The Roof Tree

CHAPTER XXXII

Sim, standing at the barn door, had watched Parish Thornton ride away that morning with a troubled heart, as he wondered what sequel these events would bring for himself. Then he went to the house and called softly to Dorothy. She was crooning a lullaby, behind the closed door of her room, to the small mite of humanity that had come, in healthy pinkness, to the comparatively mature age of one month.

"Thar hain't nuthin' ter be done right now," the hired man told her, "an' I've got ter fare over ter my own place fer a spell. A man's comin' ter haggle with me over a cattle deal."

But Sim was not going to his own house. He was acting under standing orders which might in no wise be disobeyed.

The organization that had been born in secret and nurtured to malignant vigour had never held a daylight session before. No call had gone out for one now, but an understanding existed and an obligation, acknowledged by its membership in the oath of allegiance.

If ever at any time, day or night, shine or storm, such an occasion developed as carried the urge of emergency, each rider must forthwith repair to his designated post, armed and ready for instant action.

This prearranged mobilization must follow automatically upon the event that brought the need, and it involved squad meetings at various points. In its support a system of signalling and communication had been devised, whereby separated units might establish and hold unbroken touch, and might flow together like shattered beads of quicksilver.

Unless Sim Squires was profoundly mistaken, such a time had come.

But Sim went with a heavy heart of divided allegiance. He dared not absent himself, and he knew that after last night's happening the space of twenty-four hours could scarcely pass without bringing the issue of decisive battle between the occult and the open powers that were warring for domination in that community.

He realized that somehow a hideous blunder had been committed and he guessed with what a frenzy of rage Bas Rowlett had learned that the organization into which he had infused the breath of life had murdered one of his two confidential vassals.

At the gorge that men called a "master shut-in", which was Sim's rendezvous for such an emergency meeting, he found that others had arrived before him, and among the faces into which he looked was that of Rick Joyce, black with a wrath as yet held in abeyance, but promising speedy and stormy eruption.

The spot was wild beyond description, lying in the lap of mountains that had in some day of world infancy been riven into a mighty boulder-strewn fissure between walls of sheer and gloomy precipices.

It was a place to which men would come for no legitimate purpose; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven, and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay "laurel-hells" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut, and used familiarly, tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit, and they came separately from divergent directions.

When Sim arrived they were waiting for their informal quorum, but at last a dozen had assembled and in other places there were other dozens. Each group had a commander freshly come from a sort of staff meeting, which had already decided the larger questions of policy. There would be little debate here, only the sharp giving of orders which none would venture to disobey.

Rick Joyce took inventory of the faces and mentally called his roll. Then he nodded his head and said brusquely, "We're ready ter go ahead now."

The men lounged about him with a pretence of stoical composure, but under that guise was a mighty disquiet, for even in an organization of his own upbuilding the mountaineer frets against the despotic power that says "thou shall" and "thou shalt not."

"Thar's been treason amongst us," announced Rick Joyce, sharply, and every man seemed to find that wrathful glance resting accusingly upon himself. "Thar's been treason that's got ter be paid in full an' with int'rest hereatter. Thet thing thet tuck place last night was mighty damnable an' erginst all orders. Ther fellers thet did hit affronted this hyar army of riders thet they stood sworn ter obey."

Whether among those followers gathered about him there were any who had participated in last night's murder Rick Joyce did not know, but he knew that a minority had run to a violence which had been neither ordered nor countenanced. They had gotten out of hand, wreaked a premature vengeance, and precipitated the need of action before the majority was ready. But it was now too late to waste time in lamentation. The thing was done, and the organization saddled with that guilt must strike or be struck down.

The Ku Klux had meant to move at its own appointed time, with the irresistible sweep and force of an avalanche. Before the designated season a lighter snowslide had broken away and the avalanche had no choice but to follow.

To-morrow every aroused impulse of law and order would be battle-girt and the secret body would be on the defensive – perhaps even on the run. If it were to hold the offensive it must strike and terrorize before another day had dawned – and that was not as it had planned its course.

"Hit's too late now ter cry over spilt milk," declared Joyce with a burr in his voice. "Later on we'll handle our own traitors – right now thar's another task thet won't suffer no delay."

