The Roof Tree

by Charles Neville Buck

Through a community stunned and appalled into breathlessness the news ran like quicksilver, and the easy-pacing mule from Parish Thornton's barn was lathered with sweat as the young man called upon it to annihilate time and space over the broken ways between his house and that of his stricken friend.

At Hump Doane's stile Thornton flung himself out of his saddle and paused for no word with those neighbours who stood gathered about the dooryard. He heard the whine of a saw and the pounding of a hammer off somewhere to the rear, and knew that volunteer and amateur undertakers were fashioning a coffin—but he hurled himself like a human hurricane across the threshold and demanded briefly: "War's Hump at?"

The room was dim and murky at its corners, but through the two doors poured a flood of morning light, and into its shaft projected an unhinged shutter supported on two saw-horses, with a sheeted burden upon it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too numbed for full acuteness of feeling.

Other figures to the number of two or three moved as silently as dark wraiths about the place, but when Parish entered they drifted out, leaving him alone with his friend, and one of the doors closed upon their going.

Then the lightnings of outraged wrath that seemed to crackle in the young clansman's eyes stilled themselves and altered into something like tenderness as he moved with catlike softness of footfall to where the elder man sat, and let a hand fall on his malformed shoulder.

"Hump," he said, briefly, "my heart's plum sufferin' fer ye. I jest heared of hit."

Hump Doane stirred and looked stupidly at him for a space, then with laboured slowness he came to his feet, and his only answer was the eloquent gesture with which one hand swept toward the dead body.

A stupefaction of grief had held him since they had brought him in this morning from the road where they had found him, and thought had moved so haltingly that it had scarcely been thought at all.

But now the vitalizing light of sympathy and outrage in those other eyes seemed to rouse him out of his long coma with an awakening like that which comes after ether.