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 membership, and none of his brother vigilantes suspected that his participation had been unwilling. But they might not prevail, and, in that event, it was well to have a friend among the victors.