The Roof Tree Part 44

The river itself was no longer a clear ribbon but a turgid flood-tide that swept along uprooted trees and snags of foam-lathered drift.

There was as yet neither bud nor leaf, and the air was raw and bone-chilling, but everywhere was the restless stirring of dormant life impulses and uneasy hints of labour-pains.

While the river sucked at its mud bank and lapped its inundated lowlands, the walnut tree in the yard above the high-water mark sang sagas of rebirth through the night as the wind gave tongue in its naked branches.

But in the breast of Sim Squires this spirit of restlessness was more than an uneasy stirring. It was an obsession.

He knew that when spring, or at the latest early summer, brought firmness to the mired highways and deeper cover to the woods, the organization of which he was a prominent member would strike, and stake its success or failure upon decisive issue. Then Parish Thornton, and a handful of lesser designates, would die--or else the "riders" would encounter defeat and see their leaders go to the penitentiary.

Bas Rowlett, himself a traitor to the Ku Klux, had promised Sim safety, but Sim had never known Bas to keep faith, and he did not trust him now.

Yet, should he break with the evil forces to which he stood allied, Sim's peril became only the greater. So he lay awake through these gusty nights cudgelling his brain for a solution, and at the end, when spring had come with her first gracious touches of Judas-tree and wild plum blossoming, he made up his mind.

Sim Squires came to his decision one balmy afternoon and went, with a caution that could not have been greater had he contemplated murder, to the house of Hump Doane, when he knew the old man to be alone.

His design, after all, was a simple one for a man versed in the art of double-crossing and triple-crossing.

If the riders prevailed he was safe enough, by reason of his charter members.h.i.+p, and none of his brother vigilantes suspected that his partic.i.p.ation had been unwilling. But they might not prevail, and, in that event, it was well to have a friend among the victors.

He meant, therefore, to tell Hump Doane some things that Hump Doane wished very much to know, but he would go to the confessional under such oath of secrecy as could not recoil upon him. Then whoever triumphed, be it Bas, the white-caps, or the forces of law and order, he would have a protector on the winning side.

The hunchback met his furtive visitor at the stile and walked with him back into the chill woods where they were safe from observation. The drawn face and the frightened eyes told him in advance that this would be no ordinary interview, yet he was unprepared for what he heard.

When Squires had hinted that he came heavy with tidings of gravest import, but must be given guarantees of protection before he spoke, Hump Doane sat reflecting dubiously upon the matter, then he shook his head.

"I don't jest see whar hit profits me ter know things thet I kain't make no use of," he demurred, and Sim Squires bent forward with haunted eyes.

"They're _facts_," he protested. "Ye kin use them facts, only ye mustn't tell no man whar ye got 'em from."

"Go ahead, then," decided Hump Doane after weighing the proposition even further. "I'm hearkenin', an' I stands pledged ter hold my counsel es ter yore part in tellin' me."

The sun was sinking toward the horizon and the woods were cold. The informer rose and walked back and forth on the soggy carpet of rotted leaves with hands that clasped and unclasped themselves at his back. He was under a stress of feeling that bordered on collapse.

The dog that has been kicked and knocked about from puppyhood has in it the acc.u.mulated viciousness of his long injuries. Such a beast is ready to run amuck, frothing at the mouth, and Sim Squires was not unlike that dog. He had debated this step through days and nights of hate and terror. He had faltered and vacillated. Now he had come, and the long-repressed pa.s.sions had broken all his dams of reserve, transforming him, as if with an epilepsy. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks were putty-yellow and, had he been a dog instead of a man, his fangs would have been slathered with foam.

Heretofore he had spoken hesitantly and cautiously. Now like the epileptic or the mad dog, he burst into a volcanic outpouring in which wild words tumbled upon themselves in a cataract of boiling abandon. His fists were clenched and veins stood out on his face.

"I'm ther man thet shot Parish Thornton when he fust come hyar," was his sensational beginning, "but albeit my hand sighted ther gun an' pulled ther trigger hit was another man's d.a.m.n dirty heart that contrived ther act an' another man's dollars thet paid fer hit. I was plum fo'ced ter do hit by a low-lived feller thet hed done got me whar he wanted me--a feller thet bull-dozed an' dogged me an' didn't suffer me ter call my soul my own--a feller thet I hates an' dreads like I don't nuver expect ter hate Satan in h.e.l.l!"

The informer broke off there and stood a pitiable picture of rage and cowardice, shaken with tearless sobs of unwonted emotion.

"Some men ruins women," he rushed on, "an' some ruins other men. _He_ done thet ter me--an' whenever I boggled or balked he cracked his whip anew--an' I wasn't nuthin' but his pore white n.i.g.g.e.r thet obeyed him. I ached ter kill him an' I didn't even dast ter contrary him. His name's Bas Rowlett!"

