The deputy gave a fleering laugh, ending in a “ki-yi” of the extremity of derision. He had flung himself into a chair, and, with his elbows on the table, looked up with a scornful grin at Tubal Cain Sims, who seemed to entertain solicitude as to the capacities for management and discipline of Enott Blake, famous as the veriest martinet of a drill-sergeant years before he ever saw the inside of Kildeer County jail.
This absurd officiousness, however, met with more leniency from the sheriff. Whether it was that, from his steady diet of commendation, his vanity could afford to dispense with such poor crumbs as Tubal Cain Sims might have it in his power to offer, or whether he was desirous of the emollient effects of indulgence to loosen his visitor’s tongue, he apparently took no heed of this breach of the proprieties.
“He’s all right now. You needn’t have no anxiety ’bout him,” he said, as if it were a matter of course to be brought to book in this way.
“He can’t hurt himself nor any one else now,” echoed the deputy, taking his cue.
Sims turned from one to the other inquiringly.
“Got him in a cage,” said the sheriff grimly.
For one moment Tubal Cain Sims silently cursed his curiosity that had elicited this fact for his knowledge and provision for future nightmares. It was of the order of things that sets the natural impulses of humanity and sympathy adverse to all the necessities of law and justice. He stared at the two officers, as if they were monsters. Perhaps only his weapon, empty in the deputy’s pistol-pocket, persuaded his apparent acquiescence.
“Good Lord!” he gasped, “that’s powerful tur’ble,—powerful tur’ble!”
The sheriff was no mind-reader. He deemed that the allusion applied to the unjudicial hanging.
“Not so very,” he said, seating himself in a splint-bottomed chair, and elevating his boots to the topmost bar of the rusty, fireless grate. “’Tain’t nigh so bad as havin’ ’em fire the jail,” he added gloomily. “They have played that joke on me five times. All this part o’ the buildin’ is new. Burnt spang down the last time we had a fire.”