Charles Neville Buck

“ Already Uncle Jase stood with his back to the broad, straight column whose canopy of leafage spread a green roof between the tall, waving grass that served as a carpet and the blue of a smiling sky.
Through branches, themselves as heavy and stalwart as young trees, and through the myriads of arrow-pointed leaves that rustled as they sifted and shifted the gold flakes of sunlight, sounded the low, mysterious harping of wind-fingers as light and yet as profound as those of some dreaming organist. ”

“ She found herself coming out to stand under the tree often, because it seemed to her that here she could feel the presence of the man who had gone away on a parlous mission—and it was during that time of his absence that she found more to fear in a seemingly trivial matter than in the disquieting talk of a mysterious body of avengers stirring into life. ”

“ CHAPTER XXXIV When Parish Thornton had brought his captive down the slope that afternoon he had left his rifle in safe concealment, not wishing to hamper himself with any weapon save the revolver, which had never left his palm until this moment.
Now with the instant gone in which he might have used it to stem the tide of invasion, he was not fool enough to fire. A silent and steady current of black-clad humanity was still flowing inward across the threshold, and every man was armed. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIV From the shallow porch of a house over which brooded the dismal spirit of neglect and shiftlessness a woman stood looking out with eyes that should have been young, but were old with the age of a heart and spirit gone slack. ”

“ After a brief pause, Hump Doane wheeled and addressed himself to his companions. "I reckon thet's all, men," he said, briefly, and Cal Maggard recognized that the silence with which they turned away from him was more ominous than if they had berated him.
Yet before he reached the stile Doane halted and stood irresolute with his gaze groundward and his chin on his breast, then summoning his fellows with a jerk of the thumb, he turned back to the spot where Cal Maggard had remained unmoving at the base of the great tree, and his face though still solemn was no longer wrathful. ”

“ No man of either faction stood with a more uncompromising sincerity for law and peace—but Hump Doane viewed life through the eyes of one who has suffered the afflictions and mortification of a cripple in a land that accepts life in physical aspects. ”

“ About the door of Thornton's cabin in the gray freshness of that summer dawn stood a clump of silent men in whose indignant eyes burned a sombre light which boded no good for the would-be murderer if he were found. ”

“ Indian summer is a false glory and a brief one, with alluring beauty like the music of a swan-song, and it had been in an Indian summer of present possession that she had lived from day to day, refusing to contemplate the future—but that could not go on. ”

“ Then, in the subtle influence of the moonlight and the night that awoke all the young fires of dreaming, she half closed her eyes and seemed to see a woman who looked like herself yet who—in the phantasy of that moment—was arrayed in a gown of silk and small satin slippers, looking up into the eyes of a man whose hair was dark and whose chin was cleft and whose smile flashed upon white teeth. ”

“ The walnut tree, no longer lashed into storm incantations, stood now in quiet majesty, solitary though, at a respectful distance, surrounded. The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the ranges, the earth spilled over influences of sentient youth. ”

“ Out at the tumble-down stable she saddled and mounted a mule that plodded with a limp through a blackness like a sea of freezing ink, and she shivered as she sat in the old carpet-cushioned side-saddle and flapped a long switch monotonously upon the flanks of her "ridin'-critter." ”

“ 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 God, 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 space they stood there in silence, the old man glaring, the younger slowly coming back from his mania of emotion as from a trance. ”

“ For the present I bear the word of steadfastness and courage. For the future, I bear the promise of hope."
Dorothy's lissome beauty took on a touch of something supernatural from the magic of moonlight and soft shadow and the man slipped his arm about her, while they looked off across the tempered nocturne of the hills and heard the lullaby of the night breeze in the branches overhead.
"I war thinkin', Cal," said the girl in a hushed voice, "of what would of happened ter me ef ye hedn't come. I'd be ther lonesomest body in ther mountings of Kaintuck—but, thank God, ye did come." ”

“ The Otari, or hill warriors, had set their feet into the out-trail of flight and acknowledged the chagrin of defeat, all except Dragging Canoe, the ablest and most implacable of their chiefs who, sullenly refusing to smoke the pipe, had drawn far away to the south, to sulk out his wrath and await more promising auspices. ”

“ Doane, stood less than five feet to the crown of his battered hat, and the hat sat on an enormous head out of which looked the seamed and distorted face of a hunchback. But his shoulders were so broad and his arms so long and huge that the man had the seeming of gorilla hideousness and gorilla power.
The face, too, despite its soured scowl, held the alert{90} of a keen mentality and was dominated by eyes whose sleeping fires men did not lightly seek to fan into blazes of wrath. ”

