For an hour or more he waited, but there was no return of the owner and Parish carried his search elsewhere.
Bas, he reflected, was busy to-day conferring with those leaders of the riders from whom he ostensibly stood aloof, and the man who was hunting him down followed trail after trail along roads that could be ridden and "traces" that must be tramped. Casual inquiries along the highway served only to send him hither and yon on a series of wild goose chases.
This man and that had seen Bas Rowlett, and "Bas he seemed right profoundly shocked an' sore distressed," they said. They gave Thornton the best directions they could, and as the clan-leader rode on they nodded sage heads and reflected that it was both natural and becoming that he should be seeking for Bas at such a time. The man who had been murdered last night was Rowlett's kinsman and Thornton was Rowlett's friend. Both men were prominent, and it was a time for sober counsel. The shadow of the riders lay over the country broader and deeper than that which the mountains cast across the valleys.
So from early forenoon until almost sunset Parish Thornton went doggedly and vainly on with his man-hunt. Yet he set his teeth and swore that he must not fail; that he could not afford to fail. He would go home and have supper with Dorothy, then start out afresh.
He was threading a blind and narrow pathway homeward between laurel thickets, when he came to the spot where he and Bas Rowlett had stood on that other June night a year ago, the spot where the shot rang out that had wounded him.
There he paused in meditation, summing up in his mind the many things that had happened since then, and the sinister strands of Rowlett's influence that ran defacingly through the whole pattern.
Below that shelf of rock, kissed by the long shadow of the mountain, lay the valley with its loop of quietly moving water. The roof of his own house was a patch of gray and the canopy of his own tree a spot of green beneath him. At one end, the ledge on which he stood broke away in a precipice that dropped two hundred feet, in sheer and perpendicular abruptness, to a rock-strewn gorge below. Elsewhere it shelved off into the steep slope down which Bas had carried him.
Suddenly Thornton raised his head with abrupt alertness. He thought he had heard the breaking of a twig somewhere in the thicket, and he drew back until he himself was hidden.
Five minutes later the man he had spent the day seeking emerged alone from the woods and stood ten yards from his own hiding place.
This was a coincidence too remarkable and providential to be credited, thought Thornton, yet it was no coincidence at all. Bas knew of the drama that was to be played out that night—a drama of which he was the anonymous author—and he was coming, in leisurely fashion, to a lookout from which he could witness its climax while he still held to his pose of detachment.
The master-conspirator seated himself on a boulder and wiped his brow, for he had been walking fast. A little later he glanced up, to see bent upon him a pair of silent eyes whose message could not be misread. Inone hand Thornton held a cocked revolver, in the other a sealed envelope.
Rowlett rose to his feet and went pale, and Parish advanced holding the paper out to him.
"Ther day hes come, Bas," said Thornton with the solemnity of an executioner, "when I don't need this pledge no longer. I aims ter give hit back ter ye now."
Onemight have counted ten while the picture held with no other sound than the breathing of two men and the strident clamour of a blue-jay in a hickory sapling.
Rowlett had not been ordered to raise his hands, but he held them ostentatiously still and wide of his body. The revolver in its holster under his armpit might as well have been at home, for even had both started with an equal chance in the legerdemain of drawing and firing, he knew his master, and as it was, he stood covered.
Now, too, he faced an adversary no longer fettered by any pledge of private forbearance.
This, then, was the end—and it arrived just a damnable shade too soon, when with the falling of dusk he might have witnessed the closing scenes of his enemy's doom. To-morrow there would be no Parish Thornton to dread, but also to-morrow there would be no Bas Rowlett to enjoy immunity from fear.
"Hit war jest erbout one y'ar ago, Bas," came the even and implacable inflection of the other, "thet us two stud up hyar tergither, an' a heap hes done come ter pass since then—don't ye want yore envellip, Bas?"
Silently and with a heavily moving hand, Rowlett reached out and took the proffered paper which bore his incriminating admissions and signature, but he made no answer.
"Thet other time," went on Thornton with maddening deliberation, "hit was in ther moonlight thet us two stud hyar, an' when ye told me ye war befriendin' me Iwar fool enough ter b'lieve ye. Don't ye recollict how we turned and looked down, an' ye p'inted out thet big tree—in front of ther house?"
The intriguer ground his teeth, but from the victor's privilege of verbose taunting he had no redress. After all, it would be a transient victory. Parish might "rub it in" now, but in a few hours he would be dangling at a rope's end.
"Ye showed hit ter me standin' thar high an' widespread in ther moonlight, an' I seems ter recall thet ye 'lowed ye'd cut hit down ef ye hed yore way. Ye hain't hed yore way, though, Bas, despite Satan's unflaggin' aid. Ther old tree still stands thar a-castin' hits shade over a place thet's come ter be my home—a place ye've done vainly sought ter defile."
Still Rowlett did not speak. There was a grim vestige of comfort left in the thought that when the moon shone again Parish Thornton would have less reason to love that tree.
"Ye don't seem no master degree talkative terday, Bas," suggested the man with the pistol, which was no longer held levelled but swinging—though ready to leap upward. Then almost musingly he added, "An' thet's a kinderly pity, too, seein' ye hain't nuver goin' ter hev no other chanst."
"Why don't ye shoot an' git done?" barked Rowlett with a leer of desperation. "Pull yore trigger an' be damned ter ye—we'll meet in hell afore long anyhow."
When Thornton spoke again the naked and honest wrath that had smouldered for a year like a banked fire at last leaped into untrammelled blazing.
"I don't strike down even a man likeyououten sheer hate an' vengeance," he declared, with an electrical vibrance of pitch. "Hit's a bigger thing then thet an' ye've got ter know in full what ye dies for afore I kills ye—ye hain't deluded me as fur es ye thinks ye have—Iknows ye betrayed me in Virginny; I knows ye shot at old Jim an' fathered ther infamies of ther riders; I knows ye sought ter fo'ce yoreself on Dorothy; but I didn't git thet knowledge fromher. She kep' her bargain with ye."
"A man right often thinks he knows things when he jest suspicions 'em," Bas reminded him, with a forced and factitious calm summoned for his final interview, but the other waved aside the subterfuge.
"Right often—yes—but not always, an' this hain't one of them delusions. I knows ther full sum an' substance of yore infamies, an' yit I've done held my hand. Mebby ye thought my wrath war coolin'. Ef ye did ye thought wrong!"
Parish Thornton drew a long breath and the colour gradually went out of his brown face, leaving it white and rapt in an exaltation of passion.
