The Roof Tree

by Charles Neville Buck

One of these fall afternoons when the skies were lowering and Parish was out in the woods with Sim Squires she remembered it with a pang of guilty neglect such as one might feel for an ill-used friend, and went to the attic to take it out of its hiding and renew her acquaintance.

But when she opened the old horsehide trunk it was not there and panic straightway seized her.

If the yellowed document were lost, she felt that a guardian spirit had removed its talisman from the house, and since she was a practical soul, she remembered, too, that the note-release bearing Bas Rowlett's signature had been folded between its pages! With her present understanding of Bas that thought made her heart miss its beat.

Dorothy was almost sure she had replaced it in the trunk after reading it the last time, yet she was not quite certain, and when Parish came back she was waiting for him with anxiety-brimming eyes. She told him with alarm in her face of the missing diary and of the receipt which had been enclosed and he looked grave, but rather with the air of sentimental than material interest.

"Thet old diary-book was in ther chist not very long ago," he declared. "I went up thar an' got ther receipt out when I fared over ter Sam Opdyke's arraignin'. I tuck hit ter ther co'te-house an' put hit ter record thet day—ther receipt, I means."

"How did ye git inter ther chist without my unlockin' hit?" she inquired with a relief much more material than sentimental, and he laughed.

"Thet old brass key," he responded, "war in yore key basket—an ye warn't in ther house right then, so I jest holped myself."

That brass key and that ancient record became the theme of conversation for two other people about the same time.

In the abandoned cabin which had come to be the headquarters of Bas Rowlett in receiving reports from, and giving instructions to, his secret agents, he had a talk with his spy Sim Squires, who had come by appointment to meet him there. In the sick yellow of the lantern light the lieutenant had drawn from his pocket and handed to his chief the sheaf of paper roughly bound in home-made covers of cloth which he had been commissioned to abstract from its hiding place.

"Hit's done tuck ye everlastin'ly ter git yore hands on this thing," commented Rowlett, sourly, as he held it, still unopened, before him. "But seems like ye've done got holt of hit at last."