Read Ebook: The Tempering by Buck Charles Neville Coleman Ralph P Ralph Pallen Illustrator

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Ebook has 291 lines and 15656 words, and 6 pages

a strayed touch of autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.

On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.

He did not require the spell of that indefinable melancholy which lay along the hilltops to bring home to him a mood of sadness, because for two weeks he had been here alone with his thoughts. It had been his whim during that time to isolate himself completely, and to wear, as a man may wear old clothes or old shoes, the ease of solitude that makes no demands upon one's conventional self.

In Washington there was always the need of living before other eyes. Here he had not even ridden across the ridge for letters or papers.

At the moment, while the bees droned loudly about him and the mountains slept in their ancient impassivity, he held on his knees Victor McCalloway's tin dispatch box, and his eyes were deep with thoughts of bereavement.

The veteran had said that, on his death, Boone might turn the key of that battered receptacle and read the papers which would give him a full knowledge of the identity of his benefactor.

Once he had declared, half smilingly and half in earnest:

"I suppose that at any time you hear nothing of me for five years you may assume my death." It had been five years now, and more, since he had left the little world of his hermitage, and no word had come back to Boone.

The young man's heart was heavy with loneliness, and as he sat there alone, he ached to know the secret that had shadowed the life of the man to whom his devotion was almost an idolatry; the secret that had robbed of a name one whose past must have been both colourful and tragic.

In those five years since they had met, Boone had passed the milestones from the local to the national, and if he held the respect of his colleagues he owed it all to Victor McCalloway. They said that he was a man with a broad and national vision. That, too, if it were true, was a reflection of the soldier's teaching.

But if McCalloway were to be only a memory, Boone looked forward to a life almost beggared. There was that solitary strain in his nature which came perhaps of having attached himself too strongly to a few, all-important friends. Of these McCalloway had been the chief. A facetious fellow-member had given Boone a nickname out of Kipling in coatroom small-talk, and the title had stuck. "Wellver," said the representative, "is 'the cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him.'"

Now, if he were not to see his old preceptor again, he must indeed walk by himself.

With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been, and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.

The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had his friend played a part?

Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary exile--a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the war-eagles.

Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to him. He had seen--often--the warmth of affection like the softened glow of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and--on occasion--the keen, cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too, white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it had taken the battlefield to bring out.

And these he did not know.

He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought, undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.

Prince himself had been a historian, and yet Boone doubted whether he could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing. As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes. He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments, governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.

Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe that often it became adverse criticism.

Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.

Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.

For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodpecker rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the house again, unopened.

Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the sunlight he was thinking of her.

He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville had been an adventure, daring everything.

All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation.

Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud:

"It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!"

But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her.... You always will!"

Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast.

But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white.

Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands:

"Is it politics, Morgan?"

Wallifarro nodded.

"In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane."

"Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't follow you."

"My God, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, "don't you know?"

"Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks," smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days."

Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply:

"The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it--and yesterday England came in."

The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodpecker began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow butterflies.

Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"

Morgan shook his head. "Two weeks ago," he said, "the whole thing was a sheer impossibility.... Now anything is possible."

Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... "When that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of peace but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."

"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."

Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another errand. What was it?"

Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and with Morgan it was impossible.

"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed, and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour--I can't talk of her."

"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk of her?"

"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My God, man, don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them--and, if you do, don't waste time!"

For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command, had failed to learn anything of her or her circumstances.

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