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,
longlimbed 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 downeaster,
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 whiplash.
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.
[Illustration: "THE GREAT DOME OF SNOW TOWERED IN ALL ITS GRANDEUR."]
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 haywagon; 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 haywagon, 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 whiplash 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.