So the hireling was instructed and given a leave of absence to go and "set up with ther gal in Leslie County." But he did not go to Leslie County. He went, instead, by a roundabout road to the state capital, and one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.
When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.
Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."
Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals. To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying calm—and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's strong note.
This misfortune, be assured himself, at least exhausted the possibilities of perverse circumstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of tricks were empty now!
Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.
Tonight he wanted the hills—not calm and star-lit, but rocking to hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.
Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him, and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering brain-nerves like the merciless lashing of an invisible scourge. He tried to analyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself, but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the only assuagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again—to lash out and punish some one for his hurting.
The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star. Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his star.
But her world—to which he had climbed with a dominant ambition—that was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.