high cheekbones with a
flush that spread and dyed his bull-like neck.

"All right, then," he barked out, at last casting aside all subterfuge.
"Ef they h'arkens ter what I says I'll tell 'em ter string ye up, hyar
an' now, ter thet thar same tree you an' yore woman sots sich store by!
I'll tell 'em ter teach Virginny meddlers what hit costs ter come
trespassin' in Kaintuck." He was breathing thickly with the excited
reaction from his recent terror and despair.

"Men," he bellowed, almost jubilantly, "don't waste no time--ther
gallows tree stands ready. Hit's right thar by ther front porch."

Dorothy had listened in a stunned silence. Her face was parchment-pale
but she was hardly able yet to grasp the sudden turn of events to
irremediable tragedy.

The irrevocable meaning of the thing she had feared in her dreams seemed
too vast to comprehend when it drew near her, and she had not clearly
realized that minutes now--and few of them--stood between her husband
and his death. Her scornful eyes had been dwelling on the one figure she
had recognized: the figure of Sim Squires, whom it had never occurred to
her to distrust.

But when several night-riders pushed her brusquely from her place beside
her man, and drew his hands together at his back and began whipping
cords about his unresisting wrists, the horror broke on her in its
ghastly fullness and nearness.

The stress they laid on the mention of the tree had brought her out of
the coma of her dazed condition into an acute agony of reality.

There was a fiendish symbolism in their intent.... The man they called a
usurper must die on the very tree that gave their home its significance,
and no other instrument of vengeance would satisfy them. The old
bitterness had begun generations ago when the renegade who "painted his
face and went to the Indians" had sought to destroy it, and happiness
with it. Now his descendant was renewing the warfare on the spot where
it had begun, and the tree was again the centre of the drama.

Dorothy Thornton thought that her heart would burst with the terrific
pressure of her despair and helplessness.

Then her knees weakened and she would have fallen had she not reeled
back against the corner of the mantel, and a low, heart-broken moan
came, long drawn, from her lips.

There was nothing to be done--yet every moment before death was a moment
of life, and submission meant death. In the woman's eyes blazed an
unappeasable hunger for batt