The Roof Tree
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When the young walnut had been lifted clear and its roots packed with some of its own native earth Kenneth Thornton started away carrying it in advance while Dorothy and Peter followed.
But before they came to the open space young Doane stopped on the path and barred the girl's way. "Dorothy," he began, awkwardly, and with painful embarrassment, "I've got something thet must needs be said – an' I don't rightly know how to say it."
She looked up into his set face and smiled.
"Can I help you say it?" she inquired, and he burst out passionately, "Until he come, you seemed to like me. Now you don't think of nobody else but jest him … and I hates him."
"If it's hatred you want to talk about," she said, reproachfully, "I don't think I can help you after all."
"Hatred of him," he hastened to explain. "I've done lived in the woods – an' I ain't never learned pretty graces … but I can't live without you, an' if he comes betwixt us…"
The girl raised a hand.
"Peter," she said, slowly, "we've been good friends, you and I. I want to go on being good friends with you … but that's all I can say."
"And him," demanded the young man, with white cheeks and passion-shaken voice, "what of him?"
"He asked me an hour ago," she answered, frankly. "We're going to be married."
The face of the backwoodsman worked spasmodically for a moment with an agitation against which his stoic training was no defense. When his passion permitted speech he said briefly, "I wishes ye joy of him – damn him!"
Then he wheeled and disappeared in the tangle.
"I'm sorry, dearest," declared Thornton when she had told him the story and his arms had slipped tenderly about her, "that I've cost you a friend, but I'm proud beyond telling that this tree was planted on the day you declared for me. To me too, it's a monument now."
That night the moon was clouded until late but broke through its shrouding before Dorothy went to bed, and she slipped out to look at the young shoot and perhaps to think of the man who had taken her in his arms there.
But as she approached she saw no standing shape and when she reached the spot she found that the freshly placed earth had been dug up. The tree had been spitefully dragged from its place and left lying with its roots extending up instead of its branches. Plainly it was an act of mean vandalism and Dorothy feared an emblem of deeper threat as well.
Already in the girl's thought this newly planted monument had become a sacred thing. To let it be so soon destroyed would be an evil augury and submission to a desecration. To tell Kenneth Thornton would kindle his resentment and provoke a dangerous quarrel. She herself must remedy the matter. So Dorothy Parish went for her spade, and late into the night she laboured at that second transplanting.
The roots had not had time to dry or burn, because they had been upturned so short a time, and before the girl went to her bed the task was finished, and she dreamed of birds nesting in broad branches and other home-making thoughts more intimate, but also of vague dangers and grudge-bearings.
But the next morning her face blanched when her father roused her before dawn.
"Kenneth Thornton was waylaid and shot last night," he said, briefly. "They fear he's dying. He's been asking for you."
About the door of Thornton's cabin in the gray freshness of that summer dawn stood a clump of silent men in whose indignant eyes burned a sombre light which boded no good for the would-be murderer if he were found. As the girl came up, with her face pale and grief-stricken, they drew back on either side opening passageway for her, and Dorothy went directly to the bed.
Caleb, though, halted at the threshold in response to a hand laid detainingly on his fringed sleeve.
"We hates to accuse a white man of a deed like this," said Jake Rowlett, a time-gnawed old Indian fighter, "but Thornton made a statement to us – under oath. He recognized Peter Doane – and Peter would of scalped him as well as shot him only he heard somebody rustlin' the brush an' got away."
"Peter Doane!" Caleb pressed a shaken hand to his bewildered forehead. "Peter Doane – but I can't credit that! Peter has sat by my hearth night after night … Peter has eaten my salt … Peter has been our staunchest reliance!"
Caleb's glance travelled searchingly about the circle of faces and read there unanimous conviction and grim determination.
"Peter has done growed to be half Injin hisself," came the decided answer. "Thornton didn't swear to no lie when he knew he mout be dyin'."
Caleb straightened decisively and his eyes blazed in spurts of wrath.
"Go after him then," he ordered. "It won't do to let him get away."
The pursuit parties that spread into the woods travelled fast and studiously – yet with little hope of success.
No man better than Peter Doane himself would recognize his desperation of plight – and if he had "gone bad" there was but one road for his feet and the security of the colony depended upon his thwarting.
