Into the grave near the house the rough pine coffin, which had been
knocked together by neighbour hands, was lowered by members of both
factions whose peace the dead man had impartially guarded.
No circuit-rider was available, but one or two godly men knelt there and
prayed and over the green valley, splendidly resurrected from the scorch
and thirst of the drought, floated untrained voices raised in the old
hymns.
Then as the crowd scattered along its several ways a handful of men
delayed their departure, and when the place had otherwise emptied itself
they led Cal Maggard to his front door where, without realization that
they were selecting a spot of special significance, they halted under
the nobly spread shade of the tree.
The walnut, with the blight of dry weeks thrown off, had freshened its
leafage into renewed vigour--and though its scar was fresh and raw, its
vital stalwartness was that of a veteran who has once more triumphed
over his wounding.
The few men who had remained were all Doanes, in clan affiliation if not
in name, and they stood as solemnly silent as they had been by the open
grave but with heads no longer uncovered and with a grimmer quality in
their sober eyes.
It was Hump Doane, the man with the twisted back, who broke the silence
as spokesman for the group, and his high, sharp voice carried the
rasping suggestion of a threat.
"Afore we went away from here," he said with a note of embarrassment,
"we 'lowed thet we hed need ter ask ye a few questions, Mr. Thornton."
"I'm hearkenin' ter ye," came the non-committal rejoinder, and the
hunchback went on:
"Ther man we've jest laid ter rest was ther leader of ther Harpers an'
ther Thorntons but over an' above thet he was ther friend of every man
thet loved peace-abidin' and human betterment."
That tribute Cal acknowledged with a grave inclination of his head, but
no word.
"So long as he lived ther truce thet he'd done made endured. Now thet
he's dead hit would be a right distressful thing ef hit collapsed."
Maggard's candid eyes engaged those of the others in level glance as he
inquired, "Is thar any self-respectin' man thet feels contrariwise, Mr.
Doane?"
"Thet's what we seeks ter find out. With Caleb dead an' gone, no man kin
handily foretell what ther Thorntons aims ter do--an' without we knows
we kain't breathe free."
"Why does ye come ter me?"
"Because folks tells hit thet ther old man named ye ter stand in his
stead--an' ef ye does thet we hev need ter put some questions up ter
ye."
"I hain't said I sought no leadership--but speak right out fer
yoreselves," invited Maggard.
"All right. We knows thet ye come hyar from _somewhars_ else--an' we
don't know whar from. Because ye're old Caleb's heir, what ye does an'
what ye says gets ter be mighty pithy an' pertinent ter us."
"I've done come ter kinderly reelize that, myself, hyar of late."
"Ye comes from Virginny, folks says; air thet true?"
"Thet's true."
"An' ye give one name when ye come an' tuck another atter ye'd been hyar
a while, air thet true likewise?"
Maggard stiffened but he bowed his head in assent.
"All right, then--I reckon ye kin see fer yorself thet ef we've got ter
trust our business in yore hands tor'ds keepin' ther truce, we've
jedgmatically got ter confidence ye. We seeks ter hev ye ter tell us why
ye left Virginny an' why ye changed yore name. We wants ter send a man
of our own pick an' choosin' over thar an' find out fer ourselves jest
what yore repute war in yore own home afore ye come hyar."
Cal could feel the tingling of antagonism in a galvanic current along
his spine. He knew that his eyes had flashed defiance before he had
quelled their impulse and controlled his features, but he held his lips
tight for a rebellious moment and when he opened them he asked with a
velvety smoothness:
"Ye says nobody didn't mistrust Caleb Harper. Why didn't ye ask him,
whilst he war still a-livin', whether he'd made an heir outen a man thet
couldn't be confidenced?"
"So long es he lived," came the hunchback's quick and stingingly sharp
retort, "we didn't need ter ask no questions atall an' thar warn't no
prophets amongst us ter foresay he was goin' ter die suddent-like,
without tellin' us what we needed ter know. Will ye give us them facts
thet we're askin' fer--or won't ye?"
