Читать книгу The Roof Tree - Charles Buck - Страница 4

A week later Dorothy led Kenneth Thornton and Peter Doane to a place where beside a huge boulder a "spring-branch" gushed into a natural basin of stone. The ferns grew thick there, and the moss lay deep and green, but over the spot, with branches spreading nobly and its head high-reared, stood an ancient walnut and in the narrow circle of open ground at its base grew a young tree perhaps three feet tall.

"I want to move that baby tree," said Dorothy, and now her voice became vibrant, "to a place where, when it has grown tall, it can stand as a monument over my mother's grave."

She paused, and the two young men offered no comment. Each was watching the glow in her eyes and feeling that, to her, this ceremony meant something more than the mere setting out of a random seedling.

"It will stand guard over our home," she went on, and her eyes took on an almost dreamy far-awayness. "It will be shade in summer and a reminder of coming spring in winter. It will look down on people as they live and die – and are born. At last," she concluded, "when I come to die myself, I want to be buried under it, too."

When the young walnut had been lifted clear and its roots packed with some of its own native earth Kenneth Thornton started away carrying it in advance while Dorothy and Peter followed.

But before they came to the open space young Doane stopped on the path and barred the girl's way. "Dorothy," he began, awkwardly, and with painful embarrassment, "I've got something thet must needs be said – an' I don't rightly know how to say it."

She looked up into his set face and smiled.

"Can I help you say it?" she inquired, and he burst out passionately, "Until he come, you seemed to like me. Now you don't think of nobody else but jest him … and I hates him."

"If it's hatred you want to talk about," she said, reproachfully, "I don't think I can help you after all."

"Hatred of him," he hastened to explain. "I've done lived in the woods – an' I ain't never learned pretty graces … but I can't live without you, an' if he comes betwixt us…"

The girl raised a hand.

"Peter," she said, slowly, "we've been good friends, you and I. I want to go on being good friends with you … but that's all I can say."

"And him," demanded the young man, with white cheeks and passion-shaken voice, "what of him?"

"He asked me an hour ago," she answered, frankly. "We're going to be married."

The face of the backwoodsman worked spasmodically for a moment with an agitation against which his stoic training was no defense. When his passion permitted speech he said briefly, "I wishes ye joy of him – damn him!"

Then he wheeled and disappeared in the tangle.

"I'm sorry, dearest," declared Thornton when she had told him the story and his arms had slipped tenderly about her, "that I've cost you a friend, but I'm proud beyond telling that this tree was planted on the day you declared for me. To me too, it's a monument now."

That night the moon was clouded until late but broke through its shrouding before Dorothy went to bed, and she slipped out to look at the young shoot and perhaps to think of the man who had taken her in his arms there.

But as she approached she saw no standing shape and when she reached the spot she found that the freshly placed earth had been dug up. The tree had been spitefully dragged from its place and left lying with its roots extending up instead of its branches. Plainly it was an act of mean vandalism and Dorothy feared an emblem of deeper threat as well.

Already in the girl's thought this newly planted monument had become a sacred thing. To let it be so soon destroyed would be an evil augury and submission to a desecration. To tell Kenneth Thornton would kindle his resentment and provoke a dangerous quarrel. She herself must remedy the matter. So Dorothy Parish went for her spade, and late into the night she laboured at that second transplanting.

The roots had not had time to dry or burn, because they had been upturned so short a time, and before the girl went to her bed the task was finished, and she dreamed of birds nesting in broad branches and other home-making thoughts more intimate, but also of vague dangers and grudge-bearings.

But the next morning her face blanched when her father roused her before dawn.

"Kenneth Thornton was waylaid and shot last night," he said, briefly. "They fear he's dying. He's been asking for you."

About the door of Thornton's cabin in the gray freshness of that summer dawn stood a clump of silent men in whose indignant eyes burned a sombre light which boded no good for the would-be murderer if he were found. As the girl came up, with her face pale and grief-stricken, they drew back on either side opening passageway for her, and Dorothy went directly to the bed.

Caleb, though, halted at the threshold in response to a hand laid detainingly on his fringed sleeve.

"We hates to accuse a white man of a deed like this," said Jake Rowlett, a time-gnawed old Indian fighter, "but Thornton made a statement to us – under oath. He recognized Peter Doane – and Peter would of scalped him as well as shot him only he heard somebody rustlin' the brush an' got away."

"Peter Doane!" Caleb pressed a shaken hand to his bewildered forehead. "Peter Doane – but I can't credit that! Peter has sat by my hearth night after night … Peter has eaten my salt … Peter has been our staunchest reliance!"