"I've been bidin' my time an' my time hes come," he declared in a voice that rang like a bronze bell. "When I kills ye I does a holy act. Hit's a charity ter mankind an' womankind—an' yit some foreparent bred hit inter me ter be a fool, an' I've got ter go on bein' one."
A note of hopefulness, incredulous, yet quickening with a new lease on courage, flashed into the gray despair of the conspirator's mind and he demanded shortly:
"What does ye mean?"
Thornton recognized that grasping at hope, and laughed ironically.
"I hain't goin' ter shoot ye down like ye merits," he said, "an' yit I misdoubts ef hit's so much because I've got ter give ye a chanst, atter all, es ther hunger ter see yore life go out under my bare fingers."
Slowly dying hope had its redawning in Bas Rowlett's face. His adversary's strength and quickness werelocally famous, but he, too, was a giant in perfect condition, and the prize of life was worth a good fight.
He stood now with hands held high while Thornton disarmed him and flung his pistol and knife far backward into the thicket. His own weapon, the Harper leader still held.
"Now, me an' you are goin' ter play a leetle game by ther name of 'craven an' damn fool'," Thornton enlightened him with a grim smile. "I'm ther damn fool. Hit's fist an' skull, tooth an' nail, or anything else ye likes, but fust I'm goin' ter put this hyar gun of mine in a place whar ye kain't git at hit, an' then one of us is goin' ter fling t'other one offen thet rock-clift whar she draps down them two hundred feet. Does ye like thet play, Bas?"
"I reckon I'll do my best," said Rowlett, sullenly; "I hain't skeercely got no rather in ther matter nohow."
Thornton stripped off his coat and rolled his sleeves high and the other man followed suit. Bas even grinned sardonically in appreciation when the other at length thrust his pistol under a rock which it strained his strength to lift. The man who got that weapon out would need to be one who had time and deliberation at his disposal—not one who snatched it up in any short-winded interval of struggle.
Then the two stood glaring into each other's faces with the naked savagery of wild beasts, and under the stress of their hate-lust the whites of their eyes were already bloodshot and fever-hot with murder-bent.
Yet with an impulse that came through even that red fog of fury Parish Thornton turned his head and looked for the fraction of an instant down upon the gray roof and the green tree where the shadows lay lengthed in the valley—and in that half second of diverted gaze Rowlett launched himself like a chargingbull, with head down to ram his adversary's solar plexus and with arms outstretched for a bone-breaking grapple.
It was a suddenness which even with suddenness expected came bolt-like, and Thornton, leaping sidewise, caught its passing force and stumbled, but grappled and carried his adversary down with him. The two rolled in an embrace that strained ribs inward on panting lungs, leg locking leg, and fingers clutching for a vulnerable hold. But Thornton slipped eel-like out of the chancery that would have crushed him into helplessness and sprang to his feet, and if Rowlett was slower, it was by only a shade of difference.
They stood, with sweat already flowing in tiny freshets out of their pores and eyes blazing with murderous fire. They crouched and circled, advancing step by step, each warily sparring for an advantage and ready to plunge in or leap sidewise. Then came the impact of bone and flesh once more, and both went down, Thornton's face pressed against that of his enemy as they fell, and Rowlett opened and clamped his jaws as does a bull-dog trying for a grip upon the jugular.
That battle was homerically barbaric and starkly savage. It was fought between two wild creatures who had shed their humanity: one the stronger and more massive of brawn; the other more adroit and resourceful. But the teeth of the conspirator closed on the angle of the jawbone instead of the neck—and found no fleshy hold, and while they twisted and writhed with weird incoherencies of sound going up in the smother of dust, Bas Rowlett felt the closing of iron fingers on his throat. While he clawed and gripped and kicked to break the strangle, his eyes seemed to swell and burn and start from their sockets, and the patch of darkening sky went black.
It was only the collapse of the human mass in hisarms into dead weight that brought Parish Thornton again out of his mania and back to consciousness. The battle was over, and as he drew his arms away his enemy sank shapeless and limp at his feet.
For a few seconds more Thornton stood rocking on unsteady legs, then, with a final and supreme effort, he stooped and lifted the heavy weight that hung sagging like one newly dead and not yet rigid.
With his burden Parish staggered to the cliff's edge and swung his man from side to side, gaining momentum.
Then suddenly he stopped and stood silhouetted there, sweat-shiny and tattered, blood-stained and panting, and instead of pitching Bas Rowlett outward he laid him down again on the shelf of rock.
How much later he did not know, though he knew that it was twilight now, Bas Rowlett seemed to come out of a heavy and disturbed sleep in which there had been no rest, and he found himself lying with his feet hanging over the precipice edge, and with Thornton looking intently down upon him. In Thornton's hand was the recovered pistol—so there must have been time enough for that.
But his perplexed brain reeled to the realization that he still lay up here instead of among the rocks upon which he should have been broken two hundred feet below. Presumably the victor had waited for returning consciousness in the victim to consummate that atrocity.
But Thornton's unaccountable whims had flown at another tangent.
"Git up, Bas," he commanded, briefly, "yore life b'longs ter me. I won hit—an' ye're goin' ter die—but my fingers don't ache no more fer a holt on yore throat—they're satisfied."
"What air—ye goin' ter do, now?" Rowlett found words hard to form; and the victor responded promptly, "I've done concluded ter take ye down thar, aforeye dies, an' make ye crave Dorothy's pardon on yore bended knees. Ye owes hit ter her."
Slowly Rowlett dragged himself to a sitting posture. His incredulous senses wanted to sing out in exultation, but he forced himself to demur with surly obduracy.
"Hain't hit enough ter kill me without humiliatin' me, too?"
"No, hit hain't enough fer me an' hit's too tardy feryouter make no terms now."
Bas Rowlett exaggerated his dizzy weakness. There was every reason for taking time. This mad idea that had seized upon the other was a miracle of deliverance for him. If only he could kill time until night had come and the moon had risen, it would prove not only a respite but a full pardon—capped with a reserved climax of triumph.
Down there at that house the mob would soon come, and circumstance would convert him, at a single turn of the wheel, from humbled victim to the avenger ironically witnessing the execution of his late victor.
After a while he rose and stood experimentally on his legs.
"I reckon I kin walk now," he said, drearily, "ef so be ye lets me go slow—I hain't got much of my stren'th back yit."
"Thar hain't no tormentin' haste," responded Thornton; "we've got all night afore us."