"I won't," said Maggard, shortly. "I stand ter be jedged by ther way I
demeans myself--an' I don't suffer no man ter badger me with questions
like es ef I war some criminal in ther jail-house."
The grotesque face of the hunchback hardened to the stony antagonism of
an issue joined. His dwarfed and twisted body seemed to loom taller and
more shapely as if the power of the imprisoned spirit were expanding its
ugly shell from within, and an undeniable dignity showed itself
flashingly through the caricatured features.
Back of him, his silent colleagues stiffened, too, and though they were
all tall men, with eyes flaming in unspoken wrath, they seemed smaller
in everything but bodily stature than he.
After a brief pause, Hump Doane wheeled and addressed himself to his
companions. "I reckon thet's all, men," he said, briefly, and Cal
Maggard recognized that the silence with which they turned away from him
was more ominous than if they had berated him.
Yet before he reached the stile Doane halted and stood irresolute with
his gaze groundward and his chin on his breast, then summoning his
fellows with a jerk of the thumb, he turned back to the spot where Cal
Maggard had remained unmoving at the base of the great tree, and his
face though still solemn was no longer wrathful.
"Sometimes, Mr. Thornton," he said with a slow weighing of his words,
"men thet aims at accord fails ter comprehend each other--an' gits ther
seemin' of cavillin'. Mebby we kinderly got off on ther wrong foot an' I
kain't go away from hyar satisfied without I'm plum sartain thet ye
onderstands me aright."
Maggard had learned to read the type of human features and human contact
clearly enough to place this man in his rightful page and column of
life. He recognized an honesty and sincerity that might be trusted under
the test of torture itself, purposes undeviatingly true--and the narrow
intensity of fanaticism. He would have liked to make an ally of this
man, and a friend, yet the question that had been raised could not be
answered.
"I hain't only willin' but plum anxious ter hear all ye've got ter say,
Mr. Doane," he made serious reply, and the other after a judicial pause
went on:
"Hit hain't no light an' frivolous sperit of meddlin' thet brings me
hyar askin' ye questions thet seems imp'dent an' nosy. Hit's a dire
need of safeguardin' ther peace of our folks--aye, an' thar lives, too,
like es not."
He paused, leaving room for an answer that would make easier his
approach to an understanding, but no answer came, and he continued:
"Ye hain't got no handy way of knowin' like me an' some of these other
men thet's always lived hyarabouts, what a ticklish balance things rests
on in this section. A feller mout reasonably surmise thet a peace what
hes stood fer twenty y'ar an' more would go on standin'--but mebby in
yore time ye've done seed a circus-show--hev ye?"
Maggard nodded, wondering what moral was to be drawn from tan-bark ring
and canvas top, and his interviewer continued:
"Then like es not ye've seed one of them fellers in tights an' tin
spangles balancin' a ladder on his chest with a see-saw atop hit--an' a
human bein' settin' on each eend of thet see-saw. Hit looks like he does
hit plum easy--but ef he boggles or stumbles, them folks up thar falls
down, sure as hell's hot."
"I reckon thet's right."
"Wa'al, thar's trouble-makin' sperits amongst both ther Doanes an' ther
Harpers--an' they seeks ter start all thet hell up a-bilin' ergin like
ther devil's own cauldron.... Ef we've done maintained peace 'stid of
war fer upwards of twenty y'ars hit's because old Caleb an' a few more
like him hes been balancin' thet ladder till th'ar hearts was nigh ter
bustin' with ther weight of hit. Peace hain't nuver stood upright
amongst us by hits own self--an' hit won't do hit now. Ef ye stands in
old Caleb's shoes, Mr. Thornton, ye've got ter stand balancin' thet
ladder, too."
"We hain't hed no disagreement es ter thet, Mr. Doane. I craves
law-abidin' life an' friendly neighbours as master strong es _you_
does."
"An' yit," continued the cripple, earnestly, "ef thet old-time war ever
busts loose afresh hit'll make these hyar numerous small streams, in a
manner of speakin', run red with men's blood an' salty with women's
tears, too, I fears me. I've done dream't of a time when all thet pizen
blight would be swep' away from ther hills like a fog--an' I sought ter
gain yore aid in hastenin' thet day. A man kain't skeercely plead with
his enemy but he kin with his friend--an' that's how I hoped I'd be
met."
