Outside on the straggling streets clumps of perplexed men gathered to
mull over the seven days' wonder which had been enacted before their
eyes.
Slowly they watched the Kentuckians troop out of the court house, the
late prisoner in their midst, and marvelled to see Will Turk join them
with the handshaking of complete amity. Many of these onlookers
remembered the dark and glowing face with which Turk had said yesterday
of the man upon whom he was now smiling, "Penitenshery, hell! Hit's got
ter be ther gallows!"
Public amazement was augmented when Kenneth Thornton and his wife went
home with Will Turk and slept as guests under his roof.
"Ye needn't hev no fear erbout goin' on home, Ken, an' leavin' Sally
hyar," said Turk when he and Thornton sat over their pipes that night.
"I gives ye my hand thet she's goin' ter go free on bond an' when her
case is tried she'll come cl'ar."
Kenneth Thornton knew that he was listening to the truth, and as his
fingers, groping in his pocket for a match, touched the small
walnut-shell basket, he drew it out and looked at it. Then turning to
Dorothy, who sat across the hearth, he said seriously: "Ther luck piece
held hits charm, honey."
But an hour later, when Kenneth had gone out to see to his horse in the
barn and when Lindy was busied about some kitchen task, Will Turk rose
from his seat and standing before Dorothy began to speak in a
low-pitched and sober voice:
"Ye seems ter me like a woman a man kin talk sense ter," he said, "an'
I'm goin' ter tell ye somethin' either you or yore man ought ter know.
Ken hain't plum outen danger yit. He's got an enemy over thar in
Kaintuck: an' when he starts back thet enemy's right like ter be
watchin' ther trail thet leads home."
Dorothy held his eyes steadily when she questioned him with a name, "Bas
Rowlett?"
Will Turk shook his head as he responded deliberately: "Whatever I knows
come ter me in secrecy--but hit was at a time when I miscomprehended
things, an' I sees 'em different now. I didn't say hit was Bas Rowlett
ner I didn't say hit wasn't nuther, but this much I kin say. Whoever
this feller is thet aims ter layway Ken, he aims ter do hit in Virginny.
Seems like he dastn't ondertake hit in Kaintuck."
Dorothy drew a breath of relief for even that assurance, and for the
duration of a short silence Turk again paced the floor with his head
bent and his hands at his back, then he halted.
"You go on home termorrer an' leave Ken hyar," he enjoined, "he wants
ter see his sister free on bail afore he leaves, anyhow. When he gits
ready ter start back I'll guide him by a way I knows, but one a woman
couldn't handily travel, an' I'll pledge ye he'll crost over ter
Kaintuck es safe as he come."
So on the morrow Dorothy rode with the same cavalcade that had escorted
her to Virginia, and near sunset a few days later, when low-hanging
clouds were sifting down a thick veil of snow and the bare woods stood
ghostly and white, Bas Rowlett lay numb with cold but warm with
anticipation by the trail that led from the county seat in Virginia to
the gap that gave a gateway into Kentucky.
He huddled under a tangle of briars, masking an ambuscade from which his
rifle could rake the road and his eyes command it for a hundred yards to
its eastern bend, and he had lain there all day. Kenneth Thornton would
ride that trail, he felt assured, before dark, and ride it alone, and
here, far from his own neighbourhood, he would himself be suspected of
no murderous activity.
But as Bas lay there, for once prepared to act as executioner in person
instead of through a hireling, Kenneth Thornton and Will Turk were
nearing the state border, having travelled furtively and unseen by a
"trace" that had put the bulk of a mountain between them and ambuscade.
The winter settled after that with a beleaguering of steeps and broken
levels under a blockade of stark hardship. Peaks stood naked save for
their evergreens, alternately wrapped in snow and viscid with mud.
Morning disclosed the highways "all spewed up with frost" and noon found
them impassably mired. Night brought from the forests the sharp
frost-cracking of the beeches like the pop of small guns, and in wayside
stores the backwoods merchants leaned over their counters and shook
dismal heads, when housewives plodded in over long and slavish trails to
buy salt and lard, and went home again with their sacks empty.
Those who did not "have things hung up" felt the pinch of actual
suffering, and faces in ill-lighted and more illy ventilated cabins
became morose and pessimistic.
Such human soil was fallow for the agitator, and the doctrine which the
winter did not halt from travelling was that incitement preached by the
"riders."
Every wolf pack that runs on its food-trail is made up of strong-fanged
and tireless-thewed beasts, but at its head runs a leader who has
neither been balloted upon nor born to his place. He has taken it and
holds it against encroachment by title of a strength and boldness above
that of any other. He loses it if a superior arises. The men who are of
the vendetta acknowledge only the chieftainship which has risen and
stands by that same gauge and proving.
Parish Thornton, the recent stranger, had come to such a position. He
had not sought it, but neither, when he realized the conditions, had he
evaded it. Now he had made a name of marvellous prowess, which local
minstrels wove into their "ballets." He was accounted to be possessed of
an almost supernatural courage and invulnerability; of a physical
strength and quickness that partook of magic. Men pointed to his record
as to that of a sort of superman, and they embellished fact with fable.
He had been the unchallenged leader of the Harpers since that interview
with old Aaron Capper, and the ally of Jim Rowlett since his bold ride
to Hump Doane's cabin, but now it was plain that this leadership was
merging rapidly into one embracing both clans.
