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WHEN Sandoria is snowbound it is not so very much quieter, even in its outer aspect, than at any other time; for the monotony of snow is no more complete than the monotony of yellow-gray prairie. Even when, at rare intervals, the snow covers the fences, it is no characteristic landmark which is thus obliterated; no picturesque rustic bars are thus lost to the landscape, no irregular and venerable stone walls. At the best a prairie fence offers nothing more distinctive to the view than a succession of scrawny upright stakes connected by wires invisible at a few rods' distance.
One feature Sandoria boasts, to be sure, which lends a certain distinction to the landscape at every season: namely, a long line of cottonwood-trees following the course of a halfhearted stream known as "the creek." The water-supply is but a grudging one, yet it has proved sufficient not only to induce the growth of cottonwoods, but to raise the tiny collection of houses known as Sandoria to the rank and dignity of a county-seat. For who could doubt the future growth and prosperity of a prairie town rejoicing in the unique advantage of a watercourse?
There is, however, in the modern scheme of things, one agent more potent than running water, and that is the arbitrary, omnipotent, indispensable railroad; and the railroad in its erratic course saw fit to give the cold shoulder to the ambitious little county-seat, left it ten miles to the eastward, and then went zigzagging up to Denver with a conscience as dead as that of the corporation whose creature it was.
Sandoria, unable to retaliate, took its reverses philosophically, and straightway fell into a profound slumber, from which it is thoroughly aroused but once a year. Once a year, in the depth of winter, the much-injured county-seat asserts its rightful dignity; for once a year the court convenes within its borders, and then the whole county becomes a meek tributary to its proper head. With indisputable authority the citizens of the two upstart railroad towns are summoned as jurors; ranchman and cowboy from all the countryside make daily trips in the service of the law to the neglected little county-seat, leaving, as is but just, many a ponderous silver dollar in "sample-room" or "store." At such times the visitors admit that Sandoria is a snug little place, and the new frame court-house a credit to the county, only why did they build a town where you can't see the mountains? Then the Sandorians reply that from the slight elevation west of the town there is a view of the Peak itself,—neither critic nor apologist taking into consideration how rarely men and women ascend their little hills to contemplate the wider glories of life.
To-day the court was sitting, and the town rejoiced. Every man, woman, and child felt the pleasing exhilaration of knowing that something was going forward. The square two-story false fronts of the peak-roofed buildings looked with one-eyed approval upon the thronging men and women, horses and dogs, enlivening the single street of the town. A fervent sun shone gratefully upon the loungers in front of the court-house, where the snow was trodden to the solid consistency of a pavement. The noon recess was nearly over, and all were waiting for the judge and his galaxy of legal lights.
Ed Rankin, a young ranchman from over beyond Emmaville, finding himself among strangers, and being as shy as a coyote, turned in at the court-house door, and was making his way toward the big air-tight stove, when he observed that the room was not empty, as he supposed it would be. In a remote corner sat a sorry-looking group, a woman and three children, their shrinking figures thinly clad, their eyes, red with crying or exposure, glancing apprehensively from side to side. The youngest of the group was a boy of ten; he, like all the others, had the look of a hunted creature.
Rankin walked across the room, his footsteps muffled by the sawdust with which the floor was plentifully strewn. Yet, soft as his tread was, the four shivering creatures were visibly startled by it. The young ranchman passed within "the bar" and stood with his back to the stove. He tried to whistle, but he could not do it. He looked about the room, seeking some object to divert his thoughts. Bare walls and rows of empty benches outside the bar; within that mystic boundary all the usual furnishings of the immediate precincts of justice. Three days' steadfast contemplation of these humble stage-properties had pretty well exhausted their interest, and Rankin's attention again wandered to the group in the corner. The more the dry scorching heat of the stove penetrated his own person the colder the woman and children looked. At last he blurted out, in the manner peculiar to him when suffering from embarrassment, "Say, ma'am, why don't you come and get warm?"