"Yore friend is what I'd love ter be." Maggard stood with his hand
resting on the bark of the tree, as though out of it he might hope to
draw some virtue from the far past which it commemorated or from the
dust of those wiser men whose graves its roots penetrated. His eyes were
darkly clouded with the trouble and perplexity of his dilemma. To refuse
still was to stand on a seeming point either of over-stubborn pride or
of confessed guilt. To accede was to face the court that wanted him for
murder and that would prostitute justice to hang him.
"Them things ye dreams of an' hopes fer," he went on in a voice
thrilling with earnestness and sincerity, "air matters thet I've got
heart an' cravin' ter see come erbout. An' yit--I kain't answer yore
question. Hit's ther only test ye could seek ter put me ter--thet I
wouldn't enjoy ter meet outright----"
"Then, even atter what I've told ye, ye still refuses me?"
"Even atter what ye've told me, an' deespite thet I accords with all ye
seeks ter compass hyarabouts, I've _got_ ter refuse ye. I hain't got no
other choice."
This time Hump Doane and his delegation did not turn back, but crossed
the stile and passed stiffly on.
Thornton, for now it was useless to think of himself longer as Cal
Maggard, stood straight-shouldered until the turn of the road took them
beyond sight, then his head came down and his eyes clouded into a deep
misery.
That night the moon rode in a sky where the only clouds were wisps of
opal-fleece and the ranges were flat-toned and colossal ramparts of
cobalt. Down in the valley where the river looped its shimmering thread
the radiance was a wash of platinum softly broken by blue-gray islands
of shadow.
Dorothy Thornton stood, a dim and ghostly figure of mute distress, by
the grave in the thicketed burial ground where the clods had that day
fallen and the mound still stood glaringly raw with its freshly spaded
earth, and Parish Thornton stood by her side.
But while she mourned for the old man who had sought to be father and
mother to her, he thought, too, of the sagacious old shepherd without
whose guidance the flocks were already showing tendencies to stampede in
panic.
Parish Thornton would have given much for a word of counsel to-night
from those silent lips, and hardly realizing what impulse prompted him
he raised his eyes to the great gray-purple shadow-shape of the tree.
Its roots lay in those Revolutionary graves and its top-most plumes of
foliage seemed to brush the starry sky, where the spirits of the dead
might be having their longer and serener life.
Half comprehended yet disquieting with its vague portent, a new element
of thought was stirring in the mind of the young man. By nature he was
an individualist whose inherent prompting was to walk his own way
neither interfering with his neighbour nor permitting his neighbour to
encroach unduly upon him. Had he been a quoter of Scripture his chosen
text might have been, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
And if that had been the natural colour of his mind and nature it was
deepened and intensified by his circumstance. The man whom the law seeks
and whom it charges with murder must keep to himself and within himself
if he would escape notice and capture. Yet now the older impulses that
had driven and urged his pioneering ancestors were beginning to claim
voice, too, and this voice demanded of him "can any man live alone?"
Somehow that plea from the hunchbacked Doane had, with its flaming
sincerity, left its unforgettable mark upon him. His own affairs
included a need of hiding from Virginia sheriffs and of reckoning with
Bas Rowlett, and yet he began to wonder if his own private affairs were
not after all only part of a whole, and as such smaller than the whole.
If a man is born to play a part greater in its bearings than the merely
personal he cannot escape his destiny, and to-night some stirring of
that cloudy realization was troubling Thornton.
"Let's get some leaves offen ther old tree," suggested the girl in a
hushed voice, "an' make a kind of green kiverlet over him." She
shuddered as she added, "Ther ground's plum naked!"
When they had performed their whimsical service--these two
representatives of a grimly unimaginative race of stoics--they went
again and stood together under the tree and into the girl's grief and
the man's forebodings crept an indefinable anodyne of quiet and
consolation.
That tree had known death before, and always after death it had known
rebirth. It could stand serene and placid over hearts bruised as was her
own because it had heard the echoes of immortality and seen the
transient qualities of human grief.
