The Roof Tree. Charles Buck

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      "An' now," whispered Maggard, "kiss ther book."

      As the weirdly sworn malefactor came slowly to his feet the instinct of craft and perfidy brought him back to the part he must play.

      "Now thet we onderstands one another," he said, slowly, "we're swore enemies atter ye gits well. Meantime, I reckon we'd better go on seemin' plum friendly."

      "Jist like a couple of blood-brothers," assented Maggard with an ironic flash in his eyes, "an' now Blood-brother Bas, go over thar an' set down."

      Rowlett ground his teeth, but he laughed sardonically and walked in leisurely fashion to the hearth.

      There he sat with his feet outspread to the blaze, while he sought solace from his pipe – and failed to find it.

      Possibly stray shreds of delirium and vagary mingled themselves with strands of forced clarity in Cal Maggard's thinking that night, for as he lay there a totally unreasonable comfort stole over him and seemed real.

      He had the feeling that the old tree outside the door still held its beneficent spell and that this magic would regulate for him those elements of chance and luck without which he could not hope to survive until Dorothy and Uncle Jase came back – and Dorothy had started on a hard journey over broken and pitch-black distances.

      Fanciful as was this figment of a sick imagination, the result was the same as though it had been a valid conviction, for after a while Old Man Caleb roused himself and stretched his long arms. Then he rose and peered at the clock with his face close to its dial, and once more he replenished the fire.

      "Hit's past midnight now, Bas," he complained with a querulous note of anxiety in his words. "I'm plum tetchious an' worrited erbout Dorothy."

      For an avowed lover the seated man gave the impression of churlish unresponsiveness as he made his grumbling reply.

      "I reckon she hain't goin' ter come ter no harm. She hain't nobody's sugar ner salt."

      Caleb ran his talon-like fingers through his mane of gray hair and shook his patriarchal head.

      "Ther fords air all plum ragin' an' perilous atter a fresh like this… I hain't a-goin' ter enjoy no ease in my mind ef somebody don't go in s'arch of her – an' hit jedgmatically hain't possible fer me ter go myself."

      Slowly, unwillingly, and with smouldering fury Rowlett rose from his chair.

      He was a self-declared suitor, a man who had boasted that no night was too wild for him to ride, and a refusal in such case would stultify his whole attitude and standing in that house.

      "I reckon ye'll suffer me ter ride yore extry critter, won't ye?" he inquired, glumly, "an' loan me a lantern, too."

      After the setting of the moon the night had become a void of blackness, but it was a void in which shadows crowded, all dark but some more inkily solid than others – and of these shadows some were forests, some precipices, and some chasms lying trap-like between.

      Dorothy Harper and the mule she rode were moving somewhere through this world of sooty obscurity.