* * *
When they reached the house, it stood mistily bulked among shadows, with its front door open upon an unlighted room.
The men had tramped down that slope in silence, and they crossed the threshold in silence, too, the captive preceding his captor; and the householder paused to bolt the door behind him.
Then, holding a vigilant eye on the forced guest who had not spoken, Thornton lighted a lamp and backed to the closed bedroom door at whose sill he had seen a slender thread of brightness. In all his movements he went with a wary slowness, as though he were held by a cord, and the cord was the line of direct glance that he never permitted to deviate from the face of his prisoner.
Now while his right hand still fondled the revolver, he groped with his left for the latch and opened the door at his back.
"Dorothy," he called in a low voice, "I wisht ye'd come in hyar, honey."
From within he heard a sound like a low moan; but he knew it was a sigh of relief loosening tight nerve cords that had been binding his wife's heart in suspense.
"Thank God, ye're back, Ken," she breathed. "Air ye all right—an' unharmed?"
"All right an' unharmed," he responded, as he stepped to the side of the door frame and stood there a rigid and unmoving sentinel.
But when Dorothy came to the threshold, she took in at once the whole picture, pregnant with significance: the glint of lamplight on the ready revolver, the relentless, tooth-marked face of her husband, and the figure of the vanquished plotter with its powerful shoulders hunched forward and its head hanging.
On the mantel ticked the small tin clock, which Bas Rowlett watched from the tail of a furtive eye.
As Dorothy Thornton stood in gracious slenderness against the background of the lighted door with a nimbus about her head, she was all feminine delicacy and allurement. But in that moment she stiffened to an overwhelming rush of memories which incited her to a transport of wrath for which she had no words.
She saw Bas Rowlett stripped naked to the revoltingbareness of his unclean soul, and she drew back with a shudder of loathing and unmoderated hate.
"Why did ye dally with him, Ken?" she demanded, fiercely; "don't ye know thet whilst ye lets him live yere jest handlin' an' playin' with a rattlesnake?"
"He hain't got long ter live," came the coldly confident response, "but afore he dies, he wants ter crave yore pardon, Dorothy, an' he wants ter do hit kneelin' down."
Bas Rowlett shot a sidelong glance at the clock. Time was soul and essence of the matter now and minutes were the letters that spelled life and death. He listened tensely, too, and fancied that he heard a whippoorwill.
There were many whippoorwills calling out there in the woods but he thought this was a double call and that between its whistlings a man might have counted five. Of that, however, he could not be sure.
"I hain't got no choice, Dorothy," whined the man, whose craven soul was suffering acutely as he fenced for delay—delay at any cost. "Even ef I hed, though, I'd crave yore pardon of my own free will—but afore I does hit, thar's jest a few words I'd love ter say."
Dorothy Thornton stood just inside the door. Pity, mercy, and tenderness were qualities as inherent in her as perfume in a wild flower, but there was something else in her as well—as there is death in some perfumes. If he had been actually a poisonous reptile instead of a snake soul in the body of a man Bas Rowlett could have been to her, just then, no less human.
"Yes," she said, slowly, as a memory stirred the confession of her emotions, "thar's one thing I'd like ter say, too—but hit hain't in no words of my own—hit's somethin' thet was said a long spell back."
From the mantel shelf she produced the old journal, and opened its yellowed pages.
"I've been settin' hyar," said Dorothy Thornton, in a strained quietness of voice, "readin' this old book mighty nigh all day—Ihedter read hit—" her voice broke there, then went steadily on again—"or else go mad, whilst I was waitin'—waitin' ter know whether Ken hed kilt ye oryou'dkilthim." Again she paused for a moment and turned her eyes to her husband. "This book sheds light on a heap of things thet we all needs ter know erbout—hit tells how his foreparent sought ter kill ther tree thet our ancestors planted—an' hit's kinderly like an indictment in ther high co'te."
While Dorothy Thornton accused the blood sprung from the renegade and his Indian squaw out of those ancient pages the men listened.
To the husband it was incitement and revelation. The tree out there standing warder in the dark became, as he listened with engrossed interest, more than ever a being of sentient spirit and less than ever a thing of mere wood and leaf.
To Bas Rowlett it should have been an indictment, or perhaps an excuse, with its testimony of blood strains stronger than himself—but from its moral his mind was wandering to a more present and gripping interest.
Now he was sure he had heard the double whippoorwill call! In five minutes more he would be saved—yet five minutes might be too long.
Dorothy paused. "Ye sees," she said with a deep gravity, "from ther start, in this country, our folks hev been despitefully tricked an' misused by ther offspring of thet Indian child thet our foreparents tuck in an' befriended. From ther start, ther old tree hes held us safe with hits charm erginst evil! Ever since——"
She broke off there and paused with astonished eyes that turned to the door, upon which had sounded a commanding rap. Then she rose and went over cautiously to open it an inch or two and look out.
But when she raised the latch a man, rendered uncognizable by a black slicker that cloaked him to his ankles and a masked face, threw it wide, so that the woman was forced, stumbling, back. Then through the opening poured a half dozen others in like habiliments of disguise.
All held outthrust rifles, and that one who had entered first shouted: "All right, boys, ther door's open."
Parish Thornton had not been able to shoot at the initial instant because Dorothy stood in his way. After that it was useless—and he saw Bas Rowlett step forward with a sudden change of expression on his pasty face.
"Now, then," said Bas, exultantly, "hit's a gray hoss of another colour!"
WhenParish Thornton had brought his captive down the slope that afternoon he had left his rifle in safe concealment, not wishing to hamper himself with any weapon save the revolver, which had never left his palm until this moment.
Now with the instant gone in which he might have used it to stem the tide of invasion, he was not fool enough to fire. A silent and steady current of black-clad humanity was still flowing inward across the threshold, and every man was armed.
Yet at the ring of victorious elation in Bas Rowlett's voice the impulse to strike down that master of deceit before his own moment came almost overpowered him—almost but not quite.
He knew that the bark of his weapon would bring chorused retort from other firearms, and that Dorothy might fall. As it was, the mob had come for him alone, so he walked over and laid his revolver quietly down on the table.
But the girl had seen the by-play and had rightly interpreted its meaning. For her the future held no promise—except a tragedy she could not face, and for a distracted moment she forgot even her baby as she reacted to the bitterness of her vendetta blood. So she caught up Hump Doane's rifle that still rested against the wall near her hand and threw the muzzle to Rowlett's breast.
