CHAPTER XIV
As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away from a finished chapter.
The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears, usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for service.
Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.
Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies, and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.
McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the face of his youthful protégé began to lighten. Boone was as yet too young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut—and dual. Asa's "woman" must have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be wrung from its stinted productivity—and he must put behind him that ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.
One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house, knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.
But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sight of whose face McCalloway bent forward as though confronted by a spectre—and indeed the newcomer belonged to a world which he had renounced as finally as though it had been of another incarnation.
This visitor was lean and weather-beaten. His face was long and somewhat dour, but tanned brown, and instead of speaking he brought his hand to his temple with a smart salute. It was such a salute as bespoke a long life of soldiering and the second nature of military habit. The voice in which McCalloway greeted him was almost unrecognizable as his own, because it was both far away and strained.
"Sergeant!" he exclaimed; "what has brought you here?"