University of Virginia Library

7. CHATER VII.
BEFORE CHIEF JUSTIC LYNCH.

The hurried statement of the messenger was
corroborated in the streets that night. It was
certain that McSnagley was killed. Smith's
Pocket, excited but sceptical, had seen the body,
had put its fingers in the bullet hole and was
satisfied. Smith's Pocket, albeit hoarse with
shouting and excitement, still discussed details
with infinite relish in the bar-rooms and saloons,
and in the main street in clamorous knots that
in front of the jail where the prisoner was confined
seemed to swell into a mob. Smith's Pocket,
bearded, blue-shirted and belligerent, crowding
about this locality from time to time uttered appeals
to justice that swelled on the night wind,
not unfrequently coupling these invocations
with the name of that eminent jurist—Lynch.

Let not the simple reader suppose that the
mere taking off of a fellow mortal had created
this uproar. The tenure of life in Smith's
Pocket was vain and uncertain at the best, and
as such philosophically accepted, and the blowing
out of a brief candle here and there seldom
left a permanent shadow with the survivors.
In such instances too, the victims had received
their quietus from the hands of brother-townsmen.
socially as it were, in broad day, in the
open streets, and under other mitigating circumstances.
Thus, when Judge Starbottle, of
Virginia, and “French Pete” exchanged shots
with each across the plaza until their revolvers
were exhausted and the luckless Pete received a
bullet through the lungs, half the town witnessed
it, and were struck with the gallant and
chivalrous bearing of these gentlemen, and to
this day point with feelings of pride and admiration
to the bullet holes in the door of the “National
Hotel,” as they explain how narrow was
the escape of the women in the parlor. But here
was a man murdered at night in a lonely place
and by a stranger—a man unknown to the
saloons of Smith's Pocket, a wretch who could
not plead the excitement of monte or the delirium
of whisky as an excuse. No wonder that
Smith's Pocket surged with virtuous indignation
beneath the windows of the prison and clamored
for his blood.

And as the crowd thickened and swayed to
and fro, the story of his crime grew exaggerated
by hurried and frequent repetition. Half a
dozen speakers volunteered to give the details
with an added horror to every sentence. How
one of Morpher's children had been missing for
a week or more. How the schoolmaster and the
parson were taking a walk that evening, and,
coming to Smith's Pocket, heard a faint voice
from its depths which they
recognized as belonging
to the missing child. How they had succeeded
in dragging him out and gathered from
his infant lips the story of his incarceration by
the murderer Waters and his enforced labors in
the mine. How they were interrupted by the
appearance of Waters—followed by an highly
colored and epithet-illustrated account of the
interview and quarrel. How Waters struck the
schoolmaster, who returned the blow with a pick.
How Waters thereupon drew a Derringer and
fired, missing the schoolmaster, but killing McSnagley
behind him. How it was believed that
Waters was one of Joaquin's gang—that he had
killed Smith, etc., etc. At each pause the crowd
pushed and panted, stealthily creeping around
the doors and windows of the jail like some
strange beast of prey, until the climax was
reached, and a hush fell, and two men were
silently dispatched for a rope, and a critical examination

was made of the limbs of a pine tree
in the vicinity.

The man to whom these incidents had the
most terrible significance might have seemed
the least concerned as he sat that night, but a
few feet removed from the eager crowd without,
his hands clasped tightly together between his
knees, and the expression on his face of one
whose thou hts were far away. A candle stuck
in a tin sconce on the wall, flickered as the night
wind blew freshly through a broken pane of the
window. Its uncertain light revealed a low
room whose cloth ceiling was stained and ragged,
and from whose boarded walls the tern
paper hung in strips; a lumber room partitioned
from the front office, which was occupied by a
justice of the peace. If this temporary dungeon
had an appearance of insecurity, there was some
compensation in the spectacle of an armed sentinel
who sat upon a straw mattress in the doorway,
and another who patrolled the narrow hall
which led to the street. That the prisoner was
not placed in one of the cells in the floor below
may have been owing to the fact that the law
recognized his detention as only temporary, and
while providing the two guards as a preventive
against the egress of Crime from within, discreetly
removed all unnecessary and provoking
obstacles to the ingress of Justice from without.

