But over on the far side of the ridge men only 273 fretted and chafed as yet. They had the oil under their feet, but for it there was no outlet. Like a land without a seaport, they looked over at neighbors growing rich while they themselves still “hurted fer needcessities.”
American Oil and Gas had locked them in while it milked the other cow. It had its needed charters for piping both fields, but a man who was either dead or somewhere across the world held the way barred in a stalemate of controlled rights of way.
Glory thought less about the wonderful things that were going forward than did others about her, because she had a broken heart. No letters came from Spurrier, and the faith that she struggled to hold high like a banner nailed to the masthead of her life, hung drooping. In the end her colors had been struck.
If John Spurrier returned in search of her now she would go into hiding from him, but it was most unlikely that he would return. He had married her on impulse and under a pressure of excitement. He had loved her passionately—but not with a strong enough fidelity to hold him true—and now she believed he had turned back again to his old idols. She was repudiated, and she ought to hate him with the bitterness of her mountain blood, yet in her heart’s core, though she would never forgive him and never return to him, she knew that she still loved him and would always love him.
She no longer feared that she would have hampered him in the society of his more finished world. She had visited Helen Merriwell and had come to know that other world for herself. She found that the gentle blood in her veins could claim its own 274 rights and respond graciously. Hers had been a submerged aristocracy, but it had come out of its chrysalis, bright-winged.
Then one day something happened that turned Glory’s little personal world upside down and brought a readjustment of all its ideas.
Sim Colby owned a little patch of land beside his homestead place, over cross the mountain, and he was among those who became rich. He was not so rich as local repute declared him, but rich enough to set stirring the avarice of an erstwhile friend, who owned no land at all.
So ex-Private Severance came over to the deserter’s house with a scheme conceived in envy and born of greed. He was bent on blackmail.
When he first arrived, the talk ran along general lines, because “Blind Joe,” the fiddler, was at the house, and the real object of the visit was confidential. Blind Joe had also been an oil beneficiary, and he and Sim Colby had become partners in a fashion. During that relationship Blind Joe had told Sim some things that he told few others.
But when Joe left and the pipes were lighted Severance settled himself in a back-tilted chair and gazed reflectively at the crest of the timber line.