zed
the last drop of manly resistance, "I come hyar ter crave this woman's
pardon--I still wants ter do thet--without nobody else ter heer what I
says."

"Ef she's willin' ter listen, we'll let ye talk," acceded Squires, who
found himself unchallenged spokesman now. "But we won't take no chances
with ye. When ther rope's over ther limb an' everything's ready, then
ye kin hev yore say."

* * * * *

Outside the night was as gracious as had been the last, when Old Hump
Doane had sat waiting vainly for the return of his son; but across the
moonlit sky drifted squadrons of fleecy cloud sails, and through the
plumed head of the mighty walnut sounded the restive whisper of a
breeze.

The house stood squarely blocked with cobalt shadows about it, and the
hills were brooding in blue-black immensities--but over the valley was a
flooding wash of platinum and silver.

Fragrances and quiet cadences stole along the warm current, but the song
of the whippoorwill was genuine now, and plaintive with a saddened
sweetness.

The walnut tree itself, a child of the forest that had, through
generations, been the friend of man, stood like a monument in the
silence and majesty of its own long memories.

Under its base, where the roots sank deep into the foundations of the
enduring hills, slept the dead who had loved it long ago. Perhaps in its
pungent and aromatic sap ran something of the converted life and essence
that had been their blood. Its bole, five feet of stalwart diameter,
rose straight and tapering to the first right-angle limbs, each in
itself almost a tree. Its multitude of lance-head leaves swept outward
and upward in countless succession to the feathery crests that stirred
seventy feet overhead--seeming to brush the large, low-hanging stars
that the moon had dimmed.

All was tranquil and idyllic there--until the house door opened and a
line of men filed out, bringing to his shameful end a human creature who
shambled with the wretchedness of broken nerves.

Over the lowest branch, with business-like precision, Sim Squires
pitched a stone on the end of a long cord, and to the cord he fastened
the rope's end. All that was needed now was the weight which the rope
was to lift, and in the blue-ink shadow that mercifully cloaked it and
made it vague they placed the bound figure of their man.

CHAPTER XXXVI

As though to mask a picture of such violence the tree's heavy canopy
made th