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He war too pizen mean fer folks ter abide him, an' his goin' away balanced up ther deadenin' of Mose Rowlett." "Ye sez thet old hellion used ter dwell in this hyar house onc't?" "Yes, sir, thet's what I'm noratin' ter ye. Atter he put out his fire an' called his dawgs an' went away Caleb Harper tuck over ther leadin' of ther Harpers and my uncle Jim Rowlett did likewise fer ther Doanes.
When he had sworn to Bas Rowlett that the moon should not "full again" before he avenged his betrayal with death, he had taken that oath solemnly and, he sincerely believed, in the sight of God. It was, therefore, an oath that could be neither abandoned nor modified.
Yet he set his teeth and swore that he must not fail; that he could not afford to fail. He would go home and have supper with Dorothy, then start out afresh. He was threading a blind and narrow pathway homeward between laurel thickets, when he came to the spot where he and Bas Rowlett had stood on that other June night a year ago, the spot where the shot rang out that had wounded him.
From the door Bas Rowlett raised an even voice of hypocrisy: "I knows ther new man better then any of ye, I reckon ... an' I believes him when he says he wants a quiet life ... but I don't skeercely deem ther Harpers hev any notion of heedin' him."
Bas Rowlett came last, and his face bore the marks of a sleepless night, but he had undertaken a role and he purposed to play it to its end. In after days, days for which Bas Rowlett was planning now, he meant that every man who looked back on that wedding should remember and say of him: "Bas, he war thar plum friendly. Nobody couldn't be a man's enemy an' act ther way Bas acted."
He paused, and saw the face of his enemy go green and pasty as Rowlett licked his lips yet left his hands hanging at his sides. At length the intriguer demanded, "Or else what?" Thornton knew then beyond doubt what he already believed. This man was quailing and had no stomach for the fair combat of duel yet he would never relinquish his determination to glut his hatred by subterfuge.
The master-conspirator seated himself on a boulder and wiped his brow, for he had been walking fast. A little later he glanced up, to see bent upon him a pair of silent eyes whose message could not be misread. In one hand Thornton held a cocked revolver, in the other a sealed envelope. Rowlett rose to his feet and went pale, and Parish advanced holding the paper out to him.
Pity, mercy, and tenderness were qualities as inherent in her as perfume in a wild flower, but there was something else in her as well as there is death in some perfumes. If he had been actually a poisonous reptile instead of a snake soul in the body of a man Bas Rowlett could have been to her, just then, no less human.
It was to old Jim Rowlett that Parish Thornton turned now, ignoring the spokesman who had addressed him, and his voice was clear and even: "When I come hyar from Virginny," he declared, "I didn't never seek no leadership an' ther Thorntons in gin'ral didn't never press me ter take over none but thar was men hyar thet wouldn't look on me in no other guise, an them men war you Doanes."
He had injured no man, offended no woman or child, yet the malevolent spirit of circumstance that had made a refugee of him in Virginia seemed to have pursued him and found him out. Perhaps Rowlett had been right. The Harper girl was, among other mountain women, like a moon among stars.
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