CHAPTER I_The Roof Tree

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THE ROOF TREE

[Illustration: "_She stood there a little shyly at first; as slender

and as gracefully upright as a birch_"]

THE ROOF TREE

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

ILLUSTRATED

LEE F. CONREY

GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1921

BOOKS BY

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

BATTLE CRY, THE

CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS, THE

CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS, THE

DESTINY

KEY TO YESTERDAY, THE

LIGHTED MATCH, THE

PAGAN OF THE HILLS, A

PORTAL OF DREAMS, THE

ROOF TREE, THE

TEMPERING, THE

TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS, THE

WHEN BEAR CAT WENT DRY

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

_With the wish that it were a richer

and worthier tribute, this book is

lovingly and gratefully dedicated_

_TO MY WIFE_

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"She stood there a little shyly at first; as slender and as gracefully

upright as a birch" _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

"'Hit almost seems like,' she whispered, 'that ther old tree's

got a spell in hit--ter bewitch folks with'" 66

"Even Bas Rowlett, whose nerves were keyed for an ordeal, started

and almost let the leaning bridegroom fall" 114

"Dorothy flashed past him ... and a few seconds later he heard the

clean-lipped snap of the rifle in a double report" 186

THE ROOF TREE

CHAPTER I

Between the smoke-darkened walls of the mountain cabin still murmured

the last echoes of the pistol's bellowing, and it seemed a voice of

everlasting duration to the shock-sickened nerves of those within.

First it had thundered with the deafening exaggeration of confined

space, then its echo had beaten against the clay-chink wall timbers and

rolled upward to the rafters. Now, dwindled to a ghostly whisper, it

lingered and persisted.

But the house stood isolated, and outside the laurelled forests and

porous cliffs soaked up the dissonance as a blotter soaks ink.

The picture seen through the open door, had there been any to see, was

almost as motionless as a tableau, and it was a starkly grim one, with

murky shadows against a fitful light. A ray of the setting sun forced

its inquisitive way inward upon the semi-darkness of the interior. A red

wavering from the open hearth, where supper preparations had been going

forward, threw unsteady patches of fire reflection outward. In the

pervading smell of dead smoke from a blackened chimney hung the more

pungent sharpness of freshly burned gun-powder, and the man standing

near the door gazed downward, with a dazed stare, at the floor by his

feet, where lay the pistol which gave forth that acrid stench.

Across from him in the dead silence--dead save for the lingering of the

echo's ghost--stood the woman, her hands clutched to her thin bosom, her

eyes stunned and dilated, her body wavering on legs about to buckle in

collapse.

On the puncheon floor between them stretched the woman's husband. The

echo had outlasted his life and, because the muzzle had almost touched

his breast, he sprawled in a dark welter that was still spreading.

His posture was so uncouth and grotesque as to filch from death its

rightful dignity, and his face was turned downward.

The interminability of the tableau existed only in the unfocussed minds

of the two living beings to whom the consequence of this moment was not

measurable in time. Then from the woman's parted lips came a long,

strangling moan that mounted to something like a muffled shriek. She

remained a moment rocking on her feet, then wheeled and stumbled toward

the quilt-covered four-poster bed in one dark corner of the cabin. Into

its feather billows she flung herself and lay with her fingernails

digging into her temples and her body racked with the incoherencies of

hysteria.

The man stooped to pick up the pistol and walked slowly over to the

rough table where he laid it down noiselessly, as though with that

quietness he were doing something to offset the fatal blatancy with

which it had just spoken. He looked down at the lifeless figure with

burning eyes entirely devoid of pity, then went with a soundless tread,

in spite of his heavy-soled boots, to the bed and spoke softly to the

woman--who was his sister.

"Ye've got ter quit weepin' fer a spell, honey," he announced with a

tense authority which sought to recall her to herself. "I'm obleeged ter

take flight right speedily now, an' afore I goes thar's things ter be

studied out an' sottled betwixt us."

But the half-stifled moan that came from the feather bed was a voice of

collapse and chaos, to which speech was impossible.

