ebased fruit of the gallows tree, its dignity would be forever
broken! There in the flooding moonlight of the white-and-blue night it
was protesting with a moan of uneasy rustling. The thing could not be
tolerated--and suddenly, but clearly, Dorothy knew it. This man deserved
death. No false pity could blind her to that truth, and death must ride
at the saddle cantle of such as he; must some day overtake him. It might
overtake him to-night--but it must not be here.

"Bas," she broke out in a low and trembling voice of abrupt decision, "I
kain't suffer hit ter happen--I kain't do hit."

The varied strains and terrors of that day and night had made her voice
a thing of gasps and catching breath, but while the man stood silent she
gathered her scattered powers and went on, ignoring him and talking to
the tree.

"He needs killin', God knows," she declared, "but he mustn't die on yore
branches, old Roof Tree--hit was love thet planted ye--an' love thet
planted ye back ergin when hate hed tore ye up by ther roots--I kain't
suffer ye ter be defiled!"

She broke off, and somehow the voice that stirred up there seemed to
alter from its note of suffering to the long-drawn sigh of relief; the
calm of a tranquilized spirit.

The young woman stood for a moment straight and slim, but with such an
eased heart as might come from answered prayer in the cloistered dimness
of a cathedral.

It was, to her, a cathedral that towered there above her, with its
single column; a place hallowed by mercy, a zone of sanctuary; a spot
where vengeance had always been thwarted; where malevolence had
failed--and her voice came in a rapt whisper.

"Ye stands ternight fer ther same things ye've always stud fer," she
said, "ye stands fer home an' decency--fer ther restin' place of dead
foreparents--an' ther bornin' of new gin'rations--fer green leaves an'
happiness--an' ther only death ye gives countenance to is thet of folks
thet goes straight ter God, an' not them thet's destined fer torment."

Inside the room the conclave maintained a grim silence. The shuttered
window screened from their sight the interview to which they were
submitting with a rude sense of affording the man they had condemned
some substitute for extreme unction: an interval to shrive his soul with
penitence and prayer.

But through the opening of the broken slat, high up in the shutter which
gave sliding room, passed the rope, and at its other end stood the man
upon whose