Pioneer chronicles crowned with anathema unspeakable their small but infamous roster of white renegades, headed by the hated name of Samuel Girty; renegades who had "painted their faces and gone to the Indians!"
These were the unforgivably damned!
Now at the council-fires of Yellow-Jacket, even at the war-lodge of Dragging Canoe himself, the voluntary coming of Peter Doane would mean feasting and jubilation and a promise of future atrocities.
Inside Dorothy bent over the bed and saw the eyes of her lover open slowly and painfully. His lips parted in a ghost of his old, flashing smile.
"Is the tree safe?" he whispered.
The girl stooped and slipped an arm under the man's shoulders. The masses of her night-dark hair fell brushing his face in a fragrant cascade and her deep eyes were wide, unmasking to his gaze all the candid fears and intensities of her love. Then as her lips met his in the first kiss she had ever given him, unasked, it seemed to him that a current of exaltation and vitality swept into him that death could not overcome.
"I'm going to get well," he told her. "Life is too full – and without you, heaven would be empty."
The next pack train did not arrive. But several weeks later a single, half-famished survivor stumbled into the fort. His hands were bound, his tongue swollen from thirst, and about his shoulders dangled a hideous necklace of white scalps. When he had been restored to speech he delivered the message for which his life had been spared.
"This is what's left of your pack train," was the insolent word that Peter Doane – now calling himself Chief Mad-dog, had sent back to his former comrades. "The balance has gone on to Yellow Jacket, but some day I will come back for Thornton's scalp – and my squaw."
As the summer waned the young walnut tree sent down its roots to vigour and imperceptibly lifted its crest. Its leaves did not wither but gained in greenness and lustre, and as it prospered so Kenneth Thornton also prospered, until when the season of corn shucking came again, he and Dorothy stood beside it, and Caleb, who had received his credentials as a justice of the peace, read for them the ritual of marriage.
At the adze-smoothed table of a house which, for all its pioneer crudity, reflected the spirit of tradition-loving inhabitants, sat a young woman whose dark hair hung braided and whose dark eyes looked up from time to time in thoughtful reminiscence.
She was writing with a goose-quill which she dipped into an ink-horn, and as she nibbled at the end of her pen one might have seen that whatever she was setting down lay close to her heart.
"Since I can not tell," she wrote, "whether or not I shall survive ye comings of that new life upon which all my thoughts are set and should such judgment be His Wille, I want that ye deare child shall have this record of ye days its father and I spent here in these forest hills so remote from ye sea and ye rivers of our dear Virginia and ye gentle refinements we put behind us to become pioneers. This wish leads me to the writing of a journall."
A shadow in the doorway cut the shaft of sunlight and the woman at the writing table turned. On the threshold stood Kenneth Thornton and by the hand he held a savage-visaged child clad in breech clout and moccasins, but otherwise naked. Its eyes held the beady sharpness of the Indian, and though hardly past babyhood, it stood haughtily rigid and expressionless.
The face of the man was not flashing its smile now, but deeply grave, and as his wife's gaze questioned him he spoke slowly.
"This is Peter Doane's boy," he said, briefly.
Dorothy Thornton shrank back with a gesture of repulsion, and the man went on:
"A squaw with a travelling party of friendly Indians brought him in. Mad-dog Doane is dead. His life ended in a drunken brawl in an Otari village – but before he died he asked that the child be brought back to us."
"Why?"
"Because," Thornton spoke seriously, "blood can't be silenced when death comes. The squaw said Chief Mad-dog wanted his boy raised to be a white brave… He's half white, of course."
"And he ventured to ask favours of us!" The woman's voice, ordinarily gentle, hardened, and the man led the child over and laid his own hand on her shoulder.
"The child is not to blame," he reminded her. "He's the fruit of madness – but he has human life."
Dorothy rose, inclining her head in reluctant assent.
"I'll fetch him a white child's clothes," she said.
This was the story that the faded pages told and a small part of which Dorothy Harper read as she sat in the lamplight of the attic a century and a quarter later.
CHAPTER V
The old Thornton house on Defeated Creek had for almost two decades stood vacant save for an occasional and temporary tenant. A long time back a formal truce had been declared in the feud that had split in sharp and bitter cleavage the family connections of the Harpers and the Doanes. Back into the limbo of tradition and vagueness went the origin of that "war".
