Beyond the Law

By Jackson Gregory
“Did you ever kill a man?”
The question came quietly out of a long silence. The younger man looked up quickly from the crackling camp-fire, his eyes searching his partner’s grave face for an explanation of the strangely dull note in his voice.
“No, Johnny. I never killed a man. Why?”
Johnny Watson made no answer for a little as he drew thoughtfully upon his pipe. The little, drying mountain stream upon which they had camped for the night went singing on its way under the stars.
Neither of the two men so much as stirred until after the younger man had almost forgotten the abrupt question, and was thinking upon the bed he had made of willow branches, when Johnny Watson took the pipe from between his lips, ran a brown hand across the grizzled stub of his ragged mustache and continued in the same expressionless monotone:
“I have. Three of ’em. One close to thirty years ago, Dick. A sailor, he was; and a sailor of a sort I was, too, in those days. Down where the South Seas is used to man-killing. I had a little money, a good deal for a sailorman to have all at one time, sewed in a bit of canvas in my shirt. Ben, he had been drunk and was mean and reckless, or I guess he wouldn’t ’a’ done it— Ben was a decent man after his fashion.
“He come up behind with a knife. I saw his shadow, and I give it to him across the temple with a bit of scrap-iron laying on the little pier. He died two days later.
“One was twenty years gone now. They called him DeVine, and he was the crookedest man that ever put on white man’s clothes. It began with cards, and ended with him trying to do me on a mine. He knowed when I had caught him, and pulled his gun first. He missed me about six inches, and we wasn’t standing more than seven feet apart....
“And one was something more than eight years ago. He was no account. He murdered old Tom Richards. Tom was a pardner of mine. Tom’s body wasn’t cold yet when the man as murdered him went to plead his case with the Great Judge.”