There was a little silence. Brant could not understand, could not believe this startling assertion flung in his face.
“But Hodges was thrown over the precipice,” he said, at last.
The marshal shook his head. There was defiance now in his aspect—defiance, and a mighty joy.
“It doesn’t make any difference about that,” he announced. “This is Hodges!”
Then, his exultation burst in words:
“Hodges caught in his own traps! His neck broken, as it should have been broken by the rope for the murders he’s done! It was my carelessness did it, yes. But I don’t care now, so long as it’s Hodges who’s got caught. Hodges set those traps, and—there he is!... I read about something like that once in a story. They called it ‘poetic justice.’”
“He don’t look like a poem,” Brant remarked. He turned from the gory corpse with a shudder of disgust.
“Thank God, it was Hodges!” the marshal said, 272 reverently. “Anybody else would have haunted me for life. But Hodges! Why, I’m glad!”
The affair was easily explicable in the light of what Plutina had to tell. Hodges, undoubtedly, had knowledge of some secret, hazardous path down the face of the precipice past the Devil’s Cauldron, and on to the valley. He had meant to flee by it with Plutina, thus to escape the hound. By it, he had fled alone. Perhaps, he had had a hiding-place for money somewhere about the raided still. Or, perhaps, he had merely chosen this route along Thunder Branch on his way to an asylum beyond Bull Head Mountain. What was certain was that he had blundered into his own pitiless snares. Naturally, he would have had no suspicion that the traps remained. In his mad haste, he had rushed heedlessly upon destruction. The remorseless engines of his own devising had taken full toll of him. By his own act, he paid with his life the penalty for crime. There was propriety in the marshal’s reference to poetic justice.