The one unclouded certainty was that the hatred had grown until even in this land of vendetta its levy of violent deaths had been appalling beyond those of other enmities.
Yet, paradoxically enough, the Harpers in the later feud stages had followed a man named Thornton and the Doanes had fought at the behest of a Rowlett. Now on the same night that Dorothy read in her attic smoke rose from the chimney of the long-empty house and a stranger, whose right of possession no one questioned, was to be its occupant. He sat now, in the moonlight, on the broken mill-stone that served his house as a doorstep – and as yet he had not slept under the rotting roof. About him was a dooryard gone to a weed-jungle and a farm that must be reclaimed from utter wildness. His square jaw was grimly set and the hands that rested on his knees were tensely clenched. His eyes held a far-away and haunted fixity, for they were seeing again the cabin he had left in Virginia with its ugly picture of sudden and violent death and the body of a man he hated lying on the blood-stained floor.
The hysteria-shaken figure of the woman he had left alone with that grisly companionship refused, too, to soften the troubling vividness of its remembered misery.
He himself had not escaped his pursuers by too wide a margin, but he had escaped. He had come by a circuitous course to this place where he hoped to find quiet under his assumed name of Maggard, nor was his choice of refuge haphazard.
A distantly related branch of his own family had once lived here, and the property had passed down to him, but the Thornton who had first owned the place he had never known.
The Kentucky history of his blood was as unfamiliar to him as genealogies on Mars, and while the night voices sounded in tempered cadences about him and the hills stood up in their spectral majesty of moonlight, he sat with a drawn brow. Yet, because the vitality of his youth was strong and resilient, other and less grim influences gradually stole over him and he rose after a while with the scowl clearing from his face.
Into the field of his thoughts, like sunlight into a storm sky, came a new image: the image of a girl in a red dress looking at him from an attic window. The tight lips loosened, softened, and parted in a smile.
"Afore God," he declared in a low voice, "she war a comely gal!"
Kenneth Thornton – now self rechristened Cal Maggard, was up and his coffee pot was steaming on the live coals long before the next morning's sun had pierced its shafts into the gray opaqueness that cloaked the valleys. He squatted on his heels before the fire, honing the ancient blade of the scythe that he had found in the cock loft, and that blade was swinging against the stubborn resistance of weed and briar-trailer before the drench of the dew had begun to dry.
He did not stop often to rest, and before noon he straightened and stood breathing deep but rhythmically to survey a levelled space where he had encountered an impenetrable thicket.
Then Cal Maggard leaned his scythe and axe against a young hickory and went over to the corner of the yard where a spring poured with a crystal flow into a natural basin under the gnarled roots of a sycamore. Kneeling there, stripped to the waist, he began laving his chest and shoulders and dipping his face deep into the cold water.
So intent was he that he failed to hear the light thud of hoofs along the sand-cushioned and half-obliterated road which skirted his dilapidated fence line, and he straightened up at length to see a horseman who had drawn rein there and who now sat sidewise gazing at him with one leg thrown across his pommel.
The horseman, tall and knit for tremendous strength, was clad in jeans overalls and a blue cotton shirt. His unshaven face was swarthy and high of cheekbone and his black hat, though shapeless and weather-stained, sat on his head with a jauntiness that seemed almost a challenge. Eyes, both shrewd and determined, gave the impression of missing nothing, but his voice was pleasant as he introduced himself.
"My name's Bas Rowlett, an' I reckon you're Cal Maggard, hain't ye? I've done heered ye 'lowed ter dwell amongst us."
Maggard nodded. "Come inside an' set ye a cheer," he invited, and the horseman vaulted to the ground as lightly as though he carried no weight, flinging his bridle rein over a picket of the fence.
For a short space when the host had donned his shirt and provided his guest with a chair by the door the conversation ran laggingly between these two newly met sons of a taciturn race, yet beneath their almost morose paucity of words lay an itch of curiosity. They were gauging, measuring, estimating each other under wary mantles of indifference.
Rowlett set down in his appraisement, with a touch of scorn, the clean-shaven face and general neatness of the other, but as against this effeminacy he offset the steady-eyed fearlessness of gaze and the smooth power of shoulders and torso that he had seen stripped.
Maggard's rifle stood leaning against the chinked log wall near to the visitor's hand and lazily he lifted and inspected it, setting its heel-plate to his shoulder and sighting the weapon here and there.
