smoking,
yet he was bent on making it seem evident and certain that someone had
sought to assassinate him, and so it was not at the breast that he aimed
his rifle but at the peak of the tall-crowned slouch hat.

The sights of his rifle showed clean as the rustless barrel rested on a
log. Bas himself lay stretched full-length in that position which gives
the greatest surety of marksmanship.

His temples were moist with nervous sweat, and once he took the rifle
down from his shoulder and flexed his muscles in rest. Then he aimed
again and pressed the trigger.

He could not tarry now, but he paused long enough to see the punctured
hat spin downward from the aged head and the old man rise, bewildered
but unhurt, with a dazed hand experimentally rubbing his white crown.
Then Bas grinned, and edging backward through the brush as a woman
rushed screaming out, he made his way to the house of Parish Thornton.
The first gun had been fixed in the new Harper-Doane war.

Bas knew that the tidings of the supposed attempt on the patriarch's
life would go winging rapidly through the community, and it pleased his
alibi instinct to be at his enemy's house at a time which would seem
almost contemporaneous with the shooting. To have reached his own place
would have taken longer.

But when he arrived Thornton was not indoors. He was strong enough now
to move about the place a little, though he still fretted under a
weakness that galled him, so Bas found Dorothy alone.

"I reckon, leetle gal," he made a sympathetic beginning, "yore heart's
right sore these days since yore gran'pap died. My own heart's sore fer
ye, too."

"He was mighty devoted ter ye, Bas," said the girl, and the man who had
just come from an act of perfidy nodded a grave head.

"I don't know whether he ever named hit ter ye, Dorothy," came his slow
words, "but thet day when ye war wedded he tuck me off ter one side an'
besought me always ter stand by ye--an' befriend ye."

"Ye acted mouty true-hearted thet day, Bas," she made acknowledgment and
the conspirator responded with a melancholy smile.

"I reckon I don't hev ter tell ye, I'd do most anything fer ye, leetle
gal. I'd hed hopes thet didn't turn out--but I kin still be a friend.
I'd go through hell fer ye any time."

He rose suddenly from his seat on the kitchen threshold, and into his
eyes came a flash of feeling. She thought it love, but there was an
unexpectedly greedy quality in it that frightened her