"I'll gityou, anyhow," she screamed between clenched teeth, and it was a promise she would have kept; apromise that would have turned that room into a shambles had not one of the masked figures been dexterous enough in his intervention to reach her and snatch the gun from her grasp—still unfired.
Dorothy stepped back then, her eyes staring with the fury of failure as she gazed at the man who had disarmed her—while one by one other dark and uniformed figures continued to enter and range themselves about the wall.
The night-rider who held the captured rifle had not spoken, but the woman's eye, as it ranged up and down, caught sight of a shoe—and she recognized a patch. That home-mending told her that the enemy who had balked her in the last poor comfort of vengeance was Sim Squires, a member of her own household, and her lips moved in their impulse to call out his name in denunciation and revilement.
They moved and then, in obedience to some sudden afterthought, closed tight again without speaking, but her eyes did speak in silent anathema of scorn—and though she did not know or suspect it, the thoughts mirrored in them were read and interpreted by the mob-leader.
Dorothy crossed the floor of the room, ringed with its border of grimly cloaked humanity, and took her stand by the side of the man who leaned stoically at the corner of his hearth. At least she could do that much in declaration of loyalty.
Thornton himself folded his arms and, as his eyes ran over the anonymous beings who had come to kill him, he fell back on the only philosophy left him: that of dying with such as unwhining demeanour as should rob them of triumph in their gloating.
At length the door closed, and it was with a dramatic effect of climax that the last man who entered bore, coiled on his arm, the slender but stout rope which wasto be both actual instrument and symbol of their purpose there.
Parish felt Dorothy, whose two hands were clasped about his folded arm, wince and shudder at the sinister detail, and unwilling to remain totally passive, even with the end so near and so certain, he chose to speak before they spoke to him.
"I knows right well what ye've come fer, men," he said, and in the level steadiness of his voice was more of disdain than abjectness, "but I hain't got no lamentation ter make, an' somehow I hain't es much terrified as mebby I ought ter be."
"Ye've got a right good license ter be terrified," announced the disguised voice of the masked leader, "onlessen death's a thing ye favours over life. Even ef ye does thet, hangin's a right shameful way ter die."
But Parish Thornton shook his head.
"Hit hain't hangin' hitself thet's shameful," he corrected the other, "hit's what a man hangs fer." He paused, then with the note of entire seriousness he inquired: "I reckon ye don't aim ter deny me ther privilege of sayin' a few words fust, does ye? I've always heered thet they let a man talk afore he got hung."
"Go on," growled the other, "but mebby ye'd better save hit, twell we've done tried ye. We aims ter give ye a hearin' afore ye dies."
Thornton inclined his head gravely, more sensible of the clutching grasp of his wife's fingers on his tensed biceps than of more fateful matters.
"When ye gits through hangin' me," he told them by way of valedictory, "I wants ye ter recall thet thar's somethin' ye hain't kilt yit in these hills—an' won't nuver kill. Thar's a sperit that some of us hes fostered hyar, and hit'll go on jest ther same without us—hit's a bigger thing then any man, an' hit's goin' ter dog ye tillhit gits ye all—every sneakin' mother's son an' every murderin' man-jack of yore sorry outfit! What things we've ondertook hain't a-goin' ter die with me ner with no other man ye gang murders—an' when ther high co'te sets next time, thar'll be soldiers hyar thet hain't none affrighted by ther repute ye b'ars!"
He paused, then added soberly, yet with a conviction that carried persuasiveness: "Thet's all I've got ter say, an' albeitI'mther victim right now, God in Heaven knows I pities all of ye from ther bottom of my heart—because I'm confident that amongst ye right now air some siv'ral thet, save fer bein' deluded by traitors an' cravens, air good men."
The individual who was acting as spokesman bent forward and thrust his face close to that of the man they had come to lynch.
"Nuther yore brag nor yore threats hain't agoin' ter avail ye none, Parish Thornton—because yore time is done come. Thar's a hugeous big tree astandin' out thar by yore front door, an' afore an hour's gone by, ye're goin' ter be swingin' from hit. Folks norrates thet yore woman an' you sets a heap of store by thet old walnuck an' calls hit ther roof tree, an' believes hit holds a witch-spell ter safeguard ye.... We're goin' ter see kin hit save ye now."
He paused, and at the mention of the walnut Dorothy clutched her hands to her breast and caught her breath, but the man went on:
"Ye hain't no native-born man hyar, Thornton, albeit ye've done sought ter run ther country like some old-time king or lord beyond ther water.... Ye hain't nuthin' but a trespassin' furriner, nohow—an' we don't love no tyrant. This roof-tree hain't yourn by no better right then ther nest thet ther cuckoo steals from ther bird thet built hit...."
Again he paused, then, added with a sneer:
"We don't even grant ye ownership of thet old walnuck tree—but we aims ter loan hit ter ye long enough ter hang on." He halted and looked about the place, then with cheap theatricism demanded:
"Who accuses this man? Let him stand ter ther front."
Three or four dark figures moved unhurriedly toward the centre of the circle, but one who had not been rehearsed in his part stepped with a more eager haste to the fore, and that one was Bas Rowlett.
"I don't know es I've rightly got no license ter speak up—amongst men that I kain'treecognize," he made hypocritical declaration, "but yit, I kain't hardly hold my peace, because ye come in good season fer me—an' saved my life."
After a momentary pause, as if waiting for permission to be heard, he went on:
"This man thet I saved from death one time when somebody sought ter kill him laywayed me an hour or so back, an' atter he'd done disarmed an' maltreated me, he fotched me home hyar ter insult me some more in front of his woman—afore he kilt me in cold blood.... He done them things because I wouldn't censure an' disgust you men thet calls yoreself ther riders."
Parish Thornton smiled derisively as he listened to that indictment, then he capped it with an ironic amendment.
"We all knows ye're ther true leader of this murder-gang, Bas—ye don't need ter be bashful erbout speakin' out yore mind ter yore own slaves."
Rowlett wheeled, his swarthy face burning to its high cheekbones with a flush that spread and dyed his bull-like neck.
"All right, then," he barked out, at last casting aside all subterfuge. "Ef they h'arkens ter what I says I'll tell 'em ter string ye up, hyar an' now, ter thet tharsame tree you an' yore woman sots sich store by! I'll tell 'em ter teach Virginny meddlers what hit costs ter come trespassin' in Kaintuck." He was breathing thickly with the excited reaction from his recent terror and despair.
