XV.
The accuracy of Felix Guthrie's oft-vaunted aim was attested by two ghastly objects that had exhaled life and found their doom in Crazy Zeb's cell. In the presence of these dumb witnesses of the struggle, lying surrounded by the charred and cold remnants of the fire, and scattered hay and corn which the vanished horses had left, and shadowed by the gloomy gray walls with their sinister resonance, the place seemed charged with the tragedies of its associations, frightful to contemplate, ill to linger about, and far removed from any possible conjunction with the idea of mirth and the festivities which a greasy, thickened pack of cards strewed about the two bodies, and a flask, broken by its fall on the rock, but still containing whiskey, might betoken. The chilly vault opened upon the serene splendors of the infinitely pellucid sunshine that glowed to midsummer warmth. Had ever the sky worn so dense, so keen, so clear a blue? It discredited the azure of the far western mountains, and marked how the material, even attenuated by distance to the guise of the veriest vapor, fails of the true ethereal tint of the ambient spaces of the air. The birds sang from the sun-flooded trees just beneath the cliff—so limpidly sweet the tones!—and within were two men dead in their sins, in this drear place that had known woe.
Death is not easily predicable of those of a common household, and in this scantily populated region the sense of community is close. There were some involuntary exclamations from the posse upon the recognition of the malefactors, implying a sense of catastrophe and regret; especially for one of them, a young man with the down on his lips, his face and posture contorted with the agony long endured while he had lain here deserted in the darkness of the night, lighted only by the mystic moon, beside the stark figure of his comrade, who had been shot through the heart, dying in the space of a second.
"Lordy massy 'pon my soul, ef hyar ain't Benjy Swasey! What a turrible time he mus' hev hed afore he tuk off!" cried old Bakewell, his pallid face aquiver, and his voice faltering as he bent over the recumbent form.
The sight and the circumstance failed to affect the official nerve of the sheriff. "Now this is plumb satisfactory," he remarked. "I never expected ter see Buck Cheever in this fix. I 'lowed the devil takes too good care o' his own. It's mighty satisfactory. I hed planned," he added, as he looked about at the high roof and the inaccessible depths below, "that I'd blow up this place some with giant powder or sech; but I reckon I hed better let it be—it does lead the evil-doer ter sech a bad end!"
But the old man still leaned with a pitiful corrugated brow over the lifeless figure. Age had made his heart tender, and he chose to disregard the logic that spoke from the muzzles of Swasey's discharged pistols, one lying close by, and from Cheever's bloody knife still held in the stiffened clasp of the hand that had wielded it. "Fee," he said, tremulously, "ye shoot too straight."
And Guthrie, his hand meditatively laid on his chin, and his eyes staring absently forward as if they beheld more or less than was before them, replied, "That's a true word, I reckon."
The air freighted with tragedy, with all the ultimate anguish of life and sin and death, seemed to receive with a sort of shock the sheriff's gay rallying laughter as he clapped Guthrie's shoulder.
"Then, Fee, my fine young rooster, ef ye hedn't shot straight I'd be a-sendin' fur the coroner ter kem an' set on you!"
"'Pears ter me," said the blacksmith, who still had on his leather apron, having forgotten, in the excitement, to lay it aside, and gazing with dilated eyes at the blood stains on the rock floor—"'pears ter me he'd hev a mighty oneasy seat on Fee, dead or alive."