According to Law

According to Law

by

Frank L. Packard, Lachine, P. Q., Canada

From The Fonds of Frank L. Packard at the Library and Archives, Canada. Published in The Blue Book Magazine, v10 #6, April 1910./drf Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca

Chapter I.

“Him?” Staff Sergeant Paxley of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police would say when questioned. “Lord! I dunno. None of us knows. I found him on the trail south of MacLeod. A shaver of nine or ten he was then, an’ pretty sick at that. So I ups an’ totes him into barracks, an’ the O. C., Stavely that was, you mind, an’ a blamed good sort, he says, says, he, ‘Constable Paxley’— that was before I had my stripes— ‘we’ll keep the boy, an’, please God, we’ll make a man of him, too.’ You see, we never got no inquiries for lost kids that would fit his description, an’ as for him, when he got over the brain fever, he didn’t remember a blessed thing, an’ there was nothin’ to go by but a bit of gold chain, which wasn’t much. So we named him MacLeod after the fort an’ Jack after me, an’ put him to school, an’ that’s the whole blessed story.”

Such in brief was the early biography of Jack, now Constable, MacLeod. There were other details that the sergeant never mentioned, scrapings and savings from his own scanty pay and not a few sacrifices that the lad might benefit thereby, looking to the time when the “kid” should don the red tunic with the R. N. W. M. P. on the shoulder straps, and fare out into the Great Country to take his place with the Riders of the Plains.

The years had gone by, twelve of them, and that time had come. Years full of the sergeant’s, strong, clean teachings, and full, too of his rough tenderness for his foster-son. To-morrow Constable MacLeod was to go out on his first detail, and this, the last night, they were spending together in the sergeant’s little office. The sergeant sitting with his feet up on his desk, pulling at his grizzled mustache and jabbing with a stubby forefinger at his short, black briar; his face, now grave as the conversation took a serious turn now animated as he recounted some story of the days that were gone. MacLeod’s chair was tilted back against the wall, his blue eyes fixed steadily on the sergeant; upon his face an expression that was a little boyish still, in consonance with his tall, broad shouldered figure that had not yet attained the rounded, close-knit fullness of maturity.

“In all the world,” said the sergeant, concluding an anecdote of some unsung hero who had brought credit to the Corps, “there’s no bally crowd like ours. Never forget that, kid. Out here in this big country our fellows have led the way. We ain’t much for style an’ less for show—it’s mostly work and duty. Talk of the scientific josser outfits hittin’ the trail for the North Pole! Lord, we’ve got a post in the Arctic Circle now! And son, you mark my words, it’s a sure bet that when they find that bloomin’ stick or whatever it is, it’ll be a North West Mounted man that does it!”

This was the sergeant’s creed and MacLeod’s eyes brightened as he listened—for it was his creed, too. Story followed story, but as the hour grew late he lapsed into almost complete silence, his attention not entirely given to the other’s words. In a few minutes he must say good-by, and he was searching for the words with which to express the gratitude and love that was in his heart. He looked up a little shyly. It was not easy to bare his heart even to this man who had been a father to him, whom he had come to trust and respect—to whom he owed everything he possessed.

But the Sergeant was talking now faster than ever, seemingly bent on allowing no lull to fall upon the one-sided conversation. The clock in the office struck eleven. The sergeant swung from his chair, standing straight and stiff as a ramrod.

“Time to say good-night an’ good-by, kid,” he said brusquely. “You’ll have to be off at five in the mornin’,”

“Sergeant—”

“Nope!” interrupted Sergeant Paxley, “I didn’t figure to listen to any pretty speeched, an’ I’m hanged if I will, likewise I ain’t got any to make to you. I know what you want to say, an’ what I’ve had to say I’ve tried to say little by little all the way through from when you was a bit of a shaver”—he pushed the young constable toward the door—“Nights when you’re out on the prairie under the stars, or in the woods with maybe a camp-fire dying down and you lay staring up at the bit of blue through the leaves, just remember, God made ‘em all; it’ll help you to do your duty. Don’t matter when or how or where, your duty’s first, lad, always remember that. Play the game straight an’ honest an’ square—but play it hard! Don’t never shoot unless you have to—then shoot! Good-by an’ God bless you, young ‘un.”

