When she had gone, Bob went close and turned over the huddled figure. Torn though it was, he recognized the face of Jake Houck. To construct the main features of the tragedy was not difficult.
While escaping from Bear Cat after the fiasco of the bank robbery, Houck must have stumbled somehow into the hands of the Ute band still at large. They had passed judgment on him and executed it. No doubt the wretched man had been tied at the heels of a horse which had been lashed into a frenzied gallop by the Indians in its rear. He had been dragged or kicked to death by the frightened horse.
As Bob looked down into that still, disfigured face, there came to him vividly a sense of the weakness and frailty of human nature. Not long since this bit of lifeless clay had straddled his world like a Colossus. To the young cowpuncher he had been a superman, terrible in his power and capacity to do harm. Now all that vanity and egoism had vanished, blown away as though it had never been.
Where was Jake Houck? What had become of him? The shell that had been his was here. But where was the roaring bully that had shaken his fist blasphemously at God and man?
It came to him, with a queer tug at the heartstrings, that Houck had once been a dimpled baby in a mother’s arms, a chirruping little fat-legged fellow who tottered across the floor to her with outstretched fingers. Had that innocent child disappeared forever? Or in that other world to which Jake had so violently gone would he meet again the better self his evil life had smothered?
Bob loosened the bandanna from his throat and with it covered the face of the outlaw. He straightened the body and folded the hands across the breast. It was not in his power to obliterate from the face the look of ghastly, rigid terror stamped on it during the last terrible moments.
The young husband went back to his waiting wife. He stood by her stirrup while she looked down at him, white-faced.
“Who was it?” she whispered.
“Jake Houck,” he told her gravely. “The Utes did it—because he killed Black Arrow, I reckon.”
She shuddered. A cloud had come over the beautiful world.