The Roof Tree

by Charles Neville Buck

Bas, he reflected, was busy to-day conferring with those leaders of the riders from whom he ostensibly stood aloof, and the man who was hunting him down followed trail after trail along roads that could be ridden and "traces" that must be tramped. Casual inquiries along the highway served only to send him hither and yon on a series of wild goose chases.

This man and that had seen Bas Rowlett, and "Bas he seemed right profoundly shocked an' sore distressed," they said. They gave Thornton the best directions they could, and as the clan-leader rode on they nodded sage heads and reflected that it was both natural and becoming that he should be seeking for Bas at such a time. The man who had been murdered last night was Rowlett's kinsman and Thornton was Rowlett's friend. Both men were prominent, and it was a time for sober counsel. The shadow of the riders lay over the country broader and deeper than that which the mountains cast across the valleys.

So from early forenoon until almost sunset Parish Thornton went doggedly and vainly on with his man-hunt. Yet he set his teeth and swore that he must not fail; that he could not afford to fail. He would go home and have supper with Dorothy, then start out afresh.

He was threading a blind and narrow pathway homeward between laurel thickets, when he came to the spot where he and Bas Rowlett had stood on that other June night a year ago, the spot where the shot rang out that had wounded him.

There he paused in meditation, summing up in his mind the many things that had happened since then, and the sinister strands of Rowlett's influence that ran defacingly through the whole pattern.

Below that shelf of rock, kissed by the long shadow of the mountain, lay the valley with its loop of quietly moving water. The roof of his own house was a patch of gray and the canopy of his own tree a spot of green beneath him. At one end, the ledge on which he stood broke away in a precipice that dropped two hundred feet, in sheer and perpendicular abruptness, to a rock-strewn gorge below. Elsewhere it shelved off into the steep slope down which Bas had carried him.

Suddenly Thornton raised his head with abrupt alertness. He thought he had heard the breaking of a twig somewhere in the thicket, and he drew back until he himself was hidden.

Five minutes later the man he had spent the day seeking emerged alone from the woods and stood ten yards from his own hiding place.

This was a coincidence too remarkable and providential to be credited, thought Thornton, yet it was no coincidence at all. Bas knew of the drama that was to be played out that night—a drama of which he was the anonymous author—and he was coming, in leisurely fashion, to a lookout from which he could witness its climax while he still held to his pose of detachment.

The master-conspirator seated himself on a boulder and wiped his brow, for he had been walking fast. A little later he glanced up, to see bent upon him a pair of silent eyes whose message could not be misread. In one hand Thornton held a cocked revolver, in the other a sealed envelope.