As anxiously as Dorothy followed the rise and fall in the tide of her lover's strength it is doubtful if her anxiety was keener than that of Bas Rowlett, who began to feel that he had been cheated.
Unless something unforeseen altered the trend of his improvement, Cal Maggard would recover. He would not keep his oath to avenge his way-laying before the next full moon because it would require other weeks to restore his whole strength and give back to him the use of his gun hand, but the essential fact remained that he would not die.
Bas had entered into a compact based upon his belief that the other would die—a compact which as the days passed became a thing concrete enough and actual enough to take reckoning of.
Of course Bas meant to kill his enemy. As matters now stood he must kill him—but he would only enhance his own peril by seeking to forestall the day when his agreement left him free to act.
So Bas still came to inquire with the solicitude of seeming friendship, but outside that house he was busy breathing life into a scheme of broad and parlous scope, and in all but a literal sense that scheme was a violation of his oath-bound compact.
It was when Cal sat propped against pillows in a rocking chair, with his right arm in a splint, and old Caleb smoked his pipe on the other side of the window, that Dorothy suddenly went over and standing by Maggard, laid her arm across his shoulders.
"Gran'pap," she said with a steadiness that hid its underlying trepidation, "Cal an' me aims ter wed ... an' we seeks yore blessin'."
The old mountaineer sat up as though an explosion had shaken him out of his drowsy complacency. The pipe that he held in his thin old fingers dropped to the floor and spilled its ashes unnoted.
He gazed at them with the amazement of one who has been sitting blindly by while unseen forces have had birth and growth at his elbow.
"Wed?" he exclaimed at last in an injured voice. "Why, I hedn't nuver suspicioned hit was nuthin' but jest plain charity fer a stranger thet hed suffered a sore hurt."