The Roof Tree Part 48

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 c.o.c.ked 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."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

One might have counted ten while the picture held with no other sound than the breathing of two men and the strident clamour of a blue-jay in a hickory sapling.

Rowlett had not been ordered to raise his hands, but he held them ostentatiously still and wide of his body. The revolver in its holster under his armpit might as well have been at home, for even had both started with an equal chance in the legerdemain of drawing and firing, he knew his master, and as it was, he stood covered.

Now, too, he faced an adversary no longer fettered by any pledge of private forbearance.

This, then, was the end--and it arrived just a d.a.m.nable shade too soon, when with the falling of dusk he might have witnessed the closing scenes of his enemy's doom. To-morrow there would be no Parish Thornton to dread, but also to-morrow there would be no Bas Rowlett to enjoy immunity from fear.

"Hit war jest erbout one y'ar ago, Bas," came the even and implacable inflection of the other, "thet us two stud up hyar tergither, an' a heap hes done come ter pa.s.s since then--don't ye want yore envellip, Bas?"

Silently and with a heavily moving hand, Rowlett reached out and took the proffered paper which bore his incriminating admissions and signature, but he made no answer.

"Thet other time," went on Thornton with maddening deliberation, "hit was in ther moonlight thet us two stud hyar, an' when ye told me ye war befriendin' me I war fool enough ter b'lieve ye. Don't ye recollict how we turned and looked down, an' ye p'inted out thet big tree--in front of ther house?"

The intriguer ground his teeth, but from the victor's privilege of verbose taunting he had no redress. After all, it would be a transient victory. Parish might "rub it in" now, but in a few hours he would be dangling at a rope's end.

"Ye showed hit ter me standin' thar high an' widespread in ther moonlight, an' I seems ter recall thet ye 'lowed ye'd cut hit down ef ye hed yore way. Ye hain't hed yore way, though, Bas, despite Satan's unflaggin' aid. Ther old tree still stands thar a-castin' hits shade over a place thet's come ter be my home--a place ye've done vainly sought ter defile."

Still Rowlett did not speak. There was a grim vestige of comfort left in the thought that when the moon shone again Parish Thornton would have less reason to love that tree.

"Ye don't seem no master degree talkative terday, Bas," suggested the man with the pistol, which was no longer held levelled but swinging--though ready to leap upward. Then almost musingly he added, "An' thet's a kinderly pity, too, seein' ye hain't nuver goin' ter hev no other chanst."

"Why don't ye shoot an' git done?" barked Rowlett with a leer of desperation. "Pull yore trigger an' be d.a.m.ned ter ye--we'll meet in h.e.l.l afore long anyhow."

When Thornton spoke again the naked and honest wrath that had smouldered for a year like a banked fire at last leaped into untrammelled blazing.

"I don't strike down even a man like _you_ outen sheer hate an'

vengeance," he declared, with an electrical vibrance of pitch. "Hit's a bigger thing then thet an' ye've got ter know in full what ye dies for afore I kills ye--ye hain't deluded me as fur es ye thinks ye have--I knows ye betrayed me in Virginny; I knows ye shot at old Jim an'

fathered ther infamies of ther riders; I knows ye sought ter fo'ce yoreself on Dorothy; but I didn't git thet knowledge from _her_. She kep' her bargain with ye."

"A man right often thinks he knows things when he jest suspicions 'em,"

Bas reminded him, with a forced and fact.i.tious calm summoned for his final interview, but the other waved aside the subterfuge.

"Right often--yes--but not always, an' this hain't one of them delusions. I knows ther full sum an' substance of yore infamies, an' yit I've done held my hand. Mebby ye thought my wrath war coolin'. Ef ye did ye thought wrong!"

Parish Thornton drew a long breath and the colour gradually went out of his brown face, leaving it white and rapt in an exaltation of pa.s.sion.

"I've been bidin' my time an' my time hes come," he declared in a voice that rang like a bronze bell. "When I kills ye I does a holy act. Hit's a charity ter mankind an' womankind--an' yit some foreparent bred hit inter me ter be a fool, an' I've got ter go on bein' one."

