The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

But he had not missed the tears in her eyes and he knew that his humble service had moved her. Suddenly he knew something else. It was not only because she had been less unpleasant than the other members of the household that he had missed her when she went away and had looked forward to her home-coming. He had set up his shrine to hatred of mankind. His experience had taught him much of enmity and little of love. He knew in an impersonal fashion that men had sweethearts and went "sparking" with girls, but for all this sort of thing he had retained in his young manhood the same sort of contempt which most boys pass through and out-grow in earlier life.

Now, he stood there before the roar of the fire on the hearth that he had built and watched the shadows retreat into the corners of the room. He saw Minerva sitting with her eyes still pensive and her lips still smiling, and the flames awakening soft color on her cheeks and mahogany glints in her hair.

She was beautiful. To a more discerning eye that would have long ago been apparent, but until now beauty had meant nothing to Newt Spooner. It had not existed.

So, with the stunning effect of light breaking on eyes that have been sightless, the young man in the frayed and drab homespun, whose brain had been even more colorless and somber than his clothes, felt a wild hunger to take her in his arms and claim her for his own. That this thing had been growing in his mind, unrealized until this moment, he did not suspect. That it was much less sudden than it seemed, he did not understand. He knew only that he, Newt Spooner, vassal to hate, was now in love, and, as he acknowledged it to himself, his face became drawn and pale, and his hands clenched themselves, for with the self-confession came utter despair.

She sat there in the chair he had made, by the hearth he had reared, in the room he had built—and the work had been that of a good craftsman because they had compelled him to learn in the penitentiary. Outside the winds were screaming about the roof-slabs he had nailed down. She was so close that he could put out his hand and touch her—and because now he wanted her beyond everything, even beyond the life of the man who had ruined his life, it was terribly clear that she could never be close to him except in such physical proximity as that of this moment.

The ex-convict was not accustomed to thought. In its stead, he had substituted brooding. Thought is hard and tinged with torture for the brain that has not been reflective. Yet now he must think.

Minerva had been to the college. She yearned for even a greater degree of education. He had built this room because he understood how she shrank from the squalid and unclean life of the mountain cabin—and in all the mountains was no more squalid creature than himself. She despised the idea of blood-reprisal, and to forego that would, by his standards, mean a baser surrender than for a priest to repudiate his cloth.

He was ignorant, penniless, vindictive. She was, to his thinking, learned, fastidious and pledged to the new "fotched-on" order.

Should he tell her that he loved her, provided he could imagine his stoic lips shaping such phrases, she could only be offended and distressed. He must not tell her. That one thing seemed certain, and, as he stood there, masking the storm in his thin breast under a scowling visage of tightly compressed lips and drawn brow, he was being racked by a yearning greater than he had ever known or imagined.

How long he remained rigid and silent he did not know, but at last he heard her voice, speaking very softly: