HAVING murdered his brother-in-law, Orrin Brower of Kentucky was a
fugitive from justice. From the county jail where he had been confined
to await his trial he had escaped by knocking down his jailer with an
iron bar, robbing him of his keys and, opening the outer door, walking
out into the night. The jailer being unarmed, Brower got no weapon with
which to defend his recovered liberty. As soon as he was out of the town
he had the folly to enter a forest; this was many years ago, when that
region was wilder than it is now.
The night was pretty dark, with neither moon nor stars visible, and as
Brower had never dwelt thereabout, and knew nothing of the lay of the
land, he was, naturally, not long in losing himself. He could not have
said if he were getting farther away from the town or going back to it—a
most important matter to Orrin Brower. He knew that in either case a
posse of citizens with a pack of bloodhounds would soon be on his track
and his chance of escape was very slender; but he did not wish to assist
in his own pursuit. Even an added hour of freedom was worth having.
Suddenly he emerged from the forest into an old road, and there before
him saw, indistinctly, the figure of a man, motionless in the gloom. It
was too late to retreat: the fugitive felt that at the first movement
back toward the wood he would be, as he afterward explained, “filled with
buckshot.” So the two stood there like trees, Brower nearly suffocated
by the activity of his own heart; the other—the emotions of the other are
not recorded.
A moment later—it may have been an hour—the moon sailed into a patch of
unclouded sky and the hunted man saw that visible embodiment of Law lift
an arm and point significantly toward and beyond him. He understood.
Turning his back to his captor, he walked submissively away in the
direction indicated, looking to neither the right nor the left; hardly
daring to breathe, his head and back actually aching with a prophecy of
buckshot.
Brower was as courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged; that was
shown by the conditions of awful personal peril in which he had coolly
killed his brother-in-law. It is needless to relate them here; they came
out at his trial, and the revelation of his calmness in confronting them
came near to saving his neck. But what would you have?—when a brave man
is beaten, he submits.
So they pursued their journey jailward along the old road through the
woods. Only once did Brower venture a turn of the head: just once, when
he was in deep shadow and he knew that the other was in moonlight, he
looked backward. His captor was Burton Duff, the jailer, as white as
death and bearing upon his brow the livid mark of the iron bar. Orrin
Brower had no further curiosity.
Eventually they entered the town, which was all alight, but deserted;
only the women and children remained, and they were off the streets.
Straight toward the jail the criminal held his way. Straight up to the
main entrance he walked, laid his hand upon the knob of the heavy iron
door, pushed it open without command, entered and found himself in the
presence of a half-dozen armed men. Then he turned. Nobody else
entered.
On a table in the corridor lay the dead body of Burton Duff.