The Tempering. Charles Buck
his dream-fires were hotly aglow. As he sat on the rock with the soft minstrelsy of the wind crooning overhead, a score of hearth-stone recitals came back to memory; all saga-like stories of the prowess of Morgan's men. It seemed that he could almost hear the strain of stirrup leathers and the creak of cavalry-gear; the drum-beat of many hoofs.
This great man who had ridden at the head of that command was even now on his way to Victor McCalloway's house and there he would remain until tomorrow morning. What marvellous stories those two veterans would furnish forth from their own treasuries of reminiscence!
Suddenly Boone rose with an abrupt but fixed resolve. "By Godelmighty!" he exclaimed. "I reckon I'll jest kinderly sa'anter over thar and stay all night, too. I'd love ter listen at 'em talk."
Here in the hills where the very meagreness makes a law of hospitality he had never heard of a traveller who asked a night's lodging being turned away. Yet when he arrived and lifted his hand to knock he hesitated for a space, gulping his heart out of his throat, suddenly stricken with the enormity of intruding himself, unbidden, upon such notable presences.
Then the door swung open, and the boy found himself stammering with a tongue that had become painfully and ineptly stiff:
"I've done got belated on ther highway – an' I'm leg-weary," he prevaricated. "I 'lowed mebby ye'd suffer me ter come in an' tarry till mornin'."
Over the preoccupation of McCalloway's face broke an amused smile, and he stepped aside, waving his hand inward with a gesture of welcome.
"General Prince, permit me to present my young friend, Boone Wellver," he announced, stifling the twinkle of his eyes, and speaking with ceremonial gravity. "He is a neighbour of mine – who tells me he has dropped in for the night."
The seated gentleman with the gray moustache and beard came to his feet, extending his hand, and under the overwhelming innovation of such courtesy, Boone was even more palpably and painfully abashed. But as vaguely comprehended etiquette, he recognized its importance and accordingly came forward with the stiffness of an automaton.
"Howdy," he said with a stupendous solemnity. "I've done heerd tell of ye right often, an' hit pleasures me ter strike hands with ye. Folks says ye used ter be one of ther greatest horse-thievin' raiders that ever drawed breath."
When the roar of General Prince's laughter subsided – a laughter for which Boone could see no reason, the boy drew a chair to the corner of the hearth and sat as one may sit in the wings of a theatre, his breath coming with the palpitation of simmering excitement. Soon the elders seemed to have forgotten him in the heated absorption of their debate. They were threshing over the campaigns of the war between the States and measuring the calibre of commanders as a backwoods man might estimate the girth and footage of timber.
Boone nursed contented knees between locked fingers while the debate waxed warm.
Not only were battles refought there in retrospect, with such illuminating vividness as seemed to dissolve the narrow walls into a panoramic breadth of smoking, thunderous fields, but motive and intent were developed back of the engagements.
Boone in the chimney corner sat mouse-quiet. He seemed to be rapturously floating through untried spaces on a magic carpet.
McCalloway replenished the fire from time to time, and though midnight came and passed, neither thought of sleep. It was as if men who had dwelt long in civilian inertia, were wassailing deep again in the heady wine of a martial past, and were not yet ready to set aside their goblets of memory.
The forgotten boy, electrically wakeful, huddled back, almost stifling his breath lest he should be remembered and sent to bed.
The speakers fell eventually into a silence which held long and was complete save for the light hiss and crackle of the logs, until Basil Prince's voice broke it with a low-pitched and musing interrogation. "I sometimes wonder whether the chemistry of a great war today would bring forth mightier or lesser reactions. Would the need call into evidence men of giant stature? Have we, in our time, greater potential geniuses than Grant and Lee?"
McCalloway shook his head. "I question it," he declared. "I question it most gravely. I am myself a retired soldier. I have met most of the European commanders of my day, I have campaigned with not a few. Several have demonstrated this or that element of greatness, but not one the sheer pre-eminence of genius."
"And yet – " General Prince rose abruptly from his chair, under the impulse of his engrossed interest. "And yet, there was quite recently, in the British Army, one figure that to my mind demonstrated true genius, sir, – positive and undeniable genius. Tragedy claimed him before his life rounded to fulfilment. Not the tragedy of the field – which is rather gold than black – but the unholy and – I must believe – the undeserved tragedy of unwarrantable slander. If General Hector Dinwiddie had not died by his own hand in Paris, two years ago, he would have compelled recognition – and history's grudging accolade. It is my belief, sir, that he was of that mighty handful – the military masters."
For a while, McCalloway offered neither assent nor denial. His eyes held, as if by some hypnotic influence in the coals, were like those of the crystal gazer who sees shadowy and troubling pictures, and even in the hearth-flare the usually high-colour of his Celtic cheeks appeared faded into a sort of parchment dulness. Such a tide of enthusiasm was sweeping the other along, though, that his host's detachment and taciturnity went unobserved.
"Dinwiddie was not the man to have been guilty of those things, which scandal whispered of him," persisted Prince, with such spirited animation as might have characterized him had he been confronting a jury box, summing up for the defence, "but he could not brook calumny." The speaker paused to shake his head sadly, and added, "So he made the mad mistake of self-destruction – and robbed Great Britain of her ablest and most brilliant officer."
"Perhaps," McCalloway suggested in a speculative and far-away voice, "perhaps he felt that his usefulness to his country was ended when his name was dragged into the mire."
"And in that he erred. Such a man would have emerged, clean-shriven, from the smirching of slander. His detractors would have stood damned by their own infamous falsity – had he only faced them out and given them the lie."
"Then you believe – in spite of the seemingly overpowering evidence which they produced against him – that the charges were false?"
McCalloway put the question slowly. "May I ask upon what you base your opinion? You know all they said of him: personal dishonesty and even ugly immorality?"
CHAPTER V
The one-time cavalry leader caught up the challenge of the question.
"Upon what do I base my opinion, sir? I base it upon all the experience of my life and all my conceptions of personal honour. For such a man as Dinwiddie had proven himself to be under a score of reliable tests, the thing was a sheer impossibility. It was a contradiction in the terms of nature. His was the soul of a Knight, sir! Such a man could not cheat and steal and delight in low vices."
"Yet," came the somewhat dubious observation, "even Arthur's table had its caitiff knights, if you remember."
The Kentuckian's exclamation was almost a snort. "Dinwiddie was no such renegade," he protested. "At least I can't believe it. Glance at his record, man! The son of an Edinburgh tradesman, who forced his way up from the ranks to pre-eminence. He did it, too, in an army where caste and birth defend their messes against invasion, and, as he came from the ranks to a commission, so he went on to the head. There must have been a greatness of soul there that could hardly care to wallow in viciousness." As Prince paused, a spasm of emotion twitched the lips of his host, and McCalloway's pipe died in fingers that clutched hard upon its stem.
But because McCalloway sat unmoving, making no comment of any sort, the Kentuckian continued. It was as though he must have his argument acknowledged.
"I can see the tradesman's son, Sir Hector Dinwiddie, D.S.O., K.C.B., Major General, Aide de Camp to the Queen, promising Britain another glorious name – but as God in heaven is my judge, I cannot see him soiling his character, or degrading the uniform he wore!"
A moment of dead silence hung heavily between the walls of the room. Boone Wellver