It was a hideous moment. He was dismissed––under suspicion. Suddenly he laughed. But the sound that came was high-pitched, strained, and had no semblance of a laugh in it. A moment and he sprang to his feet.
“By G––, he can’t––he can’t know what he’s done!” he muttered, a new horror in his tone. “Sacked––‘fired’––kicked out! he’s branded me as surely––as surely as if he’d put the irons on me!”
CHAPTER XX
APPROACHING THE TRIBUNAL
The sun was mounting royally in the eastern sky. There was not a breath of air to temper the rapidly heating atmosphere. The green grassland rolled away on every hand, a fascinating, limitless plain whose monotony drives men to deep-throated curses, and yet holds them to its bosom as surely as might a well-loved mistress. It was a morning when the heart of man should be stirred with the joy of life, when lungs expand with deep draughts of the earth’s purest air, when the full, rich blood circulates with strong, virile pulsations, and the power to do tingles in every nerve.
It was no day on which a man, branded with the worst crime known to a cattle country, should set out to face his fellow men. There should have been darkening clouds on every horizon. There should have been distant growlings of thunder, and every now and then the heavens should have been “rent in twain with appalling floods of cruel light,” to match the hopeless gloom of outraged innocence.
But the glorious summer day was there to mock, as is the way of things in a world where the struggles and disasters of humanity must be counted so infinitesimal.
This was the morning when Jim Thorpe turned his stiffly squared back upon the “AZ” ranch. He wanted no melodramatic accompaniment. He wanted the light, he wanted the cheering sun, he wanted that wealth of 222 natural splendor, which the Western prairie can so amply afford, to lighten the burden which had so suddenly fallen upon him.