The Tempering

When Boone surreptitiously slipped out of the house he had plunged recklessly into the thorn-tangle for a shorter cut than the two men would take: a road of precipitous peril bu...

The transforming touch of a razor, a studied amendment of manner and apparel, and the passing of ten years: these are things which can work an effective disguise for an Enoch Ar...

McCalloway's house had been chinked and sealed within a few weeks and now he was living under its roof. Boone had been out there often, and one day when he went on to Asa Gregor...

To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he made it no longer a port of call.

Summer, before it has freckled into hot fulness and forgotten the fresh scent and colour of blossoms! June heralding blitheness from the golden throats of troubadour field larks...

Backward he edged to the far side of the rock, and on he went by a detour which, in due course, brought him out to the road once more at that panel of fence where Boone Wellver...

Uncle Billy Taulbee's store had stood for a half century in the shade of mighty sycamores, where a trickle of water glinted over pebble and shale, worn hub-deep into wheel-ruts....

The snow that had lain along the Appalachian slopes had felt the first breath of thawing breezes in March, 1917. Here and there, in a sun-touched hollow, dry twigs grew less bri...

With Joe Gregory entered three others, and to Anne, who was walled off from any sight of what went on, every word and intonation came up the enclosed stair well as if from a sou...

Morgan's car was making the most rapid progress through the downtown traffic that the law allowed, and his electric energies were fretting for greater speed. The days were all t...

As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on modernity and to stand a hostage to the...

Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old conductor who always stopped and cha...

Boone Wellver walked into the office of the police chief one spring morning when the trees along the streets were youthfully green. Somewhere outside a band, parading with trans...

So if the time ever came when Boone stood face to face with Saul Fulton, it would, for all the amendment of his new life, be a moment of desperate crisis. The pig iron of his ha...

Left alone in Wellver's bedroom, Joe Gregory had been thrown back on the companionship of his own thoughts, and they told him that a tide and a wind were mounting which, unless...

He sat with his back turned on the only signs of human life within the circle of his vision; unless one called the twisting creek-bed at his front, which served that pocket of t...

When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written into his life, and Boone was prompt eno...

With the half-realized familiarity of unplaced features, one face besides that of his two distinguished companions, declared its existence to Boone Wellver out of all the faces...

Boone had stood for a moment in the lighted door, and in that interval the shrewd old eyes of Cyrus Spradling had told him that the boy too had known sleeplessness and that the...

Boone rose by gas-light the next morning and from the bureau of his hall bedroom, after removing a slender pile of shirts and underwear, he extracted a heavy-calibred revolver i...

Happy Spradling, whose father had overseen the raising of Victor McCalloway's house, was only two years younger than Boone. When he had gone away, a lad of seventeen, he had bee...

Had Tom Carr chosen to sit in a penitential spirit, reviewing his life, he might, perhaps, have been forced to acknowledge a record tarnished with misdeeds, but his conscience w...

Boone had written to Anne after the election in a vein of satisfaction for a race won. "It is a small thing," he candidly confessed; "nothing more than a corporal's stripe to th...

As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to close the sluice gates of fear and ho...

It was almost a relief to Anne when she stood on the platform of the dingy little station and waved her farewell to Boone, leaving for the state capitol and his new duties. Of c...

It was Christmas eve night, and General Basil Prince, who had hurriedly changed to evening dress after his arrival by a late train, halted for a moment at the stairhead to look...

Beyond the goal of getting through college in three years, Boone had planned his future but vaguely. He might seek election to the Legislature, when he came of qualifying age, a...

"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 b...

When he went back to Louisville, early in September, Boone found the office of Colonel Wallifarro humming with a suppressed excitement, tinctured with indignation. A municipal c...

Still the boy sat silent, with his chin in his hand, as sits the self-torturing figure of Rodin's bronze "Penseur"--the attitude of thought which kills peace. Boone understood t...

General Basil Prince sat in his law office one murky December morning of the year 1903. It was an office which bespoke the attorney of the older generation, and about it hung th...

Slowly and grudgingly Tom sheathed his weapon. He knew that to fire on an unarmed man in the tensely overwrought gathering would mean wholesale blood-letting. Black looks told o...

For Boone the approaching summer was no longer a period of zestful anticipation. During that whole term he had looked eagerly ahead to those coming months back in the hills, whe...

During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been denied bail, the boy back in the laurel...

The courtesy of manner and the precision of inflection had the perfection of Japanese officialdom, but McCalloway's response succeeded in blending with an equal politeness a not...

The prosecution had other trumps yet to play. It called a name, which brought into the courtroom, with shambling and uncertain step, a man whose face was pasty with prison pallo...

One day McCalloway received a paper, several days old, that contained a piece of news which he was anxious for Boone to see at once, and he straightway set out to find the boy.

On the afternoon of Christmas day, as Boone stood by the gate of Saul's rented patch, looking off across the wet bareness of the fields to the gray and shallow skyline, he was m...

A FEW days after that, he started back again to his mountains. With Saul in jail and his wife returning to her people, there was nothing further to hold him here. Indeed, he was...

But while Boone waited for Anne to come into the ring he made no assiduous search for her in the boxes, because, like many other men whose outward seeming is one of boldness, he...

A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy windfall out of the unexpected.

One morning of frosty tang, that touched the pulses with its livening, found Boone's eyes and thoughts wandering discursively from the papers massed on his desk. His customary c...

Morgan's teeth closed with a slight click. The sinews of his chest and arms tightened. Such insolence rightfully called for the chastisement of cane or dog-whip, he thought, but...

As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the platform crowded with others who, like...

Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skie...

When the senate convened that day, strange and uncouth lookers-on stood ranged about the state house corridors, and their unblinking eyes took account of their chief adversary a...

Paris by night was a dancer who has taken the veil. Paris by day, when the siren screamed its air-raid warning, was a bold spirit not cowed but sobered with a realization of dea...

At the edge of Marlin Town stood the bungalow of the coal company's superintendent, and in its living-room, on either side of a document-littered table, sat two men. One of them...