A VICTIM OF LAW'S DELAY
For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that night. We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance, some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil; contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never yet grew from evil seed. The girl was too honest for such fetish faith. She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious resignation that it had been the will of God evil should triumph. So she shut out the details of the horror from mind's memory and set her teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because the God of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have not fought valiant as the powers for evil.
She remembered the Ranger had tossed a revolver to the old frontiersman and Matthews had gone tearing up the slippery clay of the Mesa road ripping out oaths of his unregenerate days that he would have "the scoundrels' scalps if he had to tear them off with his own hands." Somehow, Wayland had headed the draggled horses round on the narrow Rim Rock trail.
"Go down and break the news to his mother. I'll get the body," he had said; and she had driven the buckboard down with her foot on the wheel brake. Not a soul appeared around the Senator's place as she passed the white square of fenced buildings. All the mosquito doors were hooked. Everything looked deserted; branding irons lying in disorder round the k'raal. The River had swollen too turbulent for fording and she had crossed the white bridge—she remembered she had crossed at a gallop contrary to the little notice tacked on the board railing. Then, the horses steaming from rain had stopped in front of the Mission gate and Mrs. Williams had come out "wondering about Fordie in the storm." With her back to the waiting mother, Eleanor had spent an unconscionable time tying the ponies, trying to control her own trembling lips and threshing round for some way to tell the untenable. She remembered the roil of the raging waters, the floating star blossoms on the muddy swirl, the light sifting in beaten rain dust through the silver pine needles, the curve and dip of the joyous swallows. Then, she had followed the little white haired lady into the Mission Parlor.
Almost hysterically, that saying of an old profane writer came to mind, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" and all her inner being was shouting in rebellion "Does He, Does He?" Then she shut the door. She knew very well how she ought to have broken the news with the pious platitudes that everything is for the best, with the whitewashed lies that every damnable tragedy is a blessing in disguise, that every devil-dance of fool circumstance is beneficent design, that disease is really health in a mask and sin a joke, a misnomer, that crime is really a trump card up Deity's sleeve to play down some wonderful trick of good; but—was it the Indian strain in her blood back many generations? She could not mouthe the hollow mockery of such sophistries in the presence of Death.
"Eleanor—what is it? Why do your eyes look so strange?"
The little woman clasped both the girl's hands and gazed questioningly up in her face. At the same moment, she began to tremble. She tried to ask and faltered; a tremor pulsed in the upper lip. Then the grand-daughter of the man of the iron hand had gathered the little white haired lady in her arms as if to ward the blow.
"The outlaws drove Fordie over the Rim Rocks with the herd," she said.
"Is he dead? Is he dead?"
The little woman had drawn her body up its full height.