Now she could realize only death and death's wounding, but to it the
seasons came and went as links in an unbroken chain. Beneath it slept
the first friends who had loved it. Somewhere in the great, star-strewn
spaces above it perhaps dwelt the souls of unborn men and women who
would love it hereafter. Somehow its age-old and ever-young message
seemed to come soothingly to her heart. "All end is but beginning, and
no end is final. The present is but hesitation between past and future.
Shadows and sunlight are abstract things until you see them side by
side--filtered through my branches. Winds are silent until they find
voice through my leaves.... My staunch column gives you your standard of
uprightness ... beneath me red men and white have fought and whispered
of love ... as my bud has come to leaf and in turn fallen so generation
has followed generation. For the present I bear the word of
steadfastness and courage. For the future, I bear the promise of hope."
Dorothy's lissome beauty took on a touch of something supernatural from
the magic of moonlight and soft shadow and the man slipped his arm about
her, while they looked off across the tempered nocturne of the hills and
heard the lullaby of the night breeze in the branches overhead.
"I war thinkin', Cal," said the girl in a hushed voice, "of what would
of happened ter me ef ye hedn't come. I'd be ther lonesomest body in
ther mountings of Kaintuck--but, thank God, ye _did_ come."
* * * * *
An agency for disturbing the precarious balance of peace was at work,
and the mainspring of its operation was the intriguing mind of Bas
Rowlett.
Bas had had nothing to gain and everything to lose by weakening the
pacific power of old Caleb, whose granddaughter he sought to wed, but
with a successful rival, whom he must kill or be killed by, usurping the
authority to which he had himself expected to succeed, his interests
were reversed. If he could not rule, he could wreck, and the promiscuous
succession of tragedies that would follow in the wake of such an
avalanche had no terrors to give Bas pause. Many volunteers would arise
to strike down his enemy and leave him safe on the outskirts of the
conflict. He could stand apart unctuously crying out for peace and
washing his hands after the fashion of Pontius Pilate.
Manifestly the provocation must seem to come from the Harper-Thornton
faction in order that their Doane-Rowlett adversaries might righteously
take the path of reprisal.
The device upon which the intriguer decided was one requiring such
delicate handling in both strategy and marksmanship that he dared not
trust it to either young Pete Doane or the faithful Sim Squires.
Indeed, he could trust no one but himself, and so one evening he lay in
the laurel back of the house where dwelt his universally respected
kinsman, old Jim Rowlett.
Bas had no intention of harming the old man who sat placidly smoking,
yet he was bent on making it seem evident and certain that someone had
sought to assassinate him, and so it was not at the breast that he aimed
his rifle but at the peak of the tall-crowned slouch hat.
The sights of his rifle showed clean as the rustless barrel rested on a
log. Bas himself lay stretched full-length in that position which gives
the greatest surety of marksmanship.
His temples were moist with nervous sweat, and once he took the rifle
down from his shoulder and flexed his muscles in rest. Then he aimed
again and pressed the trigger.
He could not tarry now, but he paused long enough to see the punctured
hat spin downward from the aged head and the old man rise, bewildered
but unhurt, with a dazed hand experimentally rubbing his white crown.
Then Bas grinned, and edging backward through the brush as a woman
rushed screaming out, he made his way to the house of Parish Thornton.
The first gun had been fixed in the new Harper-Doane war.
Bas knew that the tidings of the supposed attempt on the patriarch's
life would go winging rapidly through the community, and it pleased his
alibi instinct to be at his enemy's house at a time which would seem
almost contemporaneous with the shooting. To have reached his own place
would have taken longer.
But when he arrived Thornton was not indoors. He was strong enough now
to move about the place a little, though he still fretted under a
weakness that galled him, so Bas found Dorothy alone.
"I reckon, leetle gal," he made a sympathetic beginning, "yore heart's
right sore these days since yore gran'pap died. My own heart's sore fer
ye, too."
"He was mighty devoted ter ye, Bas," said the girl, and the man who had
just come from an act of perfidy nodded a grave head.