He paused, scowling, then enlightened his hearers briefly:

"We warn't ready ter finish up this matter yit but now we hain't got no choice. Hit's ternight or never. We stands disgusted by all mankind, an' in sheer self-defence we've got ter terrify mankind so they won't dast utter what disgust they feels. Old Jim's nigh ter death an' we don't need ter bother with him; Hump Doane kin wait – one blow's done fell on him already – but thar's yit another man thet won't never cease ter dog us whilst he lives, an' thet's Parish Thornton – so ternight we aims ter hang him."

Once more there was a pause, then as though pointing his moral the spokesman supplemented his remarks:

"Hit hes need ter be a thing," he said, solemnly, "thet's goin' ter terrify this whole country in sich dire fashion thet fer twenty y'ars ter come no grand juror won't dast vote fer no investigation."

There remained those exact details that should cause the elaborate operation to function together without hitch or miscarriage, and to these Rick Joyce addressed himself.

The mob was to participate in force of full numbers and no absentees were to be tolerated.

"When ther game starts up hit's got ter go quick as a bat flyin' through hell," enjoined the director. "Every man teks his slicker an' his false-face, an' goes one by one ter ther woods eround Thornton's house es soon es dusk sottles. Every man's got ter be nigh enough afore sun-down ter make shore of gettin' thar on time. Then they all draws in, holdin' ter ther thickets. Ther signal will be ther callin' of whippoorwills – a double call with a count of five betwixt 'em. When we're all drawed up eround ther house, so no way hain't left open thet a rabbit could break through, I'll sing out – an' when I does thet ye all closes in on ther run. Thar's a big walnuck tree right by ther door ter hang him on – an' termorrer mornin' folks'll hev a lesson thet they kin kinderly take ter heart."

On his way back from Hump Doane's house that morning Parish Thornton made a detour for a brief visit upon Jase Burrell, the man to whose discretion he had entrusted the keeping of Bas Rowlett's sealed confession. From the hands of that faithful custodian he took the envelope and thrust it into his breast pocket. Now that his own pledge of suspended vengeance had been exonerated he would no longer need that bond of amnesty. Moreover, he knew now that this compact had been a rope of sand to Bas Rowlett from the beginning, and would never be anything else. It only served to divert the plotter's activities and treacheries into subtler channels – and when the sun set to-day there would be either no Bas Rowlett to bind or no Parish Thornton to seek to bind him.

Then he rode home.

Thornton entered his own house silently, but with the face of an avenging spirit, and it was a face that told his story.

The rigid pose and the set jaw, the irreconcilable light in the eyes, were all things that Dorothy understood at once and without explanation. As she looked at her husband she thought, somehow, of a falcon or eagle poised on a bare tree-top at a precipice edge. There was the same alert restiveness as might have marked a bird of prey, gauging the blue sky-reaches with predatory eye, and ready to strike with a winged bolt of death.

Quietly, because the baby had just fallen asleep, she rose and laid the child on the bright patterned coverlet of the fourposter, and she paused, too, to brace herself with a glance into the cool shadows and golden lights of the ample branches beyond the window.

Then she came back to the door and her voice was steady but low as she said, "Ye've done found out who did hit. I kin read thet in yore eyes, Ken."

He nodded, but until he had crossed the room and laid a hand on each of her shoulders, he did not speak.

"Since ther fust day I ever seed ye, honey," he declared with a sort of hushed fervour, "standin' up thar in ther winder, my heart hain't nuver struck a beat save ter love ye – an' thet war jest erbout a y'ar ago."

"Hit's been all my life, Ken," she protested. "Ther time thet went ahead of thet didn't skeercely count atall."

Her voice trembled, and the meeting of their gaze was a caress. Then he said: "When I wedded with ye out thar – under thet old tree – with ther sun shinin' down on us – I swore ter protect ye erginst all harm."

"Hain't ye always done thet, Ken?"

"Erginst all ther perils I knowed erbout – yes," he answered, slowly, then his tone leaped into vehemence. "But I didn't suspicion – until terday – thet whilst I was away from ye – ye hed ter protect yoreself erginst Bas Rowlett."

"Bas Rowlett!" the name broke from her lips with a gasp and a spasmodic heart-clutch of panic. Her well-kept secret stood unveiled! She did not know how it had come about, but she realized that the time of reckoning had come and, if her husband's face was an indication to be trusted, that reckoning belonged to to-day and would be neither diverted nor postponed.

Her old fear of what the consequence would be if this revelation came to his knowledge rose chokingly and overpoweringly.

Why had she not killed Bas herself before Sim Squires came in to interfere that day? Why had she allowed the moment to pass when a stroke of the blade might have ended the peril?

