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It was when Cal sat propped against pillows in a rocking chair, with his right arm in a splint, and old Caleb smoked his pipe on the other side of the window, that Dorothy suddenly went over and standing by Maggard, laid her arm across his shoulders. "Gran'pap," she said with a steadiness that hid its underlying trepidation, "Cal an' me aims ter wed ... an' we seeks yore blessin'."
A man kain't skeercely plead with his enemy but he kin with his friend an' that's how I hoped I'd be met." "Yore friend is what I'd love ter be." Maggard stood with his hand resting on the bark of the tree, as though out of it he might hope to draw some virtue from the far past which it commemorated or from the dust of those wiser men whose graves its roots penetrated.
"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."
But Maggard did know it had been through the leafage of that splendid tree that he had first glimpsed the girl's face, and he did know that never before had he seen a thing of trunk and branch and leaf that had so impressed him with its stateliness and vital beauty. If he were master at that house, he thought, he would not cut it down.
In that conclusion lay solace. The next morning found Maggard busied about his dooryard, albeit with his rifle standing ready to hand, and to-day he wore his shirt with the arm-pit pistol holster under its cover.
I don't jedgmatically know nothin' erbout yore affairs," he nodded his head toward Maggard. "So fur's I've got any means ter tell, ye mout be independent rich or ye mout not hev nothin' only ther shirt an' pants ye sots thar in ... but thet kin go by, too. Ef my gal kain't be content withouten ye, she kin sheer with ye ... an' I aims ter leave her a good farm without no debt on hit."
The man who had "hired him killed" and whom in turn he meant to kill stood in the room where he himself lay too weak to rise from his bed, and toward that man he nodded his head. "Good mornin', Bas," he accosted, and the other replied, "Howdy, Cal." Then Maggard turned to the others. "This man, Bas Rowlett," he said, "sought to marry Dorothy hisself.
Cal Maggard sat gazing into the blaze that leaped and eddied fitfully under the blackened chimney. In one hand drooped the sheet of paper that he had found fastened to his door and in the other the pipe which had been forgotten and had died. He looked over his shoulder at the door which he had left ajar.
"So long es he lived," came the hunchback's quick and stingingly sharp retort, "we didn't need ter ask no questions atall an' thar warn't no prophets amongst us ter foresay he was goin' ter die suddent-like, without tellin' us what we needed ter know. Will ye give us them facts thet we're askin' fer or won't ye?" "I won't," said Maggard, shortly.
"Hain't ye nuver heered tell of ther Harper-Doane war?" he demanded and Maggard shook an unabashed head. "I hain't nuver heered no jedgmatic details," he amended, "I knowed thar was sich-like warfare goin' on here one time. My folks used ter dwell in Kaintuck onc't but hit war afore my own day."
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