The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Jeffrey Whiting stood where she had left him digging up the tender roots of the new grass with his toe. He did not look after the girl. He had forgotten her.

He felt no resentment at the things that she had said. He did not argue with himself as to whether these things were just or unjust. Of all the things that she had said only one thing mattered. And that not because she had said it. It mattered because it was true. The quick, jabbing sentences from the girl had driven home to him just one thing.

Guilty? He was guilty. He was as guilty as––Rafe Gadbeau.

Provocation? Yes, he had had provocation, bitter, blinding provocation. But so had Rafe Gadbeau: and he had never thought of Rafe Gadbeau as anything but guilty of murder.

He turned on his heel and walked down the Run with swift, swinging strides, fighting this conviction that was settling upon him. He fought it viciously, with contempt, arguing that he was a man, that the thing was done and past, that men have no time for remorse and sickish, mawkish repentance. Those things were for brooding women, and Frenchmen. He fought it reasonably, sagaciously; contending that he had not, in 319 fact, pulled the trigger. How did he know that he would ever have done so? Maybe he had not really intended to kill at all. Maybe he would not have killed. The man might have spoken to him. Perhaps he was going to speak when he turned that time. Who could tell? Ten thousand things might have happened, any one of which would have stood between him and killing the man. He fought it defiantly. Suppose he had killed the man? What about it? The man deserved it. He had a right to kill him.

But he knew that he was losing at every angle of the fight. For the conviction answered not a word to any of these things. It merely fastened itself upon his spirit and stuck to the original indictment: “As guilty as Rafe Gadbeau.”

And when he came over the top of the hill, from where he could look down upon the grave of Rafe Gadbeau there under the Gaunt Rocks, the conviction pointed out to him just one enduring fact. It said: “There is the grave of Rafe Gadbeau; as long as memory lives to say anything about that grave it will say: a murderer was buried here.”

Then he fought no more with the conviction. It gripped his spirit and cowed him. It sat upon his shoulders and rode home with him. His mother saw it in his face, and, not understanding, began to look for some fresh trouble.

She need not have looked for new trouble, so 320 far as concerned things outside himself. For Jeffrey was doing very well in the world of men. He had gotten the home rebuilt, a more comfortable and finer home than it had ever been. He had secured an excellent contract from the railroad to supply thousands of ties out of the timber of the high hills. He had made money out of that. And once he had gotten a taste of money-making, in a business that was his by the traditions of his people and his own liking, he knew that he had found himself a career.

He was working now on a far bigger project, the reforesting of thirty thousand acres of the higher hill country. In time there would be unlimited money in that. But there was more than money in it. It was a game and a life which he knew and which he loved. To make money by making things more abundant, by covering the naked peaks of the hill country with sturdy, growing timber, that was a thing that appealed to him.