“That looks like common sense to me,” declared the other, and he went home, forgetting the witch woman on the way, because of the other and lovelier witchcraft that he knew awaited him in his own house.
Spurrier, despite his dangers, responsibilities, and conflict of purposes, was happy. He was happy in a simpler and less complicated way than he had ever been before, because his heart was in the ascendancy, and Glory, he thought, was “livin’ up to her name.”
If he could have thrust some other things into the same dark cupboard of half-contemptuous philosophy to which he relegated his own dangers, he might have been even happier. But a mentor who had rarely troubled him in past years became insistent and audible 222 through the silences—speaking with the voice of conscience.
He remembered telling Vivian Harrison, over the consommé, that pearls did not make oysters happy and that these illiterates of the hills might have hidden wealth in the shells of their isolation and gain nothing more than the oyster. Indeed, he had thought of them no more than the pearl fisherman thinks of the low form of life whose diseased state gives birth to treasure. They inhabited a terrain over which he and the forces of American Oil and Gas were to do battle, and like birds nesting on a battlefield, they must take their chances.
It was no longer possible to maintain that callous indifference. These men, to whom he could not, without disclosing his strategy and defeating his purpose, tell the truth, had befriended him.
They were human and in many ways lovable. If he succeeded, they would, upon his own advice, have sold their birthrights.
However, he gave an anodyne to his conscience with the thought that if victory came to him there would be wealth enough for all to share. Having won his conquest, he could be generous, rendering back as a gift a part of what should have been theirs by right. The means of doing this he had worked out but he could confide to no one. He had embarked as cold bloodedly as Martin Harrison had ever started on any of the enterprises that had made him a money baron. Indeed it had been Spurrier who had fired the chief with interest in the scheme, and if the thing were culpable the culpability had been his own. Then he had come to realize that in the human equation was a 223 factor that he had ignored: the rights of the ignorant native. He had fought down that recognition as the voice of sentimentality until at last he had no longer been able to fight it down. Between those two states of mind had been a war of mental agony and conflict, of doubt, of vacillation. The conclusion had not been easily reached. Now he meant to carry on the war he had undertaken unaltered as to its objective of winning a victory for Harrison over Trabue and the myrmidons of A. O. and G., but he meant to bring in that victory in such a guise that the native would share in the division of the spoils. He knew that Harrison, if he had an intimation of such an amendment of plan, would sharply veto it, but when the thing was done it would be too late to object—and meanwhile Spurrier regarded himself no less the trustee of the mountain-land holder than the servant of Martin Harrison. He was willing to shoulder, out of his own stipulated profits, the chief burden of this division, and in the end he would have driven a better bargain for his simple friends than they could have hoped to attain for themselves.
Yet in him was being reborn an element of character, which had long been repressed.
And there in the other section of the State where political connections had to be established and the skids of intrigue greased, much stood waiting to be done. Already most of what could be accomplished here on the ground had progressed to a point from which the end could be seen.
John Spurrier, the seeming idler, could control almost all the territory needful for his right of way—all except a tract belonging to Brother Bud Hawkins, 224 cautiously left for the last because he wished to handle that himself and did not yet wish to appear in the negotiations.