He wrung MacLeod’s hand in a grip that made the young man wince, and then without giving him time to reply, forced him gently outside,

For a minute MacLeod stood motionless before the closed door.

Once or twice he swallowed hard, then his hand went smartly up to the salute, and wheeling about he walked with long strides in the direction of the men’s quarters.

Two months later, towards six o’clock in the evening, Constable MacLeod, riding slowly, was making for the little butte that rose a quarter of a mile in front of him. All that day, and for many days before, he had covered mile after mile of endless prairie, patrolling the section to which he had been detailed when he had reported from the barracks at MacLeod to Sergeant Greeley, in command of the Red Deer post. The day had been much like the preceding ones. He had stopped at all the homesteads on his route, five of them, with the customary query, “any complaints?” The settlers had answered in the negative, signed their names, mostly in scrawling, illegible characters, to the reports, and he had ridden on again. That was all.

Somewhere to the westward should be Thompson’s place, where he intended to ask a bunk for the night. It was not in sight, but he fell to speculating fancifully on what it would be like, whether there would be a woman and, perhaps children, or, like that outfit a half-mile back, just a man alone. He was a queer sort, that chap, black almost as an Indian, his head covered with a great shook of unkempt hair that tumbled over a low brow. From the corner of one eye a great brown scar had stretched back across the temple, and on the opposite cheek another, long and white, that reaching to the lip had pulled it slightly back, disclosing the upper teeth on one side of his face. He had looked pale and sickly, and his hand had shaken visibly when, leaning against the saddle-bow, he had signed his name to the “complaint report.” And yet, unprepossessing as the man had appeared, there was still something about him that left MacLeod loath to judge him for the hard character that he looked to be. “Thorold De Barr,” MacLeod had pulled out the complaint report from his pocket to look at the signature as he had done several times before. The name was signed in a rounded, well-formed hand. He remembered the man’s strange answer, “not in your department,” when he had asked him if he had any complaints.

“Queer beggar!” MacLeod muttered, as he folded the report, and replaced it in his pocket.

His horse had topped the little rise and MacLeod, dismounting, allowed the animal to graze on the short prairie stubble. Behind him, fifty miles or so, was the Edmonton trail. As far as the eye could reach the prairie stretched out vast, limitless, like the ocean, unbroken in its dull yellow-brown as it swept to the horizon.

In front of him the Rockies, forty miles away, made a blue-blurred line reaching north and south. Here the prairie was more rolling, dipping and undulating in little swells, For three or four minutes he could see no sign of the place for which he was searching. Then a little to the right, almost hidden by a rise in the ground, he pioked out the roof of a house.

“That must be Thompson’s,” he said aloud, and mounting again he loped down the side of the butte making toward it.

As he approached, he was struck with the air of desertion and loneliness that pervaded the place. There were no signs of life anywhere. The board shutters were up on the windows. The few plants in a small flower-bed in front of the house were withered and dying. MacLeod halloed as he drew up before the door. There was no response. He dismounted, to find it fastened with length of chain driven through two staples and secured by a padlock.

