The Roof Tree Part 49

For a few seconds more Thornton stood rocking on unsteady legs, then, with a final and supreme effort, he stooped and lifted the heavy weight that hung sagging like one newly dead and not yet rigid.

With his burden Parish staggered to the cliff's edge and swung his man from side to side, gaining momentum.

Then suddenly he stopped and stood silhouetted there, sweat-shiny and tattered, blood-stained and panting, and instead of pitching Bas Rowlett outward he laid him down again on the shelf of rock.

How much later he did not know, though he knew that it was twilight now, Bas Rowlett seemed to come out of a heavy and disturbed sleep in which there had been no rest, and he found himself lying with his feet hanging over the precipice edge, and with Thornton looking intently down upon him. In Thornton's hand was the recovered pistol--so there must have been time enough for that.

But his perplexed brain reeled to the realization that he still lay up here instead of among the rocks upon which he should have been broken two hundred feet below. Presumably the victor had waited for returning consciousness in the victim to consummate that atrocity.

But Thornton's unaccountable whims had flown at another tangent.

"Git up, Bas," he commanded, briefly, "yore life b'longs ter me. I won hit--an' ye're goin' ter die--but my fingers don't ache no more fer a holt on yore throat--they're satisfied."

"What air--ye goin' ter do, now?" Rowlett found words hard to form; and the victor responded promptly, "I've done concluded ter take ye down thar, afore ye dies, an' make ye crave Dorothy's pardon on yore bended knees. Ye owes. .h.i.t ter her."

Slowly Rowlett dragged himself to a sitting posture. His incredulous senses wanted to sing out in exultation, but he forced himself to demur with surly obduracy.

"Hain't hit enough ter kill me without humiliatin' me, too?"

"No, hit hain't enough fer me an' hit's too tardy fer _you_ ter make no terms now."

Bas Rowlett exaggerated his dizzy weakness. There was every reason for taking time. This mad idea that had seized upon the other was a miracle of deliverance for him. If only he could kill time until night had come and the moon had risen, it would prove not only a respite but a full pardon--capped with a reserved climax of triumph.

Down there at that house the mob would soon come, and circ.u.mstance would convert him, at a single turn of the wheel, from humbled victim to the avenger ironically witnessing the execution of his late victor.

After a while he rose and stood experimentally on his legs.

"I reckon I kin walk now," he said, drearily, "ef so be ye lets me go slow--I hain't got much of my stren'th back yit."

"Thar hain't no tormentin' haste," responded Thornton; "we've got all night afore us."

When they reached the house, it stood mistily bulked among shadows, with its front door open upon an unlighted room.

The men had tramped down that slope in silence, and they crossed the threshold in silence, too, the captive preceding his captor; and the householder paused to bolt the door behind him.

Then, holding a vigilant eye on the forced guest who had not spoken, Thornton lighted a lamp and backed to the closed bedroom door at whose sill he had seen a slender thread of brightness. In all his movements he went with a wary slowness, as though he were held by a cord, and the cord was the line of direct glance that he never permitted to deviate from the face of his prisoner.

Now while his right hand still fondled the revolver, he groped with his left for the latch and opened the door at his back.

"Dorothy," he called in a low voice, "I wisht ye'd come in hyar, honey."

From within he heard a sound like a low moan; but he knew it was a sigh of relief loosening tight nerve cords that had been binding his wife's heart in suspense.

"Thank G.o.d, ye're back, Ken," she breathed. "Air ye all right--an'

unharmed?"

"All right an' unharmed," he responded, as he stepped to the side of the door frame and stood there a rigid and unmoving sentinel.

But when Dorothy came to the threshold, she took in at once the whole picture, pregnant with significance: the glint of lamplight on the ready revolver, the relentless, tooth-marked face of her husband, and the figure of the vanquished plotter with its powerful shoulders hunched forward and its head hanging.

On the mantel ticked the small tin clock, which Bas Rowlett watched from the tail of a furtive eye.