Since the prisoners arrest he had refused to
answer any interrogatories. Since he had been
placed in confinement he had not moved from
his present attitude. The guard, finding all attempts
at conversation fruitless, had fallen into
a reverie, and regaled himself with pieces of
straw plucked from the mattress. A mouse ran
across the floor. The silence contrasted strangely
with the hum of voices in the street.

The candlelight falling across the prisoner's
forehead showed the features which Smith's
Pocket knew and recognized as Waters, the
strange prospector. Had Mliss or Aristides
seen him then they would have missed that sinister
expression which was part of their fearful
remembrance. The hard, grim outlines of his
mouth were bent and contracted; the quick,
searching eyes were fixed on vacancy. The strong
man—physically strong only—was breaking up
The fist that might have felled an ox could do
nothing more than separate its idle fingers with
childishness of power and purpose An hour
longer in this condition, and the gallows would
have claimed a figure scarcely less limp and
impotent than that it was ultimately destined to
reject.

He had been trying to collect his thoughts.
Would they hang him? No, they must try him
first, legally, and he could prove—he could prove
—but what could he prove? For whenever he
attempted to consider the uncertain chances of
his escape he found his thoughts straying wide of
the question. It was of no use for him to clasp
his fingers or knit his brows. Why did the recollection
of a school-fellow, long since forgotten,
blot out all the fierce and feverish memories
of the night and the terrible certainty of
the future? Why did the strips of paper hanging
from the wall recall to him the pattern of a
kite he had flown forty years ago? In a moment
like this, when all his energies were required,
and all his cunning and tact would be called into
service, could he think of nothing better than
trying to match the torn paper on the wall or to
count the cracks in the floor? And an oath rose
to his lips, but from very feebleness died away
without expression.

Why had he ever come to Smith's Pocket?
If he had not been guided by that hell cat, this
would not have happened. What if he were to
tell all he knew!—what if he should accuse
her?—but would they be willing to give up the
bird they had already caught? Yet he again
found himself cursing his own treachery and
cowardice, and this time an exclamation burst
from his lips and attracted the attention of the
guard.

“Hello there!—easy—old fellow—thar ain't
any good in that”—said the sentinel, looking
up. “It's a bad fix you're in, sure, but rarin'
and pitchin' won't help things. Taint no use,
cussin'—leastways taint that kind o' swearin'
that gets a chap out o' here,” he added with a
conscientious reservation; “Now ef I was in
your place l'd kinder reflect on my sins, and
make my peace with God Almighty, for I tell
you the looks o' them people outside ain't pleasant.
You're in the hands of the law, and the
law will protect you as far as it can—as far as
two men kin stand agin a hundred—sabe?
That's what's the matter!—and it's as well as
you knowed that now as at any time.”

But the prisoner had relapsed into his old attitude
and was surveying the jailer with the
same abstracted air as before. That individual
resumed his seat on the mattress, and now leant
his ear to a colloquy which seemed to be progressing
at the foot of the stairs. Presently he
was hailed by his brother turnkey from below.

“O, Bill,” said fidus Achates from the passage,
with the usual Californian prefatory ejaculation.

“Well.”

“Here's Mliss! Says she wants to come up.
Shall I let her in?”

The subject of inqury, however, settled the
question of admission by darting past the guard
below in this moment of preoccupation and
bounded up the stairs like a young fawn. The
guards laughed. “Now, then, my infant phenomenon,”
said the one called Bill, as Mliss

stood panting before him, “wot's up—and
nextly, wot's in that bottle?”

Mliss whisked the bottle which she held in
her hand smartly under her apron and said,
curtly, “Where's him that killed the parson?