Caleb's glance travelled searchingly about the circle of faces and read there unanimous conviction and grim determination.

"Peter has done growed to be half Injin hisself," came the decided answer. "Thornton didn't swear to no lie when he knew he mout be dyin'."

Caleb straightened decisively and his eyes blazed in spurts of wrath.

"Go after him then," he ordered. "It won't do to let him get away."

The pursuit parties that spread into the woods travelled fast and studiously – yet with little hope of success.

No man better than Peter Doane himself would recognize his desperation of plight – and if he had "gone bad" there was but one road for his feet and the security of the colony depended upon his thwarting.

Pioneer chronicles crowned with anathema unspeakable their small but infamous roster of white renegades, headed by the hated name of Samuel Girty; renegades who had "painted their faces and gone to the Indians!"

These were the unforgivably damned!

Now at the council-fires of Yellow-Jacket, even at the war-lodge of Dragging Canoe himself, the voluntary coming of Peter Doane would mean feasting and jubilation and a promise of future atrocities.

Inside Dorothy bent over the bed and saw the eyes of her lover open slowly and painfully. His lips parted in a ghost of his old, flashing smile.

"Is the tree safe?" he whispered.

The girl stooped and slipped an arm under the man's shoulders. The masses of her night-dark hair fell brushing his face in a fragrant cascade and her deep eyes were wide, unmasking to his gaze all the candid fears and intensities of her love. Then as her lips met his in the first kiss she had ever given him, unasked, it seemed to him that a current of exaltation and vitality swept into him that death could not overcome.

"I'm going to get well," he told her. "Life is too full – and without you, heaven would be empty."

The next pack train did not arrive. But several weeks later a single, half-famished survivor stumbled into the fort. His hands were bound, his tongue swollen from thirst, and about his shoulders dangled a hideous necklace of white scalps. When he had been restored to speech he delivered the message for which his life had been spared.

"This is what's left of your pack train," was the insolent word that Peter Doane – now calling himself Chief Mad-dog, had sent back to his former comrades. "The balance has gone on to Yellow Jacket, but some day I will come back for Thornton's scalp – and my squaw."

As the summer waned the young walnut tree sent down its roots to vigour and imperceptibly lifted its crest. Its leaves did not wither but gained in greenness and lustre, and as it prospered so Kenneth Thornton also prospered, until when the season of corn shucking came again, he and Dorothy stood beside it, and Caleb, who had received his credentials as a justice of the peace, read for them the ritual of marriage.

At the adze-smoothed table of a house which, for all its pioneer crudity, reflected the spirit of tradition-loving inhabitants, sat a young woman whose dark hair hung braided and whose dark eyes looked up from time to time in thoughtful reminiscence.

She was writing with a goose-quill which she dipped into an ink-horn, and as she nibbled at the end of her pen one might have seen that whatever she was setting down lay close to her heart.

"Since I can not tell," she wrote, "whether or not I shall survive ye comings of that new life upon which all my thoughts are set and should such judgment be His Wille, I want that ye deare child shall have this record of ye days its father and I spent here in these forest hills so remote from ye sea and ye rivers of our dear Virginia and ye gentle refinements we put behind us to become pioneers. This wish leads me to the writing of a journall."

A shadow in the doorway cut the shaft of sunlight and the woman at the writing table turned. On the threshold stood Kenneth Thornton and by the hand he held a savage-visaged child clad in breech clout and moccasins, but otherwise naked. Its eyes held the beady sharpness of the Indian, and though hardly past babyhood, it stood haughtily rigid and expressionless.

The face of the man was not flashing its smile now, but deeply grave, and as his wife's gaze questioned him he spoke slowly.

"This is Peter Doane's boy," he said, briefly.

Dorothy Thornton shrank back with a gesture of repulsion, and the man went on:

"A squaw with a travelling party of friendly Indians brought him in. Mad-dog Doane is dead. His life ended in a drunken brawl in an Otari village – but before he died he asked that the child be brought back to us."

"Why?"

"Because," Thornton spoke seriously, "blood can't be silenced when death comes. The squaw said Chief Mad-dog wanted his boy raised to be a white brave… He's half white, of course."

"And he ventured to ask favours of us!" The woman's voice, ordinarily gentle, hardened, and the man led the child over and laid his own hand on her shoulder.

"The child is not to blame," he reminded her. "He's the fruit of madness – but he has human life."

Dorothy rose, inclining her head in reluctant assent.

"I'll fetch him a white child's clothes," she said.

This was the story that the faded pages told and a small part of which Dorothy Harper read as she sat in the lamplight of the attic a century and a quarter later.