"Thet rifle-gun balances up right nice," he approved, then seeing a red squirrel that sat chattering on a walnut tree far beyond the road he squinted over the sights and questioned musingly, "I wonder now, could I knock thet boomer outen thet thar tree over yon."
"Not skeercely, I reckon. Hit's a kinderly long, onhandy shot," answered Maggard, "but ye mout try, though."
Rowlett had hoped for such an invitation. He knew that it was more than an "unhandy" shot. It was indeed a spectacularly difficult one – but he knew also that he could do it twice out of three times, and he was not averse to demonstrating his master-skill.
The rifle barked and the squirrel dropped, shot through the head, but Maggard said nothing and Rowlett only spat and set the gun down.
After that he relighted his pipe. Had this newcomer from across the Virginia border been his peer in marksmanship, he reasoned, he would not have let the exploit rest there without contest, and his own competitive spirit prompted him to goad the obviously inferior stranger.
"Thar's an old cock-of-the woods hammerin' away atter grubs up yon," he suggested. "Why don't ye try yore own hand at him – jest fer ther fun of ther thing?"
He pointed to a dead tree-top perhaps ten yards more distant than his own target had been, where hung one of those great ivory-billed woodpeckers that are near extinction now except in the solitudes of these wild hills.
Maggard smiled again, as he shook his head noncommittally – yet he reached for the rifle. That silent smile of his was beginning to become provocative to his companion, as though in it dwelt something of quiet self-superiority.
The weapon came to the stranger's shoulder with a cat-like quickness of motion and cracked with seemingly no interval of aim-taking, and the bird fell as the squirrel had done.
Rowlett flushed to his high cheekbones. This was a country of riflemen where skill was the rule and its lack the exception, yet even here few men could duplicate that achievement, or, without seeing it, believe it possible. It had been characterized, too, by the incredible swiftness of a sleight-of-hand performance.
"Hell's red hole," came the visitor's eruptive outburst of amazement. "Ef ther man-person thet used ter dwell in this hyar house, and his kinfolks, hed of shot thet fashion, I reckon mebby ther Rowletts wouldn't never hev run old Burrell Thornton outen these mountings."
"Did they run him out?"
Rowlett studied his companion much as he might have studied someone who calmly admits a stultifying ignorance.
"Hain't ye nuver heered tell of ther Harper-Doane war?" he demanded and Maggard shook an unabashed head.
"I hain't nuver heered no jedgmatic details," he amended, "I knowed thar was sich-like warfare goin' on here one time. My folks used ter dwell in Kaintuck onc't but hit war afore my own day."
"Come on over hyar," prompted Rowlett, and he led the way to the back of the house where half-buried in the tangle that had overrun the place stood the ruins of a heavy and rotting log stockade.
"Old Burrell Thornton dwelt hyar in ther old days," he vouchsafed, "an' old Burrell bore ther repute of being ther meanest man in these parts. He dastn't walk in his own backyard withouten he kept thet log wall betwixt hisself an' ther mounting-side. So long as him an' old Mose Rowlett both lived thar warn't no peace feasible nohow. Cuss-fights an' shootin's an' laywayin's went on without no eend, twell finely hit come on ter be sich a hell-fired mommick thet ther two outfits met up an' fit a master battle in Claytown. Hit lasted nigh on ter two days."
"What war ther upcome of ther matter?" inquired the householder, and the narrator went on:
"Ther Harpers an' Thorntons went inside ther co'te house an' made a pint-blank fort outen hit, an' ther Rowletts tuck up thar stand in ther stores an' streets. They frayed on, thet fashion, twell ther Doanes wearied of hit an' sot ther co'te house afire. Some score of fellers war shot, countin' men an' boys, and old Mose Rowlett, thet was headin' ther Doanes, war kilt dead. Then – when both sides war plum frazzled ragged they patched up a truce betwixt 'em an' ther gist of ther matter war that old Burrell Thornton agreed ter leave Kaintuck an' not never ter come back no more. He war too pizen mean fer folks ter abide him, an' his goin' away balanced up ther deadenin' of Mose Rowlett."
"Ye sez thet old hellion used ter dwell in this hyar house onc't?"