The woman started and looked over her shoulder before she answered.
"I guess we'd rather stay where we are," she said.
Incapable of withstanding such a rebuff, Rankin slouched across the room and stood in the open doorway. A three-seated ranch-wagon, drawn by a pair of ill-matched but brisk little broncos, was just coming along the street. The heavy wheels creaked and groaned over the snow, and then stopped before the court-house. The whole "court," which was sojourning with a well-to-do ranchman a couple of miles out of town, had arrived, plentifully wrapped up in mufflers of every color of the rainbow. As judge and lawyers descended before the temple of justice, it was curious to observe how, in spite of bemufflered heads and crimson noses, these representatives of a different civilization contrasted with the prairie people. There was the grave, keen-eyed judge, of humane and dignified bearing; there was the district attorney, shrewd and alert, a rising man; and there were lawyers from the city of Springtown: all this ability and training placed at the service of the remote little prairie community.
"What's on this afternoon, judge?" asked Merriam the storekeeper, with the well-bred familiarity of a prominent citizen.
"The Rumpety case, I believe."
"Not much good, I suppose."
"I'm afraid not," said the judge, glancing as he passed at the shivering woman and children. "I wonder if they have had any dinner," he queried, with sudden solicitude.
"Yes. My wife looked after that. She took 'em over a mess of stuff. They looked scared of their lives to eat it, but it's safe inside of 'em now." And the kind, red-faced storekeeper hugged himself visibly at the thought.
The court assembled.
Within the bar a group of chairs had already been taken possession of by the dames and belles of Sandoria and the neighboring ranches, to whom court-week is the equivalent of carnival, opera, or races in more favored regions; and where, indeed, could a more striking drama be presented for their delectation than here, where friends and neighbors played the leading parts?
The court assembled; lawyers and stenographer took their places; the clerk stood in readiness; the judge mounted the bench; and lo! the historic dignity of a court of justice had descended upon that rude stage, and all was ready for whatever comedy or tragedy might be to enact upon it.
The judge, referring to the list, announced that the next case would be "The people of the State of Colorado against Dennis Rumpety." Then, being called, Dennis Rumpety walked down the court-room and passed within the bar.
The man looked fifty or thereabouts; a short, thick-set figure, with a large head covered with thick iron-gray hair. The smooth-shaven face was a peculiar one, being broad in its outline, with the features, especially the eyes, small and close together. The short, bushy eyebrows met above a fine, clean-cut nose; the jaws were heavy and brutal; yet the menace of the face was not in these, but in the thin straight lips which closed like the shears of Fate. A cruel smile gathered about the lips as he answered the questions of the court. There was something peculiarly incongruous in the jovial, happy-go-lucky name to which this man answered.
"Mr. Rumpety," the judge asked, "have you provided yourself with legal advice?"
"No, your honor," the man replied, with a strong north-country brogue. "No, sorr! I've got no use for the laryers."
"You are prepared, then, to argue your own case?"
"I lave me case in the hands of me fahmily. Their testimony will clear me from the false accusations of me innimies. If thim as"
"That will do, Mr. Rumpety."
"If thim as are"
"Mr. Rumpety, that will do."
The judge invariably spoke in a low tone of voice, but it was not often that he had to repeat himself; the voice of authority has a way of making itself heard.
Rumpety locked his lips again and took his seat. The jury was called, Ed Rankin's name among the first.
Rankin had not heard a word about the Rumpety case, yet the nature of it was as clear to him as daylight. This brute was up for cruelty to those four shivering creatures on the bench in the corner, and they would never dare testify against their persecutor. In all those abject countenances there was not one ray of courage visible.
Now began the process of weeding out the jury, which, when it came his turn, Rumpety performed with a free hand. The prosecution having dismissed some half-dozen men and "passed" the jury, the defendant began his inquisition. He asked no unnecessary questions, gave no reasons for his prejudices, but with unalterable decision declared, "I won't have that man on the jury at all!" or, "I don't want him: he may go."
