Beyond the Law
By Jackson Gregory
CHAPTER I
WATSON HEARS HIS CALL
“Did you ever kill a man?”
The question came quietly out of a long silence. The younger man looked up quickly from the crackling camp-fire, his eyes searching his partner’s grave face for an explanation of the strangely dull note in his voice.
“No, Johnny. I never killed a man. Why?”
Johnny Watson made no answer for a little as he drew thoughtfully upon his pipe. The little, drying mountain stream upon which they had camped for the night went singing on its way under the stars.
Neither of the two men so much as stirred until after the younger man had almost forgotten the abrupt question, and was thinking upon the bed he had made of willow branches, when Johnny Watson took the pipe from between his lips, ran a brown hand across the grizzled stub of his ragged mustache and continued in the same expressionless monotone:
“I have. Three of ’em. One close to thirty years ago, Dick. A sailor, he was; and a sailor of a sort I was, too, in those days. Down where the South Seas is used to man-killing. I had a little money, a good deal for a sailorman to have all at one time, sewed in a bit of canvas in my shirt. Ben, he had been drunk and was mean and reckless, or I guess he wouldn’t ’a’ done it— Ben was a decent man after his fashion.