In the house where Nigger Nat, assassin, had himself been struck by the hand of Death in the night, Douglas Hampton, alias Hammerless, alias Hamp, sat alone.
Nigger Nat lay in his grave, if grave it could be called; a hastily dug hole into which he had been rolled like a dead skunk. No pretense of ceremony, and certainly none of mourning, had graced his departure from the sight of men. Nor was any headboard set above his mound. As soon as he had been disposed of, his burial party had departed with all speed.
For the sake of the living, however, the spot where he lay would be not only marked, but improved. Even now his headboard was being carved—and by the man whom he had attempted to murder. On a piece of planking, found among the odds and ends of Jake Dalton’s shed and dressed clean with the hatchet, Douglas was cutting in deep, bold letters:
NAT OAKS
He intended, too, to clear away the brush around the mound and cut to it a straight trail from the road, so that the women whom Nat left behind him could—if they wished—visit his grave. But that work could wait for another day. Now, while Hampton’s hands were drawing his knife-point along the neat lines and hollowing out the spaces between them, his mind was reviewing the events since the interment.
For a time the four men, united in a common task of humanity, had shelved their mutual distrust in fruitless search for the cause of Nat’s death. With Douglas’ tacit permission, the pair of officers had inspected the house from roof to foundations, Uncle Eb meanwhile narrating in full the tale of Jake Dalton’s death. Douglas in turn had told of his first meeting with Oaks, the fight with the dogs and Nat himself, his whim to view the sunrise, his finding of the corn-hook driven into the dummy. He did not, however, deem it necessary to mention the warning note which he had partly burned.
“The feller ye want to git,” Uncle Eb barked, rounding on Ward and Bill, “is Snake Sanders! Git him an’ ye’ve got the man that’s back of all the devil-work into the Traps. If ye make him talk, ye’ll git an awful lot o’ knowledge all to oncet.”
The pair, taking in everything and saying almost nothing, had nodded slightly at this. And at length, non-committal as to what they might plan to do, they had gone. Before departure, however, Ward had scoffed at the ha’nt.
“I don’t take any stock in this ghost stuff,” he said. “Oaks was an old souse. Heart prob’ly was rotten with booze. He came in here with a bun on, took a swipe at the dummy, got cold feet sudden—heard somethin’, perhaps, a rat or somethin’—and beat it. Heart quit on him and he croaked.
“This Dalton, you say he was a souse too. Funny that two guys should croak the same way in the same place, yeah. But if the booze you guys make around here is as bad as the wildcat whiskey I’ve struck in some other places, I ain’t much surprised. It’d kill anybody that lapped it up for a steady diet. So long. Come on, Bill.”