CHAPTER XXXI
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 passed an open palm across his forehead. Somehow this hideous recital, which had made him an old man in the space 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.
He was acknowledging, too, that if the riders numbered among their secret adherents such men as Bas Rowlett and his own boy, his fight was upon a poison that had struck deeper and more malignantly into the arteries of the community than he had heretofore dreamed.