“Ef they was rightfully married,” she retorted, “hit didn’t come ter pass twell old man Cappeze diskivered her alone with him—in his house—jest ther two of ’em—an’ they wouldn’t nuver hev been diskivered savin’ an’ exceptin’ fer ther attack on ther furriner.” In the self-satisfaction of one who has scored, she added: “I’ll be farin’ on now, I reckon.”
“An’ don’t nuver come back,” stormed Aunt Erie, whose occasional tantrums were as famous as her usual good humor. “Unless ye seeks ter hev ther dawgs sot on ye.”
While the spiteful and forked little tongues of 232 gossip were doing their serpent best to poison what had promised to be an Eden for Glory at home in the hills, the husband who was charged with neglecting her was miserable in town.
His work had been the breath of life to him until now, bringing the zestful delight of prevailing over stubborn difficulties, and building bridges that should carry him across to his goal of financial power. Now he found it a necessity that exiled him from a place to which he had come half-contemptuously and to which his converted thoughts turned as the prayers of the true believer turn toward Mecca.
He who had been urban in habit and taste found nothing in the city to satisfy him. The smoke-filled air seemed to stifle him and fill him with a yearning for the clean, spirited sweep of the winds across the slopes. He knew that these physical aspects were trivial things he would have swept aside had they not stood as emblems for a longing of the heart itself—a nostalgia born of his new life and love.
But all the plans that had built one on the other toward a definite end of making an oil field of the barren hills were drawing to a focus that could not be neglected. He could no more leave these things undone than could his idol Napoleon have abandoned his headquarters before Austerlitz, and the sitting of the legislature could not be changed to suit his wishes. Neither could the lining up of forces that were to guide his legislation to its passage be left unwatched.
So the absence that he had thought would be brief, or at worst a series of short trips away from home, was prolonging itself into a winter in Louisville and Frankfort. He found himself as warily busy as a 233 collie herding a panicky flock, and as soon as one danger was met and averted, a new one called upon him from a new and unsuspected quarter.
Much of the deviousness of playing underground politics disgusted him, and yet he knew he would have regarded it only as an amusing game for high stakes before his change of heart. But now that it was to be a battle for the mountain men as well as for Martin Harrison and for himself, it could be better stomached.
The effort to pick out men who could be trusted in an enterprise where they had to be bought, was one which taxed both his insight into human nature and his self-esteem.
Senator Chew, himself a mountaineer, who had come from a ragged district to the state assembly and who seemed to harbor a hatred against A. O. and G. of utter malevolence, was almost as his other self, furnishing him with eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear, and familiarity with all the devious, unlovely tricks of lobby processes.