Old Jim had not long to live, and since the peace had been
reestablished, the Doanes no less than the Harpers began to look to, and
to claim as their own, this young man whose personal appeal had laid
hold upon their imaginations.
But that is stating one side of the situation that the winter saw
solidifying into permanence. There was another.
Every jealousy stirred by this new regime, every element that found
itself galled by the rearrangement, was driven to that other influence
which had sprung up in the community--and it was an influence which was
growing like a young Goliath.
So far that growth was hidden and furtive, but for that reason only the
more dangerous. The riders had failed to free Sam Opdyke, and Sam was in
prison--but the riders were not through. It pleased them to remain
deceptively quiet just now but their meetings, held in secret places,
brought a multiplied response to the roll call. Plans were building
toward the bursting of a storm which should wreck the new dykes and
dams--and the leaders preached unendingly, under the vicarious urging of
Bas Rowlett, that the death of Parish Thornton was the aim and end
beyond other aims and ends.
The riders were not striking sporadic blows now, as they had done at
first, in petty "regulatings." They were looking to a time when there
was to be one ride such as the mountains had never seen; a ride at whose
end a leader living by the river bend, a judge, a Commonwealth's
attorney living in town and the foreman of a certain jury, should have
paid condignly for their offences.
Christmas came to the house in the bend of the river with a crystal
sheeting of ice.
The native-born in the land of "Do Without" have for the most part never
heard of Christmas trees or the giving of gifts, but they know the old
legend which says that at the hour when the Saviour was born in a manger
the bare and frozen elder bushes come to momentary bloom again in the
thickets and the "critters and beasties" kneel down in their stalls,
answering to some dumb mandate of reverence. This, however, is myth, and
the fact is more substantially recognized that at this period the
roisterous ride the highways, shooting and yelling, and the whiskey jug
is tilted and tragedy often bares her fangs.
But Dorothy and Parish Thornton had each other, and the cloud that their
imaginations had always pictured as hanging over the state border had
been dispelled. Their hearts were high, too, with the reflection that
when spring came again with its fragrances and whispers from the south
there would be the blossoming of a new life in that house, as well as
along the slopes of the inanimate hills.
But now on Christmas morning, as Dorothy looked out of a window, whose
panes were laced with most delicate traceries of frost rime, there was a
thorn-prickle of fear in her heart.
Parish came in and stood looking outward over her shoulder, and his
smile flashed as it had done that first day when it startled her,
because, before she had seen it, she had read of just such a smile in a
journal written almost a century and a half ago.
"Hit's plum beautiful--out thar," she murmured, and the man's arm
slipped around her. It might almost have been the Kenneth Thornton who
had seen Court life in England who gallantly responded, "Hit's still
more beautiful--in _hyar_."
There had been an ice storm the night before, following on a day of
snowfall, and the mountain world stood dazzling in its whiteness with
every twig and branch glaced and resplendent under the sun.
On the ice-bound slopes slept shadows of ultramarine, and near the
window the walnut tree stood, no more a high-priest garbed in a green
mantle or a wind-tossed cloak of orange-brown, but a warrior starkly
stripped of his draperies and glitteringly mailed in ice.
He stood with his bold head high lifted toward the sky, but bearing the
weight of winter, and when it passed he would not be found unscarred.
Already one great branch dropped under its freighting, and as the man
and woman looked out they could hear from time to time the crash of
weaker brethren out there in the forests; victims and sacrifices to the
crushing of a beauty that was also fatal.
Until spring answered her question, Dorothy reflected, she could only
guess how deep the blight, which she had discovered in the fall, had
struck at the robustness of the old tree's life. For all its
stalwartness its life had already been long, and if it should die--she
closed her eyes as though to shut out a horror, and a shudder ran
through her body.
"What is it, honey," demanded the man, anxiously, as he felt her tremor
against his arm, "air ye cold?"
Dorothy opened her eyes and laughed, but with a tremulousness in her
mirth.
"I reckon I hain't plum rekivered from ther fright hit give me when ye
went over thar ter Virginny," she answered, "sometimes I feels plum
timorous."
"But ther peril's done past now," he reassured her, "an' all ther
enemies we had, thet's wuth winnin' over, hev done come ter be friends."
"All thet's wuth winnin' over, yes," she admitted without conviction,
"but hit's ther other kind thet a body hes most cause ter fear."
Into the man's thought flashed the picture of Bas Rowlett, and a grim
stiffness came to his lips, but she could hardly know of that remaining
danger, he reflected, and he asked seriously, "What enemies does ye
mean, honey?"
She, too, had been thinking of Bas, and she, too, believed that fear to
be her own exclusive secret, so she answered in a low voice:
"I was studyin' erbout ther riders. I reckon they've done tuck thought
thet you an' Hump hev been seekin' evi_dence_ erginst 'em."
The man laughed.
"Don't disquiet yoreself erbout them fellers, honey. We _hev_ been
seekin' evi_dence_--an' gittin' hit, too, in some measure. Ef ther
riders air strong enough ter best us we hain't fit ter succeed."
The smile gave slowly way to a sterner and more militant expression, the
look which his wife had come to know of late. It had brought a gravity
to his eyes and a new dimension to his character, for it had not been
there before he had dedicated himself to a cause and taken up the
leadership which he had at first sought to refuse. Dorothy knew that he
was thinking of the fight which lay ahead, before the scattered enmities
of that community were resolved and the disrupted life welded and
cemented into a solidarity of law.