In a moment, seated in the buckboard between the two men, with only time for a good-by to Bess, a shake of the old man's hand, and never a moment to explain that the accident he had mentioned had befallen himself, not Jane, Job Malden rode down over the Pine Tree road, handcuffed, on his way to the county jail at Gold City.
Past the Miners' Home and the Palace Hotel they drove at last. Bitter faces glared into the prisoner's, friends of other days met him with silence, and here and there a voice cried, "Lynch him!" Up past the old church where he and Jane had gone and come together; up to the door of the quaint white court house with square tower and green blinds they drove, and Job passed through the rear door, and into the narrow, dark dungeon, with only, high up, a little iron-barred window to let in light and air—a prisoner of Grizzly county, to answer for the killing of Jane Reed.
Only when he heard the sound of the bolt in the door, heard the crowd outside cheering the sheriff for his bravery in capturing the outlaw, and, seated on the narrow cot, looked around the cheerless cell with no other furniture, did a sense of what it all meant rush over him. Then the hot tears came, his head sank between his hands, and he felt that he had taken the first step up Calvary. Like a far-off murmur there came to him the words he had said in his heart on that long-ago Communion Sunday:
"Where He leads me I will follow,
I'll go with Him all the way."
All the way? Ah, he was beginning to know what that meant! Then there came that other verse—how it soothed his troubled heart!
"He will give me grace and glory,
And go with me all the way."
Just then the sun stole in at the little cell window, and the perpendicular and horizontal bars made the shadow of a cross on the floor, all surrounded by a flood of light. A great peace came into Job Malden's heart, as the Master whispered, "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee."
All Gold City was stirred to its depths. Nothing had happened in forty years to so move the hearts of men. Business was forgotten, groups of men met and talked long on the street corners, the mining camp was deserted. There was but one theme—the tragedy of Inspiration Point. Up at the Yellow Jacket a great shadow rested over office, church and the miners' shanties. On the lowest levels of the mines, grimy men looked into each other's faces and talked in an undertone of the awful fear which they would not have the rocks and the secret places of the earth know; that "the parson" was in a murderer's cell, and the storm clouds were gathering fast about him, and the worst was, he was guilty—it must be so!