The self that he displayed here was the self of the infectious smile, of the frank boldness and good humor that had made him beloved among his army 139 mess-mates before these more gracious qualities had been winter-killed by misfortune.
So he was the picturesque and charming version of himself, and he became to Glory an object of hero worship, whose presence made the day eventful and whose intervals of absence were filled with dreams of his next coming.
It was about this time that John Spurrier, the “opportunity hound,” made a disquieting discovery. It came upon him one night as he sat on the porch of Dyke Cappeze’s log house at twilight, with pipes glowing and seductive influences stealing into the senses. Daylight color had faded to the mistiness of tarnished silver except for a lemon afterglow above western ridges that were violet-gray, and the evening star was a single lantern hanging softly luminous, where soon there would be many others.
Cadenced and melodious as a lullaby fraught with the magic of the solitudes, the night song of frog and whippoorwill rose stealingly out of silence, and the materialist who had been city bound so much since conviction of crime had shadowed his life discovered the thing which threatened danger.
It came to him as his eyes met those of Glory, who sat in the doorway itself—since she, at least, need not fear to show her face to any lurking rifleman.
The yellow lamplight from within outlined the lovely contour of her rounded cheek and throat and livened her hair, but it was not only her undeniable beauty that caused Spurrier sudden anxiety. It was the eyes and what he read in them. Instantly as their gazes engaged she dropped her glance but, in the moment before she had masked her expression, Spurrier 140 knew that she had fallen in love with him. The eyes had said it in that instant when he had surprised them. They had immediately seized back their secret and hidden it away, but not in time.
The opportunity hound rose and knocked the ash from his pipe. He wondered whether old Dyke Cappeze, sitting there inscrutable and dimly shaped in the shadows, had shared his discovery—that grizzled old watchdog who was not too far gone to fight for his own with the strength of his yellowed fangs.
The visitor shook hands and walked moodily home, and as he went he sought to dismiss the matter from his mind. It was all a delusion, he assured himself; some weird psychological quirk born of a man’s innate vanity; incited by a girl’s physical allurement. He would go to sleep and to-morrow he would laugh at the moonshine problem. But he did not find it so easy to sleep. He remembered one of those men in the islands who had become a melancholiac. The fellow had been normal at one moment; then without warning something like an impenetrable shadow had struck across him. He had never come out of the shadow. So this disquiet—though it was abnormal elation rather than melancholy, had suddenly become a fact with himself, and instead of dismissing it Spurrier found himself reacting to it. Not only was Glory Cappeze in love with him but—absurdity of absurdities—he was in love with Glory!
It was as irreconcilable with all the logic of his own nature as any conceivable thing could be, yet it was undeniably true.
But Spurrier had been there in the hills when summer had overcome winter. He had seen trickles of 141 water grow into freshets and feed rivers. He had seen clouds as large as one’s hand swell abruptly into tempests that cannonaded mightily through the peaks, with the lashing of torrents, the sting of lightnings, and the onsweep of hurricanes. He had seen the pink flower of laurel and rhododendron make fragrant magic over wastes of chocolate and slag-gray mountain sides, and in himself something akin to these elemental forces had declared itself. He found himself two men, and though he swore resolutely that his brain should dominate and govern, he also recognized in himself the man of new-born impulses who drew the high air into his chest with a keen elation, and who wanted to laugh at the artificial things that life has wrought into its structure of accepted civilization.