t."

Hump Doane stirred and looked stupidly at him for a space, then with
laboured slowness he came to his feet, and his only answer was the
eloquent gesture with which one hand swept toward the dead body.

A stupefaction of grief had held him since they had brought him in this
morning from the road where they had found him, and thought had moved so
haltingly that it had scarcely been thought at all.

But now the vitalizing light of sympathy and outrage in those other eyes
seemed to rouse him out of his long coma with an awakening like that
which comes after ether.

As gray dawn quickens gradually out of darkness, a numbed indignation in
his pupils began to liven into unquenchable wrath.

"I hain't been able ter talk ... ter these hyar kindly neighbours of
mine...." he faltered, "but somehow, I believes I kin with _you_."

"I'm hyar ter s'arve ye, howsoever I kin, Hump," Parish assured him. "Ef
ye was my own father I couldn't love ye better."

Hump Doane held out a crumpled paper that had been crushed in his taut
hand, and Thornton stepping to the light smoothed it and read, pencilled
in roughly printed characters, "A warning to all traitors."

"Hit war pinned on him...." explained the father. "Ther riders done
hit ... _he'd_ done jined 'em ... an' he quit."

Parish Thornton stood with the light full on his face and the paper
grasped in his hand. The angle of his clean-cut jaw seemed to harden
from the plastic texture of flesh to the hardness of granite, and in his
narrowed eyes spurted jets of those blue-and-white fires that hold
intensest heat.

"I always aimed ter raise him up in godly ways," went on the father with
self-accusing misery, "but I war a hard man, an' I never gentled him
none. I reckon I driv him ter others ... thet debauched an' ruint him."

He had been, to that point, the man conscious only of his hurt, but now
his face became contorted and livid with a sudden hurricane of rage.

"But them thet hanged him," he cried out in abrupt violence, "vile es
they war ... they warn't nothin' ter ther man thet made a dupe out of
him ... ther man thet egged them on.... Bas Rowlett's accountable ter
me--an' afore ther sun sets I aims ter stand over his dead body!"

Parish Thornton flinched at the name. He had turned his face toward the
sheeted figure, but now he wheeled back, crouching and straightening
with the spasmodic quickness of a boxer who sidesteps a blow.

"Bas Rowlett!" he echoed in a low bu