By this time the Dane’s rage was again in the ascendency. His sullen face was actually black with anger, and he ground his teeth and shook his manacled hands at the smiling agent.
“Dey all lif not here,” he shouted. “Does Chinamen lif not here nor puild up der country! Does railroad people lif not here! Does land company lif not here! Dere all like so many plud vorms, suck, suck, sucking at der life of men vat vork hard. Vy should I not kill von of them?”
Then, as if remembering himself, he ceased speaking, and sank down in his seat again to resume contemplation of his bruised hands. There was a hush for a moment. The rough, hard-working farmer folks felt there had been much close home truth in what he said. Few but had had their own experiences in the same line; but they were sane, law-abiding citizens, who felt the necessity for supporting the dignity of the commonwealth, not hot-headed and irrational like this yellow-haired, blue-eyed foreigner.
The rest of the proceedings were soon over. All the testimony was against the Dane. His own statement was damning evidence of his guilt. He was remanded to the calaboose, as the town jail was called, to be sent to the county jail next day and regularly committed for trial.
I saw him taken to the railway station next morning in charge of a deputy-sheriff. In the procession of curious ones who followed him was a weeping woman bearing a young baby in her arms, while two others clung to her skirts. His “vooman,” they told me, but no one seemed able to say what she would do while the husband and father expiated his crime in durance vile. It seemed hard, but the majesty of the law must be upheld.
THE EARTH SLEPT.
I.
The earth slept.
Age upon age passed over the nebulous mass that lay without form and void in space, unknowing, unfeeling, yet guided ever by the workings of inexorable law.
“Brothers! Brothers!” whispered one statoblast to the others, “I feel a strange stirring within me, a consciousness of broader life; and, brothers, what is this shining whiteness creeping all about us? Brothers, I dreamed once, long ago, of a wonderful glory called light. I believe, brothers, that the light is breaking!”