Were she to commit this deed, would not its terror abide with her for all time—a hideous ever-present spectre, that would follow her through life? She recalled to mind a sermon she had once heard in Alder Creek glen, in which had been pictured in powerful intensity the wrong of taking human life, and the murderer's unrest and troubled conscience forever after. Must she be a taker of human life?
Then would her own soul be stained with crime, her own hand prove the fatal instrument for sending a lost soul to a judgment in which there could be no hope, from which there was no appeal. The word of God himself was against such an act, for in letters of flame the sentence seemed to flash into her brain—"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay."
No! no! she must not blot her soul with this awful act, there was surely some other means to employ, some method less dreadful by which she could save the one in peril. She would wait a little longer, hoping without hope as it were.
Her arm rested idly on her knee, her finger fell away from the trigger she had come so near to pressing, while a half exultant joy leaped in her soul that she had not obeyed the first savage impulse to which her troubled mind gave birth. Not yet had she usurped God's prerogative.
"Am I to be shot down like a dog?" cried the prisoner sharply.
"A traitor may meet his death by rope, bullet, or knife. He deserves to suffer by each separate means," said the leader with a significant glance rather at Steve than at the prisoner.
"See that the prisoner is safely bound." At his command Steve stepped forward and closely examined the cords with which Milt's ankles and wrists were bound. His hands were tied behind him, and with his feet in the shadow the watcher on the rocky ledge above had not noticed until this moment how utterly helpless he was.
Once more she grasped the pistol with a determined grip, and breathlessly looked down on the group beneath her. A crisis was surely approaching.
The captain gave a brief command.
Two of his henchmen—men as unscrupulous and callous as he—began to remove some flat stones that were laid on a pile of cedar logs near the rocky sides of the quarry just beyond the prisoner. This spot was partly in the shadow, and Sally had not noticed it until her attention was directed thither.