“Take them down to the gully. Build a fire and dig their graves.” Old Erskine Beasley spoke the sentence.
A short, sharp cry of satisfaction was the answer. A cry that suggested the snapping of jaws let loose upon the prey.
Then Joseph Winthrop stood in the very midst of the crowd, laying hands upon the two cowering men, and spoke. A moment before he had caught his heart saying: This is justice, let it be 206 done. But he had cried to God against the sin that had whispered at his heart, and he spoke now calmly, as one assured.
“Do we do wisely, men?” he questioned. “These men are guilty. We know that, for you saw them almost in the act. The sentence is just, for they planned what might have been death for you and yours. But shall only these two be punished? Are there not others? And if we silence these two now forever, how shall we be ever able to find the others?”
“We’ll be sure of these two,” said a sullen voice in the crowd.
“True,” returned the Bishop, raising his voice. “But I tell you there are others greater than any of these who have come into the hills risking their lives. How shall we find and punish those other greater ones? And I tell you further there is one, for it is always one in the end. I tell you there is one man walking the world to-night without a thought of danger or disgrace from whose single mind came all this trouble upon us. That one man we must find. And I pledge you, my friends and my neighbours,” he went on raising his hand, “I pledge you that that one man will be found and that he will do right by you.
“Before these men die, bring a justice––there is one of the village––and let them confess before the world and to him on paper what they 207 know of this crime and of those who commanded it.”
A grudging silence was the only answer, but the Bishop had won for the time. Old Toussaint Derossier, the village justice, was brought forward, fumbling with his beloved wallet of papers, and made to sit upon an up-turned bucket with a slab across his knee and write in his long hand of the rue Henri the story that the men told.
They were ready to tell. They were eager to spin out every detail of all they knew for they felt that men stood around them impatient for the ending of the story, that they might go on with their task.
The Bishop knew that the real struggle was yet to come. He must save these men, not only because it was his duty as a citizen and a Christian and a priest, but because he foresaw that his friend, Jeffrey Whiting, might one day be accused of the killing of a certain man, and that these men might in that day be able to tell something of that story which he himself could but must not tell.