Now he gulped down the tight constriction of his throat and ordered, "Go on! Tell hit all!"
Rowlett again thrust himself forward, but Rick Joyce, scarcely looking at him, sent him reeling backward with an open-handed blow against his chest.
With torrential and cascading onrush came the capitulation of the long and black record against the master plotter from its beginning in jealousy to its end in betrayal of the Ku Klux.
"He come over hyar when this man Thornton lay in jail an' sought ter make love ter thet woman," shouted the frenzied witness, but Dorothy, who had been leaning unnerved and dazed against the wall, raised a warning hand and interrupted.
"Stop!" she shouted. "I've done told Parish all thet! Whatever he heers erbout this man, he heers from me. We don't need no other testimony!"
Then it was that the room began to waver and spin about Dorothy Thornton, until with the drone of the hired man's voice diminishing in her ears she fell swooning, and was lifted to a chair.
When her eyes opened—even before they opened—she was conscious again of that voice, but now it was one of dominating confidence, stinging with invective; scourging with accusations that could be verified; ripping away to its unbelievable nakedness all the falsity of Bas Rowlett's record—a voice of triumph.
In the altered attitudes of the attentive figures the woman could read that the accuser was no longer talking to a hostile audience, but to one capriciously grown receptive, and educated to the deceits of the accused. They knew now how Bas had craftily set the Harpers and the Doanes at one another's throats, and how Thornton had tranquilized them; they knew how their own grievances against the man they had come to hang had been trumped up from carefully nourished misconceptions. But above all that, they saw how they themselves had been dupes and tools, encouraged to organize and jeopardize their necks only that they might act as executioners of Rowlett's private enemy, and then be thrown to the wolves of the law.
"I come inter this house," declared Sim Squires, "at Bas Rowlett's behest, ter spy on Parish Thornton—an' I j'ined ther riders fer ther same reason—but I'm done with lyin' now! Hit's Bas Rowlett thet made a fool of me an' seeks ter make convicts outen you."
He paused; then wheeling once more he walked slowly, step by step, to where Bas Rowlett stood cowering.