So the brother lifted her in arms that remained unshaken and sat on the

edge of the bed looking into her eyes with an almost hypnotic

forcefulness.

"Ef ye don't hearken ter me now, I'm bound ter tarry till ye does," he

reminded her, "an' I'm in right tormentin' haste. Hit means life and

death ter me."

As if groping her tortured way back from pits of madness, the woman

strove to focus her senses, but her wild eyes encountered the dark and

crumpled mass on the floor and again a low shriek broke from her. She

turned her horrified face away and surrendered to a fresh paroxysm, but

at length she stammered between gasps that wrenched her tightened

throat:

"Kiver him up first, Ken. Kiver him up ... I kain't endure ter look at

him thetaway!"

Although the moments were pricelessly valuable, the man straightened the

contorted limbs of the dead body and covered it decently with a quilt.

Then he stood again by the bed.

"Ef I'd got hyar a minute sooner, Sally," he said, slowly, and there was

a trace of self-accusation in his voice, "hit moutn't hev happened. I

war jest a mite too tardy--but I knows ye hed ter kill him. I knows ye

acted in self-defence."

From the bed came again the half-insane response of hysterical moaning,

and the young mountaineer straightened his shoulders.

"His folks," he said in a level voice, "won't skeercely listen ter no

reason.... They'll be hell-bent on makin' somebody pay.... They'll plum

hev ter hang SOME person, an' hit kain't be _you_."

The woman only shuddered and twisted spasmodically as she lay there

while her brother went doggedly on:

"Hit kain't be _you_ ... with yore baby ter be borned, Sally. Hit's been

punishment enough fer ye ter endure him this long ... ter hev been

wedded with a brute ... but ther child's got hits life ter live ... an'

hit kain't be borned in no jail house!"

"I reckon--" the response came weakly from the heaped-up covers--"I

reckon hit's _got_ ter be thetaway, Ken."

"By God, no! Yore baby's got ter w'ar a bad man's name--but hit'll hev a

good woman's blood in hits veins. They'll low I kilt him, Sally. Let 'em

b'lieve hit. I hain't got no woman nor no child of my own ter think

erbout ... I kin git away an' start fresh in some other place. I loves

ye, Sally, but even more'n thet, I'm thinkin' of thet child thet hain't

borned yit--a child thet hain't accountable fer none of this."

* * * * *

That had been yesterday.

Now, Kenneth Thornton, though that was not to be his name any longer,

stood alone near the peak of a divide, and the mists of early morning

lay thick below him. They obliterated, under their dispiriting gray, the

valleys and lower forest-reaches, and his face, which was young and

resolutely featured, held a kindred mood of shadowing depression.

Beneath that miasma cloak of morning fog twisted a river from which the

sun would strike darts of laughing light--when the sun had routed the

opaqueness suspended between night and day.

In the clear gray eyes of the man were pools of laughter, too, but now

they were stilled and shaded under bitter reflections.

Something else stretched along the hidden river-bed, but even the

mid-day light would give it no ocular marking. That something which the

eye denied and the law acknowledged meant more to this man, who had

slipped the pack from his wearied shoulders, than did the river or the

park-like woods that hedged the river.

There ran the border line between the State of Virginia and the State of

Kentucky and he would cross it when he crossed the river.

So the stream became a Rubicon to him, and on the other side he would

leave behind him the name of Kenneth Thornton and take up the less

damning one of Cal Maggard.

He had the heels of his pursuers and, once across the state line, he

would be beyond their grasp until the Sheriff's huntsmen had whistled in

their pack and gone grumbling back to conform with the law's intricate

requirements. At that point the man-hunt fell into another jurisdiction

and extradition papers would involve correspondence between a governor

at Richmond and a governor at Frankfort.

During such an interlude the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost

himself in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where

his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate

aiming of a lightning bolt.

But mere escape from courts and prisons does not assure full measure of

content. He had heard all his life that this border line separated the

sheep of his own nativity from the goats of a meaner race, and to this

narrow tenet he had given unquestioning belief.