Rankin was among the first to be thus summarily rejected, and he joined the crowd outside the bar, only half contented with his release. He would have liked "to convict that beast."
It was not much of a compliment to be retained on Rumpety's jury. As often as, in his cursory examination, he came upon an ignorant or brutish face, a complacent smile played about the thin lips, and he said, "That man'll do. He'll do."
And now the trial began. People from the town of Wolverton testified that the boy Victor—poor little defeated Victor!—had appeared in the street fleeing from his home, four miles away, crying that his father was going to kill him. The child's ear had been frightfully bruised and swollen, and there were unmistakable marks of ill usage upon him. The man Rumpety's barbarity was notorious on all the countryside, and this was the third successive year he had been up before the court. It had never been possible to secure a conviction, owing to the dogged persistence of his victims in perjuring themselves in his favor.
As one after another of the trembling family shuffled up to the witness-seat and swore, with hanging head and furtive eyes, that Dennis Rumpety was a kind husband and father, who never punished them "more than was just," this model parent sat with gleaming eyes and an evil smirk, resting his case upon the "testimony of his fahmily." If, occasionally, the witness hesitated, Rumpety would lift his eyebrows or make a slight movement which sent the blood into the pale cheek of woman or child and an added tremor into the faint voice. More than once the district attorney sprang to his feet and cried, "Your honor, I object to this man's intimidating the people's witnesses;" but the intimidation was too subtle to seize hold upon.
Ed Rankin wondered what would happen if somebody should hit the wretch a whack over the head every time he raised an eyebrow. Somehow it struck him that the law was hardly equal to tackling "that kind."
The cross-examination brought out no new evidence.
The district attorney was especially persistent with the boy, the immediate victim in this instance.
"Victor," he said, "state to the jury why you accused your father of abusing you and wanting to kill you, if it wasn't true."
The boy hesitated.
"Don't be afraid to speak the truth. He sha'n't hurt you."
But the boy knew better.
"Sure I lied," he said.
"And what did you lie for?"
"Because I was mad."
"But what made you get mad with such a kind father?"
"Because he came into the cellar and found fault wid me about the potatoes."
"Had he reason to find fault with you?"
The boy looked at his father: one look was enough.
"Yes, sorr. I had an ugly fit on."
Poor little shrinking shivering wretch, with his cowed figure and trembling lips! It is safe to say that an "ugly fit" seized upon every person listening to that futile confession.
Ed Rankin felt the blood boil in his veins. He glanced at Myra Beckwith, sitting among the audience within the bar. She was leaning forward with her hands clasped tightly, watching the boy. There were tears in her eyes, and Rankin blessed her for them.
It was clear that the district attorney himself was a good deal wrought upon, for his manner grew quieter every minute. He sat with his head slightly forward, looking out from under his brows straight into the miserable little face before him. His questions came short and incisive.
"State to the jury again how you hurt your ear."
"Sure I fell off a horse."
"Hm! You fell off a horse and lit on your ear?"
"Yes, sorr."
"And this ingenious tumble took place before the racket in the cellar?"
"Yes, sorr."
"How long before?"
"I guess about a week."
"Your mother testified that it happened the same morning."
"Yes, sorr. It was the same marning."
The poor little chap's answers were getting almost inaudible. He looked spent with misery and apprehension. He gave no sign of tears. His wan, pinched little face looked as if he had cried so much in his short life that there was no longer any relief in it. He was soon dismissed, and went shuffling back to his cold corner.
The woman and girls proved no more available for purposes of justice than the boy. Their testimony was perfectly consistent and absolutely unshakable; it had been thoroughly beaten into them, that was clear.
When it came time for Rumpety to plead his own cause before the jury he proved quite equal to the situation. He planted himself before them and harangued them like any third-rate criminal lawyer.
"I tell you, gen'lemen," he declared, "it's no small b'y's job to keep that fahmily in arder!" and he proceeded to describe them as a cantankerous lot, to be ruled only by that ideal justice tempered by mercy which he was apparently a master in dispensing.