“Yonder,” replied the man, indicating the
abstracted figure with his hand. “Wot do you
want with him?—None of your tricks here
now,” he added, warningly.

“I want to see him!”

“Well, look! make the most of your time
and his too for the matter of that, but mind
now, no nonsense, Mliss, he won't stand it!” repeated
the guard, with an emphasis in the caution.

Mliss crossed the room until opposite the
prisoner. “Are you the chap that killed the
parson?” she said, addressing the motionless
figure.

Something in the tone of her voice startled the
prisoner from his reverie; he raised his head
and glanced quickly and with his old sinister
expression at the child.

“What's that to you?” he asked, with the
grim lines setting about his mouth again, and
the old harshness of his voice.

“Didn't I tell you be wouldn't stand any of
your nonsense, Mliss,” said the guard, testily.

Mliss only repeated the question.

“And what if I did kill him?” said the prisoner,
savagely; “what's that to you, you young
hell cat. Guard! Damnation! What do you
let her come here for? Do you hear, Guard?”
he screamed, rising in a transport of passion,
“Take her away; fling her down-stairs. What
the h—ll is she doing here?”

“If you was the man that killed McSnagley,”
said Mliss, without heeding the interruption,
“I've brought you something,” and she drew
the bottle from under her apron and extended
it to Waters, adding, “It's brandy—Cognac—
A 1.”

“Take it away, and take yourself with it,”
returned Waters, without abating his angry accents,
“take it away—do you hear?”

“Well, that's what I call ongrateful—dog
gone my skin if it ain't,” said the guard, who
had been evidently struck with Mliss's generosity.
“Pas the licker this way, my beauty, and
I'll keep it till he changes his mind. He's naterally
a little flustered just now, but he'll come
round after you go.”

But Mliss didn't accede to this change in the
disposition of the gift, and was evidently taken
aback by her reception and the refusal of the
proffered comfort.

“Come, hand the bottle here,” repeated the
guard. “It's again rules to bring the pris'ner
anything anyway, and it's confiscated to the
law. It's agin the rules too to ask a pris'ner
any question that'll crim nate him, and on the
whole you'd better go, Mliss,” added the guard,
to whom the appearance of the bottle had been
the means of provoking a spasm of discipline.

But Mliss refused to make over the coveted
treasure. Bill arose half-jestingly and endeavored
to get possession of the bottle. A struggle
ensued, good-naturedly on the part of the guard,
but characterized on the part of Mliss by that
half-savage passion which any thwarted whim
of instinct was sure to provoke in her nature.
At ast, with a curse, she freed her arm from his
grasp, and seizing the bottle by the neck, aimed
it with the full strength of her little arm fairly
at his head. But he was quick enough to avert
that important object, if not quick enough to
save his shoulder from receiving the strength of
the blow, which shattered the thin glass and
poured the fiery contents of the bottle over his
shirt and breast, saturating his clothes, and diffusing
a sharp alcoholic odor through the room.

A forced laugh broke from his lips as he sank
back on the mattress, not without an underlying
sense of awe at this savage girl who stood panting
before him, and from whom he had just escaped
a blow which might have been fatal. “It's
a pity to waste so much good liquor,” he added,
with affected carelessness, narrowly watching
each movement of the young Pythoness, whose
rage was not yet abated.

“Come, Mliss,” he said, at last, “we'll say
quits. You've lost your brandy, and I've got
some of the pieces of yonder bottle sticking in
my shoulder yet. I suppose brandy is good for
bruises though. Hand me the light!”

Mliss reached the candle from the sconce and
held it by the guard as he turned back the collar
of his shirt to lay bare his shoulder. “So,”
he muttered, “black and blue—no bones broken
though—no fault of yours, eh! my young cherub,
if it wasn't. There—why, what are you
looking at in that way, Mliss, are you crazy?—
Hell's furies, don't hold the light so near? What
are you doing—hell—ho, there! Help!