"I disgusts Kaintuck'!" exclaimed the refugee half aloud as his strong

hands clenched themselves, one hanging free and the other still grasping

the rifle which as yet he had no intent of laying aside. "I plum

disgusts Kaintuck'!"

The sun was climbing now and its pallid disk was slowly flushing to the

wakefulness of fiery rose. The sky overhead was livening to turquoise

light and here and there along the upper slopes were gossamer dashes of

opal and amethyst, but this beauty of unveiling turrets and gold-touched

crests was lost on eyes in which dwelt a nightmare from which there was

no hope of awakening.

To-day the sparsely settled countryside that he had put behind him would

buzz with a wrath like that of swarming bees along its creek-bed roads,

and the posse would be out. To-day also he would be far over in

Kentucky.

"I mout hev' tarried thar an' fronted hit out," he bitterly reflected,

"fer God in Heaven knows he needed killin'!" But there he broke off into

a bitter laugh.

"God in Heaven knows hit ... _I_ knows hit an' _she_ knows hit, but

nairy another soul don't know an' ef they did hit wouldn't skeercely

make no differ."

He threw back his head and sought to review the situation through the

eyes of others and to analyze it all as an outsider would analyze it. To

his simplicity of nature came no thought that the assumption of a guilt

not his own was a generous or heroic thing.

His sister's pride had silenced her lips as to the brutality of this

husband whose friends in that neighbourhood were among the little czars

of influence. Her suffering under an endless reign of terror was a

well-kept secret which only her brother shared. The big, crudely

handsome brute had been "jobial" and suave of manner among his fellows

and was held in favourable esteem. Only a day or two ago, when the

brother had remonstrated in a low voice against some recent cruelty, the

husband's wrath had blazed out. Witnesses to that wordy encounter had

seen Thornton go white with a rage that was ominous and then bite off

his unspoken retort and turn away. Those witnesses had not heard what

was first said and had learned only what was revealed in the indignant

husband's raised voice at the end.

"Don't aim ter threaten me, Ken. I don't suffer no man ter do thet--an'

don't never darken my door henceforward."

Now it must seem that Thornton had not only threatened but executed, and

no one would suspect the wife.

He saw in his mind's eye the "High Court" that would try the alleged

slayer of John Turk; a court dominated by the dead man's friends; a

court where witnesses and jurors would be terror-blinded against the

defendant and where a farce would be staged: a sacrifice offered up.

There had been in that log house three persons. One of them was dead and

his death would speak for him with an eloquence louder than any living

tongue. There were, also, the woman and Thornton himself. Between them

must lie the responsibility. Conscientiously the fugitive summarized the

circumstances as the prosecution would marshal and present them.

A man had been shot. On the table lay a pistol with one empty "hull" in

its chamber. The woman was the dead man's wife, not long since a bride

and shortly to become the mother of his child. If she had been the

murdered man's deadly enemy why had she not left him; why had she not

complained? But the brother had been heard to threaten the husband only

a day or two since. He was in the dead man's house, after being

forbidden to shadow its threshold.

"Hell!" cried Thornton aloud. "Ef I stayed she'd hev ter come inter

C'ote an' sw'ar either fer me or ergin me--an' like es not, she'd break

down an' confess. Anyhow, ef they put her in ther jail-house I reckon

ther child would hev hits bornin' thar. Hell--no!"

He turned once more to gaze on the vague cone of a mountain that stood

uplifted above its fellows far behind him. He had started his journey at

its base. Then he looked westward where ridge after ridge, emerging now

into full summer greenery, went off in endless billows to the sky, and

he went down the slope toward the river on whose other side he was to

become another man.

Kenneth Thornton was pushing his way West, the quarry of a man-hunt, but

long before him another Kenneth Thornton had come from Virginia to

Kentucky, an ancestor so far lost in the mists of antiquity that his

descendant had never heard of him; and that man, too, had been making a

sacrifice.