He was acknowledging, too, that if the riders numbered among their secret adherents such men as Bas Rowlett and his own boy, his fight was upon a poison that had struck deeper and more malignantly into the arteries of the community than he had heretofore dreamed.

He must talk with Parish Thornton, whose strength and judgment could be trusted. He would see him to-night.

But at that point he halted. As yet he could not reveal his unsubstantiated information to another. A pledge of sacredly observed confidence had been the price of his learning these things--and over there at the Thornton house a baby was expected before long. It would be both wise and considerate to defer the interview that must of necessity bring the whole crisis to violent issue until the young father's thoughts were less personally involved. It was a time to make haste slowly. Old Hump Doane laughed bitterly. He was a father himself, and to-night he had learned how the heart of a parent can be battered.

But before he went to his bed he had talked with his son, while his son sat cowering. It had been a stormy interview during which Pete had denied, expostulated, and at the end broken down in confession, and when Hump Doane rose he had abandoned that slender shred of hope to which, in the teeth of conviction, he had been clinging, that his boy might still be able to clear himself.

"Ye've done lied ter me, an' ye've done broke my heart," declared the hunchback, slowly, "but ye've done confessed--an' I'm too d.a.m.n weak ter turn ye over ter ther law like my duty demands. Don't nuver go ter no other meetin', an' ef they questions why ye don't come, tell 'em ter ask me! An' now"--the old man crumpled forward and buried his great head in his knotted hands--"an' now git outen my sight fer a spell, fer I kain't endure ther sight of ye!"

But when he rode abroad the next day no man suspected the cataclysm which had shattered Hump Doane's world into a chaos of irretrievable wreck.

A closer guard of caution than ever before he set upon his speech and bearing, while he sought to run down those devastating truths that had come to him with such unwelcome illumination.

In those days of first bud and leaf Dorothy Thornton looked out of her window with a psychological anxiety. If the first hint of life that came to the great tree were diseased or marked with blight, it would be an omen of ill under which she did not see how she could face her hour, and with fevered eyes she searched the gray branches where the sap was rising and studied the earliest tinge of green.

"Ef harm hed done come ter hit," she argued with herself, "hit would show, by this time, in them leetle buds an' tossels," but she was not satisfied, and reaching through the attic window she broke off from day to day bits of twig to see whether the vitality of rising sap or the brittleness of death proclaimed itself in the wood.

Slowly, under soft air and rain, the buds broke into tiny spears, too small and tender, it seemed to her, to live against the unkind touch of harsh winds, and the rudimentary filaments spread and grew into leaves.

But the time that seemed to Dorothy to lag so interminably was pa.s.sing, and the veils of misty green that had scarcely showed through the forest grays were growing to an emerald vividness. Waxen ma.s.ses of laurel were filling out and flushing with the pink of blossom. The heavy-fragranced bloom of the locust drooped over those upturned chalices of pink, and the black walnut was gaunt no more, but as brightly and l.u.s.tily youthful as a troubador whom age had never touched.

Warm with swelling life and full throated with bird music the beginnings of summer came to the hills, and the hills forgot their grimness.

But Old Jim Rowlett, over there in his house, was failing fast, men said. He prattled childishly, and his talon-like hands were pitifully palsied. He would scarcely see another spring, and in the fight that was coming his wise old tongue would no longer be available for counsel. So toward the younger and more robust influence of Parish Thornton his adherents turned in his stead.

In those places where secret night sessions were held were the stir of preparation and the talk of punishing a traitor--for young Pete had deserted the cause, and the plotters were divided in sentiment. A majority advocated striking with stunning suddenness toward the major purpose and ignoring the disaffection of the one young renegade, but a fiercer minority was for making him an example, and cool counsels were being taxed.

To Dorothy Thornton's eyes contentment had returned because gay and hopeful young flags of green flew from every twig of the tree of augury, and in her deep pupils dwelt the serene sweetness that broods on thoughts of approaching motherhood.

Then one morning before dawn Uncle Jase Burrell and a neighbour woman, versed in the homely practises of the midwife, came to the room where Parish Thornton sat with tightly clenched hands before the ruddy hearth.

"He's done been borned," said Uncle Jase, cheerily; "he's hale an'

survigrous an' sa.s.sy--an' he's a boy."

Sim Squires had not gone home that night, and now he rose from his chair and picked up his hat. "I reckon I'll be farin' on," he announced, "hit's all over now but ther shoutin'." At the door, though, he turned back and from his coat pocket drew a roll of sheafed paper bound in a limp cloth.

"I found this hyar thing layin' behind a barrel up thar in ther attic,"

he lied, as he restored the lost journal of the revolutionary ancestress. "I 'lowed hit mout be somethin' ye prized."

One night, when June had come to her full-bosomed richness, young Pete Doane did not return to his father's house and the old hunchback's face darkened anxiously.

The warm night was a blue and moonlit glory of summer tranquillity and from the creek bottom came the full-throated chorus of the frogs. Back in the dark timber sounded the plaintive sweetness of the whippoorwills, and from everywhere drifted an intangible blending of fragrances.

