A look of consternation spread over the faces of the lesser men, but Harrison inquired with a grim smile:
“Madam, haven’t I seen you somewhere before to-day?”
“Once before—down in the hills.”
“Then you are this man’s wife! Was this dramatic incident prearranged between you?”
She raised an imperative hand, and her voice admitted no question of sincerity.
“Make no such mistake. Mr. Spurrier knew nothing of this. He was loyal enough—to you. From him I never even learned the nature of his business. Without his knowledge I was loyal to my people.”
Then for ten minutes she talked clearly, forcefully, and with the ring of indubitable sincerity giving fire to voice and manner. She told of the fight she and her father had made to keep heart in mountain folk, enraged by what they believed to be the betrayal by a man they had trusted and attacked by every means of coercion at the disposal of American Oil and Gas.
She told of small local reservoirs, mysteriously burned by unknown incendiaries; of neighborhood pipe lines cut until they spilled out their wealth again into the earth; of how she herself had walked these lines at night, watching against sabotage.
As she talked with simple directness and without self-vaunting, they saw her growing in the trust of these men whose wrath had been, in the words of old Cappeze, “Like that of the wolf-bitch robbed a second 307 time of her whelps.” They recognized the faith that had commissioned her to speak as trustee, and to act with carte-blanche powers.
Harrison and his subordinates were not susceptible men, easily swayed by a dramatic circumstance, so they cross-examined and heckled her with shrewd and tripping inquiries, until she reminded them that she had not come as a supplicant, but to lay before them terms, which they would, at their peril, decline to accept.