"Ah!" retorted Gully, bitterly. "And yet you might have got snagged a hundred times there and only just cursed and snapped your line and reeled in, thinking it was a log or something. . . . Well, as I was saying, I realized the jig was up after that dog business, and directly I got home I began making preparations for my get-away last night. If you'd all only have come half an hour later than you did—That's what made me so mad—just another half hour later, mind you, and I would have been away—en route for the Coast by the night train."
Presently Kilbride threw aside his pen and straightened up. "Now, listen, Gully!" he said. And he read out the confession that he had composed from the main facts of the prisoner's remarkable statement.
"Yes!" muttered Gully thoughtfully, as the inspector finished. "Yes, that will do, Kilbride. Give me the pen, please, and I will sign it. . . ."
He proceeded to affix his signature, continuing with a sort of deadly composure: "I have endorsed and executed many death-warrants in my time—in my capacity of Deputy-Sheriff—I little thought that some day I might be called upon to sign my own . . . which this document virtually is. . . ."
He reared himself up to his huge, gaunt height, and with a sweeping glance at his captors added: "Nothing remains for me now I imagine, but to shake hands with—Radcliffe.[1] . . ."
And his dreadful voice died away like a single grim note of a great, deep-toned bell, tolled perchance in some prison-yard.
"Eshcorrt! Get ready!" boomed out Sergeant Slavin's harsh command. The party was on the station platform. Yorke and McSporran fell in briskly on either side of their heavily-manacled prisoner, and stood watching the distant lights of the oncoming east-bound train as it rounded the Davidsburg bend.
One last despairing glance Gully cast about him at the all familiar surroundings, then he raised his fettered hands on high and lifted up his great voice:
"I have striven! I have striven!—and now!—Oh! there is no God! Bear witness there is no God! No God! . . ." he cried to the heavens.
The wild, harsh, dreadful blasphemy rang far and wide out into the night, floating over the nearby river and finally dying away a ghastly murmur up among the timber-lined spurs of Crag Cañon.