Spurrier kept most of his valuable papers in a safety vault in Louisville, but for purposes of reference here, he maintained a complete system of carbon copies, and these must be stored in some place where he could feel sure they were immune from any prying eye. The entire record of his proceedings would be clear to any reader of those memoranda.
While Glory was away one day, he removed a section of the living-room wall and fashioned something in the nature of a secret cabinet, upon which he could rely for these purposes. Before he went away again he shared that secret with her, since in certain exigencies it might be needful that some one should be able to act on wired instructions. He showed her the bit of molding that was removable and which gave entrance to the hidden recess.
“In that strong box,” he told her, “are papers of vital importance. If I haven’t taken you entirely into my confidence about them all, dear, it’s because they concern other people more closely than myself. All my own affairs are yours—but in the service of others, I must obey instructions and those instructions are rigid.”
He took out one envelope, though, plainly marked.
“This,” he said, “is a paper to be used only in case of extreme emergency. It is an order on the safety-deposit 236 people in Louisville to open my vault to the bearer. In the event of my death, or if I should wire you from a distance, I would want you to use it.”
Even that admittance into the veiled sanctum of his business life pleased Glory, and she nodded her head gravely.
She did not tell him, and he did not guess, that tongues were wagging in his absence, and that people said she was good enough only for that part of his life in which he shed his white collar and his “fine manners” and donned the rougher habiliments of the backwoods.
Even when she learned that his coming back had been only to spend the holidays with her and that he must leave again to be gone for weeks, at least, she let none of the disquiet that smouldered in her find an utterance in words.
On a fine old Blue Grass estate, which exhaled the elegance and ease of the Old South, lived Colonel Merriwell, a life-long friend of Dyke Cappeze. In years long gone he had more than once sought to have Cappeze transfer his activities to a wider field. Now, timber interests called him to the mountains, and though the cold weather had set in, his daughter chose to come with him. She had heard much of the strange and retarded life of the mountains, and because it was so different from the refinements with which she had always been surrounded, she wanted to see it.