Part 15 (1/2)

Inside, the atmosphere seemed suffocating. The room was so crowded that he did not find Myra's face anywhere. The sheriff was among the dancers, but the fiddles were winding up the set with a last prolonged squeak.

As the sc.r.a.ping ceased, Rankin stood before the sheriff. In the sudden pause of sound and motion his voice sounded distinctly throughout the room.

”I have just killed Dennis Rumpety,” he said.

For ten seconds there was absolute silence; then a rough voice growled, ”Thunder! But you done a good job!”

Upon that everybody began talking at once, and in the midst of the clamor Ed Rankin, the man who loved freedom better than life, was formally placed under arrest.

His trial came off the next day but one. The coroner's inquest had shown death by apoplexy, caused probably by a paroxysm of rage. The jury rendered a verdict of ”involuntary manslaughter.” The sentence was the lowest the law allows: namely, one day's imprisonment with hard labor.

This unlooked-for clemency staggered the prisoner. Oblivious of every fact but the terrible one that Dennis Rumpety had died by his hand, he had nerved himself for what he believed would be his death-blow. The tension had been too great; he could not bear its sudden removal.

”Say, your honor,” he cried, regardless of court etiquette,--”say, your honor, couldn't you lay it on a little heavier?”

”The court sees no reason for altering its decision,” his honor replied, gravely, pa.s.sing on to the delivery of the next sentence.

But after the court had adjourned, the judge stepped up to the prisoner and said, kindly, ”I wouldn't take it too hard, if I were you, Rankin.

We all know that there was no murder in your heart.”

”Yes, there was, your honor. Yes, there was.”

”At any rate, the man's death was clearly not your deed. It was the hand of the Lord that did it.”

”I don't know, your honor,” Rankin persisted. ”It feels to me as though it was me that done it.”

The judge and the lookers-on were puzzled by this persistency. It did not seem in character. For the first time in his life, Rankin felt the need of words. The moral perplexity was too great for him to deal with; he was reaching out for something to take hold of, a thing which his self-contained, crudely disciplined nature had never craved before.

”It's an awful thing to send a soul to h.e.l.l,” he muttered.

Then, in his extremity, he felt a soft touch upon his arm. Myra Beckwith stood beside him.

”Ed,” she said, with the sweet seriousness which had first attracted him, and now at last there was the tone in her voice which he would have given his life to hear,--”Ed, think of the seven souls you have delivered out of h.e.l.l! I was over to see them yesterday.”

The consolation of that voice and touch calmed his troubled spirit, restored him to himself; the nightmare of the last two days faded and slid away. He stood a moment in awkward silence, while Myra's hand rested upon his arm; then, before them all, he laid his hand upon it, and, with the solemnity of a priest before the altar, he said, ”I guess it was the Lord that done it, after all!”

VI

THE LAME GULCH PROFESSOR.

Simon Amberley had never been able to strike root in life, until, some ten years since, he found a congenial soil in that remote fastness of the Rocky Mountains known as Lame Gulch. From the first moment of his arrival there it was borne in upon him that this was the goal of his long, apparently aimless pilgrimage, and he lost no time in securing to himself a foothold, by the simple and inexpensive method of taking up a ranch.

The land he chose was higher up the Gulch than any of the neighboring ranches, and all that it was rich in was views. It ran up the side of a hill, seen from the top of which, the whole Rocky Mountain Range had the appearance of marshalling itself in one grand, exhaustive cyclorama. On every hand were snowy summits forming a t.i.tanic ring which seemed to concentrate upon Lame Gulch; and much of the sense of aloofness and security which was the chief element in Amberley's content came from the illusion which he carefully guarded, that that wall of giants really was impenetrable. He liked, too, to feel himself at a great alt.i.tude above the lower world where he had so long and vainly toiled.

”Nine thousand feet above sea-level!” he would a.s.sure himself in self-congratulatory mood. ”When I come to quit, I sha' n't hev fur to go!” which confidence in the direction his spirit was destined to take, may fairly be accepted as indication of a good conscience.

Amberley had not married, and although he felt the omission to be matter for regret, he had never, as far as his recollection served him, found his wish to do so particularized in favor of any one woman.

”No, I ain't never married,” he reluctantly admitted, when Enoch Baker, his next-door neighbor at Lame Gulch, pressed the point.