"Yes, sir, thet's what I'm noratin' ter ye. Atter he put out his fire an' called his dawgs an' went away Caleb Harper tuck over ther leadin' of ther Harpers and my uncle Jim Rowlett did likewise fer ther Doanes. Both on 'em war men thet loved law-abidin' right good an' when they struck hands an' pledged a peace they aimed ter see thet hit endured – an' hit did. But till word come thet old Burrell Thornton war dead an' buried, folks didn't skeercely breathe easy nohow. They used ter keep hearin' thet he aimed ter come back an' they knowed ef he did – "
There the speaker broke off and shrugged his powerful shoulders.
A brief silence fell, and through the sunflecks and the deep woodland shadows came the little voices that were all of peace, but into Rowlett's eyes flashed a sudden-born ghost of suspicion.
"How come you ter git possession of ther place hyar?" he demanded. "Ye didn't heir hit from Old Burrell Thornton's folks, did ye?"
The new occupant was prepared for this line of interrogation and he laughed easily.
"Long erbout a year back," he said, "a feller named Thornton thet dwelt over thar in Virginny got inter debt ter me an' couldn't pay out. He give me a lease on this hyar place, but I didn't hev no chanst ter come over hyar an' look at hit afore now."
Rowlett nodded a reassured head and declared heartily:
"I'm right glad ye hain't one of thet thar sorry brood. Nobody couldn't confidence them."
Rowlett, as he rekindled the pipe that had died in the ardour of his narration, studied the other through eyes studiously narrowed against the flare of his match.
The newcomer himself, lost in thought, was oblivious of this scrutiny, and it was as one speaking from revery that he launched his next inquiry.
"Ther gal thet dwells with old man Harper… She hain't his wife, air she?"
The questioner missed the sudden tensely challenged interest that flashed in the other's eyes and the hot wave of brick-red that surged over the cheeks and neck of his visitor.
But Bas Rowlett was too adroit to betray by more than a single unguarded flash his jealous reaction to mention of the girl and he responded quietly and unemotionally enough.
"She hain't no man's wife … yit. Old Caleb's her grandpap."
"I've done seed some powerful comely gals in my day an' time," mused Maggard, abstractedly, "but I hain't nuver seed ther like of her afore."
Bas thoughtfully fingered his pipe, and when he spoke his words came soberly.
"Seein' es how ye're a stranger hyarabouts," he suggested, "I reckon hit hain't no more then plain charity ter forewarn ye. She's got a lavish of lovers an' thar's some several amongst 'em that's pizen mean – mean enough ter prove up vi'lent and murderous ter any new man thet comes trespassin'."
"Oh, pshaw, thet's always liable ter happen. Anyhow, I reckon I don't have ter worrit myself 'bout thet yit."
"Suit yoreself." This time the native spoke dryly. "But what ye says sounds unthoughted ter me. Ef a man's mean enough ter foller murderin' somebody over a gal, he's more like ter do hit afore ther feller gits his holt on her then a'tterwards. When did ye see ther gal?"
Maggard shook himself like a dog roused from contented sleep and sat up straight.
"I hain't nuver seed her but jest one time, an' I hain't nuver passed no word of speech with her," he replied. "When I come by ther house an' tarried ter make my manners with ther old man, she was a-standin' in an upstairs winder lookin' out an' I seed her thar through ther branches of that big old walnuck tree. She hed on a dress thet made me think of a red-bird, an' her checks minded me right shrewdly of ivy blooms."
"Does ye aim ter name hit ter her thet she puts ye in mind of – them things?"
"I kinderly hed hit in head ter tell her." Suddenly Maggard's frank laugh broke out disconcertingly as he added an inquiry so direct that it caused the other to flush.
"Rowlett, be ye one of these hyar lavish of lovers ye jest told me erbout?"
The mountaineer is, by nature, secretive to furtiveness, and under so outright a questioning the visitor stiffened with affront. But at once his expression cleared of displeasure and he met frankness with a show of equal candour.
"I'm one of ther fellers thet's seekin' ter wed with her, ef thet's what ye means, albeit hit's my own business, I reckon," he said, evenly. "But I hain't one of them I warned ye erginst on account of meanness. Myself I believes in every person havin' a fair chanst an' ther best man winnin'."
The other nodded gravely.
"I didn't aim at no offense," he hastened to declare. "I hain't nuver met ther gal an' like as not she wouldn't favour me with no second look nohow."