Part 27

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.