Suspicion of Colby was perhaps far-fetched, but it took a powerful hold on Spurrier, and one from which he could not free himself. At all events, he must see this Sim Colby when Colby did not know he was coming—and look at his eyes again.
So he made a second trip across the hills to the head of Little Quicksand, and for the sake of safeguarding 164 against any warning going ahead of him, he spoke to no one of his intention.
This time he went armed with an automatic pistol and a very grim purpose. When they met—if the mountaineer’s eyes were no longer black—he would probably need both.
But once again the opportunity hound encountered disappointment. He found a chimney with no smoke issuing from it and a door barred. The horse had been taken out of the stable and from many evidences about the untenanted place he judged that the man who lived alone there had been absent for several days.
To make inquiries would be to proclaim his interest and prejudice his future chances of success, so he slipped back again as surreptitiously as he had come, and the determination which he had keyed to the concert pitch of climax had to be laid by.
At home again he found that the love which he could neither accept nor conquer was demoralizing his moral and mental equipoise. He could no longer fix and hold his attention on the problems of his work. His spirit was in equinox.
The only solution was to go to Glory and tell her the truth, for if he let matters run uncontrolled their momentum would become unmanageable. It was the simple matter of choosing failure with her or success without her, and he had at last reached his decision. It remained only to tell her so.
It had pleased John Spurrier to find a house upon an isolated site from which he could work unobserved, while he maintained his careful semblance of idleness. His nearest neighbor was a mile away as the crow 165 flew, and Dyke Cappeze almost two miles. Even the deep-rutted highroad, itself, lay beyond a gorge which native parlance called a “master shut-in.”
Now that remoteness pleased his enemies as well. Former efforts toward his undoing had been balked by accidents. One must be made that could have no chance to fail and an isolated setting made for success. Matters that required deft handling could be conducted by daylight instead of under a tricky moon. It was a good spot for a “rat-killing” and Spurrier was to be the rat.
It was well before sunset on a Thursday afternoon that rifle-armed men, holding to the concealment of the “laurel hells,” began approaching the high place above and behind Spurrier’s house. They came from varying directions and one by one. No one had seen any gathering, for the plans had been made elsewhere and the details of liaison perfected in advance. Now they trickled noiselessly into their designated posts and slowly drew inward toward the common center of the house itself.