The Roof Tree Part 22

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 circ.u.mstance. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 h.e.l.l 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: a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d!" 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, un.o.btrusively 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.