The Roof Tree

by Charles Neville Buck

But as Bas lay there, for once prepared to act as executioner in person instead of through a hireling, Kenneth Thornton and Will Turk were nearing the state border, having travelled furtively and unseen by a "trace" that had put the bulk of a mountain between them and ambuscade.

The winter settled after that with a beleaguering of steeps and broken levels under a blockade of stark hardship. Peaks stood naked save for their evergreens, alternately wrapped in snow and viscid with mud. Morning disclosed the highways "all spewed up with frost" and noon found them impassably mired. 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.

Those who did not "have things hung up" felt the pinch of actual suffering, and faces in ill-lighted and more illy ventilated cabins became morose and pessimistic.

Such human soil was fallow for the agitator, and the doctrine which the winter did not halt from travelling was that incitement preached by the "riders."

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 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 had not sought it, but neither, when he realized the conditions, had he evaded it. Now he had made a name of marvellous prowess, which local minstrels wove into their "ballets." He was accounted to be possessed of an almost supernatural courage and invulnerability; of a physical strength and quickness that partook of magic. Men pointed to his record as to that of a sort of superman, and they embellished fact with fable.

He had been the unchallenged leader of the Harpers since that interview with old Aaron Capper, and the ally of Jim Rowlett since his bold ride to Hump Doane's cabin, but now it was plain that this leadership was merging rapidly into one embracing both clans.

Old Jim had not long to live, and since the peace had been reestablished, the Doanes no less than the Harpers began to look to, and to claim as their own, this young man whose personal appeal had laid hold upon their imaginations.

But that is stating one side of the situation that the winter saw solidifying into permanence. There was another.

Every jealousy stirred by this new regime, every element that found itself galled by the rearrangement, was driven to that other influence which had sprung up in the community—and it was an influence which was growing like a young Goliath.