"Air this the law? No trial! no jury! Not a minute gin him to explain! Call him thief, an' shoot him down, unarmed, in cold blood!"
They pressed about him with eyes hardly less luminous than the eyes of wolves, hardly so gentle, while the officer protested first self-defence.
"With twenty men at yer back?" "An' Guthrie's pistols over yander in the holsters on his saddle?" the refutation rang out. Then, on the repetition of the terrible cry, "String him up!" the effort at exculpation shifted to a claim of the accidental discharge of the weapon. And still the fierce clamor rose anew.
Meantime Felix Guthrie lay very still in the pale moonlight, heedless of vengeance. His long hair stretched backward on the dank grass; his face, upturned to the moonbeams, was calm and untroubled; his hands were listless and limp, and one of the younger men mechanically chafed them as he now and again bent over to seek some sign of life in the fixed eyes.
Shattuck stood bewildered, looking with a sort of numb stupefaction at the prostrate figure upon the grass, and then at the agitated and furious group about the sheriff. The catastrophe, the very scene before him, he could not realize. He felt as in a horrible dream, when the consciousness of fantasy opens before the oppressed senses. More than once a touch upon his arm failed to rouse him. When he turned his head at last he saw, half hidden by the boughs of the blooming laurel, Letitia crouching tremulously in the shadow. He did not wonder how she came there now, nor note that the door of the little log cabin was open, and its inmates, roused by the tumult, were standing on the porch. He only saw her pale elfin face looking out from among the blooms as if she were native to the laurels. Her voice, though it was but a whisper, vibrated with urgency.
"Mount an' ride—ride for yer life!" she said; she held his horse by the bridle. "Thar'll be lynchin' 'fore day." Her tones grew steadier. "Nobody knows who, nor why."
"I'm not afraid of the law," he said, indignantly.
"This ain't law! Gin yerse'f up in town ef ye want law. But ride now—ride off in the shadder! Ride fur yer life!"
From the leafy screen she stepped forth, throwing the reins over the head of the horse, which was frightened and restive, and held the stirrup for Shattuck. The clamorous voices of those angered men rose to a hoarse scream, and the agitated tones of the officer, pleading, arguing, justifying himself, were overborne. Shattuck put his foot in the stirrup. The next moment he was in the saddle. As he looked down, he saw Letitia's face distinctly in the moonlight that trickled through a bough; something of that love of hers, which Guthrie had at once divined and denied and revealed, was expressed in it.
"Ye'll kem back again—some day—some day?" she said.