"I don't know whether he ever named hit ter ye, Dorothy," came his slow
words, "but thet day when ye war wedded he tuck me off ter one side an'
besought me always ter stand by ye--an' befriend ye."
"Ye acted mouty true-hearted thet day, Bas," she made acknowledgment and
the conspirator responded with a melancholy smile.
"I reckon I don't hev ter tell ye, I'd do most anything fer ye, leetle
gal. I'd hed hopes thet didn't turn out--but I kin still be a friend.
I'd go through hell fer ye any time."
He rose suddenly from his seat on the kitchen threshold, and into his
eyes came a flash of feeling. She thought it love, but there was an
unexpectedly greedy quality in it that frightened her. Then at once the
man recovered himself, and turned away, and the girl breathed easy
again.
"I'm beholden ter ye fer many things," she said, softly.
Suddenly and with no reason that she could explain, his recent words,
"I'd do most anything fer ye," set her thoughts swirling into a new
channel ... thoughts of things men do, without reward, for the women
they love.
This man, she told herself in her ignorance of the truth, had sacrificed
himself without complaint. She knew of only one greater sacrifice, and
of that she could never think without a cloud of dread shutting off the
sunlight of her happiness.
Even Bas would hardly have done what her husband had done for his
sister: assumed a guilt of murder which made of himself an exile and a
refugee whom the future always threatened.
Then somehow, as Bas sat silent, she saw again that hunger in his eyes,
a hunger so wolf-like that it was difficult to harmonize it with his
record of generous self-effacement; a hunger so avidly rapacious that a
dim and unacknowledged uneasiness stirred in her heart.
But at that moment they heard a shout from the front, and Peanuts Causey
came hurriedly around the corner of the house. His great neck and fat
face were fiery red with heat and excitement, and he panted as he gave
them his news.
"Old Jim Rowlett's done been shot at from ther bresh!" he told them. "He
escaped death, but men says ther war's like ter bust, loose ergin
because of hit."
"My God!" exclaimed Bas Rowlett in a tone of shocked incredulity; "old
Jim hain't got no enemies. A man would hev need ter be a fiend ter harm
him! I've got ter git over thar straightway."
Yet the crater did not at once burst into molten up-blazing. For a while
yet it smouldered--held from eruption by the sober counsel of the man
who had been fired on and who had seemingly escaped death by a miracle.
Adherents of the two factions still spoke as they met on the road, but
when they separated each turned his head to watch the other out of sight
and neither trusted an unprotected back to the good faith of any
possible adversary.
To the house of Aaron Capper, unobtrusively prompted by Sim Squires,
went certain of the Harper kin who knew not where else to turn--ignoring
Parish Thornton as a young pretender for whom they had little more
liking than for the enemy himself.
The elderly clansman received them and heard their talk, much of which
was wild and foolish. All disclaimed, and honestly disclaimed, any
knowledge of the infamy that had been aimed at old Jim Rowlett, but even
in their frothy folly and yeasty clamour none was so bereft as to deny
that the Harpers must face accountability. If war were inevitable,
argued the hotheads, it were wisdom to strike the first blow.
Yet Aaron, who had during the whole long truce been fretting for a free
hand, listened now with a self-governed balance that astonished his
visitors.
"Men," said he with a ring of authority in his voice, "thar hain't no
profit in headlong over-hastiness. I've been foreseein' this hour an'
prayin' fer guidance. We've got ter hev speech with young Parish
Thornton afore we turns a wheel."
Sim Squires had not been enlisting his recruits from the ranks of those
who wished to turn to Thornton, and from them rose a yelping clamour of
dissent, but Aaron quelled that mutiny aborning and went evenly on.
"Ef warfare lays ahead of us we hev need ter stand tergether solid--an'
thar's good men amongst us thet wouldn't nuver fergive affrontin' old
Caleb's memory by plum lookin' over his gal's husband. Thet's my
counsel, an' ef ye hain't a-goin' ter heed hit----"
The quiet voice ripped abruptly into an explosiveness under which some
of them cowered as under a lash.
"Then I reckon thar'll be Thorntons an' Harpers thet _will_--an they'll
fight both ther Doanes an' your crowd alike."