"Men," he bellowed, almost jubilantly, "don't waste no time—ther gallows tree stands ready. Hit's right thar by ther front porch."
Dorothy had listened in a stunned silence. Her face was parchment-pale but she was hardly able yet to grasp the sudden turn of events to irremediable tragedy.
The irrevocable meaning of the thing she had feared in her dreams seemed too vast to comprehend when it drew near her, and she had not clearly realized that minutes now—and few of them—stood between her husband and his death. Her scornful eyes had been dwelling on the one figure she had recognized: the figure of Sim Squires, whom it had never occurred to her to distrust.
But when several night-riders pushed her brusquely from her place beside her man, and drew his hands together at his back and began whipping cords about his unresisting wrists, the horror broke on her in its ghastly fullness and nearness.
The stress they laid on the mention of the tree had brought her out of the coma of her dazed condition into an acute agony of reality.
There was a fiendish symbolism in their intent.... The man they called a usurper must die on the very tree that gave their home its significance, and no other instrument of vengeance would satisfy them. The old bitterness had begun generations ago when the renegade who "painted his face and went to the Indians" had sought to destroy it, and happiness with it. Now his descendant was renewing the warfare onthe spot where it had begun, and the tree was again the centre of the drama.
Dorothy Thornton thought that her heart would burst with the terrific pressure of her despair and helplessness.
Then her knees weakened and she would have fallen had she not reeled back against the corner of the mantel, and a low, heart-broken moan came, long drawn, from her lips.
There was nothing to be done—yet every moment before death was a moment of life, and submission meant death. In the woman's eyes blazed an unappeasable hunger for battle, and as they met those of her husband they flashed the unspoken exhortation: "Don't submit ... die fighting!"
It was the old dogma of mountain ferocity, but Parish Thornton knew its futility and shook his head. Then he answered her silent incitement in words:
"Hit's too late, Dorothy.... I'd only git you kilt as well as me.... I reckon they hain't grudgin'younone, es things stands now."
But the mob leader laughed, and turning his face to the wife, he ruthlessly tore away even that vestige of reassurance.
"We hain't makin' no brash promises erbout ther woman, Thornton," he brutally announced. "I read in her eyes jest now thet shereeco'nized one of us—an' hit hain't safe ter know too much."
They were still working at the ropes on the prisoner's wrists and the knots were not yet secure. The man had gauged his situation and resigned himself to die like a slaughter-house animal, instead of a mountain lion—in order to save his wife. Now they denied him that.
Suddenly his face went black and his eyes became torrential with fury.
His lunging movement was as swift and powerful asa tiger-spring, and his transition from quiet to earthquake violence as abrupt and deadly as the current of the electric chair.
His shoulders and wrists ripped at their bonds, and the men busied about them were hurled away as with a powder blast. The arms came free and the hands seized up a chair. A human tornado was at work in a space too crowded for the use of firearms; and when the insufficient weapon had been shattered into splinters and fallen in worthless bits there were broken crowns and prostrate figures in that room.
Faces were marked with bruise and blood and laceration—but the odds were too overwhelmingly uneven, and at last they bore him down, pounded and kicked, to the puncheon floor, and when they lifted him to his feet again the ropes that fastened him were firm enough to hold.
Then Parish Thornton spoke again: spoke with a passion that seemed almost as destructive as the short-lived chair he had been swinging flail-like, though the panting exertion made his voice come in disjointed and sob-like gasps.
"Ye hain't done yit," he shouted into their maddened faces as they crowded and yapped about him. "By dint of numbers ye've done tuck me alive, but thar's still a reckonin' ahead!"
Above the answering chorus of jeers rang his berserk fury of defiance.
"Ye kin go ahead an' hang me now—an' be damned ter ye! Ye kin even murder a woman ef ye've got a mind ter—but thar's a baby in this house thet's comin' ter manhood some day."
"Ye won't be hyar ter train him up fer vengeance," came the sneering voice of Bas Rowlett who had stood clear of that conflict; and glaring at him Thornton managed a bitter laugh.
"He won't need no trainin' up," he retorted. "Hit's bred in his blood an' his bone ter hate snakes an' kill 'em. He's drunk hit in at his mother's breast an' breathed hit in ther air.... He'll settle our scores some day!"
Sim Squiresknew that when the brief farce of the trial took place he would be called forward to testify with a few prearranged lies. In his mouth was a pebble, put there to change his voice—but in his mutinous heart was an obsession of craving to see Bas Rowlett in such a debased position as that which Parish Thornton occupied—for, of all men, he feared and hated Bas most.
This unrelished participation in the mob spirit was more abhorrent than it had been before. The scorn of Dorothy's eyes had a scorpion sting that he could not escape—and this woman had given his life an atmosphere of friendliness and kindliness which it had not known before.
"Now," announced the masked spokesman, "we're well-nigh ready, an' thar hain't no virtue in bein' dilitary—albeit we don't aim ter hang him untried. Witness Number One, come forward."
Witness Number One was Sim Squires, and as though his tongue had been stricken with sudden dumbness and his limbs with paralysis, he hung back when he had been called. Slowly he looked at Parish Thornton, whose face was pale, but set once more to the calm of resoluteness—and at the ghost-terror and the lingering contempt in the deep and suffering eyes of the wife.
"Thar's a man hyar in this room," began Sim Squires, "thet's done been seekin' evidenceerginst ther riders, an' he's done secured a lavish of hit, too." So far, hiswords were running in expected grooves, and as the voice went on a little indistinct because of the pebble under the tongue, his impatient audience accorded him only a perfunctory attention.
"He's done hed spies amongst ye an' he's got evidencethet no co'te kain't fail ter convict on," proceeded the witness, slowly. "He aims ter penitensheryyou," his finger rose and settled, pointing toward the man who had acted as spokesman, and who was Rick Joyce. Then it rose again and fell on others, as Sim added, "an'you—an'you!"
"We don't aim ter give him no chanst," interrupted Joyce, and it was then that Sim Squires branched into unanticipated ways.
Suddenly this amazing witness ripped off his mask and threw aside his hat. Then he spat out the pebble that interfered with his enunciation and annoyed him, and like the epilepsy victim who slides abruptly from sane normality into his madness, the man became transformed. The timidities that had fettered him and held him a slave to cowardice were swept away like unconsidered drift on the tide of a passion that was willing to court death, if vengeance could come first. He had definitely crossed the line of allegiance and meant to swing the fatal fury of that mob from one victim to another, or die in his effort to that end. His eyes were the ember pupils of the madman or the martyr, his face was the frenzied face of a man to whom ordinary considerations no longer count; whose idea as fixed and single, and to whom personal consequences have become unimportant. His body was rigid yet vibrant, and his voice rang through the room as his finger rose and pointed into the face of Bas Rowlett.
