A stupefaction of grief had held him since they had brought him in this morning from the road where they had found him, and thought had moved so haltingly that it had scarcely been thought at all.

But now the vitalizing light of sympathy and outrage in those other eyes seemed to rouse him out of his long coma with an awakening like that which comes after ether.

As gray dawn quickens gradually out of darkness, a numbed indignation in his pupils began to liven into unquenchable wrath.

"I hain't been able ter talk ... ter these hyar kindly neighbours of mine...." he faltered, "but somehow, I believes I kin with _you_."

"I'm hyar ter s'arve ye, howsoever I kin, Hump," Parish a.s.sured him. "Ef ye was my own father I couldn't love ye better."

Hump Doane held out a crumpled paper that had been crushed in his taut hand, and Thornton stepping to the light smoothed it and read, pencilled in roughly printed characters, "A warning to all traitors."

"Hit war pinned on him...." explained the father. "Ther riders done hit ... _he'd_ done jined 'em ... an' he quit."

Parish Thornton stood with the light full on his face and the paper grasped in his hand. The angle of his clean-cut jaw seemed to harden from the plastic texture of flesh to the hardness of granite, and in his narrowed eyes spurted jets of those blue-and-white fires that hold intensest heat.

"I always aimed ter raise him up in G.o.dly ways," went on the father with self-accusing misery, "but I war a hard man, an' I never gentled him none. I reckon I driv him ter others ... thet debauched an' ruint him."

He had been, to that point, the man conscious only of his hurt, but now his face became contorted and livid with a sudden hurricane of rage.

"But them thet hanged him," he cried out in abrupt violence, "vile es they war ... they warn't nothin' ter ther man thet made a dupe out of him ... ther man thet egged them on.... Bas Rowlett's accountable ter me--an' afore ther sun sets I aims ter stand over his dead body!"

Parish Thornton flinched at the name. He had turned his face toward the sheeted figure, but now he wheeled back, crouching and straightening with the spasmodic quickness of a boxer who sidesteps a blow.

"Bas Rowlett!" he echoed in a low but deadly tensity of voice. "Steady yoreself, man, an' construe what ye means!"

Hump Doane had shaken off his torpor now and stood trembling under all the furies of repressed years. His words came in a torrent of vehemence that could not be stemmed, and they mounted like gathering winds.

"I've preached peace day in an' day out.... I've striven ter keep hit ... an' I knows I did aright ... but this day I'm goin' ter stultify myself an' kill a man ... an' when I finishes him, I'm going ter keep right on till I'm either kilt myself or gits all them thet's accountable fer _this_!" He paused, breathing in gasps, then rushed on again: "I trusted Bas Rowlett ... I believed in him ... some weeks back I l'arned some things erbout him thet shocked me sore, but still I held my hand ... waitin' ter counsel with _you_ atter yore baby hed been borned."

"What war hit ye l'arned, Hump?" The younger man's voice was almost inaudibly low, and the answer came like volley-firing with words.

"Hit war Bas thet hired ye laywayed.... Hit war Bas thet egged Sam Opd.y.k.e on ter kill ye.... Hit war Bas thet sent word over inter Virginny ter betray ye ter ther law.... Hit war Bas thet shot through old Jim's hat ter make a false appearance an' foment strife.... Hit war Bas thet stirred men up ter organizin' ther riders ... an' used my boy fer a catspaw!"

"Listen, man!" Parish Thornton was breathing his words through lips that scarcely moved as he bent forward with the tautness of a coiled spring.

"I knowed Bas Rowlett hired me shot ... but we'd done pledged ourselves ter settle thet betwixt us.... I held my hand because of ther oath I give ye when we made ther truce ... but these other things, I hain't nuver even dremp' of ther like afore. Does ye know aught more of him?"

"I knows thet whilst ye war away in Virginny he went over an' sought ter make love ter yore wife ... an' she come nigh killin' him fer hit ...

but she feared fer bloodshed ef she bore thet tale ter _you_."

The old man paused, and Parish Thornton made no answer in words, but between his lips the breath ran out with the hiss of sobbing waters.

"I kain't prove none of them things in law," went on Hump, and his eyes travelled back to the hideous fascination of the sheeted body, "yit I knows, in my heart, every one of 'em's true--an' thet's enough fer me.

Now I'm goin' ter be my own law!"

The cripple turned and walked unsteadily to the corner of the room, and from its place behind a calico curtain he took out a repeating rifle.