A note of hopefulness, incredulous, yet quickening with a new lease on courage, flashed into the gray despair of the conspirator's mind and he demanded shortly:

"What does ye mean?"

Thornton recognized that grasping at hope, and laughed ironically.

"I hain't goin' ter shoot ye down like ye merits," he said, "an' yit I mis...o...b..s ef hit's so much because I've got ter give ye a chanst, atter all, es ther hunger ter see yore life go out under my bare fingers."

Slowly dying hope had its redawning in Bas Rowlett's face. His adversary's strength and quickness were locally famous, but he, too, was a giant in perfect condition, and the prize of life was worth a good fight.

He stood now with hands held high while Thornton disarmed him and flung his pistol and knife far backward into the thicket. His own weapon, the Harper leader still held.

"Now, me an' you are goin' ter play a leetle game by ther name of 'craven an' d.a.m.n fool'," Thornton enlightened him with a grim smile.

"I'm ther d.a.m.n fool. Hit's fist an' skull, tooth an' nail, or anything else ye likes, but fust I'm goin' ter put this hyar gun of mine in a place whar ye kain't git at hit, an' then one of us is goin' ter fling t'other one offen thet rock-clift whar she draps down them two hundred feet. Does ye like thet play, Bas?"

"I reckon I'll do my best," said Rowlett, sullenly; "I hain't skeercely got no rather in ther matter nohow."

Thornton stripped off his coat and rolled his sleeves high and the other man followed suit. Bas even grinned sardonically in appreciation when the other at length thrust his pistol under a rock which it strained his strength to lift. The man who got that weapon out would need to be one who had time and deliberation at his disposal--not one who s.n.a.t.c.hed it up in any short-winded interval of struggle.

Then the two stood glaring into each other's faces with the naked savagery of wild beasts, and under the stress of their hate-l.u.s.t the whites of their eyes were already bloodshot and fever-hot with murder-bent.

Yet with an impulse that came through even that red fog of fury Parish Thornton turned his head and looked for the fraction of an instant down upon the gray roof and the green tree where the shadows lay lengthed in the valley--and in that half second of diverted gaze Rowlett launched himself like a charging bull, with head down to ram his adversary's solar plexus and with arms outstretched for a bone-breaking grapple.

It was a suddenness which even with suddenness expected came bolt-like, and Thornton, leaping sidewise, caught its pa.s.sing force and stumbled, but grappled and carried his adversary down with him. The two rolled in an embrace that strained ribs inward on panting lungs, leg locking leg, and fingers clutching for a vulnerable hold. But Thornton slipped eel-like out of the chancery that would have crushed him into helplessness and sprang to his feet, and if Rowlett was slower, it was by only a shade of difference.

They stood, with sweat already flowing in tiny freshets out of their pores and eyes blazing with murderous fire. They crouched and circled, advancing step by step, each warily sparring for an advantage and ready to plunge in or leap sidewise. Then came the impact of bone and flesh once more, and both went down, Thornton's face pressed against that of his enemy as they fell, and Rowlett opened and clamped his jaws as does a bull-dog trying for a grip upon the jugular.

That battle was homerically barbaric and starkly savage. It was fought between two wild creatures who had shed their humanity: one the stronger and more ma.s.sive of brawn; the other more adroit and resourceful. But the teeth of the conspirator closed on the angle of the jawbone instead of the neck--and found no fleshy hold, and while they twisted and writhed with weird incoherencies of sound going up in the smother of dust, Bas Rowlett felt the closing of iron fingers on his throat. While he clawed and gripped and kicked to break the strangle, his eyes seemed to swell and burn and start from their sockets, and the patch of darkening sky went black.

It was only the collapse of the human ma.s.s in his arms into dead weight that brought Parish Thornton again out of his mania and back to consciousness. The battle was over, and as he drew his arms away his enemy sank shapeless and limp at his feet.