If ever a man needed God’s look at that moment, it was this fugitive. Let it be understood clearly, however, he was not at all the murderer Royal’s imagination had conjured up. That boy’s second sight had been working overtime, and had fallen into error. Except in an indirect way, the man had never been a murderer. He had never desired the death of any human being. Yet he had undoubtedly turned the feet of at least “twelve noble youths” into the roads that lead to death. Also, he was revisiting a scene. Therefore we may as well admit that Royal’s imaginings had strange truths mingled with their errors. Perhaps his visions, like yours and mine, were made up wholly from truths, but truths mysteriously misplaced; truths disordered, and so, unserviceable.
The fugitive’s crime, that is to say, the particular crime for which he was at that moment being hunted from hill to hill, was one known to the most ancient civilizations. It takes its title from shameful lost cities engulfed under Divine wrath. Yet to-day there are gentle communities where even its Biblical name, if heard by chance in the pulpit fulminations of some itinerant preacher, would not be understood. And because, deep-rooted in the nature of mankind, there is that which cries out upon this crime as an abomination, the law defines it darkly, and punishes it strictly. “La nature a de ces bizarreries”? Only a long-descended Mediterranean intellect, with a planetary point of view, could calmly make that comment on the case!
The outlaw lit one of the black cigars, and thrust the thin bars of chocolate into his pocket. Loathsome package food, again, but better than nothing, if worse came to the worst. Of late, he had feared even to enter the crossroads grocery stores, with their meagre yet apparently varied supplies, with their horribly unexpected little electric bulbs illuminating a customer whose trembling hope had been to remain unseen!
Royal’s cigar sickened him, and he dropped it, still burning, into the brown pine needles. He watched the tiny, red-rimmed hole it was making. The circle grew larger and larger. Curse it, why not let this be the end-all here? But just as the slowly widening red rim really flickered into a faint blaze, the red on his forehead rushed fiercely over the rest of his face. No, by God, no! Not that way! With his woollen cap he stifled the flame. It died down utterly, and with it his own last remnant of vigor.
Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The one spot on earth! For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life, full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in that State knew him for the Burton that he was.
No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing, painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘carpe diem’ fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits, painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great pains. Of all his various arenas for the exhibition of his personality, he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities. Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!
The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogether a weaker vessel; at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons; Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil, in turn, conquered them.
The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached the end of his appointed rounds.