In the intricate workings of such a project by a campaign of secrecy, the matter was not only one of acquiring a certain expanse of a definite sort of property in a given region, but of acquiring holdings that commanded the only practicable route through passable gaps. This special lie and trend of ground he thought of and spoke of, in his business correspondence, as “the neck of the bottle.” When he held it, it mattered little who else had liquid in the bottle. It could come out only through his neck and, therefore, under his terms. Yet even when that was achieved, there remained the need of the corkscrew without which he himself could make no use of his range-wide jug of crude petroleum. That corkscrew was the charter to be had from a legislature where American Oil and Gas was supposed to have sentinels at the door.
He could not take Glory with him on these trips, because Glory was of the hills, and loyal to the hills—and he could not yet take the natives into his confidence. For the same reason he could give her only business reasons of the most general and evasive character for leaving her behind.
But the work that Spurrier had done so far was only the primary section of a broader design. What he had accomplished affected the oil field on the remote side of Hemlock Mountain, the part of the field that the earlier boom had never touched, and his entire project looked to a totality embracing also the 225 “nigh” side, where his operations still existed only in projection.
It was while this situation stood that there came to him one day two letters calling upon him for two irreconcilable courses of action. One was from Louisville, urging him to return there at once to busy himself with political plannings; the other was a rude scrawl from Sam Mosebury setting an appointment with the “witch woman.”
Spurrier was reluctant to go to Louisville. It meant laying aside the little paradise of the present for the putting on of heavy harness. It necessitated another excuse to Glory, and more than that, being away from Glory. Yet that was the bugle call of his mission, and he fancied that whatever threatened him here in the hills was a menace of local effect. If that were true he would not need the warning which the unaccountable desperado, Sam Mosebury, meant to relay to him through channels of alleged magic, until he came back.
Therefore, the witch could wait. But in that detail Spurrier erred, and when he answered the summons that called him to town without his occult consultation, he unwittingly discarded a warning which he needed there no less than in the hills.
He was called upon to choose a turning without pause, and he followed his business instincts. It happened that instinct misled him.