Two men with the guilt of a murder standing between them had come into a radius too small to contain them both. It was as if they had met on a narrow log spanning a chasm where only one could pass and the other must fall.
If old Cappeze dragged him to the courthouse now, he would be delivered over to Spurrier, waiting there to identify him, as a fox in a trap is delivered to the skinning knife. That must be the meaning of the stranger’s visit to the lawyer.
Sim Colby went to an ancient and dilapidated bureau and from a creaking drawer took out a memento which, for some reason, he had preserved from times not treasured in memory. He carried it to the open door and stood looking at it as it lay on the palm of his hand with the light glinting upon it.
It was a sharpshooter’s medal, for, whatever his military shortcomings, Private Grant had been an efficient rifleman, and as he looked at it now his lips twisted into a grim smile. Then he took his rifle from its corner and, sitting on the doorstep, polished it with a fond particularity, oiling its mechanism and burnishing its bore.
Already Spurrier had made arrangements to ensconce himself under the roof of a house he had rented. Already the faces that he met in the road were, for the most part, familiar, and without exception they were friendly. Quick on the heels of his first disgust for the squalor of this lapsed and retarded life, had succeeded an exhilaration born of the wine-like sparkle of the air and the majestic breadth of vistas across ridge and valley. As he watched mile-wide shadows creep between sky-high lines of peaks, his dreams borrowed something of their vastness.
Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken spaces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power.
One afternoon Spurrier started over to the house he had rented, but into which he had not yet moved. The way lay for a furlong or more through a gorge deeply and somberly shaded. Even now, at midday, the sunlight of the upper places left it cloistered and the bowlders trooped along in ferny dampness, where the little waters whispered.
Beside a bulky hummock of green-corroded sandstone the man halted and stood musingly, with eyes downcast and thoughts uplifted—uplifted to the worship of his one god: Ambition. At his feet was an oily sediment along the water’s edge and the gravel was thick with “sand blossom”—tiny fossil formations 88 that are prima facie evidence of oil. Then, without warning, he felt a light sting along his cheek and the rock-walled fissure reverberated under what seemed a volley of musketry.
But the magnified and crumbling effect of the echo struck him with a less poignant realization than a slighter sound and a sharper one. As if a taut piano wire had been sharply struck, came the clear whang that he recognized as the flight song of a rifle bullet, and, whatever its origin it called for a prompt taking of cover.