“You forced me to do it!” Carson Dwight said, his great soul rising to heights of pity and dismay never reached before. “God knows I did not want to shoot you. Dan, I never have had anything against you. I would have avoided this if I could.”
The stare of the wounded man flickered. With a moan of pain he bent to the neck of his horse and remained there a moment, and then, dropping his revolver and resting both quivering hands on the pommel of his saddle, he drew himself partially erect. His eyes were rolling upward, his purple lips moved as if to speak, but his vocal organs seemed to have lost their power. Holding to his pommel with his left hand, he raised his right and partially extended it towards Dwight, but he had not the strength to sustain its weight, and with another moan, a frothing at the mouth, Dan Willis toppled from his horse and went to the ground, the animal breaking away in alarm and running down the road.
Quickly dismounting, Carson bent over the dying man. “Dan, were you offering me your hand?” he asked, tenderly. But there was no response. The mountaineer was dead. There he lay, a pint whiskey flask nearly empty of its contents protruding from his shirt.
Carson looked up and about him. The sky had never seemed clearer, the forest never so beautifully lush and green, so full of sylvan recesses and the gladsome songs of birds. Higher and more majestic never had the mountains seemed to tower into God's infinite blue. And yet here at his feet lay the remains of one who had been created in the image of his Maker, as lifeless as the clod from which he had sprung. All this—and Carson's horse nibbling with bitted mouth the short grass which grew about. There were no fires of satisfied revenge at which the spiritually chilled young man could warm himself. Regret steeped in the vat of remorse filled his young soul. Seating himself at the side of the road, he remained there a long time calmly laying his plans. Of course, knowing the law as he knew it, he would give himself up to the sheriff. Then with a start and a shock of horror he thought of his mother. Dr. Stone's warning now loomed up before him as if written in letters of fire. Yes, this—this, of all things, would kill her! Knowing her nature, nothing that could happen to him would be more fatal. Not even his own death by violence would hold such terrors for her sensitive, imaginative temperament, which exaggerated every ill or evil that beset his path. After all, he grimly asked himself, which way did his real duty lie? Obedience to the law he reverenced demanded that he throw himself upon its slow and creaking routine, and yet was there not a higher tribunal? By what right should the legal machinery of his or any other country require the life of a stricken woman that the majesty of its forms might be upheld and the justice or injustice to an outlaw who had persistently hounded him be formally passed upon?
No, he told himself, the right to protect his mother was his—it was even more, as he saw it, it was his first duty. And yet if he kept his own counsel, he asked himself, his legal mind now active, what were the chances of escape from accusation? Noticing the target still pinned to the trunk of the tree with the dead man's pocket-knife, the shots showing on the bark and paper, and the sprawling attitude of the corpse with the wound over the region of the heart, he asked himself, with faintly rising hope, what more natural than to assume that death had resulted from accident? What more reasonable than the theory that on his frightened horse Dan Willis had accidentally directed his shot upon his own body? What better evidence that he was not at himself than the almost empty flask in his shirt? Yes, Carson Dwight decided, it was his duty to wait at least to see further before taking a step which would result in even deeper tragedy. Besides, he knew he was morally guiltless. His conscience was clear; there was consolation in that at all events. But now what must he do? To go on to Springtown by that road was out of the question, for only a mile or so farther on was a store and a few farm-houses, and it would be known there that he had passed the fatal spot. So, remounting, he rode slowly back towards Darley, now earnestly, and even craftily, hoping that he would meet no one. He was successful, for he reached the main road, which was longer, not so well graded, and a more sparsely settled thoroughfare to his destination.
He had lost time, and he now put his horse into a brisk canter and sped onward with a queer blending of emotions. The thought of possibly saving his mother from a terrible shock buoyed him up while the grewsome happening put a weight upon him he had never borne before.