John moved to the door.
“Where’st going now?” asked Barraclough, apprehensive of the slackening of the spring he had wound up.
“To her grave,” said John, and Barraclough nodded approvingly. He trusted Annie’s grave; there would be no slackening of the spring and mentally he thanked John for thinking of a grave-side vigil. Barraclough had not thought of anything so trustworthy; he had thought of an inn, to which the objections were that he had no wish to be seen in company with John, and that alcohol is capricious in effect.
Barraclough had given him a goal, and an outlet for all his pent-up emotion. There was his dreadful childhood in the factory, then the splendid mitigation whose name was Annie, and the tearing loss of her: behind all that, there was the System and above it now was Hepple-stall. He had an exaltation by her grave. There was a people enslaved by Hepplestall and there was John Bradshaw, their deliverer, John Bradshaw magnified till he was qualified for the high rôle of an avenging angel. He was without fear of himself or of any consequences, he had no doubts and no loose ends, he had simply a purpose—to kill Hepplestall. To be sane is to think and John did not think: he felt.
There was some reason why he could not kill Hepplestall till it was dark. Once or twice he tried, vaguely, to remember what the reason was, then forgot that he was trying to remember anything. When it was dark he was to go to Barraclough’s for the gun with which he would kill Hepplestall. He was cold and hungry, shivering violently and aware of nothing but that he was God’s executioner.
When dusk came he left the grave and went, dry-lipped, stumbling like a man walking in a dream, to Barra-clough’s. At the sight of him, Barraclough had more than doubt. Of what use a gun in these palsied hands? What demonstration, other than one palpably insane, could this trembling instrument effect?
But Bradshaw was the one hope of the agent and since there was nothing else to trust, he must trust his luck.
“The gun! The gun!”
Barraclough placed it in his hands without a word and John turned with it and was gone. The canny Barraclough, taking his precautions in case the worst (or the best) happened, slept that night in a public-house midway between Needham’s and Hepplestall’s. He had made himself pleasant to several passers-by on the road; he had asked them the time; he had established his alibi.