Receiving no reply to his repeated knocks, he began to make a circuit of the house. He walked slowly around until he turned the corner at the rear, then, with a low exclamation, he halted abruptly, shocked at the unexpectedness of his discovery. There before him was a curving mound of earth, the grave quite freshly covered. At its head half of a shingle, that had once been upright, now lay skewed to one side and almost flat. Some printed letters upon it caught his eye and he bent down to read them:

                                       “HERE L—

------------------------------------------ ALDYTHE MART—“

That was all. MacLeod’s Stetson was in his hand as he stood erect. It was but another tragedy of the Great Plains! Lost for a moment to his surroundings, he fell to wondering who and what this woman, the occupant of the lonely grave, had been. Thompson’s wife, most likely. Where she had come from. If there was a home somewhere, in the Old Country, perhaps—a mother and father, brothers and sisters—or was she, like himself a—

A piece of shingle ground into the earth a few feet away attracted his attention, changing the trend of his thoughts. He picked it up, brushing the dirt carefully from it. It was the other part of the pitiful tombstone.

He pieced the two together:

“HERE LIES

ALDYTHE MARTHA KERR”

“Kerr!” he read the name again. Not Thompson’s wife, then.

He had been wrong. But what had she to do with Thompson? And Thompson, where had he gone and why? It seemed strange. A vague suspicion that all was not right flashed through MacLeod’s mind. He turned and walked back to the front of the house, and why he hardly knew himself, for he expected no answer to his summons, banged heavily with his fist upon the door. A moment he waited, then he put his shoulder against it to force it open. Once it resisted his efforts, then he flung his weight upon it. The chain flew back as a staple gave and he half-tumbled inside before he could recover himself.

The interior that confronted him was the kitchen and general living-room of the house. A table in the center, three or four chairs in the corner, at one side a stove, while back against the wall a cupboard, made from a packing box, was nailed above a makeshift sink. Between the cupboard and the sink various cooking utensils hung in neat rows. Some cheap colored prints, mostly pages torn from periodicals and tacked into place, adorned the walls. Dust was everywhere, lying thick as the prairie winds had blown it in through the crevices in the walls and windows. The desertion here, as without, was on all sides in evidence.

To MacLeod’s right, from where he stood on the threshold, was a door leading through the partition that divided the house in two. He started toward it, then stopped and stooped quickly to the floor. As he straightened up he held in his hand a little lump of earth that had been tracked in by someone’s boots, almost dust in its dryness but still preserving a faint trace of moisture, Somebody had been there since, or during that morning! For days the prairie had been dry, insufferably dry—he had reason to remember it. That morning it had rained!

MacLeod walked rapidly toward the other door. It was ajar and he pushed it back with the heel of his boot. A scene of almost indescribable confusion met his eye. In the corner a bed had been literally torn to pieces, the covers lay around upon the floor, and great gashes had been slashed in the mattress—a cheap affair from which the straw now protruded. At his feet, must inside the room, was a hideous red stains, ghastly in its inference. He bent to examine it more closely, and his lips compressed into a hard, straight line as he rose again.

From a small combination desk and bureau the drawers had been wrenched out and the contents, for the most part a women’s garments, flung in all directions, as if someone had dug with both hands in a mad search as a dog paws wildly at a gopher’s hole scattering the dirt behind him. On the farther side of the room a trunk, its cover half-torn from the hinges, lay bottom side up, and before it, in a heap, the articles it had contained.

It was rapidly growing too dark in the room to see distinctly. MacLeod began a hurried search; then, at the expiration of half-an-hour, he stepped out into the living-room and made his way to the sink. He remembered having noticed a candle there. This he lighted and proceeded to examine the two pieces of paper that he held in his hand. One was a bill, receipted, and dated several years back. He laid it aside. The other was a torn fragment of what had evidently been a letter, it was old and yellow. He had found it in a corner of the tray where, in all probability, it had fluttered unnoticed when at sometime a person, standing beside the open trunk, had torn up a letter. The words were disjointed and meaningless, but MacLeod stared at them with a curious sense of familiarity. For a moment he was puzzled, then his hand went quickly into his pocket and he was comparing the writing with the signature on the complaint report. It was the same hand, the same rounded well-formed hand that had signed “Thorobold De Barr.”

