Spurrier could no longer deny that his personal world centered about Glory; that away from her would be only the unspeakable bleakness of lonely heart hunger.
But it was equally certain that he could not abandon everything upon which he had underpinned his future, and in that structure was no niche which she could occupy.
Sitting alone in his house with a chill ache at his heart and facing a dilemma that seemed without solution, he knew for once the tortures of terror. For once he could not face the future intrepidly.
He had recognized when the army had stigmatized him and cast him out, that only by iron force and aggression could he break his way through to success. He was enlisted in a warfare captained by financiers of major caliber and committed to a struggle out of which victory would bring him not only wealth, but a place of his own among such financiers—a place which Glory could not share.
He and his principals alike were fighting for the prizes of the looting victor in a battle without chivalry, and whether he won or was crushed by American Oil and Gas, the native landholder must be ground and bruised between the impact of clashing forces. In the trail of his victory, no less than theirs, would be human wreckage.
Sitting before his dead hearth while the afternoon shadows slanted and lengthened, Spurrier wondered what agonies had wracked the heart of Napoleon 158 when he was called upon to choose between Josephine and a dynasty. For even in his travail the egoist thought of himself and his ambitions in Napoleonic terms.
As he sat there alone with silences about his lonely cabin that seemed speaking in still voices of vastness, the poignant personality of his thoughts brought him, by the strange anomaly of life, to realizations that were not merely personal.
Glory had won his heart and it was as though in doing so she had also made his feelings quicken for her people: these people from whose poverty, hospitality and kindness had been poured out to him: these people who had taken him at first with reserve and then accepted him with faith.
He had eaten their bread and salt. He had drunk their illicit whiskey, given to him with no fear that he would betray them even in the lawlessness which to them seemed honorable and fair.
And yet his purpose here, was the single one of enabling a certain group of money-grabbing financiers to triumph over another group at the cost of the mountaineer land-holders. It was not because, if he succeeded, there would not be enough of legitimate profit to enrich all, but because in a campaign of secrecy he could make a confidant of no one. If the enterprise were carried through at all he must have secured, for principals who would abate nothing and give back nothing, the necessary property bought on the basis of barren farming land. Were it his own endeavor he could first plunder and develop and then make restitution, but acting as an agent he could no 159 more do that than the soldier who has unconditionally surrendered, can subsequently demand terms.