What a terrible and inexcusable madness had possessed him, Kent
realized the instant he rose from Mercer's prostrate body. Never had
his brain flamed to that madness before. He believed at first that he
had killed Mercer. It was neither pity nor regret that brought him to
his senses. Mercer, a coward and a traitor, a sneak of the lowest type,
had no excuse for living. It was the thought that he had lost his
chance to reach the river that cleared his head as he swayed over
Mercer.
He heard running feet. He saw figures approaching swiftly through the
starlight. And he was too weak to fight or run. The little strength he
had saved up, and which he had planned to use so carefully in his
flight, was gone. His wound, weeks in bed, muscles unaccustomed to the
terrific exertion he had made in these moments of his vengeance, left
him now panting and swaying as the running footsteps came nearer.
His head swam. For a space he was sickeningly dizzy, and in the first
moment of that dizziness, when every drop of blood in his body seemed
rushing to his brain, his vision was twisted and his sense of direction
gone. In his rage he had overexerted himself. He knew that something
had gone wrong inside him and that he was helpless. Even then his
impulse was to stagger toward the inanimate Mercer and kick him, but
hands caught him and held him. He heard an amazed voice, then
another--and something hard and cold shut round his wrists like a pair
of toothless jaws.
It was Constable Carter, Inspector Kedsty's right-hand man about
barracks, that he saw first; then old Sands, the caretaker at
Cardigan's place. Swiftly as he had turned sick, his brain grew clear,
and his blood distributed itself evenly again through his body. He held
up his hands. Carter had slipped a pair of irons on him, and the
starlight glinted on the shining steel. Sands was bending over Mercer,
and Carter was saying in a low voice:
"It's too bad, Kent. But I've got to do it. I saw you from the window
just as Mercer screamed. Why did you stop for him?"
Mercer was getting up with the assistance of Sands. He turned a bloated
and unseeing face toward Kent and Carter. He was blubbering and
moaning, as though entreating for mercy in the fear that Kent had not
finished with him. Carter pulled Kent away.
"There's only one thing for me to do now," he said. "It isn't pleasant.
But the law says I must take you to barracks."
In the sky Kent saw the stars clearly again, and his lungs were
drinking in the cool air as in the wonderful moments before his
encounter with Mercer.
He had lost. And it was Mercer who had made him lose. Carter felt the
sudden tightening of his muscles as he walked with a hand on his arm.
And Kent shut his teeth close and made no answer to what Carter had
said, except that Carter heard something which he thought was a sob
choked to death in the other's throat.
Carter, too, was a man bred of the red blood of the North, and he knew
what was in Kent's heart. For only by the breadth of a hair had Kent
failed in his flight.
Pelly was on duty at barracks, and it was Pelly who locked him in one
of the three cells behind the detachment office. When he was gone, Kent
sat down on the edge of his prison cot and for the first time let the
agony of his despair escape in a gasping breath from between his lips.
Half an hour ago the world had reached out its arms to him, and he had
gone forth to its welcome, only to have the grimmest tragedy of all his
life descend upon him like the sword of Damocles. For this was real
tragedy. Here there was no hope. The tentacles of the law had him in
their grip, and he could no longer dream of escape.
Ghastly was the thought that it was he, James Kent, who had supervised
the building of these cells! Acquainted with every trick and stratagem
of the prisoner plotting for his freedom, he had left no weak point in
their structure. Again he clenched his hands, and in his soul he cursed
Mercer as he went to the little barred window that overlooked the river
from his cell. The river was near now. He could hear the murmur of it.
He could see its movement, and that movement, played upon by the stars,
seemed now a writhing sort of almost noiseless laughter taunting him in
his folly.
He went back to his cot, and in his despair buried his face in his
hands. In the half-hour after that he did not raise his head. For the
first time in his life he knew that he was beaten, so utterly beaten
that he no more had the desire to fight, and his soul was dark with the
chaos of the things he had lost.