It might mean much or little. There was nothing further to be gained by staying where he was, and he decided that his best course was to ride back to Le Barr’s. He put the slip of paper and the complaint report back in his pocket, blew out the candle, and walked to the doorway. As he stepped outside and closed the door behind him, the long, haunting cry of a coyote rose on the evening air. It was creepily, weirdly in keeping with his surroundings. He mounted hurriedly and turned his horse’s head in the direction from which he had come.

He rode rapidly, his mind occupied with the events of the evening. Who was this woman—Aldythe Martha Kerr? What was she to Thompson? Where was Thompson? What was the meaning of that disordered room, that stain on the floor, was it—and that grave so newly made! De Barr’s curious reply of the afternoon came back to him again as his thoughts turned to the fragment of letter written in this man’s hand. Who was De Barr, and what had he to do with the Thompson household? These questions and others, as others led from them, piled themselves upon his consciousness as he rode along. He had passed the butte sometime ago, where, earlier in the evening, he had first caught sight of Thompson’s place, and now, though too dark to see it, he knew he must be close to De Barr’s homestead.

He pulled up his horse to get his beatings, and the next instant his hat was lifted and half-turned upon his head, he heard the whistle of a bullet, and the sharp report of a rifle rang out on the still air. He flung himself from his horse, revolver loosened in his hand, and stood, every nerve at its highest tension, staring into the darkness. it had been too sudden, to locate the shot. He had not seen the flash, as at that moment he must have turned in his saddle looking backward.

“Cra-ang!”

Another report followed the first, though there must have been an interval of three or four minutes between the two. This time the bullet did not come near him, but he placed the flash—directly ahead but a few hundred yards away. It was from De Barr’s place! Instinctively he rested his heavy .45 upon the pommel, aiming across the saddle only to lower it again as the uselessness, nay more, the folly of such an action came to him. It would but expose his own position.

MacLeod threw the bridle over his horse’s head, and, dropping to his hands and knees, started quickly and silently away, making a half-circular detour with the intention of coming up to the shack from the opposite side. Once or twice as he moved swiftly along he stopped to listen. There was no sound. Then satisfied that he had gone far enough, he made straight in toward the house.

Suddenly a light burst out almost before him. He threw himself flat on the ground, stretched straight out, watching. The door of the cabin was wide open. A man—De Barr—had just lighted a lamp and, holding it in his hand, was standing in the doorway. He paused there for a moment and then, still carrying the lamp, he began to walk somewhat in the direction from which MacLeod had come.

MacLeod edged closer in, and rising to his feet stepped quietly across the threshold. Feeling his way cautiously in the darkness his hand encountered a table. He wheeled about facing the doorway and leaned against it, waiting for De Barr. It was barely a minute before he saw the light returning and then the man’s form appeared in the entrance.

“You don’t light up very early,” MacLeod remarked coolly!

De Barr’s face went ghastly white. He uttered a cry of fright.

The Lamp almost fell from his hands as he started violently.

“Come in, De Barr,” MacLeod went on quietly. “Come in, put down that lamp and shut the door.”

And then as the other obeyed, MacLeod swung himself to the table, one foot still resting on the floor. In his right hand he held his revolver. The other he put out behind him for support, as he did so his fingers closed over a rifle barrel. It was still warm!

De Barr had evidently seen the action and read the cold question in MacLeod’s eyes. He met MacLeod’s look for an instant, then his eyes dropped.

“I was firing at a—coyote,” he said, uneasily.

“You keep your hands in sight!” said MacLeod hoarsely—he rested his revolver upon his knee. “Understand?”

“Oh, yes, I understand.”

“Then sit down! There, in that chair.” MacLeod indicated one facing him with the toe of his boot.