At the last he waxed pathetic, and, in a tearful voice, somewhat at odds with his dry, wicked little eyes, he cried, "I've got a row to hoe, that if there was a lot of men in it they'd have hanged themselves from a rafter!"
With which magnificent climax and a profound bow and flourish, he took his seat, and assumed a pose of invulnerable righteousness from which no invectives nor innuendoes of the prosecuting attorney could move him. He had rested his case on the testimony of his "fahmily," and he knew his jury too well to have much anxiety about their verdict.
The lamps had been lighted long ago, and the early winter evening had set in. The court took a recess, waiting the verdict of the jury. This was the last case on the trial docket for that day.
Rumpety was standing, broad and unblushing, before the stove, whither, in obedience to his commands, his wife and children had also repaired. With true prairie courtesy the men had placed chairs for the Rumpety "fahmily," and an unsuccessful attempt was made to converse with them on indifferent topics.
Rumpety stood, plainly gloating over his victims, the queer gleam in his eyes growing more intense every minute.
Mrs. Rumpety did not share her husband's confidence in the issue. Once, when the judge spoke a kind word to her, she muttered, "Ach, your honor! don't let 'em put the costs on us! Don't let 'em put the costs on us!" and Rankin, standing by, realized with a pang that even this misery could be increased.
The situation was oppressive. Rankin sauntered out of the room and out of the court-house, closing the door behind him. The air was intensely cold; the stars glittered sharply. He liked it outside; he felt the same relief and exhilaration which he had experienced when he first took possession of his "claim," three years before, and felt himself lord over the barren sweep of prairie. There had been hardship in it; the homely comforts of his father's little down-east farm were lacking,—but it was freedom. Freedom! It used to seem to Rankin, before he knew Myra Beckwith, that freedom was all he wanted in life. This shy, awkward, long-limbed fellow had desired nothing so much as room enough, and he had wrested it from Fate.
He wondered, as he stood out under the stars, why Mrs. Rumpety and her children did not run away. The world was big enough and to spare. They would probably starve, to be sure; but starvation was infinitely better than bondage.
The door at his elbow closed sharply, and a voice cried,—
"Hullo, Rank! did you know that those blamed idiots had acquitted him?"
"I knew they would." Rankin answered, with a jerk which betokened suppressed emotion.
"There's nothing left now but lynching," his friend continued. It was Ray Dolliber, one of the more reckless spirits.
Rankin grunted in a non-committal manner.
"Say, Rank, would you lend a hand?"
"I guess not," Rankin replied slowly, as if deliberating the question.
"Why not?"
"I never did believe in lynching."
"What's the matter with lynching?"
"'T ain't fair play. Masked men, and a lot of 'em, onto one feller."
Dolliber waxed sarcastic.
"P'raps you think it's fair play for a great brute of a man to bully a woman and six children."
"P'raps I do," said Rankin, still deliberating, "but I guess 't ain't likely."
Another man came out of the court-house, leaving the door open behind him. They could see Rumpety pulling on a thick overcoat and winding his ears and throat in a heavy muffler. "Come along," he swaggered, with a flourish of the arms; and woman and children, unencumbered by other wraps than those they had worn all day, followed abjectly and made their way after him to the shed where the team was tied.
"I say, Dolliber, did they say it was fourteen miles to their ranch?"
"Yes."
"South, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"They'll have the wind in their faces."
"You bet!"
A few minutes later the Rumpety wagon went creaking and groaning past the court-house.
Ed Rankin stepped inside and got his leather jacket and woollen muffler. He met the jury straggling out with the crestfallen air of men conscious of an inglorious performance. The judge and the district attorney stood just within the door, waiting for the ranch-wagon.
"They say," said the district attorney, "that Rumpety never does a stroke of work."
"Saves up his strength for bullying his family," the judge rejoined. "He takes good care of himself. Did you see how warmly he was dressed?"