At last he opened his eyes to the blackness of his prison room, and he
beheld a marvelous thing. Across the gloom of the cell lay a shaft of
golden fire. It was the light of the rising moon coming through his
little, steel-barred window. To Kent it had crept into his cell like a
living thing. He watched it, fascinated. His eyes followed it to the
foot-square aperture, and there, red and glorious as it rose over the
forests, the moon itself filled the world. For a space he saw nothing
but that moon crowding the frame of his window. And as he rose to his
feet and stood where his face was flooded in the light of it, he felt
stirring within him the ghosts of his old hopes. One by one they rose
up and came to life. He held out his hands, as if to fill them with the
liquid glow; his heart beat faster in that glory of the moonrise. The
taunting murmur of the river changed once more into hopeful song, his
fingers closed tightly around the bars, and the fighting spirit rose in
him again. As that spirit surged stronger, beating down his despair,
driving the chaos out of his brain, he watched the moon as it climbed
higher, changing from the red of the lower atmosphere to the yellow
gold of the greater heights, marveling at the miracle of light and
color that had never failed to stir him.
And then he laughed. If Pelly or Carter had heard him, they would have
wondered if he was mad. It was madness of a sort--the madness of
restored confidence, of an unlimited faith, of an optimism that was
bound to make dreams come true. Again he looked beyond the bars of his
cell. The world was still there; the river was there; all the things
that were worth fighting for were there. And he would fight. Just how,
he did not try to tell himself now. And then he laughed again, softly,
a bit grimly, for he saw the melancholy humour of the fact that he had
built his own prison.
He sat down again on the edge of his cot, and the whimsical thought
struck him that all those he had brought to this same cell, and who had
paid the first of their penance here, must be laughing at him now in
the spirit way. In his mental fancy a little army of faces trooped
before him, faces dark and white, faces filled with hatred and despair,
faces brave with the cheer of hope and faces pallid with the dread of
death. And of these ghosts of his man-hunting prowess it was Anton
Fournet's face that came out of the crowd and remained with him. For he
had brought Anton to this same cell--Anton, the big Frenchman, with his
black hair, his black beard, and his great, rolling laugh that even in
the days when he was waiting for death had rattled the paper-weights on
Kedsty's desk.
Anton rose up like a god before Kent now. He had killed a man, and like
a brave man he had not denied it. With a heart in his great body as
gentle as a girl's, Anton had taken pride in the killing. In his prison
days he sang songs to glorify it. He had killed the white man from
Chippewyan who had stolen his neighbor's wife! Not HIS wife, but his
neighbor's! For Anton's creed was, "Do unto others as you would have
others do unto you," and he had loved his neighbor with the great
forest love of man for man. His neighbor was weak, and Anton was strong
with the strength of a bull, so that when the hour came, it was Anton
who had measured out vengeance. When Kent brought Anton in, the giant
had laughed first at the littleness of his cell, then at the
unsuspected strength of it, and after that he had laughed and sung
great, roaring songs every day of the brief tenure of life that was
given him. When he died, it was with the smiling glory in his face of
one who had cheaply righted a great wrong.
Kent would never forget Anton Fournet. He had never ceased to grieve
that it had been his misfortune to bring Anton in, and always, in close
moments, the thought of Anton, the stout-hearted, rallied him back to
courage. Never would he be the man that Anton Fournet had been, he told
himself many times. Never would his heart be as great or as big, though
the Law had hanged Anton by the neck until the soul was choked out of
his splendid body, for it was history that Anton Fournet had never
harmed man, woman, or child until he set out to kill a human snake and
the Law placed its heel upon him and crushed him.
And tonight Anton Fournet came into the cell again and sat with Kent on
the cot where he had slept many nights, and the ghosts of his laughter
and his song filled Kent's ears, and his great courage poured itself
out in the moonlit prison room so that at last, when Kent stretched
himself on the cot to sleep, it was with the knowledge that the soul of
the splendid dead had given him a strength which it was impossible to
have gained from the living. For Anton Fournet had died smiling,
laughing, singing--and it was of Anton Fournet that he dreamed when he
fell asleep. And in that dream came also the vision of a man called
Dirty Fingers--and with it inspiration.