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 battle, and as they met those of her husband they flashed the unspoken exhortation: "Don't submit ... die fighting!" It was the old dogma of mountain ferocity, but Parish Thornton knew its futility and shook his head. Then he answered her silent incitement in words: "Hit's too late, Dorothy.... I'd only git you kilt as well as me.... I reckon they hain't grudgin' _you_ none, es things stands now." But the mob leader laughed, and turning his face to the wife, he ruthlessly tore away even that vestige of reassurance. "We hain't makin' no brash promises erbout ther woman, Thornton," he brutally announced. "I read in her eyes jest now thet she _ree_co'nized one of us--an' hit hain't safe ter know too much." They were still working at the ropes on the prisoner's wrists and the knots were not yet secure. The man had gauged his situation and resigned himself to die like a slaughter-house animal, instead of a mountain lion--in order to save his wife. Now they denied him that. Suddenly his face went black and his eyes became torrential with fury. His lunging movement was as swift and powerful as a tiger-spring, and his transition from quiet to earthquake violence as abrupt and deadly as the current of the electric chair.