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"Ye won't be hyar ter train him up fer vengeance," came the sneering voice of Bas Rowlett who had stood clear of that conflict; and glaring at him Thornton managed a bitter laugh. "He won't need no trainin' up," he retorted. "Hit's bred in his blood an' his bone ter hate snakes an' kill 'em.
On the threshold of the back door sat Bas Rowlett gazing outward, and his physical position, beyond the margin of the group proper, seemed to typify a mental attitude of detachment from those mounting tides of passion that held sway within.
All of Rowlett's friendliness and loyalty had been only an alibi! It had been Rowlett who had led him, unsuspecting, into ambush! Maggard's coat and pistol-holster hung at the headboard of his bed. Now with a cat-soft tread upon the creaking puncheons of the floor Rowlett approached them.
Rowlett had not been ordered to raise his hands, but he held them ostentatiously still and wide of his body. The revolver in its holster under his armpit might as well have been at home, for even had both started with an equal chance in the legerdemain of drawing and firing, he knew his master, and as it was, he stood covered.
Some score of fellers war shot, countin' men an' boys, and old Mose Rowlett, thet was headin' ther Doanes, war kilt dead. Then when both sides war plum frazzled ragged they patched up a truce betwixt 'em an' ther gist of ther matter war that old Burrell Thornton agreed ter leave Kaintuck an' not never ter come back no more.
For the words of the hunchback came like a roar of thunder and he seemed on the verge of leaping at his visitor's throat. "Afore God, ye self-confessed, murderin' liar," he bellowed, "don't seek ter accuse Bas Rowlett ter me in no sich perjury! He's my kinsman an' my friend an' I knows ye lies.
But the teeth of the conspirator closed on the angle of the jawbone instead of the neck and found no fleshy hold, and while they twisted and writhed with weird incoherencies of sound going up in the smother of dust, Bas Rowlett felt the closing of iron fingers on his throat.
In the abandoned cabin which had come to be the headquarters of Bas Rowlett in receiving reports from, and giving instructions to, his secret agents, he had a talk with his spy Sim Squires, who had come by appointment to meet him there.
That silent smile of his was beginning to become provocative to his companion, as though in it dwelt something of quiet self-superiority. The weapon came to the stranger's shoulder with a cat-like quickness of motion and cracked with seemingly no interval of aim-taking, and the bird fell as the squirrel had done. Rowlett flushed to his high cheekbones.
I aim to stay here and go wherever I takes the notion. I aim to be as peaceable as I'm suffered to be and as warlike as I has to be. "I wonders, now," mused Rowlett, half-aloud, "who that damn craven mout be?" Suddenly his swarthy face brightened with an idea and he volunteered: "Let me hev thet thar paper.
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