come through. Hit’s wantin’ ter live thet does hit.” ”

“ Doesn’t it occur to you that a man has his human side? I have a wife and a home and when I am ordered to leave them for an indefinite time I’m entitled to a breathing space in which to set my own affairs in shape. I am willing enough to undertake your bidding—but not to-morrow.”
Spurrier paused at the end of his outbreak and stood looking down at the seated figure, which to all intents and purposes might have been the god that held, for him, life and death in his hand.
And as he looked Spurrier thought he had never seen such glacial coldness and merciless indifference 267 in any human face. ”

“ They are her people. I shall seem to plunder them, but if my plans succeed I shall be in a position to make terms—and my terms shall be theirs. Until I succeed I must seem false to them. God knows I’m paying for that too. I love Glory!”
162
Suddenly Spurrier wiped a hand across a clammy forehead and stood looking about his room, empty save for himself. He seemed a man who had been through a delirium. But he reached no conclusion, and when twilight found him tramping toward the Cappeze house it was with a heart that beat with anticipation—while it sought refuge in postponed decision. ”

“ To be outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. ”

“ And it is not given to a man to live under such conditions, and remain the man who fights only across mahogany tabletops in offices. Yet John Spurrier scornfully reasoned that if he could not remain himself even in a new and altered habitat, he was a weakling, and he had no intention of proving a weakling. ”

“ To no eye of observation was there any trace of 250 collapse or reversal. He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.
At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching. ”

“ His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retired lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had stopped along the railroad.
Cappeze was a “queer fellow,” a recluse who had quit the villages and drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and, having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and Spurrier meant to know him. ”

“ So all that winter while John Spurrier was away as the ambassador, practicing in Moscow and Odessa the adroit arts of financial diplomacy, the fixed idea of his assassination was festering in the mind of the man who lived, under an assumed name, at the head of Little Quicksand.
That obsession took fantastic shapes and wove webs of grotesque patterns of hate as Colby, who had been Grant, sat brooding before his untidy hearth while the winter winds wailed about the eaves and lashed the mountain world into forlorn bleakness. ”

“ Spurrier,” replied the other, “ef I hed attempted yore life I wouldn’t hev failed, an’, moreover, I don’t hate old Cappeze. Ther man thet wins out don’t hev no need ter harbor hatreds. He hates me because he sought ter penitentiary me—an’ failed.”
“When shall we go to consult the oracle?” asked Spurrier, and Mosebury shook his head.
“I reckon mebby I mout seem over cautious—even timorouslike ter ye, in bein’ so heedful erbout keepin’ outen sight in this matter,” he said. “But them thet knows my record, knows I ain’t, jest ter say easy skeered. ”

“ John Spurrier was glad that it was dark out there. He knew that the mountain men awaited his judgment as something carrying the sanction of finality and he felt like a Judas. He himself knew that back of his seeming betrayal was a determination to safeguard their rights, but the whole game of maneuvering and dissembling was as impossible to play proudly as it would have been to undertake the duties of a spy.
“I’ll admit,” observed Wharton modestly, “that if I lost some money, it wouldn’t break me—and I’m a stubborn man when I get a hunch. Well, I’m going in to watch them dance.” ”