De Barr took it without a word. For a moment there was silence between the two men. MacLeod’s glance was sweeping the room but never for an instant long enough away from the other to allow of a move that he could not forestall. It was a large room occupying nearly the whole of the shack. A couch in one corner, a desk in another. Near the door was a music stand and beside it on the floor a violin case. The walls, except for a few photographs, were bare of decoration. MacLeod’s eyes came back to the figure in the chair and held there. De Barr’s head was bent forward resting in his two hands. An ugly customer he looked, his face white without a vestige of color, except the great brownish scar, so thin skinned over the temple that MacLeod could count the blood beats beneath it.

“Shooting coyotes,” said MacLeod in a hard, even voice, “is according to law, but—

De Barr caught him up quickly. “According to law,” he repeated “Yes, that’s it, according to law. According to law!” His voice sank almost to a whisper as he reiterated the phrase.

MacLeod stared at the man in amazement. De Barr’s features seemed contorted with pain, his figure to shrink into itself, and he threw out one hand in a piteous gesture.

“But,” MacLeod continued steadily, “it seems that shooting coyotes is not your only occupation. I have been to Thompson’s and I found this!”

He held up the scrap of paper so that the other could see it.

De Barr lurched unsteadily in his chair.

“It is the end,” he said in a low voice. “Hers first, then his, now mine! I have seen to-night, pictured it, for weeks and months. Listen, I will tell you. I will tell you—because it is the end—and it should be told. The story goes back many years. There are papers in the desk. You can trust me to cross the room for them, suppose.”

MacLeod pointed to the bullet-holes in his hat. “Can I?” he said. “I’m not so sure of that!”

“My God!” whispered De Barr. “You think I did that? Oh, I understand now. He took you for me!”

“What are you talking about?” demanded MacLeod sharply. “Who is ‘he’?”

De Barr sank back in his chair. “The story goes back many years,” he repeated. “I can tell the story without them. There was a man named Kerr with his son and daughter, and Thompson, and myself. We were traveling in a wagon train out over the prairie with a band of settlers to take up homes in the new land. We three, Kerr Thompson, and I, were the only educated men in the outfit, and were therefore together a great deal; but Kerr and Thompson became very intimate.”

De Barr stopped. He was swaying his seat as he looked up at MacLeod with a little shiver.

“You look like the shadow of death with that thing pointing at me,” he said, querulously. “Lower it, can’t you!”

Little beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead, and the muscles of his face, twitching violently, accentuated his ugliness of feature.

MacLeod moved the revolver from his knee, and still keeping it in his hand allowed his arm to hang downward, the weapon pointing to the floor.

“I loved her from the moment I first saw her,” De Barr’s voice was low, hushed, reverent. “I loved her then—and always! Then, all at once, Thompson began to pay her attention. No, it’s not for that, because he won and I lost, I hated him, for I never had any chance from the beginning. What girl could care for any man with a face like mine?” He laughed a little bitterly. “Once—but no matter. A Malay kris did this,” he put his finger on his lips and cheek, then moved it to his temple, “and this I got in an Afghan pass. Then Kerr died. I was with him alone for a few moments just before his death, and he had started to tell me of some property or estate in England when Thompson came in. He ended by saying that Thompson knew all about it, and made promise to help Thompson do anything that was possible for his children, as he called them. I—

The pallor on Be Barr’s face deepened, he seemed exhausted, he was catching for his breath.

“What’s the matter with you?” said MacLeod sharply, starring toward him. “Are you sick?”

De Barr waved him back. “I’m all right. Don’t interrupt me. Let me go on. I couldn’t get much of anything out of Thompson, and what I am going to tell you now I didn’t discover for years after, but it fits in here, you understand? When Kerr, who was a younger son and practically penniless, lost his wife, he left England to come out here with the children. After he had started, he received word from home that relatives—it’s all in those papers—had died, and he was heir to the estate. Instead of starting right back, he decided that having come so far he would spend a few months longer in the country, as it would be an experience he might never have the opportunity or repeating. So he wrote his solicitors to that effect and kept on, saying nothing to his children about the change in their fortune. All this, and more, he told to Thompson one night when they were sitting together by the camp-fire. It was after this that Thompson began paying attention to Aldythe. That was her name, Aldythe Martha Kerr. Well, one night at the end of the day’s march, a few weeks after Kerr had died, the boy was missing. He was about nine years old. Aldythe was sole heir—or so Thompson thought!”