But Hump sat alone and morose in the house where no one dwelt but himself and his son--save the neighbour woman who came in the daytime to cook and clean house for the widower. He sat there until midnight had pa.s.sed and the moon was riding low to the west; he was still sitting in the darkness that comes before dawn, and young Pete had not yet come.

Then when even June could not make gracious that dismal hour that brings fog and reek before the first gray streaks the east, the old man heard a voice outside his door and rose heavily to answer it.

He was a marked man, and should not have been so incautious, but in these days death held no threat for Hump Doane. It was life that brought him torture.

So he ignored those precepts of wariness which had been taught him by years of experience, and when he stood unarmed in the doorway, against a background of pale lamplight, he felt the thrust of a rifle muzzle against his ribs, and heard a disguised voice ordering, "Come with us."

Hump did not flinch or give back. Neither did he obey. Instead, he laughed with a hollow callousness and replied, "Shoot ef ye've a mind ter. I hain't goin' ter stir a step ter foller ye."

But masked men closed in and caught his misshapen elbows, and the voice that had first accosted him went on in the level tones of its disguise:

"We don't aim ter harm ye, Hump; leastways not yit--but we aims ter show ye somethin' we've brought ye fer a gift."

They led him, too dull and apathetic of spirit to resist, too indifferent of any consequence to protest, out and across his own fog-wrapped yard and down to the sledge-trail road.

There in the bleak obscurity of blackness his eyes could make out a squad of silent figures, but nothing more.

"Ye kain't rightly see hit yit, Hump," announced the spokesman, "but thar's a fodder-sledge standin' thar at ther aidge of ther road--an' on hit thar's somethin' thet b'longs ter ye. Hyar's a pine f.a.ggot thet's soaked with kerosene--an' hyar's matches ter light hit with--but--on pain of death--wait twell we've done gone away."

Into the heavy indifference of the old man's mood flashed a sickening shaft of dread. He took the torch and the matches, and then with a cowardice that was alien to his character he stood trembling like a frightened child, while the dark figures disappeared as though they had melted.

Hump Doane was afraid to kindle his torch, not afraid because of any threat to himself, but terrified for what he might see.

Then he braced himself, and with his back turned, struck the match and saw the guttering flames leap greedily upon the oiled pine splinter.

Slowly he wheeled, and his eyes fell on the illuminated sledge--his own sledge stolen from his barn--and there stretched lifeless, and shamefully marked with the defacement of the hangman's rope, lay what was left of his son.

Old Hump Doane, who had never stepped aside from any danger, who had never known tears since babyhood, stood for a moment gulping, then the light dropped from his hand and the agony of his shriek went quavering across the silent hills and reechoed in the woods.

The pine splinter burned out in the wet gra.s.s and old Hump lay beside it insensible, but after a while he awakened out of that merciful sleep and crawled on his hands and knees over to where the sledge stood, and he knelt there with his face buried on the lifeless breast.

"G.o.d fergive me," he murmured with a strangled voice. "He didn't nuver hev no mammy ter raise him up aright. I reckon I failed him when he needed me most--but Bas Rowlett's accountable ter _me_!"

When the neighbour woman came the next morning to prepare breakfast she fled screaming away from the gruesome sight that met her eyes: the sight of a dead man lying on a sledge, and a hunchback, who seemed dead, too, stretched unconscious across the body. It was so that men found them later, and carried them in, and it would have been more merciful had Hump Doane been as lifeless as he seemed instead of coming back to the ordeal he must face.

Through a community stunned and appalled into breathlessness the news ran like quicksilver, and the easy-pacing mule from Parish Thornton's barn was lathered with sweat as the young man called upon it to annihilate time and s.p.a.ce over the broken ways between his house and that of his stricken friend.

At Hump Doane's stile Thornton flung himself out of his saddle and paused for no word with those neighbours who stood gathered about the dooryard. He heard the whine of a saw and the pounding of a hammer off somewhere to the rear, and knew that volunteer and amateur undertakers were fashioning a coffin--but he hurled himself like a human hurricane across the threshold and demanded briefly: "War's Hump at?"

The room was dim and murky at its corners, but through the two doors poured a flood of morning light, and into its shaft projected an unhinged shutter supported on two saw-horses, with a sheeted burden upon it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too numbed for full acuteness of feeling.

Other figures to the number of two or three moved as silently as dark wraiths about the place, but when Parish entered they drifted out, leaving him alone with his friend, and one of the doors closed upon their going.

Then the lightnings of outraged wrath that seemed to crackle in the young clansman's eyes stilled themselves and altered into something like tenderness as he moved with catlike softness of footfall to where the elder man sat, and let a hand fall on his malformed shoulder.

"Hump," he said, briefly, "my heart's plum sufferin' fer ye. I jest heared of hit."

Hump Doane stirred and looked stupidly at him for a s.p.a.ce, then with laboured slowness he came to his feet, and his only answer was the eloquent gesture with which one hand swept toward the dead body.