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The exact wording of the warrant was after all of no particular consequence. The announcement of its purport had carried all its necessary significance. Yet, before he spoke again, Kenneth Thornton, also known as Parish Thornton and as Cal Maggard these names being included in the document as aliases read it from preamble to signature and seal at the end.
They knowed that despite all ther bad blood an' hatefulness me an' Jim was friends an' thet more then we loved our own kin an' our own blood, we loved peace fer every man ... us two!" Cal Maggard was watching the fine old face the face out of which life's hardship and crudity had not quenched the majesty of unassuming steadfastness.
Neither of them made any comment just then, but as they turned away Rowlett murmured, as though to himself: "Of course, any feller kin eat peanuts." All that afternoon Cal Maggard lay hidden in the thicket overlooking his front door and, as a volunteer co-sentinel, Bas Rowlett lay in a "laurel-hell" watching from the rear, but their vigilante was unrewarded.
As the menacing face hung over him, Maggard saw it school itself slowly into a hard composure and read a peremptory warning for silence in the eyes. The outstretched hands had already touched him, and now they remained holding his shoulders as the voice answered: "Cal jest woke up. I reckon he war outen his head, an' I'm heftin' him up so's he kin breath freer."
"I reckon ef he feels sartin he's got enough ter live fer he kin kinderly holp nature along right lavish." That same day Maggard opened his eyes while the girl was sitting by his bedside. His smile was less dazzling out of a thin, white face, than it had been through the tan of health, but such as it was he flashed it on her gallantly.
"Why don't ye try yore own hand at him jest fer ther fun of ther thing?" He pointed to a dead tree-top perhaps ten yards more distant than his own target had been, where hung one of those great ivory-billed woodpeckers that are near extinction now except in the solitudes of these wild hills. Maggard smiled again, as he shook his head noncommittally yet he reached for the rifle.
"I'm obleeged, Bas." Maggard's voice was faint but steady now. "Thar's a thing I've got ter tell ye afore my stren'th gives out." Beguiled by a seeming absence of suspicion into the belief that Maggard had just then awakened to consciousness, Rowlett ensconced himself on the bedside and nodded an unctuous sympathy. The other closed his eyes and spoke calmly and without raising his lids.
"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.
Then came a concussion as though the earth had broken like a bursted emery wheel, and a hall of white fire seemed to pass through the walls of the place. Dorothy pitched forward, stunned, to the floor and at the pit of his stomach Cal Maggard felt a sudden sickness of shock that passed as instantly as it had come.
He himself had not escaped his pursuers by too wide a margin, but he had escaped. He had come by a circuitous course to this place where he hoped to find quiet under his assumed name of Maggard, nor was his choice of refuge haphazard.
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