De Barr paused, moistening his lips with his tongue.

MacLeod leaned forward, his face was as white as the other’s.

“Go on,” he said hoarsely.

De Barr’s face was working horridly, his hands were clenched in fierce passion.

“The hound, the cold-blooded, murdering hound!” he cried. “But see what he got for it! I heard him confess with his own lips that he was at the bottom of the boy’s disappearance—I’m coming to that. He was bad, Thompson was, and smooth! My God, he was smooth—and rotten! I suppose he killed the child. With her father and her brother gone, Aldythe was almost out of her head. Thompson was about her all the time. There was nothing he could not do for her. And she, she was alone in the world, and nothing but a child herself—not more than seventeen. She married him. The letters she wrote and the efforts she made to find her brother never got any further than—Thompson! He saw to that. Besides, communication wasn’t very easy out here in this country twelve years ago.

“We got to Calgary. They stayed there, and I picked up something to do. I was broke. Now, here’s the ghastly joke!

“Thompson began to make claim for the estate in his wife’s name. I don’t know much about law, there was entail, tenant holders, and other claimants, but it was all straight enough except that neither of the children could inherit until the boy was twenty-one years old! And Thompson couldn’t, daren’t prove the boy was dead! Disappearance, whereabouts unknown, counted for nothing. Do you see? Can you understand the way it acted on that hell-hound! Well, he took it out of his wife. God knows the life he led her year after year. She wouldn’t leave him—she wasn’t that kind of a woman. It wasn’t long before she began to understand the tragedy of her marriage, though she never really knew the truth until—but I’ll come to that—Brandy!” gasped De Barr suddenly, pointing toward a shelf.

MacLeod got the bottle hurriedly, the man was almost in a state of collapse. The spirits seemed to revive him, for as MacLeod started to speak De Barr broke in quickly.

“Let me go on,” he said hoarsely. “Let me go on—while I can. One day, after we had been in Calgary about two years, she gathered all the papers and documents together and brought them to me, begging me to keep them. She didn’t say much, only that she could trust me, that I was always to let her know where I was if I went away, and never to give up the papers to anyone except herself. I didn’t just understand why she did that then, but I did afterwards. Thompson had given the matter up; but she was looking ahead to time when the boy, if he were alive, would be twenty-one. She was always sure that some day he would turn up, and it was for his sake that she wanted those papers out of her husband’s control when the time would come that they should be needed.”

MacLeod was sitting, strained forward, tense, staring at the other the dread that was clutching at his soul showing in his eyes,

“Go on, go on!” he said again, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“Don’t look at me like that!” said De Barr sharply. “You give me the shakes——God knows I’m bad enough as it is. Don’t look at like that, I tell you!”

For barely a second MacLeod obeyed the other, mechanically shifting his gaze from De Barr’s face, his lips scarcely moving as they formed the oft repeated command:

“Go on!”

“I took the papers,” De Barr was speaking more quickly now, as if anxious to bring his story to an end, “and soon after that I left Calgary. I tried my hand at ranching, farming, clerking—any thing I could find to do. I did not see either Aldythe or Thompson again for eight years, that is, until about a year ago. I heard from her occasionally, but only at such times as they changed from one place to another. That is all there ever was in the letters until two years ago when they took up a homestead here. Then she began to write more frequently, and in every letter implored me to safeguard the papers, and once, in the last letter I received, she added at the end ‘I am afraid of Edward.’ Now, remember, this was at the time, a year before to be exact, when the boy would have been twenty-one, and Edward that’s Thompson, you understand, who had not forgotten, was after the estate again and wanted the papers. At least that is what I imagined and it proved to be correct.