“ My staunch column gives you your standard of uprightness ... beneath me red men and white have fought and whispered of love ... as my bud has come to leaf and in turn fallen so generation has followed generation. ”

“ Jerry trembled, but he bit into his lower lip and let himself be martyred without much whimpering. They stripped him in a lonely gorge two miles from his abode and tied him, face inward, to a sapling. They cow-hided him, then treated him to a light coat of tar and feathers and sent him home with most moral and solemn admonitions against future brutalities. There the victims of that harshness for which he had been "regulated" wept over him and swore that a better husband and father had never lived. ”

“ 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{266} against encroachment by title 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 did not know that this tree which grows stiff of head and narrow of shoulder in the woods alters its character when man provides it with a spacious setting, and that it becomes the noblest of our native growths. ”

“ The mother had survived him only long enough to bring her baby into the world and then die broken-hearted because the child was not a boy whom she might suckle from the hatred in her own breast and rear as a zealot dedicated to avenging his father. ”

“ Juries are presumed to be all logic; in fact, they are two-thirds emotion—and if you appear for the first time in that courtroom at precisely the right moment with your youth and wholesomeness and loyalty, your arrival will do more for your husband than anything short of an alibi. ”

“ Each of the two was acting under orders that day, and each was spreading an infection whose virus sought to stir into rebirth the war which the truce had so long held in merciful abeyance.
Aaron Capper, who was as narrow yet as religious as an Inquisition priest, had always believed the Thorntons to be God's chosen and the Doanes to be children of Satan. The bonds of enforced peace had galled him heavily. Three sons had been killed in the battle at Claytown and he felt that any truce made before he had evened his score left him wronged and abandoned by his kinsmen. ”

“ For a space the silence held save for the tempest of sobs that were not unhappy and that gradually subsided, but after a little the rapt happiness on the man's face became clouded under a thought that carried a heavy burden of anxiety and he seemed groping for words that were needed for some dreaded confession.
"When a man fust falls in love," he said, "he hain't got time ter think of nuthin' else ... then all ther balance of matters comes back ... an' needs ter be fronted. Thar's things I've got ter tell ye, Dorothy." ”

“ The diabolical thought had come to him that by shaking the prone figure he could cause a hemorrhage that would assure death—and the evil fire in his eyes as his hands stole out toward his intended victim betrayed his reflection.
The seemingly insensible listener, with a Spartan effort, held his pale face empty of betrayal as the two impulsive hands came closer.
But as quickly the arms drew back, and the expression clouded with doubt.
"No...." reflected Bas without words. "No, hit ain't needful nohow ... an' Jase Burrell mout detect I'd done hit." ”

“ Just now a young girl stood in the large unfurnished room that served the house as an attic—and she held a folded paper in her hand.
She had drawn out of its dusty corner a small and quaintly shaped horsehide trunk upon which, in spots, the hair still adhered. The storage-room that could furnish forth its mate must be one whose proprietors held inviolate relics of long-gone days, for its like has{12} not been made since the life of America was slenderly strung along the Atlantic seaboard and the bison ranged about his salt licks east of the Mississippi. ”

“ He sketched for her the grim narrative of that brief drama in the log cabin beyond the river and of the guilt he had assumed. He told it with many needful pauses for breath, but refused to stop until the story had reached its conclusion, and as she listened, the girl's face mirrored many emotions, but the first unguarded shock of horror melted entirely away and did not return.
"Ef ye'd acted any other fashion," came her prompt and spirited declaration when the recital reached its end, "I couldn't nuther love ye ner esteem ye. Ye tuck blame on yoreself ter save a woman." ”

“ Ye kin even murder a woman ef ye've got a mind ter—but thar's a baby in this house thet's comin' ter manhood some day."
"Ye won't be hyar ter train him up fer vengeance," came the sneering voice of Bas Rowlett who had stood clear of that conflict; and glaring at him Thornton managed a bitter laugh.{325}
"He won't need no trainin' up," he retorted. "Hit's bred in his blood an' his bone ter hate snakes an' kill 'em. He's drunk hit in at his mother's breast an' breathed hit in ther air.... He'll settle our scores some day!" ”

“ Here, where our faces are graven with anxieties that besette our waking and sleeping, it seemeth that most men have forgotten ye very fashion of laughter. Joy seemes killed out of them, as by a bitter frost, yet he hath ever kept ye clear peale of merriment in his voice and its flash in his eye and ye smile that showes his white teeth. ”

“ The dog that has been kicked and knocked about from puppyhood has in it the accumulated 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. ”

“ 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. ”