"Thet man," he shouted, "hes bore ther semblance of yore friend, but he aims terdeestroy ye.... I knows because I've done been his slave an' he's toldme so ... he aims ter hev ye murder Parish Thornton fer him fust ... an' then ter penitenshery ye fer doin' his dirty work. Ye hain't nothin' on God's green y'arth but only his dupes!"
Squires paused for breath, and instead of the clamour and outcry for which he had braced himself he encountered a hushed stillness through which he could hear the hammering of his own heart.
Rowlett had started to bellow out an enraged denial, but he had swiftly reconsidered and chosen instead to treat the accusation with a quieter and more telling contempt. Now he laughed derisively as he turned toward Joyce.
"I reckon," he suggested, "I don't even need ter gainsay no sich damn lie es thet, does I?"
But of late there had been so much traitorousness that no man knew whom he could trust. Now to Rowlett's astonished discomfiture he recognized the stern and ominous note of doubt in Joyce's response.
"Ef I was you, I wouldn't only gainsay hit, but I'd strive master hard terprovemy denial."
"I hain't done yit," shouted Sim with a new vigour of aggressiveness, and at the sight of this human hurricane which had developed out of a man heretofore regarded as unimportant, the tempest violence of the mob hung suspended, inquisitive, astonished.
The tanned face of the witness had become pallid, but out of it his eyes shot jets of fire, hysterical to madness, yet convincing in an earnestness that transcended the fear of death and carried indubitable conviction. His body shook with a palsy as he confronted the man whom, next to Bas Rowlett, he had feared above all others; and now in evidence of his impassioned sincerity he blurted out his own confession.
"I kilt Joe Joyce," announced Sim Squires, "an' I sought ter kill Parish Thornton, too, when he fust comehyar, but I done both them deeds because I didn't dast gainsay ther man thet bade me do 'em. His bull-dozin' terrified me ... his power over me made me a craven, an' his dollars in my pocket paid me fer them dasterdly jobs. Thet man war Bas Rowlett thar!"
The leader of the mob stood for an instant with the stunned senses of an ox struck by a cleaver, and after that first dumfounded moment he wanted the truth, as a starving man wants food. Joe Joyce had been his nephew, and if this witness were telling the truth it would not appease him to take vengeance on the servant only. A more summary punishment was owing to the master.
Now he gulped down the tight constriction of his throat and ordered, "Go on! Tell hit all!"
Rowlett again thrust himself forward, but Rick Joyce, scarcely looking at him, sent him reeling backward with an open-handed blow against his chest.
With torrential and cascading onrush came the capitulation of the long and black record against the master plotter from its beginning in jealousy to its end in betrayal of the Ku Klux.
"He come over hyar when this man Thornton lay in jail an' sought ter make love ter thet woman," shouted the frenzied witness, but Dorothy, who had been leaning unnerved and dazed against the wall, raised a warning hand and interrupted.
"Stop!" she shouted. "I've done told Parish all thet! Whatever he heers erbout this man, he heers from me. We don't need no other testimony!"
Then it was that the room began to waver and spin about Dorothy Thornton, until with the drone of the hired man's voice diminishing in her ears she fell swooning, and was lifted to a chair.
When her eyes opened—even before they opened—shewas conscious again of that voice, but now it was one of dominating confidence, stinging with invective; scourging with accusations that could be verified; ripping away to its unbelievable nakedness all the falsity of Bas Rowlett's record—a voice of triumph.
In the altered attitudes of the attentive figures the woman could read that the accuser was no longer talking to a hostile audience, but to one capriciously grown receptive, and educated to the deceits of the accused. They knew now how Bas had craftily set the Harpers and the Doanes at one another's throats, and how Thornton had tranquilized them; they knew how their own grievances against the man they had come to hang had been trumped up from carefully nourished misconceptions. But above all that, they saw how they themselves had been dupes and tools, encouraged to organize and jeopardize their necks only that they might act as executioners of Rowlett's private enemy, and then be thrown to the wolves of the law.
"I come inter this house," declared Sim Squires, "at Bas Rowlett's behest, ter spy on Parish Thornton—an' I j'ined ther riders fer ther same reason—but I'm done with lyin' now! Hit's Bas Rowlett thet made a fool of me an' seeks ter make convicts outenyou."
He paused; then wheeling once more he walked slowly, step by step, to where Bas Rowlett stood cowering.
"Ye come hyar ter hang ther wrong man, boys," he shouted, "but ther right man's hyar—ther rope's hyar, an' ther tree's hyar! Hang Bas Rowlett!"
There was a silence of grim tension over the room when the accuser's voice fell quiet after its staccato peroration of incitement. The masked men gave no betrayal of final sentiment yet, and the woman rose unsteadily from her chair and pressed her hands against the tumultuous pounding of her heart. She could notstill it while she waited for the verdict, and scarcely dared yet to hope.
Rowlett had been long trusted, and had there been left in him the audacity for ten adroitly used minutes of boldness, he might have been heard that night in his own defence. But Bas had, back of all his brutal aggressions, a soul-fibre of baseness and it had wilted.
Now, with every eye turned on him, with the scales of his fate still trembling, the accused wretch cast furtive glances toward the door, weighing and considering the chances of escape. He abandoned that as hopeless, opened his lips and let his jaw sag, then crouched back as though in the shadow of the room's corner he hoped to find concealment.
"Look at him, men!" shouted Sim Squires, following up the wreck of arrogance who through years had brow-beaten him, and becoming in turn himself the bully. "Look at him huddlin' thar like a whipped cur-dawg! Hain't he done es good es made confession by ther guilty meanness in his face?"
He paused, and then with a brutal laugh he struck the cowering Rowlett across his mouth—a blow that he had dreamed of in his sleep but never dared to think of when awake—and Rowlett condemned himself to death when he flinched and failed to strike back.
"Jest now, men," rushed on the exhorter, "ye seed Thornton thar facin' death—an' he showed ye how a man kin demean himself when he thinks his time hes come. Take yore choice between them two—an' decide which one needs hangin'!"