“That last letter decided me. Whether I did right or wrong, God knows, but my very soul was full of fear of what that devil might do. I came down here myself, three months ago, took up a quarter-section and build myself this shack. I did not go to Thompson’s often, but I saw enough to have made it as easy for me to kill that fiend as I would a sneaking coyote. I am not going to tell you what I went on— what I saw wasn’t the worst. He never touched her when I was there. My God, if he had lifted a finger!”

De Barr’s white, livid face was almost hideous as he stopped.

He was trying to compose himself.

MacLeod shuddered, his hands gripped the edge of the table fiercely, and again he muttered hoarsely:

“Go on!”

“’According to law,’ you said a while ago,” Barr’s voice was a tense whisper. “You were right. According to law! Not your law, nor man’s law, but God’s law! That’s why I told you it wasn’t in your department. I’ve prayed hour after hour during the last week down on my knees, do you understand, that He might take me the instrument of His vengeance. Listen, I have almost finished.

“A week ago, about five o’clock in the afternoon, Thompson came by here and stopped. I don’t where he had been. Back at that half-breed’s outfit ten miles east of here, I suppose. He was drunk, crazy, fighting drunk. I tried to get him to stay here until he was sober before he went to her, but he wouldn’t. He said he had some business to attend to at home. My God! I can hear him say that now with his hellish laugh.

“He rode off at a furious gallop. I hurried outside, caught my pony, threw on the saddle, and followed. I was afraid. Do you know what it is to be afraid with a fear that freezes the blood in your veins, that clutches at your heart, stopping its beat with an icy grip, and your whole soul turns sick and faint! I was afraid.

“I was perhaps ten minutes behind him, the time I had lost in getting my pony, and as I rode up to the house I could hear him snarling and cursing. I made straight for the door and rushed in. I heard him say, ‘The papers, I tell you! Where are they? The brat is dead, and if you’d like to know it, it was me that turned him loose.’ They were in the other room—the bedroom.”

De Barr covered his eyes with his hands, breathing heavily.

“I saw him raise his fist and strike her. I saw her reel back onto the bed with a great ugly welt across her forehead, and then everything before my eyes was red—red! I threw myself on him like a madman, to tear him in pieces, to strangle the life out of him, to kill the cur. I fought him in a blind, senseless fury that was like a savage beast’s. We fell to the floor. He got his knife loose and struck me here, in the side. That weakened me and I lost my grip.

“He tore himself away and rushed out of the house. I suppose he thought he had killed us both, and, terror-stricken, ran. After a bit I got to my feet and stopped the blood as best I could. Aldythe never moved, never spoke, she lay there—Oh, my God! Her heart was broken and it just snapped her life.

“In the morning I dug the grave you saw. It took me all that day. I was very weak and the shovel kept opening my wound. I put a little shingle at the head of the grave with her name, not his, upon it. Then I waited for Thompson. I knew he would be back to try and find the papers.

“On the third morning I was lying a few hundred yards out on the prairie, when I saw him skulk around the corner of the house, stoop over the grave, read the name, and then he lifted his boot and kicked the shingle in half. He began to stamp upon the broken piece, grinding it into the ground, when I fired, I missed him. I was too weak to hold the rifle steady. He ran around the house, got on his horse and rode off. Since then I have been too bad to ride, and I stayed here at home.

“Last night he fired at me through the window; to-night he fired at you in mistake for me, and—that! That! that’s that? It’s yours? Tell me quick!”

He was pointing a shaking at the short length of gold watchchain that stretched from a button-hole to the outer breast-pocket of Macleod’s tunic.

MacLeod’s face was ashen. His mouth was dry. He could not answer, only nod his head.

De Barr came staggering toward him, clutched at the chain with both hands and held it close to his eyes.

“My God!” he said slowly, his voice full of awe. “I’ve been telling you your own story!”

