Lying in the rift with his head toward the deep waters of Little Wolf Creek lay Thomas Smith, scowling with unseeing eyes at the fast clearing sky. While on the farther side of the road lay the still form of John Jacobs, rain-beaten and smeared with mud, as if he had struggled backward in his death-throes.
As Champers bent tenderly over him, the smile on his lips took away the awfulness of the sight, and the serenity of the rain-drenched face rested as visible token of an abundant entrance into eternal peace.
Grass River and Big Wolf settlements had never before known a tragedy so appalling as the assassination of John Jacobs at the hands of an “unknown” man. Hans Wyker had gone to Kansas City on the day before the event and Wykerton never saw his face again. Rosie Gimpke, who did not know the stranger’s name, and Darley Champers, who thought he did, believed nothing could be gained by talking, so they held their peace. And Thomas Smith went “unknown” back to the dust of the prairie in the Grass River graveyard.
The coroner tried faithfully to locate the blame. But as Jacobs was unarmed and was shot from the front, and the stranger had only one bullet in his revolver and was shot from behind, and as nobody lost nor gained by not untangling the mystery, the affair after a nine days’ complete threshing, went into local history, the place of sepulchre.
CHAPTER XXI
Jane Aydelot’s Will
| Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act, And make her generous thought a fact, Keeping with many a light disguise The secret of self-sacrifice, O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best That Heaven itself could give thee—rest. —Snow Bound. |
Darley CHAMPERS sat in his little office absorbed in business. The May morning was ideal. Through the front door the sounds of the street drifted in. Through the rear door the roomy backyard, which was Champers’ one domestic pleasure, sent in an odor of white lilac. By all the rules Champers should have preferred hollyhocks and red peonies, if he had cared for flowers at all. It was for the memory of the old mother, whom he would not turn adrift to please a frivolous wife, that he grew the white blossoms she had loved. But as he never spoke of her, nor seemed to see any other flowers, nobody noticed the peculiarity.