"Thar's my co'te of jestice," he declared, and his voice trembled as with hunger and thirst.

But Parish Thornton had thrown back his head and unaccountably he laughed as he laid on the other's arm fingers that closed slowly into a grip of steel and rawhide.

"Hump," he said, "hit would be a turrible pity fer us ter quarrel--but I don't aim ter be robbed, even by _you_! Thet man belongs ter _me_ ...

an' I aims ter claim him now. When my blood war bi'lin' like a mortal fever ... right hyar in this room ... didn't ye fo'ce me ter lay aside my grudge till sich day es ye give me license ter take hit up ergin?...

an' hain't thet day come now?... From thet time till this I've kep' my word ... but h.e.l.l hitself couldn't hold me back no longer.... Ye kain't hev him, Hump. He's _mine_!"

He paused, then with something like a sob he repeated in a dazed voice, "An' ye says he aimed ter fo'ce Dorothy with his love-makin'. G.o.d!"

Hump Doane was still clinging to the rifle upon which Thornton had laid his hands, and they stood there, two claimants, neither of whom was willing to surrender his t.i.tle to a disputed prize--the prize of Bas Rowlett's life.

But at length the older fingers loosened their hold and the older man took a stumbling step and knelt by his dead. Then the younger, with the gun cradled in his elbow, and a light of release in his eyes--a light that seemed almost one of contentment--went out through the door and crossed the yard to the fence where his mount was. .h.i.tched.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Sim, standing at the barn door, had watched Parish Thornton ride away that morning with a troubled heart, as he wondered what sequel these events would bring for himself. Then he went to the house and called softly to Dorothy. She was crooning a lullaby, behind the closed door of her room, to the small mite of humanity that had come, in healthy pinkness, to the comparatively mature age of one month.

"Thar hain't nuthin' ter be done right now," the hired man told her, "an' I've got ter fare over ter my own place fer a spell. A man's comin'

ter haggle with me over a cattle deal."

But Sim was not going to his own house. He was acting under standing orders which might in no wise be disobeyed.

The organization that had been born in secret and nurtured to malignant vigour had never held a daylight session before. No call had gone out for one now, but an understanding existed and an obligation, acknowledged by its membership in the oath of allegiance.

If ever at any time, day or night, shine or storm, such an occasion developed as carried the urge of emergency, each rider must forthwith repair to his designated post, armed and ready for instant action.

This prearranged mobilization must follow automatically upon the event that brought the need, and it involved squad meetings at various points.

In its support a system of signalling and communication had been devised, whereby separated units might establish and hold unbroken touch, and might flow together like shattered beads of quicksilver.

Unless Sim Squires was profoundly mistaken, such a time had come.

But Sim went with a heavy heart of divided allegiance. He dared not absent himself, and he knew that after last night's happening the s.p.a.ce of twenty-four hours could scarcely pa.s.s without bringing the issue of decisive battle between the occult and the open powers that were warring for domination in that community.

He realized that somehow a hideous blunder had been committed and he guessed with what a frenzy of rage Bas Rowlett had learned that the organization into which he had infused the breath of life had murdered one of his two confidential va.s.sals.

At the gorge that men called a "master shut-in", which was Sim's rendezvous for such an emergency meeting, he found that others had arrived before him, and among the faces into which he looked was that of Rick Joyce, black with a wrath as yet held in abeyance, but promising speedy and stormy eruption.

The spot was wild beyond description, lying in the lap of mountains that had in some day of world infancy been riven into a mighty boulder-strewn fissure between walls of sheer and gloomy precipices.

It was a place to which men would come for no legitimate purpose; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven, and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay "laurel-h.e.l.ls" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut, and used familiarly, tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit, and they came separately from divergent directions.

When Sim arrived they were waiting for their informal quorum, but at last a dozen had a.s.sembled and in other places there were other dozens.

Each group had a commander freshly come from a sort of staff meeting, which had already decided the larger questions of policy. There would be little debate here, only the sharp giving of orders which none would venture to disobey.

Rick Joyce took inventory of the faces and mentally called his roll.

Then he nodded his head and said brusquely, "We're ready ter go ahead now."

The men lounged about him with a pretence of stoical composure, but under that guise was a mighty disquiet, for even in an organization of his own upbuilding the mountaineer frets against the despotic power that says "thou shall" and "thou shalt not."