There the station agent was called in to lend the counsel of his official position. A man could not be shipped by freight if alive, he said. He could be sent as a corpse is sent, by paying the rate of a fare and a half and stowing him in the baggage-car with trunks and dogs. The undertaker was of the same opinion, which he expressed gravely, with becoming sadness and gloom.
Judge Thayer wrote the address on the shipping tag, the undertaker tacked it on Seth Craddock's case, and then the amazed people of Ascalon came forward surrounding the case, and read:
Chief of Police,
Kansas City, Missouri.
That was the consignee of the strangest shipment ever billed out of Ascalon. People wondered what the chief of police would do with his gift. They wished him well of it, with all their hearts.
Meantime Seth Craddock, with the blood of eight men on his hands, was making more noise in the coffin box than a sack of cats. It was a most undignified way for a man of his sanguinary reputation to accept this humiliation at the hands of a public that he had outraged. A mule in a box stall could not have made a greater clatter with heels against planks than the fallen city marshal of Ascalon drummed up with his on the stout end of the coffin box. He cursed as he kicked, and called in muffled voice on the friends of his brief day of power to come and set him free.
But the sycophants who had hung to his heels like hand-fed dogs when power glorified him like a glistening garment and exalted him high above other men, turned out as all time-servers and cowardly courtiers always finish when the object of their transitory adulation falls with his belly in the dust. They sneered, they jeered, they turned white-shirted coatless backs upon his box with derisive, despising laughter on their night-pale faces. Seth Craddock was a mighty man as long as he had a license to walk about and slay, but fastened up in a box like a corpse for shipment at the rate of the dead, he was only a hull and an empty husk of a man.
They said he was a coward; they had known it all along. It called for a coward to shoot men down like rabbits. That was not the way of a brave and worthy man. This great moral conclusion they reached readily enough, Seth Craddock securely caged before them. If Morgan's rope had missed its mark, if a snarl had shortened it a foot; if Craddock had been a second sooner in starting to draw his gun, this wave of moral exaltation would not have descended upon Ascalon that day.
There was some concern over the holding quality of the box. People feared Craddock might burst out of it before going far, and return against them for the reckoning so volubly threatened. The undertaker quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help if he screwed him shut in that most competent container of the mortal remains of man.
Thus assured, the citizens carried the box in festive spirit, with more charity and kindness toward old Seth than he deserved, and stood it on end in the shadow of the depot. There was an auger hole on a level with Seth's eye, through which he could glower out for his last look on Ascalon, and the people who gathered around to deride him and triumph in his overthrow.