“I have observed that,” I replied. “Have you noticed on the other hand,” he continued, “that they never show any concern for acquaintances who comprehend the situation, but pay them the compliment of assuming that they have sense enough to know what they are doing and to take care of themselves?”
“I have observed that same too,” I affirmed.
He puffed again for a while.
“My father,” he returned presently, “used to say that there are two ends to a quarrel, the right end and the wrong end, but that either end of a feud is the wrong end. I am one end of a feud. Wherever I am is one focus of that feud. The other focus is local, and I have removed myself as far as may be from it. But I am not safe here, should not be safe anywhere on earth; doubt if I should be safe on the moon, or Mars, on a planet of some other sun, or the least conspicuous satellite of the farthest star. I am obnoxious to the hate of a power as far-reaching”. he took off his broad felt hat and looked up at the canvas of the tent-roof. “as far-reaching as the displeasure of God.”
“And as implacable,” he almost whispered. “As the malice of Satan.” He looked sane, healthy and self-possessed.
“I am nowhere safe,” he recommenced in his natural voice, “while my chief adversary is alive. My enemies are many and malignant, enough, but their power is negligible, and their malignancy vicarious. Without fomenting their hostility would evaporate. Could I but know that my chief enemy were no more I should be free from all alarm. But while that arch-foe survives I am liable to attack at any moment, to attacks so subtle that I am at a loss to make you comprehend their possible nature, so crude that I could not make you realize the danger you are in at this instant.”
I looked at him, unmoved.
“I shall say no more to you,” he said. “You must do as you please. If you regard my warnings as vapors, I have at least warned you. If you are willing to share my danger, in such degree as my very neighborhood is always full of danger, you do so at your own risk. If you consider it advisable to have no more to do with me, say so now.”
“I see no reason,” I told him without even a preliminary puff, “why your utterances should make any difference in my treatment of you.”
“I thought you would say that,” he said. “But my conscience is clear.”
“Shall we proceed to business?” I asked.
“There is one point more,” he replied. “Have you ever been in mining camps or amid other frontier conditions?”
“Several times,” I answered, “and for some time at that.”
“Have you ever noticed that when two men have been mutually threatening to shoot each other at sight, pending the final settlement, neither will expose women or children to danger by being in their neighborhood or permitting them in his, if he can prevent their nearing them?”
“Such scrupulosity can be observed,” I told him dryly, “nearer home than mining camps or frontier towns.”
“So I have heard,” he replied stiffly. “When I left America the personal encounter had not yet taken the place of the formal duel in these regions.”
He puffed a bit.
“However,” he continued, “it makes no difference from what part of the world you draw the illustration; it is equally in point. The danger of being near me is a hundred times, a thousand times greater than that of running the risk of stopping a wild or random bullet. I cannot bring myself to expose innocent beings to such danger.”
“How about Jeff and Cato?” I asked.
“A nigger,” declared Colonel Case (and he looked all the colonel as he spoke it) “is like a dog or a horse, he shares his master's dangers as a matter of course. I speak of women and children and unsuspecting men. I am resolute to sit at no man's table, to enter no man's house, uninvited or invited. All who come to me knowingly I shall welcome. When you bring any one with you I shall assume that he has been forewarned. But I shall intrude upon no one.”
“How then are you to inspect,” I queried, “the properties I expected to show you?”
“Business,” said Colonel Case, “is different. When people propose to do business they assume any and all risks. Are you afraid to assume the risk of driving me about in that buggy of yours?”
“Not a particle,” I disclaimed. “Are you willing to expose the people of Brexington to these dangers on which you descant so eloquently and which I fail to comprehend?”
Colonel Case fixed me with a cold stare. He looked every inch a warrior, accustomed to dominate his environment, to command and be obeyed, impatient of any opposition, ready to flare up if disbelieved in the smallest trifle.
“Radford,” he said, slowly and sternly, “I am willing to take any pains to avoid wronging anyone, I am unwilling to make myself ridiculous by attempting impossibilities.”
“I see,” I concluded. “Let us go.
As we drove through the town he said:
“This is like coming back to earth from another world. It is like a dream too. Some streets are just as they were, only the faces are unfamiliar. I almost expect to see the ghosts of thirty years ago.”
I made some vague comment and as we jogged along talked of the unchanged or new owners of the houses. Then I felt him make a sudden movement beside me, and I looked round at him. He could not turn any paler than he was, yet there had been a change in his face.
“I do see ghosts,” he said slowly and softly.
I followed his glance as he gazed past me. We were approaching the Kenton homestead and nearly opposite it. It had an old-fashioned classic portico with four big white columns. At the top of the steps, between the two middle columns, stood Mary Kenton, all in pink with a rose in her jetty hair. She was looking intently at us, but not at me. Case stared at her fixedly.
“Mary Kenton is the picture of her mother,” I told him.
“Her very image,” he breathed, his eyes steadily on her. She continued gazing at us. Of course she knew whom I was driving. My horses were trotting slowly and when we were opposite her, she waved her hand.
“Welcome home, Cousin Cassius,” she called cheerily.
Colonel Case waved his hat to her and bowed, but said nothing.
The Shelby mansion did not suit Colonel Case. What he wanted, he said, was a house at the edge of the town. When he had made his selection he bought it promptly. He had the outbuildings razed, the shrubbery torn up and the trees trimmed so that no limb hung within ten feet of the ground; above they were left untouched, tall and spreading as they were and almost interlacing with each other. The house he practically rebuilt. Its all-round veranda he had torn down and replaced by one even broader, but at the front only, facing the entrance, the only entrance he left. For he entirely closed the back-way to the kitchen and side-gate to the stable, cutting instead a loop-drive around the house from the one front entrance.
Except for this stone-posted carriage-gate with the little foot-path gate beside it, he had the whole place surrounded with a fence the like of which Brexington had never seen. The posts were T-beams, of rolled steel, eight feet tall above ground, reaching six feet below it and bedded down in rammed concrete. To these was bolted a four-foot continuous, square-mesh wire fencing, the meshes not over six inches at its top and as small as two inches at the bottom, which was sunk a hand's breadth below the surface and there held by close-set clamps upon sections of gas-pipe, extending from post to post and bolted to them. Inside this mesh-fencing, as high as it reached, and above it to the top of the posts, were strung twenty strands of heavy barbed wire, the upper wires six inches apart, the lower strands closer. Inside the fence he had set a close hedge. As the plants composing it were large and vigorous when they arrived from the nursery- man, this was soon thick and strong. It was kept clipped to about three feet high. The flower-beds he abolished and from house to drive and drive to hedge soon had the whole place in well-kept turf.