“Growing sentimental?” queried Harrison dryly, and the younger man shook his head.
“No,” he responded slowly, “I can’t afford that—yet.”
“And see that you don’t,” admonished the chief sharply. “Bear in mind, as you have in the past, that we don’t want to depend on men of brittle resolution and temperamental squeamishness. We are in this thing toward a definite end and not as humanitarian dreamers. However——” He broke off abruptly and added in a milder voice, “I don’t have to caution you. You understand the proposition.”
For some minutes the cigar smoke floated in a silent room, while Martin Harrison sat with the knitted brows of concentrated thought. Spurrier did not interrupt the mental process which he knew had the heat and power of an ore smelter, reducing to fluid amenability the hard metal of a stubborn proposition. He knew, too, that the fuel which fed the fire was his principal’s animosity against Trabue, rather than the possibilities or extent of the loot. This, no less than the mountain vendetta, was, in last analysis, a personal feud and in the parlance of the Cumberlands a “war was in ther b’ilin’.”
At last Harrison straightened up and tossed away his cigar.
“You are ambitious, Spurrier,” he said. “Put this 107 thing over and I should say that all your ambitions can come to realization.”
While he sat waiting Spurrier had lifted from the table a photograph of Vivien, appropriately framed in silver. He had taken it up idly because it was a new portrait and one that he had not before seen, but into the gesture the father read a deeper significance. It was as if Spurrier had asked “All my ambitions?” and had emphasized his question by laying his hands on the picture of the girl. That, thought Harrison, was an audacious suggestion, but it was Spurrier’s audacity that recommended him.
Slowly the capitalist’s eyes lighted into an amused smile as their glance traveled from the younger face to the framed photograph, and slowly he nodded his head.
“All your ambitions,” he repeated meaningly, then with the electric snap of warning in his voice he added an admonition: “But don’t underestimate the difficulties of your undertaking. You are bucking the strongest and most relentless piracy in finance. You will incur enmities that will stop nowhere, and you must operate in a country where murderers are for ‘hire.’”
The threat of personal danger just at that moment disquieted John Spurrier less than the other curtailment of freedom implied in Harrison’s words; the tacit acceptance of him as Vivien’s suitor. It came to him abruptly that he did not love Vivien; that he wished to remain untrammeled. Heretofore, he had always postponed matrimonial thoughts for the misty future. Now they became embarrassingly near and tangible.