MacLeod was standing straight up, his shoulders thrown back as if to receive the blow that, almost from the moment the other had begun to speak, he had felt was to fall. He looked at De Barr dumbly, piteously; then, groping blindly for a chair, he sank into one at the end of the table. The room was swimming before his eyes, even De Barr’s form seemed to totter crazily as the man crossed to his desk and back again, bringing with him a bundle of papers and a little box.

“Look!” cried De Barr, opening the latter and pushing the few links of gold chain that it contained into MacLeod’s hand. “It’s like yours, She said her brother had the other piece when he disappeared. It was your mother’s; your father divided it between you.”

With a low moan MacLeod flung out his arms before him and buried his head. Neither man spoke; then, suddenly, MacLeod sprang erect and extended his hand to De Barr.

“Wait!” said De Barr weakly, leaning heavily against the table. “I told you I had fired at a coyote. This time I did not miss. The coyote’s out yonder on the prairie a few hundred yards away—dead! Thompson is the coyote I shot to-night. It was as it should be. According to law as I have prayed it would be. Not your law, for by that I am a murderer, but His law even as He has given it to me to do. That is all. I am your prisoner. I—give me your arm, will you, I—I’m a bit—weak—again. It’s here—” He pressed his hand to his side.

MacLeod sprang forward catching the other as he swayed and, lifting him in his arms, carried him to the bed. He hastily unbuttoned De Barr’s shirt, disclosing a rude bandage.

“Brandy!” murmured De Barr, faintly.

MacLeod got the bottle and poured out a small glassful which Be Barr swallowed.

“Let me look,” MacLeod was striving to steady his voice. “Perhaps I can do something for it.”

He took off the bandage and laid bare a great knife gash, the inflammation from which had already spread. Tenderly he washed and dressed it as best he could, tearing one of De Barr’s clean shirts into strips for a fresh bandage. De Barr thanked him with his eyes, and then closed them as if to rest.

MacLeod walked to the doorway and stood staring out over the prairie. With all his strength he strove to meet the issue that confronted him. The hot blood seethed and seemed to scorch him as the tale that he had heard flashed its pictures through his mind.

Out there somewhere, not very far, lay the man who had meant him to die a helpless child so many years ago, the man who for so many years had led his sister a life of hell, and who had as surely murdered her as if he had driven a knife into her heart. Behind him in the room, stretched out on the bed, was the man, the only man in all the world, who had stood between her and that inhuman fiend, the man who to avenge her, his sister, had—

“Oh, God!” he cried aloud in his anguish! “Oh God! My prisoner!

The sergeant’s words were ringing in his ears:

“Don’t matter when or how or where, your duty’s first, lad, always remember that.”

MacLeod rocked backward and forward in his agony of soul, then he stepped outside and began to walk, up and down, up and down, before the cabin. The night breeze blew upon his head, drying the moisture that stood in little drops on his forehead. After a long time he turned and walked slowly back into the room. De Barr’s eyes opened as he bent over him.

“You’ve got a bad jab there,” said MacLeod, in a husky voice. “I’ll have to move you in somewhere where there’s a doctor.”

“And then?” the words were low.

De Barr was searching MacLeod’s face.

MacLeod flung himself on his knees by the bed.

“I’ve got to do it, man,” he said brokenly. “I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to hand you over.”

The sick man shook his head with a wan smile.

“Neither doctor nor judge for me. To-night is the end. Up there,” he pointed his finger above him, “it will be all right, all right for me. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. It was His way, His law.”

The words of comfort that MacLeod tried to speak would not come, only a choking sound. He rose from his knees and placed a chair beside the bed and there, until the morning, he sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, motionless—as motionless as the figure on the bed.

Suddenly, just as it grew light, De Barr raised himself up, and his voice rang out clear and true like the treble notes of some grand cathedral organ.

“According to law—God’s law,” he cried. Then he fell back onto the bed, and his features fixed with a calm, satisfied look.

The End.

[6800 words]