But with the young logger who had been taken out into the night things
were different. Wesley Everest was thrown, half unconscious, into the
bottom of an automobile. The hands of the men who had dragged him there
were sticky and red. Their pant legs were sodden from rubbing against the
crumpled figure at their feet. Through the dark streets sped the three
machines. The smooth asphalt became a rough road as the suburbs were
reached. Then came a stretch of open country, with the Chehalis river
bridge only a short distance ahead. The cars lurched over the uneven road
with increasing speed, their headlights playing on each other or on the
darkened highway.
Wesley Everest stirred uneasily. Raising himself slowly on one elbow he
swung weakly with his free arm, striking one of his tormentors full in the
face. The other occupants immediately seized him and bound his hands and
feet with rope. It must have been the glancing blow from the fist of the
logger that gave one of the gentlemen his fiendish inspiration. Reaching
in his pocket he produced a razor. For a moment he fumbled over the now
limp figure in the bottom of the car. His companions looked on with stolid
acquiescence. Suddenly there was a piercing scream of pain. The figure
gave a convulsive shudder of agony. After a moment Wesley Everest said in
a weak voice: "For Christ's sake, men; shoot me--don't let me suffer like
this."
On the way back to Centralia, after the parade rope had done Its deadly
work, the gentlemen of the razor alighted from the car in front of a
certain little building. He asked leave to wash his hands. They were as
red as a butcher's. Great clots of blood were adhering to his sleeves.
"That's about the nastiest job I ever had to do," was his casual remark as
he washed himself in the cool clear water of the Washington hills. The
name of this man is known to nearly everybody in Centralia. He is still at
large.
The headlight of the foremost car was now playing on the slender steel
framework of the Chehalis river bridge. This machine crossed over and
stopped, the second one reached the middle of the bridge and stopped while
the third came to a halt when it had barely touched the plankwork on the
near side. The well-dressed occupants of the first and last cars alighted
and proceeded at once to patrol both approaches to the bridge.