"Yes, curse him!"
"It would be a mercy if the others were to freeze to death on the way home."
"Seems likely enough, too; but it would be rather hard on the three little brats waiting at the ranch for their mother."
Rankin, meanwhile, had got himself equipped for his long ride.
There was to be a dance in the court-house that evening, and some men were sweeping the sawdust into a corner and setting the benches against the wall.
"Ain't you goin' to stay for the dance, Ed?" one of them asked. "The girls are all coming."
Rankin felt himself blush ignominiously.
"No," he growled. "I've got some work to do to-night."
"What, at the ranch?"
Rankin paused to take account with his conscience. Being a down-easter, he liked to keep on good terms with that monitor. But conscience had no fault to find as he presently answered, "Yes, at the ranch."
He strode out of the court-house with a tread very different from his usual slouching gait. Out in the shed he found his bronco sniffing ruefully at an empty dinner-bag. But she whinnied pleasantly at his approach. Five minutes later horse and rider were off at a swinging pace, headed, not for their own ranch, which lay twelve miles to the northward. Straight in the teeth of the wind they travelled; in the teeth of the south wind, that stung their faces like a whip-lash.
Before very long they sighted the Rumpety wagon showing plainly against the snow in the starlight. The road went most of the way down-hill, and wagon and bronco made good speed. The air grew colder every minute.
"About ten below, shouldn't you say, Pincher?"
Pincher tossed her tousled mane affirmatively.
They kept about forty yards behind the team, which went at a steady rate.
"I say, Pincher, the old beast must be laying it onto them horses, to make 'em go like that."
This time Pincher merely laid an ear back in token of sympathy.
"We'll give him a worse trouncing than that, though. Eh, Pincher?"
And Rankin fumbled with cold fingers at the whip-handle in his pocket. The reins lay across Pincher's neck. Rankin did not want his hands to get too cold "for business."
On and on they pounded through the snow; colder and colder it grew. There was a shiver in the stars themselves, and only the snow looked warm.
"If I wasn't so all-fired mad, Pincher, I believe 't would seem kind o' cold."
At these words Pincher took a spurt and had to be held in, lest they should overtake the wagon.
They had crossed the railroad, leaving Wolverton with its handful of twinkling lights to the eastward, and now a line of the Peak was gleaming, a narrow white crescent, above the long, low rise of ground to the west. Once they passed a depression through which the great dome of snow towered in all its grandeur; but that was only for a moment. Rankin's heart beat high at sight of it.
"There's a way out of 'most every place," he muttered, below his breath.
The last three miles of the way the cold had got such a grip on him that he desisted from further social amenities. Pincher quite understood his silence, though she, with her furry coat and hard exercise, was not as near freezing as he.
At length they perceived, close to the road, a dim light shining from a single point in a huddled group of buildings. The wagon turned into a corral, close to a tumble-down shanty, and as Rankin rode up to the opening the children were just disappearing in at the door, while the woman slowly and painfully climbed down over the wheel. Rumpety stood by, jeering at her slow progress.
"Come, horry a little, me foine lady," Rankin heard him say. "Horry, or I'll come and give ye a lift ye'll not thank me for!"
The poor creature's dress had caught in something, and she stood an instant on the hub.
With a sudden movement the brute raised the long whip he held in his hand and gave her a stinging blow across the shoulders. There was a faint moan, a sound of tearing cotton, and the woman fell in a heap to the ground. In another instant she had scrambled to her feet and fled limping into the house.
Ed Rankin felt the blood rush to his heart and then go tingling down into his finger-tips; but he made no sound nor sudden movement. With his teeth set hard, his hand clutching his cowhide whip, he got off his horse and stood on the ground.
"I guess I'll wait till he's given the critters their supper," he muttered in Pincher's ear. "He might forget to do it after I'm done with him."
He stood looking into the enclosure while Rumpety unharnessed "the critters" and put them up in an open shed.
