For a little she made no answer, but the delicate color of her cheeks was gone to an ivory whiteness and the violet eyes were hardening.
“Perhaps we oughtn’t to judge him too harshly for these things,” said the father comfortingly. “The scroll of my bitterness against him is already heavy enough and to spare. He has broken your heart and that’s enough for me. As to the rest there are many so-called honorable gentlemen who are no more scrupulous. We demand clean conduct here in these hills,” a fierce bitterness came into his words, “but then we are ignorant, backwoods folk! There are many intricate ins and outs to this business and I don’t presume to speak with absolute conclusiveness yet.”
Outside the katydids sang their prophecies of frost 285 to come and an owl hooted. Glory Spurrier sat staring ahead of her and at last she said aloud, in that tone which one uses when a thought finds expression, unconscious that it has been vocal: “So he won our faith—with his clear eyes and his honest smile—only to swindle and rob us!”
“My God, if I were a younger man,” broke out the father passionately, rising from his chair and clenching the damaging papers in his talon-like fingers, “I’d learn the oil game. I’d take this information and use it against both their gangs—and I believe I could force them both to their knees.”
He paused and the momentary fire died out of his eyes.
“I’m too old a dog for new tricks though,” he added dejectedly, “and there’s no one else to do it.”
“How could it be done?” demanded Glory rousing herself from her trance. “Between them they hold all the power, don’t they?”
“As far as I can make out,” Cappeze explained with the interest of the legalistic mind for tackling an abstruse problem, “Spurrier had completed his arch as to one of his two purposes—all except its keystone. He had yet to gain a passage way through Brother Hawkins’ land. With that he would have held the completed right-of-way—and it’s the only one. The other gang of pirates hold the ability to get a charter but no right of way over which to use it. Now the man who could deliver Brother Hawkins’ concession would have a key. He could force Spurrier’s crowd to agree to almost anything, and with Spurrier’s crowd he could wring a compromise from the others. Bud Hawkins is like the delegate at a convention 286 who can break a deadlock. God knows I’d love to tackle it—but it’s too late for me.”
Glory had come to her feet, and stood an incarnation of combat.
“It’s not too late for me,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m too crude to go into John Spurrier’s world of cultivated people but I’m shrewd enough to go into his world of business!”