This state of mind prevented him from suspecting any connection between this present and mysterious enmity and those things which had happened across the Pacific.
He had kept himself informed as to the movements of Private Severance and when that time-expired man had stepped ashore at San Francisco, John Spurrier had been waiting to confront him, even though it involved facing men who had once been brother officers and who could no longer speak to him as an equal.
From the former soldier, who brought a flush to his cheeks by saluting him and calling him “Lieutenant,” he had learned nothing. There had been no reason to hope for much. It was unlikely that he 92 would be able to shake into a damaging admission of complicity—and any statement of value must have amounted to that—the witness who had come unscathed out of the cross-examination of two courts-martial.
Indeed Spurrier had expected to encounter unveiled hostility in the attitude of the mountaineer, who had been doing sentry duty at the door through which the prisoner, Grant, had escaped. It might have followed logically upon the officer’s defense, which had sought to involve that sentinel as an accomplice in the fugitive’s flight, and even in the murder itself.
But Severance had greeted him without rancor and with the disarming guise of candid friendliness.
“I’d be full willin’ ter help ye, Lieutenant—ef so be I could,” he had protested. “I knows full well yore lawyers was plum obliged ter seek ter hang ther blame wharsoever they was able, an’ I ain’t harborin’ no grudge because I happened ter be one they sought ter hurt. But I don’t know nothin’ that kin aid ye.”
“Do you think Grant escaped alive?” demanded Spurrier, and the other shook his head.
“I feels so plum, dead sartain he died,” came the prompt response, “thet when I gits back home I’m goin’ ter tell his folks he did. Bud Grant was a friend of mine, but when he went out inter thet jungle he was too weakly ter keer fer hisself an’ ef he’d lived they would hev done found him an’ brought him back.”
Spurrier had come to embrace that belief himself. The one man whose admission, wrung from him by persuasion or compulsion, could give him back his clean name, must have perished there in the bijuca 93 tangles. The hope of meeting the runaway in life had died in the ex-officer’s heart and consequently it did not now occur to him to think of the deserter as a living menace.
At length he rose and stood against the shadowy background of his door, which was an oblong of darkness behind the golden outer clarity.