As Dorothy Thornton stood in gracious slenderness against the background of the lighted door with a nimbus about her head, she was all feminine delicacy and allurement. But in that moment she stiffened to an overwhelming rush of memories which incited her to a transport of wrath for which she had no words.

She saw Bas Rowlett stripped naked to the revolting bareness of his unclean soul, and she drew back with a shudder of loathing and unmoderated hate.

"Why did ye dally with him, Ken?" she demanded, fiercely; "don't ye know thet whilst ye lets him live yere jest handlin' an' playin' with a rattlesnake?"

"He hain't got long ter live," came the coldly confident response, "but afore he dies, he wants ter crave yore pardon, Dorothy, an' he wants ter do hit kneelin' down."

Bas Rowlett shot a sidelong glance at the clock. Time was soul and essence of the matter now and minutes were the letters that spelled life and death. He listened tensely, too, and fancied that he heard a whippoorwill.

There were many whippoorwills calling out there in the woods but he thought this was a double call and that between its whistlings a man might have counted five. Of that, however, he could not be sure.

"I hain't got no choice, Dorothy," whined the man, whose craven soul was suffering acutely as he fenced for delay--delay at any cost. "Even ef I hed, though, I'd crave yore pardon of my own free will--but afore I does. .h.i.t, thar's jest a few words I'd love ter say."

Dorothy Thornton stood just inside the door. Pity, mercy, and tenderness were qualities as inherent in her as perfume in a wild flower, but there was something else in her as well--as there is death in some perfumes.

If he had been actually a poisonous reptile instead of a snake soul in the body of a man Bas Rowlett could have been to her, just then, no less human.

"Yes," she said, slowly, as a memory stirred the confession of her emotions, "thar's one thing I'd like ter say, too--but hit hain't in no words of my own--hit's somethin' thet was said a long spell back."

From the mantel shelf she produced the old journal, and opened its yellowed pages.

"I've been settin' hyar," said Dorothy Thornton, in a strained quietness of voice, "readin' this old book mighty nigh all day--I _hed_ ter read hit--" her voice broke there, then went steadily on again--"or else go mad, whilst I was waitin'--waitin' ter know whether Ken hed kilt ye or _you'd_ kilt _him_." Again she paused for a moment and turned her eyes to her husband. "This book sheds light on a heap of things thet we all needs ter know erbout--hit tells how his foreparent sought ter kill ther tree thet our ancestors planted--an' hit's kinderly like an indictment in ther high co'te."

While Dorothy Thornton accused the blood sprung from the renegade and his Indian squaw out of those ancient pages the men listened.

To the husband it was incitement and revelation. The tree out there standing warder in the dark became, as he listened with engrossed interest, more than ever a being of sentient spirit and less than ever a thing of mere wood and leaf.

To Bas Rowlett it should have been an indictment, or perhaps an excuse, with its testimony of blood strains stronger than himself--but from its moral his mind was wandering to a more present and gripping interest.

Now he was sure he had heard the double whippoorwill call! In five minutes more he would be saved--yet five minutes might be too long.

Dorothy paused. "Ye sees," she said with a deep gravity, "from ther start, in this country, our folks hev been despitefully tricked an'

misused by ther offspring of thet Indian child thet our foreparents tuck in an' befriended. From ther start, ther old tree hes held us safe with hits charm erginst evil! Ever since----"

She broke off there and paused with astonished eyes that turned to the door, upon which had sounded a commanding rap. Then she rose and went over cautiously to open it an inch or two and look out.

But when she raised the latch a man, rendered uncognizable by a black slicker that cloaked him to his ankles and a masked face, threw it wide, so that the woman was forced, stumbling, back. Then through the opening poured a half dozen others in like habiliments of disguise.

All held outthrust rifles, and that one who had entered first shouted: "All right, boys, ther door's open."

Parish Thornton had not been able to shoot at the initial instant because Dorothy stood in his way. After that it was useless--and he saw Bas Rowlett step forward with a sudden change of expression on his pasty face.

"Now, then," said Bas, exultantly, "hit's a gray hoss of another colour!"