The corral was a comfortless, tumble-down place. The outlines of the crazy huts and sheds which enclosed it on three sides showed clear in the starlight. A gaunt plough-horse stood motionless in the cold shelter of a skeleton hay-wagon; in one corner a drinking-trough gleamed, one solid mass of ice. And now across this dreary, God-forsaken stage passed the warmly clad, stalwart figure that Fate was waiting for. Rankin noted that he held the whip still in his hand as he made for the door of the cabin.
Suddenly Rankin blocked his path.
"You cur!"
The words were flung like a missile into the face of the brute.
With a cry of inarticulate rage Rumpety raised his long whip, and then, coward that he was, let it fall.
Rankin never had a very clear idea of what happened next. Somehow or other he had torn the coat off the man's back, had bound him with the lasso to a corner of the hay-wagon, and was standing over him, cowhide in hand, panting with rage and the desire for vengeance. The gaunt horse had moved off a few paces, and stood like an apparition, gazing with spectral indifference at the scene.
Rankin raised his arm and brought the whip-lash whistling down upon the broad shoulders. There was a strange guttural sound, and the figure before him seemed to collapse and sink, a dead weight, down into the encircling rope. Rankin's arm was arrested in mid-air.
"Stand up, you hound, or I'll murder you!" he hissed between his teeth.
But the figure hung there like a log. The spectral horse sniffed strangely.
A swift horror seized upon Rankin. He grasped the heavy shoulder and shook it roughly. It was like shaking—hush! he dared not think what!
Rankin flung his whip to the ground, and wildly, feverishly, untied the rope. It was a difficult thing to do, the sinking of the body having tightened the knots. At last they yielded, and the dead weight tumbled in a heap before him. Even in his wild horror Rankin thought how the woman had fallen just so in a heap on the ground a few minutes before. The thought put life into his heart.
The gaunt horse had taken a step forward and was sniffing at that heap on the ground, mouthing the limp trousers: a few wisps of hay had clung to them. Rankin watched the weird scene. He knew that that was a dead man before him; nothing could make that surer.
He tried to lift the body and carry it toward the house; he could not do it. It was not the weight, it was the repulsion that lamed him.
He stalked to the cabin and flung open the door. The woman crouched in a corner with her six children about her; seven pitiful scared faces were lifted to his. He stepped in and closed the door behind him.
"Dennis Rumpety is dead," he stated, in a hard, unnatural voice. It seemed to him as if those awful words must echo round the globe, rousing all the powers of the land against him, striking terror to the hearts at home.
The woman glanced about her with wandering eyes. Then she shook her head.
"Dinnis Rumpety? Sure he'll niver be dead!"
"I tell you Dennis Rumpety is dead. I have killed him!"
"You!" she shrieked. "The saints preserve ye!"
It was a ghastly work to get that dishonored body across the corral while the spectral horse came sniffing after. Rankin wondered whether the dishonored soul could be far away. He wondered that the woman and children did not seem to dread being left alone with—it. He did not know how futile ghostly horrors seemed, as compared with those horrors they had thrust out.
As Pincher bore him back over the fourteen miles thither where justice awaited him, Rankin was a prey to two alternating regrets. At one moment he wished he had not said, "I'll murder you!" In the next turn of thought he wished it had been murder in the first degree, that the penalty might have been death rather than imprisonment.
He did not allow himself to think of Myra Beckwith; his mind felt blood-stained, no fit place for the thought of her. There, where the thought of her had shone for months, a steady, heart-warming flame, was only a dull desolation which he dared not face.
As he rode up the deserted street of Sandoria a strong desire possessed him to keep on to the north and have one more night of freedom on his own ranch; but that would have been a cruelty to Pincher. He put her up in the shed and gave her the next day's dinner which he had brought with him that morning in case there should be a dance to keep him over-night. Then he took a long, deep breath of the icy air and passed into the court-house.
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 scraping 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, passing 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 hell," 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 hell! 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!"