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."