As gray dawn quickens gradually out of darkness, a numbed indignation in his pupils began to liven into unquenchable wrath.
"I hain't been able ter talk ... ter these hyar kindly neighbours of mine...." he faltered, "but somehow, I believes I kin with you."
"I'm hyar ter s'arve ye, howsoever I kin, Hump," Parish assured him. "Ef ye was my own father I couldn't love ye better."
Hump Doane held out a crumpled paper that had been crushed in his taut hand, and Thornton stepping to the light smoothed it and read, pencilled in roughly printed characters, "A warning to all traitors."
"Hit war pinned on him...." explained the father. "Ther riders done hit ... he'd done jined 'em ... an' he quit."
Parish Thornton stood with the light full on his face and the paper grasped in his hand. The angle of his clean-cut jaw seemed to harden from the plastic texture of flesh to the hardness of granite, and in his narrowed eyes spurted jets of those blue-and-white fires that hold intensest heat.
"I always aimed ter raise him up in godly ways," went on the father with self-accusing misery, "but I war a hard man, an' I never gentled him none. I reckon I driv him ter others ... thet debauched an' ruint him."
He had been, to that point, the man conscious only of his hurt, but now his face became contorted and livid with a sudden hurricane of rage.
"But them thet hanged him," he cried out in abrupt violence, "vile es they war ... they warn't nothin' ter ther man thet made a dupe out of him ... ther man thet egged them on.... Bas Rowlett's accountable ter me—an' afore ther sun sets I aims ter stand over his dead body!"
Parish Thornton flinched at the name. He had turned his face toward the sheeted figure, but now he wheeled back, crouching and straightening with the spasmodic quickness of a boxer who sidesteps a blow.