"Bed-bug Brown, detective!"
CHAPTER IX
The Home-Coming of a Dead Man
Meanwhile the body of the murdered man—noble countenance peaceful now after twenty-five years of adventure—had been traveling eastward to its final resting place. The body of William F. Cummins came home in state—home at last, where the familiar caw of crow and tinkle of cow-bell might almost conjure the dead back to life again. Three years before, at the time of the great Centennial, when, in the full vigor of manhood, Will Cummins had visited his native town, no sounds had so stirred old memories of fields and mountains as those homely sounds of crow and cow-bell.
Then neighbors had flocked about the bold Californian, eager to press his hand and to look into his fearless eyes. Now, robbed and murdered, he came home again, life's journey ended. The quiet village was appalled, and shaken with anger. Friends and neighbors flocked to the funeral—indignant youths, solemn old men and women. True, the younger generation had hardly known of the Californian's existence. To them he seemed to have come out of the Sierras like a Rip Van Winkle, who slept soundly on, asking no questions. But to the old men he had died a youth, full of promise. They remembered well the eager buoyancy with which he and his comrades had set out for the gold fields. Middle-aged men and women remembered his school days in Reedsville, when he was one of them, when they were all healthy, merry boys and girls together.
The funeral over, and the Californian safely laid in his native soil on the hillside, men gathered in groups on the corners of the village street, or stepped into the bank to look at the six-shooter which had failed their friend in his hour of need. The local minister, gazing upon the dead man's revolver, was heard to remark:
"They that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
But the bystanders would not endure the doctrine. Their Anglo-Saxon blood recoiled. And a former Californian, who was an old friend of Cummins, stepped forward and said:
"Mr. Lamb, Will Cummins was not afraid to perish with the sword. And, if he could have drawn that revolver, there would have been two dead robbers. This doctrine of non-resistance is wrong, dead wrong. We proved that in California, just as you people proved it here in the Civil War. Will Cummins was not afraid to defend his rights."