Not many moments had passed, when I heard hoofs coming, and Armstrong rode into view. The gaunt white horse galloped with the long, careless fling I had noticed all day. He moved machine-like, as if without choice or volition of his own, a horse commissioned to carry a Fate. Larrap’s stolen horse trotted along by his old master.
Armstrong glanced at Murker’s body lying there, a battered mass.
“Both!” he whispered. “The other was sent right into my hands to be put to death. I knew all the time it would be sent to me to do killing. He was spurring up the Alley on my own horse. He snapped at me. My pistol did not know how to snap. See here!”
And he showed me, hanging from his saddle horn, that loathliest of all objects a man’s eyes ever lighted upon, a fresh scalp. It sickened me.
“Shame!” said I. “Do you call yourself a man, to bring such a thing into a lady’s presence?”
“It was rather mean to take the fellow’s hair,” says Armstrong. “I don’t believe brother Bill would have did it. But I felt orful ugly, when I saw that fat, low-lived devil, and thought of my brother, a big, hul-hearted man as never gave a bad word to nobody, and never held on to a dollar or a slug when ayry man wanted it more ’n him. Come, I’ll throw the nasty thing away, if you say so.”
“Help me drag off this corpse, and we’ll bury man and scalp together,” I said.
We buried him at the gate of the Alley, under a great cairn of stones.
“God forgive them both,” said I, as I flung the last stone, “that they were brutes, and not men.”
“Brutes they was, stranger,” says Armstrong, “but these things is ordered somehow. I allow your pardener and you is glad to get that gal out of a Mormon camp, ef it did cost him a horse and both on you an all day’s tremble. Men don’t ride so hard, and look so wolfish, as you two men have did, onless their heart is into it.”