“Lights on steer horns are nothing to this,” I began, when a piercing scream cut me short.
Timberline, at the other side of the stony platform, had clapped his hands to his head.
“Take off your hat,” I shouted.
But he had fallen on his knees, and was ripping, tearing his clothes. He plucked and dragged at the old rags next his skin. Then he flung his hands to the sky.
“O God!” he screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Keep him off me! Oh, save me!” His glaring face now seemed fixed on something close to him. “Leave me go! I didn’t push you over. You know he made me push you. I meant nothing. I knowed nothing, I was only the cook. Why, I liked you—you was kind to me. Oh, why did I ever go! There! Take it back! There’s your money! He give it to me when you was dead to make me hush up. There! I never spent a cent of it!”
He tore from his rags the hush-money that had been sewed in them, and scattered the fluttering bills in the air. Then once more he clapped his hands to his head as he kneeled.
“Take off your hat!” I cried again.
He rose, stared wildly, and screamed: “I tell you you’ve got it all. It’s all he gave to me!”
The next moment he plunged into the cauldron, a thousand feet below.
On the following day we found the two bodies—that second victim the country had wondered about, and the boy. And we counted the money, the guilty money that had for a while closed the boy’s innocent mouth: five ten-dollar bills! Not much to hide murder for, not much to draw a tortured soul back to the scene of another’s crime. The true murderer was not caught, and no one ever claimed the reward.