Then feeding on the meat of new authority, Sim Squires, who had always been an underling before, seized up from the hearth, where the ashes were dead, a charred stick—and it happened to be a bit of black walnut that had grown and died on the tree which was about to become a gallows.
With its blackened end Sim drew a line across the planks of the floor between himself and Rick Joyce.
"Thar, now," he passionately importuned his hearers. "Thar hain't room in this country fer a lot of warrin' enemies thet would all be friends save fer mischief makers. Parish Thornton hes done admitted thar's good men amongst ye, an' we've agreed ter punish them briggatty fellers thet kilt Pete Doane, so thar hain't rightfully no grudge left outstandin'. I takes up my stand on this side of thet line, along with Parish Thornton, an' I summonses every man thet's decent amongst ye all ter come over hyar an' stand with us. We aims ter hev our hangin' without nodeefault, but with a diff'rent man swingin' on ther rope!"
For the space of forty seconds that seemed as many minutes a thunder-brooding tension hung in the stillness of the room—then without haste or excitement Rick Joyce took off his hat and dropped it to the floor. After it he flung his mask, and when he had crossed the line, he turned.
"Come on, men," he gave brusque and half-peremptory invitation, "this hyar's whar we b'longs at."
At first they responded singly and hesitantly, but soon it was a small stampede—save for those who kept guard at the doors—and ten minutes later Parish Thornton stood free of limb and Bas Rowlett trembled, putty pale, in the centre of the room with bound wrists and a noose draped across his shoulders.
"I only asks one thing of ye," faltered Bas, from whose soul had oozed the last drop of manly resistance, "I come hyar ter crave this woman's pardon—I still wants ter do thet—without nobody else ter heer what I says."
"Ef she's willin' ter listen, we'll let ye talk," acceded Squires, who found himself unchallenged spokesman now. "But we won't take no chances with ye. Whenther rope's over ther limb an' everything's ready, then ye kin hev yore say."
* * *
Outside the night was as gracious as had been the last, when Old Hump Doane had sat waiting vainly for the return of his son; but across the moonlit sky drifted squadrons of fleecy cloud sails, and through the plumed head of the mighty walnut sounded the restive whisper of a breeze.
The house stood squarely blocked with cobalt shadows about it, and the hills were brooding in blue-black immensities—but over the valley was a flooding wash of platinum and silver.
Fragrances and quiet cadences stole along the warm current, but the song of the whippoorwill was genuine now, and plaintive with a saddened sweetness.
The walnut tree itself, a child of the forest that had, through generations, been the friend of man, stood like a monument in the silence and majesty of its own long memories.
Under its base, where the roots sank deep into the foundations of the enduring hills, slept the dead who had loved it long ago. Perhaps in its pungent and aromatic sap ran something of the converted life and essence that had been their blood. Its bole, five feet of stalwart diameter, rose straight and tapering to the first right-angle limbs, each in itself almost a tree. Its multitude of lance-head leaves swept outward and upward in countless succession to the feathery crests that stirred seventy feet overhead—seeming to brush the large, low-hanging stars that the moon had dimmed.
All was tranquil and idyllic there—until the house door opened and a line of men filed out, bringing to his shameful end a human creature who shambled with the wretchedness of broken nerves.
Over the lowest branch, with business-like precision, Sim Squires pitched a stone on the end of a long cord, and to the cord he fastened the rope's end. All that was needed now was the weight which the rope was to lift, and in the blue-ink shadow that mercifully cloaked it and made it vague they placed the bound figure of their man.
As thoughto mask a picture of such violence the tree's heavy canopy made that spot one of Stygian murk, and even the moon hid its face just then, so that the world went black, and the stars seemed more brilliant against their inky velvet. But the light had held until the grim preparations were finished, and then when Bas Rowlett had taken his appointed place, tethered and wearing the hempen loop, when the other end of the long line had been passed through the broken slat of the closed window shutters, where it would be held by many hands in assurance against escape, Sim Squires kept his promise.
His followers trooped callously back into the house and he himself remained there, on watch, only until with the stiffness of a sleep walker Dorothy Thornton appeared for a moment in the open door and came slowly to the foot of the tree.
She could scarcely see the two men shrouded there in the profundity of shadow, and she had almost walked into the one who was to die before she realized his nearness and drew back shuddering.
Then Sim, who was holding the loose end of the rope so that it would not slacken too freely, put it in her hand and, as their fingers touched, found it icy.
"Ye'll hev ter take hold of this," he directed, "we've got t'other end indoors. When ye're ready for us—or should he seek ter git away—jest give hit a tight jerk or two. We won't interfere with ye ner come outtill we gits thet signal—but don't suffer him ter parley overlong."
Then the man left her, and the woman found herself standing there in the darkness with a terrible sense of Death hovering at her shoulder.
For a moment neither spoke, and Dorothy Thornton lifted her eyes to the tree from which had always emanated an influence of peace. She needed that message of peace now. She looked at the dark human figure, robbed of its menace, robbed of all its own paltry arrogance, and the furies that had torn her ebbed and subsided into a sickness of contemptuous pity.
Then the cloud drifted away from the moon and the world stood again out of darkness into silvery light; the breeze that had brought that brightening brought, too, a low wailing voice from high overhead, where the walnut tree seemed to sob with some poignant suffering; seemed to strive for the articulate voice that nature had denied it.
That monument to honoured dead could never shed its hallowed spirit of peace again if once it had been outraged with the indignities of a gibbet! If once it bore, instead of its own sweetly wholesome produce, that debased fruit of the gallows tree, its dignity would be forever broken! There in the flooding moonlight of the white-and-blue night it was protesting with a moan of uneasy rustling. The thing could not be tolerated—and suddenly, but clearly, Dorothy knew it. This man deserved death. No false pity could blind her to that truth, and death must ride at the saddle cantle of such as he; must some day overtake him. It might overtake him to-night—but it must not be here.
"Bas," she broke out in a low and trembling voice of abrupt decision, "I kain't suffer hit ter happen—I kain't do hit."
The varied strains and terrors of that day and nighthad made her voice a thing of gasps and catching breath, but while the man stood silent she gathered her scattered powers and went on, ignoring him and talking to the tree.
"He needs killin', God knows," she declared, "but he mustn't die on yore branches, old Roof Tree—hit was love thet planted ye—an' love thet planted ye back ergin when hate hed tore ye up by ther roots—I kain't suffer ye ter be defiled!"
She broke off, and somehow the voice that stirred up there seemed to alter from its note of suffering to the long-drawn sigh of relief; the calm of a tranquilized spirit.
