The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

Newt Spooner had been there perhaps an hour while waltz and two-step alternated to set the human mass he was trying to sift into fresh and maddening puzzles of rapid movement and vagueness. At the distance he had decided it was hopeless, and though the summer-house under the honey-suckle seemed a favorite retreat to which couple after couple came for a moment of rest and innocent flirtation, it had not proved a Mecca for his victim, if indeed his victim were there at all. Of this possibility he now felt a diminishing credulity. He would, nevertheless, try to slip closer for a final scrutiny and then go back to town, admitting temporary defeat. Then, as with snake-like movements he was hitching himself forward, he suddenly stopped and crouched closer to the ground and held his intaken breath in his throbbing throat.

A new couple came out of the shadow and strolled across the patch of open moonlight toward the summer-house. The girl was she who had picked him up on the road, and the man was Henry Falkins. Even in evening dress, there was no mistaking the features, and that shirt-front was a target to even an amateur's taste.

The girl wore a filmy gown and about her bare shoulders was thrown some silky thing as iridescent as gossamer. But, unlike those others who had come there, she was not laughing.

Instead, she was looking up with a very direct gaze into the man's face, and her eyes and lips bore a somewhat wistful seriousness.

At the front of the summer-house, her companion stopped and broke a spray of bloom from the vine.

"It always reminds me of you," he told her in a soft voice. "There may be sweeter fragrances, but I doubt it. I guess that's why."

He lifted a drooping branch of leaf and bloom, and she passed under his arm.

Newt Spooner was lying only a few yards away, but he must be closer. The mass of vine obscured his line of vision, and he had no wish to kill the girl. Behind his ambuscade of trellised supports, he could come near enough to reach his hand through and touch his victim if he chose. It was almost too simple—too easy. Yet, after all, it was a bad arrangement, though that he could not remedy. He must announce himself to the man he meant to kill, or defeat the satisfaction of revenge. To let him die without realizing why would rob the punishment of its sting. Then the woman would doubtless make an outcry, and his chance of escape would end. Besides that there was a second objection: the girl had befriended him. He was to some extent "beholden to her." He wished now that he had refused to drive with her; but, when he had accepted her invitation, he had had no idea that his purpose could concern her, and his purpose came first.

Newt Spooner drew very near. He cautiously pulled back a branch of the honey-suckle, and looked through. The girl was sitting with her eyes downcast, and the man standing with one knee on the rough bench. He was leaning forward and his voice, though tense with earnestness, was almost a whisper. Newt might at that moment have been noisy instead of noiseless without danger of distracting the attention of that man and woman.

At home in the mountains, Henry Falkins would have been more wary, but here in the bluegrass he had laid aside all thoughts of danger, as he had laid aside his high-laced boots and corduroys. He was standing at the other side of life's gamut. Enmity, for him, did not exist. The universe was filled, he believed at that moment, to the boundary of the last sentinel star with love. The night breathed it. He was breathing it, the girl's eyes were just then raised to meet his, brimming with a light that set his pulses bounding.