The recital broke off and the speaker stood trembling from head to foot.

Then the hearer who had listened paled to the roots of his s.h.a.ggy hair and his gargoyle face became a mask of tragic fury.

At first Hump Doane did not trust himself to speak and when he did, there was a moment in which the other feared him almost more than he feared Bas Rowlett.

For the words of the hunchback came like a roar of thunder and he seemed on the verge of leaping at his visitor's throat.

"Afore G.o.d, ye self-confessed, murderin' liar," he bellowed, "don't seek ter accuse Bas Rowlett ter me in no sich perjury! He's my kinsman an' my friend--an' I knows ye lies. Ef ye ever lets words like them cross yore lips ergin in my hearin' I'll t'ar ther tongue outen yore mouth with these two hands of mine!"

For a s.p.a.ce they stood there in silence, the old man glaring, the younger slowly coming back from his mania of emotion as from a trance.

Perhaps had Sim sought to insist on his story he would never have been allowed to finish it, but in that little interval of pause Hump Doane's pa.s.sion also pa.s.sed, as pa.s.sions too violent to endure must pa.s.s.

After the first unsuspected shock, it was borne in on him that there are confessions which may not be doubted, and that of them this was one. His mind began to reaccommodate itself, and after a little he said in a voice of deadly coldness:

"Howsoever, now thet ye've started, go on. I'll hear ye out."

"I'm tellin' ye gospel truth, an' sometimes ther truth hurts," insisted Sim. "Bas war jealous of Dorothy Harper--an' I didn't dast ter deny him. He paid me a patch of river-bottom land fer ther job, albeit I failed."

Hump Doane stood, his ugly face seamed with a scowl of incredulous sternness, his hand twitching at the ends of his long and gorilla-like arms. "Go on," he reiterated, "don't keep me waitin'."

Under the evening sky, standing rigid with emotion, Squires doggedly went on. He told, abating nothing, the whole wretched story from his own knowledge: how Bas had sought to bring on the war afresh in order that his enemy Parish Thornton might perish in its flaming; how with the same end in view Bas had shot at Old Jim; how he himself had been sent to trail Thornton to Virginia that his master might inform upon him, and how while the Virginian was away, in jeopardy of his life, the arch-conspirator had pursued his wife, until she, being afraid to tell her husband, had come near killing the tormentor herself.

"Hit war Bas thet stirred up ther riders into formin'," declared the spy in conclusion. "He didn't nuver take no part hisself, but he used two men thet didn't dast disobey him--two men thet he rules over like n.i.g.g.e.r slaves--an' ther riders hev got one object over an' above everything else, thet he aims ter hev 'em carry through. Thet is ter kill Parish Thornton."

Hump Doane walked over and stood looking up from his squat, toad-like deformity into the face of the man who towered above him, yet in his eyes was the blaze with which a giant might look down on a pigmy.

"Ye says he used two men, Sim," the falsetto of the hunchback's voice was as sharp as a dagger's point. "Ef ye came hyar fer any honest purpose, I calls on ye, now, ter give me them two names."

Squires' face turned even paler than it had been. The veins along his temple were pulsing, and his words caught and hung in hesitancy; but he gulped and said in a forced voice: "I was one of 'em, Hump."

"An' t'other one? Who war he?"

Again the informer hesitated, this time longer than before, but in the end he said dully:

"Hump, t'other one war--yore own boy, Pete."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Strangely enough it was as though the old man's capacity for being shocked or infuriated had been exhausted. There was no roar of maddened wrath or denunciation of denial now. Never had Sim seen on a human face such a despair of stricken grief. Hump Doane only pa.s.sed an open palm across his forehead. Somehow this hideous recital, which had made him an old man in the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes, blasting him like a thunder bolt, could not be seriously doubted. It was not allegation but revelation.

Pete was young and impressionable. He was clay upon the wheel of Bas Rowlett's domination, and of late he had been much away from home.

The father tried to straighten his twisted shoulders and his warped back. He turned his eyes to the west where the fires of sunset were crimson and purple, then he spoke again in a manner of recovered and hard-held self-control.

"Ef these things ye tells me be true," he said, "I hev need ter know 'em an' I'm beholden ter ye. Ef they're false ye've done struck me a blow I kain't nuver fergive, an' I don't see how you an' me kin both go on livin'. I aims ter find out fer myself, an' meanwhile--I'll keep my pledge ter ye." He paused, then the leader triumphed over the stricken individual.

"Keep right on goin' ter every meetin' ther riders holds," he directed, quietly. "Don't suffer 'em ter suspicion no falsity."

But when Sim had left him Hump Doane stood there while the sunset faded, while the afterglow livened and died, while the cold twilight settled.

He was thinking of the son he loved and despised, of the soft human metal that had been hammered into debauchery by this other man whom he had trusted.