Too late, for in an instant he was a sheet of
living flame. When or how the candle had
touched his garment, saturated with the inflammable
fluid, Waters, the only inactive spectator
of the room, could never afterward tell. He
only knew that the combustion was instantaneous
and complete, and before the cry had died
from his lips, not only the guard, but the straw
mattress on which he had been sitting, and the
loose strips of paper hanging from the walls,
and the torn cloth ceiling above, were in flames.

Help! help! Fire! fire!

With a superhuman effort, Mliss dragged the
prisoner past the blazing mattress, through the

doorway into the passage, and drew the door,
which opened outwardly, against him. The unhappy
guard, still blazing like a funeral pyre,
after wildly beating the air with his arms for a
few seconds, dashed at the broken window,
which gave way with his weight, and precipitated
him, still flaming, into the yard below. A
column of smoke and a licking tongue of flame
leaped from the open window, at the same
moment, and the cry of fire was re-echoed from
a hundred voices in the street. But scarcely had
Mliss closed the open door against Waters, when
the guard from the doorway mounted the stairs
in time to see a flaming figure leap from the
window. The room was filled with smoke and
fire. With an instinct of genius, Mliss, pointing
to the open window, shouted hoarsely in his
ear:

“Waters has escaped!”

A cry of fury from the guard was echoed from
the stairs, even now crowded by the excited mob
who feared the defvastating element might still
cheat them of their intended victim. In another
moment the house was emptied, and the front
street deserted, as the people rushed to the rear
of the jail—climbing fences and stumbling into
ditches in pursuit of the imagined runaway.
Mliss seized the hat and coat of the luckless
“Bill,” and dragging the prisoner from his place
of concealment, hurriedly equipped him, and
hastened through the blinding smoke of the
staircase boldly on the heels of the retiring
crowd. Once in the friendly darkness of the
street, it was easy to mingle with the pushing
throng until an alley crossing at right angles
enabled them to leave the main thoroughfare.
A few moments' rapid flight, and the outskirts
of the town were reached, the tall pines
opened their abysmal aisles to the fugitives,
and Mliss paused with her companion. Until
daybreak, at least, here they were safe!

From the time they had quitted the burning
room to that moment, Waters had passed into
his listless, abstracted condition, so helpless
and feeble that he retained the grasp of Mliss's
hand more through some instinctive prompting
rather than the dictates of reason. Mliss had
found it necessary to almost drag him from the
main street and the hurrying crowd, which
seemed to exercise a strange fascination over
his bewildered senses. And now he sat down
passively beside her, and seemed to submit to
the guidance of her superior nature.

“You're safe enough now till daylight,” said
Mliss, when she had recovered her breath, “but
you must make the best time you can through
these woods to-night, keeping the wind to your
back, until you come to the Wingdam road.
There! Do you hear!” said Mliss, a little vexed
at her companion's apathy.

Waters released the hand of Mliss, and commenced
mechanically to button his coat around
his chest with fumbling, purposeless fingers.
He then passed his hand across his forehead, as
if to clear his confused and bewildered brain.
All this, however, to no better result than to apparently
root his feet to the soil and to intensify
the stupefaction which seemed to be creeping
over him.

“Be quick now. You've no time to lose!
Keep straight on through the woods until you
see the stars again before you and you're on the
other side of the ridge. What are you waiting
for?” and Mliss stamped her little foot impatiently.

An idea which had been struggling for expression
at last seemed to dawn in his eyes. Something
like a simpering blush crept over his face
as he fumbled in his pocket. At last, drawing
forth a twenty-dollar piece, he bashfully proffered
it to Mliss. In a twinkling the extended
arm was stricken up, and the bright coin flew
high in the air and disappeared in the darkness.

“Keep your money! I don't want it. Don't
do that again!” said Mliss, highly excited, “or
I'll—I'll bite you!”