The young woman stood for a moment straight and slim, but with such an eased heart as might come from answered prayer in the cloistered dimness of a cathedral.
It was, to her, a cathedral that towered there above her, with its single column; a place hallowed by mercy, a zone of sanctuary; a spot where vengeance had always been thwarted; where malevolence had failed—and her voice came in a rapt whisper.
"Ye stands ternight fer ther same things ye've always stud fer," she said, "ye stands fer home an' decency—fer ther restin' place of dead foreparents—an' ther bornin' of new gin'rations—fer green leaves an' happiness—an' ther only death ye gives countenance to is thet of folks thet goes straight ter God, an' not them thet's destined fer torment."
Inside the room the conclave maintained a grim silence. The shuttered window screened from their sight the interview to which they were submitting with a rude sense of affording the man they had condemned some substitute for extreme unction: an interval to shrive his soul with penitence and prayer.
But through the opening of the broken slat, high up in the shutter which gave sliding room, passed therope, and at its other end stood the man upon whose neck it was fixed: the man whose hands and feet were tethered and whose movements were being watched by the woman.
They shifted uneasily and impatiently on their feet in there. Sim Squires and Rick Joyce standing shoulder to shoulder held the free end of the rope in their hands. The others breathed heavily and their faces were implacable, restive of this time being vouchsafed to an idea, yet steadfast in their resolve to keep the word given their victim.
"She's lettin' him talk too long," growled a voice, and in monosyllables Rick Joyce growled back, "Shet up—he'll be dead a long time."
But outside Dorothy had turned again to the man.
"You an' yore foreparents hev plotted an' worked evil since ther fust days ther white man come hyar, Bas," she declared. "Thar hain't no death too shameful fer ye—an' ther hain't no hate deeper then thet I feels fer ye. Ye've betrayed an' wronged me an' everybody I ever loved, an' I swore I'd kill ye myself ef need be. I'm half sorrowful I didn't do hit—but from them fust days this hyar tree hes spread peace an' safety over this house an' them thet dwelt in hit. Hit's been holy like some church thet God hed blessed, an' I aims ter keep hit holy. Ef they hangs ye somewhars else, I reckon they'll do simple jestice—but hit hain't goin' ter be on this tree. My child hain't ergoin' ter look up in them branches an' see no shadow of evil thar. I hain't goin' ter lay buried in hits shade some day with yore black sperit hoverin' nigh. Sin ner shame hain't nuver teched hit yit. They hain't nuver ergoin' ter. Ther bright sun an' ther clean wind air goin' ter come ter hit an' find hit like hit's always been. God's breath is goin' ter stir in hit ther same es hit's always done."
Just then a heavier cloud shut off the moonlight, andstill holding the rope steadily enough to prevent its sudden jerking in premature signal, she came close to Bas Rowlett and ordered in clipped syllables of contempt, "Turn round! I aims ter sot ye free."
She handed the loose rope to the man, and knowing full well the vital need of keeping it undisturbed, he held it gingerly.
The other end of that line still rested in the hands of his executioners, who waited with no suspicion of any confederacy between their victim and the woman.
Dorothy loosened the noose and slipped it from his neck, and her fingers busied themselves nervously with his wrist-knots.
She worked fast and anxiously, for she had promised to set frugal limits on the duration of that interview and the interval of clouded darkness was precious, but while she freed the cords, she talked:
"I hain't doin' this fer yore sake, Bas. Ye richly merits ter die—an' I misdoubts ef ye escapes fur—but I hain't ergoin' ter suffer ye ter contam'nate this tree—an' I aims ter give ye a few minutes' start, ef I kin."
Now she rose from the ankle fetters and the man took a step, to find himself free.
"Begone," ordered the woman, tensely. "Don't tarry—an' don't nuver let me see ye ergin'!"
She saw him cross the fence in the heavy shadow, hardly discernible even to her straining eyes that had grown accustomed to the dark. She heard the light clatter of his feet and knew that he was running, with the speed and desperation of a hounded deer, then she straightened and lifted her eyes to the rustling masses of cool serenity overhead.
Across the ranges came a warm, damp scent that promised rain, and the clouds once more parted bringing the tranquil magic of a silver-toned nocturne. The tree stood with its loftiest plumes moving lightly, as thoughbrushing the heavens, where the clouds were flakes of opal fleece. Then the breeze stiffened a little and the branches swayed with an enhancement of movement and sound—and the murmur was that of a benediction.
Dorothy waited as long as she dared, and her soul was quiet despite the anger which she knew would shortly burst in an eruption over the threshold of her house. When she had stretched her allotted interval to its limit she gave the rope its designated signal of jerk, and saw the door swing to disgorge its impatient humanity. She saw them coming with lanterns held high, saw them halt halfway, and heard their outbursts of angry dismay when the yellow light revealed to them the absence of the victim they had left in her keeping.
But Dorothy turned and stood with her back against the great trunk and her fingers clutching at its seamed bark, and there she felt the confidence of sanctuary.
"I couldn't suffer hit—ter happen hyar," she told them in a steady voice. "Us two was married under this old tree—hit's like a church ter me—I couldn't let no man hang on hit—I turned him loose."
For an instant she thought that Sim Squires would leap upon her with all the transferred rage that she had thwarted on the eve of its glutting. The others, too, seemed to crouch, poised, waiting for their cue and signal from Sim, but Parish Thornton came over and took her in his arms.
Then with an abrupt transition of mood Sim Squires wheeled to his waiting cohorts.
"Men," he shouted, "we kain't handily blame her—she's a woman, an' I honours her fer bein' tenderhearted, but any other tree'll do jest as well! He kain't hev got fur off yit. Scatter out an' rake ther woods."
She saw them piling over the fence like a pack of human hounds, and she shuddered. The last man carried the rope, which he had paused to pull from thelimb. They had already forgotten her and the man they had come to kill. They were running on a fresh scent, and were animated with renewed eagerness.
For a few minutes the two stood silent, then to their ears came a shout, and though he said nothing, the husband thought he recognized the piercing shrillness of the hunchback's voice and the resonant tones of the sheriff. He wondered if Hump Doane had belatedly received an inkling of that night's work and gathered a posse at his back.
There followed a shot—then a fusilade.
But Parish Thornton closed Dorothy in his arms and they stood alone. "Ther old tree's done worked hits magic ergin, honey," he whispered, "an' this time I reckon ther spell will last so long es we lives."