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The Roof Tree, a fiction by Charles Neville Buck |
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Chapter 9 |
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_ CHAPTER IX Cal Maggard lay unmoving as the old man's chair creaked. Over there with his back turned toward the fire stood Bas Rowlett, his barrel-like chest swelling heavily with that excitement which he sought to conceal. To Caleb Harper, serenely unsuspicious, the churlish sullenness of the eyes that resented his intrusion, went unmarked. It was an intervention that had come between the wounded man and immediate death, and now Rowlett cursed himself for a temporizing fool who had lost his chance. He stood with feet wide apart and his magnified shadow falling gigantically across floor and wall--across the bed, too, on which his intended victim lay defenseless. If Cal Maggard had been kneeling with his neck on the guillotine block the intense burden of his suspense could hardly have been greater. So long as Caleb Harper sat there, with his benign old face open-eyed in wakefulness, death would stand grudgingly aloof, staring at the wounded man yet held in leash. If those eyes closed in sleep the restive executioner would hardly permit himself to be the third time thwarted. Yet the present reprieve would for a few moments endure, since the assassin would hesitate to goad his victim to any appeal for help. Slowly the fire began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of death approached with the thickening shadows. He craved only sleep yet knew that it meant death. With a morose passion closely akin to mania the thoughts of the other man, standing with hands clenched at his back, were running in turbulent freshet. To have understood them at all one must have seen far under the surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of vicious degeneracy. Yet with this brain-warping brutality went a self-protective disguise of fair-seeming and candour. Rowlett's infatuation for Dorothy Harper had been of a piece with his perverse nature--always a flame of hot passion and never a steadfast light of unselfish love. He had received little enough encouragement from the girl herself, but old Caleb Harper had looked upon him with partiality, and since, to his own mind, possession was the essential thing and reciprocated affection a minor consideration, he had until now been confident of success. Once he had married Dorothy Harper, he meant to break her to his will, as one breaks a spirited horse, and he had entertained no misgivings as to his final mastery. Once unmasked, Bas Rowlett could never regain his lost semblance of virtue--and this battered creature in the bed was the only accuser who could unmask him. If the newcomer's death had been desirable before, it was now imperative. The clock ticked on. The logs whitened, and small hissing tongues of blue flame crept about them where there had been flares of vermilion. Like overstrained cat-gut drawn tauter and tauter until the moment of its snapping is imminent, the tension of that waiting grew more crucial and tortured. Bit by bit into Cal Maggard's gropings after a plan crept the beginnings of an idea, though sometimes under the stupefying waves of drowsiness he lost his thread of thought. Old Caleb was not yet asleep, and as the room grew chill he shivered in his chair, and rose slowly, complaining of the misery in his joints. He threw fresh fuel on the fire and then, over-wearied with the night's excitement, let his head fall forward on his breast and his breath lengthen to a snore. Then in a low but peremptory voice Maggard said: "Rowlett, come hyar." With cautious but willing footfall Rowlett approached, but before he reached the bedside a curt undertone warned him, "Stop right thar ... ef ye draws nigher I'll call out. Kin ye hear me?... I aims ter talk low." "I'm hearkenin'." "All right. Give me yore pledge, full-solemn an' in ther sight of God Almighty ... thet ye'll hold yore hand till I gits well ... or else dies." "Whar'fore would I do thet?" "I'll tell you fer why. Ef ye don't ... I'll wake old Caleb up an' sw'ar ter a dyin' statement ... an' I'll tell ther full, total truth.... Does ye agree?" The other hesitated then evaded the question. "S'posin' I does give ye my pledge ... what then?" "Then ef I dies what I knows'll die with me.... But ef I lives ... me an' you'll settle this matter betwixt ourselves so soon es I kin walk abroad." That Maggard would ever leave that bed save to be borne to his grave seemed violently improbable, and if his silence could be assured while he lay there, success for the plotter would after all be complete. Yet Rowlett pretended to ponder the proposition which he burned ardently to accept. "Why air ye willin' ter make thet compact with me?" he inquired dubiously, and the other answered promptly: "Because ter send ye ter sulter in ther penitenshery wouldn't pleasure me ner content me ... no more then ter see ye unchurched fer tale-bearin'. Ye've got ter _die_ under my own hands.... Ef ye makes oath an' abides by hit ... ye needn't be afeared thet I won't keep mine, too." For a brief interval the standing man withheld his answer, but that was only for the sake of appearances. Then he nodded his head. "I gives ye my hand on hit. I sw'ars." Something like a grunt of bitter laughter came from the bed. "Thet hain't enough ... fotch me a Bible." "I don't know whar hit's at." "I reckon they've got one--in a godly dwellin'-house like this. Find hit--an' speedily ... or I'll call out." Rowlett turned and left the room, and presently he returned bearing a cumbersome and unmistakable tome. "Now kneel down," came the command from the bed, and the command was reluctantly obeyed. "Repeat these hyar words atter me ... 'I swa'rs, in ther sight an' hearin' of God Almighty....'" and from there the words ran double, low voiced from two throats, "'thet till sich time as Cal Maggard kin walk abroad, full rekivered ... I won't make no effort ter harm ner discomfort him ... no wise, guise ner fashion.... Ef I breaks this pledge I prays God ter punish me ... with ruin an' death an' damnation in hell hyaratter!" "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. Sometimes in the bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a miscalculated step. Sometimes, higher up, a path wide enough only for the setting down of foot before foot skirted a cliff's edge--and the storm might at any point have washed even that precarious thoroughfare away in a gap like a bite taken out of a soft apple. But along those uncertain trails, obeying something surer than human intelligence, the beast piloted his rider with an intuitive steadiness, feeling for his foothold, and the girl, being almost as wise as he, forebore from any interference of command save by the encouragement of a kindly voice. Once in a swollen ford where the current had come boiling up mount and rider were lifted and swept downstream, and for a matter of long moments it was a toss-up whether water-power or mule-power would prevail. Through the caldron roar of storm-fed waters, then, the girl could hear the heavy, straining breath in the beast's lungs, and the strong lashing of its swimming legs. She caught her lip till it bled between her teeth and clung tight and steady, knowing her danger but seeking to add no ounce of difficulty to the battle for strength and equilibrium of the animal under her. And they had won through and were coming back. At her side now rode Uncle Jason, the man of diverse parts who was justice of the peace, adviser in dissension, and self-taught practitioner of medicine. He had been roused out of his sleep and had required no urging. He had listened, saddled, and come, and now, when behind them lay the harder part of the journey, they heard other hoofs on the road and made out a shadowy horseman who wheeled his mount to ride beside them. Then for the first time in a long while the girl opened her tight-pressed lips to shape the gasping question which she was almost terrified to ask. "How is he, Bas? Air he still alive?" When at last they stood by the bedside, the volunteer doctor pressed his head to the hardly stirring chest and took the inert wrist between his fingers. Then he straightened up and shook a dubious head. "Thar hain't but jist only a flicker of pulse-beat left," he declared. "Mebby he mout live through hit--but ef he does hit'll p'int-blank astonish me." _ |
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