A shuffling of muddy feet ensued; then a lesser sound that came with the giving out of many breaths; a sound that has no name but which has been known since days when men and women settled back in the circus of the Caesars and waited for the lions to be turned into the arena where the victims waited.

From the bench was drawled the routine query, "Has the Commonwealth any motions?" and the Commonwealth's attorney rose to his feet and straightened the papers on his desk.

"May it please your Honour," he said, slowly, "in the case of the Commonwealth against Kenneth Thornton, charged with murder, now pending on this docket, I wish to enter a motion of dismissal and to ask that your Honour exonerate the bond of the defendant."

The man in the prisoner's dock had come braced against nerve-trying, but now he bent forward in an amazement that he could not conceal, and from the back of the courtroom forward ran an inarticulate sound from human throats that needed no words to voice its incredulity--its disappointment.

There was a light rapping of the gavel and the state's representative went evenly on:

"The trial of this defendant would only entail a fruitless cost upon the state. I hold here, duly attested, the confession of Sally Turk, sister of the accused and widow of the deceased, that it was she and not Kenneth Thornton who shot John Turk to death. I have sworn out a warrant for this woman's arrest, and will ask the sheriff to execute it forthwith and take her into custody."

Kenneth Thornton was on his feet with a short protest shaping itself on his lips, but his eyes met those of his sister who rose from her place against the wall as her name was spoken and he read in them a contentment that gave him pause and an unspoken plea for silence.

Answering to the restraining hand of his own lawyer on his elbow he sank back into his seat with a swimming head and heard the calm, almost purring voice from the bench directing, "Mr. Clerk, let the order be entered." After that, astonishment mounted to complete dumfounding as he saw standing in the aisle Will Turk, the backbone and energy of the entire prosecution--and heard his voice addressing the judge:

"May it please your Honour, I'd love ter be tuck on Sally Turk's bond when ther time comes. I've done satisfied myself thet she kilt my brother in self _dee_fence."

CHAPTER XXIX

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, h.e.l.l! 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-sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.surance, 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sured, 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 impa.s.sably 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 t.i.tle 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 Opd.y.k.e, 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 d.y.k.es 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-p.r.i.c.kle 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 pa.s.sed 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.