The Roof Tree

by Charles Neville Buck

"Ye'll hev ter take hold of this," he directed, "we've got t'other end indoors. When ye're ready for us—or should he seek ter git away—jest give hit a tight jerk or two. We won't interfere with ye ner come out till we gits thet signal—but don't suffer him ter parley overlong."

Then the man left her, and the woman found herself standing there in the darkness with a terrible sense of Death hovering at her shoulder.

For a moment neither spoke, and Dorothy Thornton lifted her eyes to the tree from which had always emanated an influence of peace. She needed that message of peace now. She looked at the dark human figure, robbed of its menace, robbed of all its own paltry arrogance, and the furies that had torn her ebbed and subsided into a sickness of contemptuous pity.

Then the cloud drifted away from the moon and the world stood again out of darkness into silvery light; the breeze that had brought that brightening brought, too, a low wailing voice from high overhead, where the walnut tree seemed to sob with some poignant suffering; seemed to strive for the articulate voice that nature had denied it.

That monument to honoured dead could never shed its hallowed spirit of peace again if once it had been outraged with the indignities of a gibbet! If once it bore, instead of its own sweetly wholesome produce, that debased fruit of the gallows tree, its dignity would be forever broken! There in the flooding moonlight of the white-and-blue night it was protesting with a moan of uneasy rustling. The thing could not be tolerated—and suddenly, but clearly, Dorothy knew it. This man deserved death. No false pity could blind her to that truth, and death must ride at the saddle cantle of such as he; must some day overtake him. It might overtake him to-night—but it must not be here.

"Bas," she broke out in a low and trembling voice of abrupt decision, "I kain't suffer hit ter happen—I kain't do hit."

The varied strains and terrors of that day and night had made her voice a thing of gasps and catching breath, but while the man stood silent she gathered her scattered powers and went on, ignoring him and talking to the tree.

"He needs killin', God knows," she declared, "but he mustn't die on yore branches, old Roof Tree—hit was love thet planted ye—an' love thet planted ye back ergin when hate hed tore ye up by ther roots—I kain't suffer ye ter be defiled!"

She broke off, and somehow the voice that stirred up there seemed to alter from its note of suffering to the long-drawn sigh of relief; the calm of a tranquilized spirit.

The young woman stood for a moment straight and slim, but with such an eased heart as might come from answered prayer in the cloistered dimness of a cathedral.