Atavistic impulses and contradictions of her blood welled confusedly up within her. This was her own battle and she wanted to fight it out for herself. If Rowlett were to be executed it should be she herself who sent him to his accounting. She was torn, as she stood there, between her terror for the man she loved and her hatred for the other – a hatred which clamoured for blood appeasement.

But she shook her head and sought to resolve the conflicting emotions.

"I hid ther truth from ye, Ken," she said, "because I feared fer what mout happen ef ye found out. I wasn't affrighted of Bas fer myself – but I war fer you. I knowed ye trusted him an' ef ye diskivered he war a traitor – "

"Traitor!" the man interrupted her, passionately, "he hain't never deluded me es ter thet since ther fust night I laid in thet thar bed atter I'd been shot. Him an' me come ter an' understandin' then an' thar – but he swore ter hold his hand twell we could meet man ter man, jest ther two of us."

A bitter laugh came with his pause, then he went on: "I 'lowed you trusted him an' I didn't seek ter rouse up no needless fears in yore heart – but now we both knows ther truth, an' I'm startin' out d'reckly ter sottle ther score fer all time."

Dorothy Thornton caught his shoulders and her eyes were full of pleading.

"Ye've done built up a name fer yoreself, Ken," she urged with burning fervour. "Hit war me thet told ye, thet day when Aaron Capper an' them others come, thet ye couldn't refuse ter lead men – but I told ye, too, ye war bounden ter lead 'em to'rds peace an' law. Ye've done led 'em thetaway, Ken, an' folks trusts ye, Harpers an' Doanes alike. Now ye kain't afford ter start in leadin' 'em wrong – ye kain't afford ter dirty yore hands with bloodshed, Ken. Ye kain't afford ter do hit!"

The man stood off looking at her with a love that was almost awe, with an admiration that was almost idolatry, but the obduracy persisted in his eyes.

"Partly ye're talkin' from conscience thet don't traffic ner barter with no evil, Dorothy," he made sober response, "an' partly, too, ye're talkin', woman-fashion, outen a fear thet seeks ter shield yore man. I honours both them things, but this time I hain't follerin' no fox-fire an' I kain't be stayed." He paused, and the hand that closed over hers was firm and resolute for all the tenderness of its pressure.

"Hit's warfare now ter ther hilt of ther knife, honey, but hit's ther warfare of them that strives fer decency an' law erginst them thet murders in ther night-time. An' yit ther riders has good men amongst 'em, too – men thet's jest sorely misguided. I reckon ye don't know thet, either, but Bas Rowlett's ther one body thet brought 'em ter life an' eggs 'em on. When he dies ther riders'll fall apart like a string of beads thet's been cut in two. Terday I aims ter cut ther thread."

The woman stood trembling with the fervour of outraged indignation as he told her all he knew, but when he finished she nodded her head, in a finale of exhortation, toward the bedroom. Possibly she was not unlike the lawyer whose duty is to argue for legal observances even though his heart cries out mutinously for a hotter course.

"Air hit wuth while – orphanin' him – an' widderin' me fer – Ken?"

"Hit's wuth while his growin' up ter know thet he wasn't fathered by no craven, ner yit borne by a woman thet faltered," answered Parish Thornton; then he set Hump Doane's rifle in the corner and took out his own with the particularity of a man who, for a vital task, dares trust no tool save that with which he is most familiar.

When he had gone Dorothy sat down in her chair again. She remembered that other time when her mind had reeled under anxieties almost too poignant for endurance. Now she was nursing a baby, and she must hold herself in hand. Her eyes wandered about the place, seeking something upon which her mind might seize for support, and at length she rose and ran up the boxed-in stairway to the attic.

When she came back again to the bedroom she carried the journal that had been so mysteriously lost and recovered, and then she drew a chair to the window and opened the document where she had left off in her reading. But often she laid the book absent-mindedly in her lap to listen with an ear turned toward the bed, and often, too, she looked out into the spreading softness of golden-green laced through by dove-gray and sepia-brown branches on which played baffling reflexes of soft and mossy colours.

Parish Thornton did not approach the house of his enemy from the front. He came upon it from behind and held to the shelter of the laurel as long as that was possible, but he found a padlock on the door and all the windows closed.

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. In one 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."

CHAPTER XXXIII

One might 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 I war 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 like you outen 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 – I knows 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 from her. 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."