“You see them two must have knowed about the one-o'clock freight, and that it was to stop here to take on the empty lumber cars. I don't know how they knowed it, but they did. It was this way: when they dropped from the window, they beat through the storm, straight for this side-track. At the same time Mr. Harkless leaves Briscoes' goin' west. It begins to rain. He cuts across to the railroad to have a sure footing, and strikin' for the deepo for shelter—near place as any except Briscoes' where he'd said good-night already and prob'ly don't wish to go back, 'fear of givin' trouble or keepin' 'em up—anybody can understand that. He comes along, and gets to where we are precisely at the time they do, them comin' from town, him strikin' for it. They run right into each other. That's what happened. They re-cog-nized him and raised up on him and let him have it. What they done it with, I don't know; we took everything in that line off of 'em; prob'ly used railroad iron; and what they done with him afterwards we don't know; but we will by night. They'll sweat it out of 'em up at Rouen when they get 'em.”
“I reckon maybe some of us might help,” remarked Mr. Watts, reflectively.
Jim Bardlock swore a violent oath. “That's the talk!” he shouted. “Ef I ain't the first man of this crowd to set my foot in Roowun, an' first to beat in that jail door, an' take 'em out an' hang 'em by the neck till they're dead, dead, dead, I'm not Town Marshal of Plattville, County of Carlow, State of Indiana, and the Lord have mercy on our souls!”
Tom Martin looked at the brown stain and quickly turned away; then he went back slowly to the village. On the way he passed Warren Smith.
“Is it so?” asked the lawyer.
Martin answered with a dry throat. He looked out dimly over the sunlit fields, and swallowed once or twice. “Yes, it's so. There's a good deal of it there. Little more than a boy he was.” The old fellow passed his seamy hand over his eyes without concealment. “Peter ain't very bright, sometimes, it seems to me,” he added, brokenly; “overlook Bodeffer and Fisbee and me and all of us old husks, and—and—” he gulped suddenly, then finished—“and act the fool and take a boy that's the best we had. I wish the Almighty would take Peter off the gate; he ain't fit fer it.”
When the attorney reached the spot where the crowd was thickest, way was made for him. The old colored man, Xenophon, approached at the same time, leaning on a hickory stick and bent very far over, one hand resting on his hip as if to ease a rusty joint. The negro's age was an incentive to fable; from his appearance he might have known the prophets, and he wore that hoary look of unearthly wisdom many decades of superstitious experience sometimes give to members of his race. His face, so tortured with wrinkles that it might have been made of innumerable black threads woven together, was a living mask of the mystery of his blood. Harkless had once said that Uncle Xenophon had visited heaven before Swedenborg and hell before Dante. To-day, as he slowly limped over the ties, his eyes were bright and dry under the solemn lids, and, though his heavy nostrils were unusually distended in the effort for regular breathing, the deeply puckered lips beneath them were set firmly.
He stopped and looked at the faces before him. When he spoke his voice was gentle, and though the tremulousness of age harped on the vocal strings, it was rigidly controlled. “Kin some kine gelmun,” he asked, “please t'be so good ez t' show de ole main whuh de W'ite-Caips is done shoot Marse Hawkliss?”
“Here was where it happened, Uncle Zen,” answered Wiley, leaning him forward. “Here is the stain.”
Xenophon bent over the spot on the sand, making little odd noises in his throat. Then he painfully resumed his former position. “Dass his blood,” he said, in the same gentle, quavering tone. “Dass my bes' frien' whut lay on de groun' whuh yo staind, gelmun.”