The Escape of Mr. Trimm Read online

  VI

  THE EXIT OF ANSE DUGMORE

  When a Kentucky mountaineer goes to the penitentiary the chances arethat he gets sore eyes from the white walls that enclose him, or quickconsumption from the thick air that he breathes. It was entirely inaccordance with the run of his luck that Anse Dugmore should get themboth, the sore eyes first and then the consumption.

  There is seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of themountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and thedelightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fictionhas invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of beltedaccouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equallydeadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractivekind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume or setting. Rarely ishe a fine figure of a man.

  Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormallylong, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't havethat steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of anyparticular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and nochin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or aman's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.

  Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in thetribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and itsprincipal tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. Hewas getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring risewhen word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of hisimmediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.

  "Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'longYaller Banks togither," was the message brought by a breathless bearerof news. "The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't deadyit."

  From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over theridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eatsup the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when hesat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to hiscrippled-up father reciting the saga of the feud, with the tally ofthis one killed and that one maimed; for this he had been schooled whenhe practised with rifle and revolver until, even as a boy, his aim hadbecome as near an infallible thing as anything human gets to be; forthis he had been schooled still more when he rode, armed and watchful,to church or court or election. Its coming found him ready.

  Two days he ranged the ridges, watching his chance. The Tranthams werehard to find. They were barricaded in their log-walled strongholds, wellguarded in anticipation of expected reprisals, and prepared in dueseason to come forth and prove by a dozen witnesses, or two dozen if somany should be needed to establish the alibi, that they had no hand inthe massacre of the Dugmores.

  But two days and nights of still-hunting, of patiently lying in waitbehind brush fences, of noiseless, pussy-footed patrolling in likelyplaces, brought the survivor of the decimated Dugmores his chance. Hecaught Pegleg Trantham riding down Red Bird Creek on a mare-mule. Peglegwas only a distant connection of the main strain of the enemy. It wasprobable that he had no part in the latest murdering; perhaps doubtfulthat he had any prior knowledge of the plot. But by his name and hisblood-tie he was a Trantham, which was enough.

  A writer of the Western school would have found little in this encounterthat was really worth while to write about. Above the place of themeeting rose the flank of the mountain, scarred with washes and scantilyclothed with stunted trees, so that in patches the soil showed throughlike the hide of a mangy hound. The creek was swollen by the April rainsand ran bank-full through raw, red walls. Old Pegleg came canteringalong with his rifle balanced on the sliding withers of his mare-mule,for he rode without a saddle. He was an oldish man and fat for amountaineer. A ten-year-old nephew rode behind him, with his short armsencircling his uncle's paunch. The old man wore a dirty white shirt witha tabbed bosom; a single shiny white china button held the neckbandtogether at the back. Below the button the shirt billowed open, showinghis naked back. His wooden leg stuck straight out to the side, its wornbrass tip carrying a blob of red mud, and his good leg dangled downstraight, with the trousers hitched half-way up the bare shank and asoiled white-yarn sock falling down into the wrinkled and gaping top ofan ancient congress gaiter.

  From out of the woods came Anse Dugmore, bareheaded, crusted to hisknees with dried mud and wet from the rain that had been dripping downsince daybreak. A purpose showed in all the lines of his slouchy frame.

  Pegleg jerked his rifle up, but he was hampered by the boy's arms abouthis middle and by his insecure perch upon the peaks of the slab-sidedmule. The man afoot fired before the mounted enemy could swing hisgunbarrel into line. The bullet ripped away the lower part of Pegleg'sface and grazed the cheek of the crouching youngster behind him. Thewhite-eyed nephew slid head first off the buck-jumping mule andinstantly scuttled on all fours into the underbrush. The rifle droppedout of Trantham's hands and he lurched forward on the mule's neck,grabbing out with blind, groping motions. Dugmore stepped two pacesforward to free his eyes of the smoke, which eddied back from hisgunmuzzle into his face, and fired twice rapidly. The mule was bouncingup and down, sideways, in a mild panic. Pegleg rolled off her, as inertas a sack of grits, and lay face upward in the path, with his arms wideoutspread on the mud. The mule galloped off in a restrained anddignified style until she was a hundred yards away, and then, havingsnorted the smells of burnt powder and fresh blood out of her nostrils,she fell to cropping the young leaves off the wayside bushes, mouthingthe tender green shoots on her heavy iron bit contentedly.

  For a long minute Anse Dugmore stood in the narrow footpath, listening.Then he slid three new shells into his rifle, and slipping down the bankhe crossed the creek on a jam of driftwood and, avoiding the roads thatfollowed the little watercourse, made over the shoulder of the mountainfor his cabin, two miles down on the opposite side. When he was gonefrom sight the nephew of the dead Trantham rolled out of his hidingplace and fled up the road, holding one hand to his wounded cheek andwhimpering. Presently a gaunt, half-wild boar pig, with his spine archedlike the mountains, came sniffing slowly down the hill, pausingfrequently to cock his wedge-shaped head aloft and fix a hostile eye ontwo turkey buzzards that began to swing in narrowing circles over oneparticular spot on the bank of the creek.

  The following day Anse sent word to the sheriff that he would be comingin to give himself up. It would not have been etiquette for the sheriffto come for him. He came in, well guarded on the way by certain of hisclan, pleaded self-defense before a friendly county judge and was lockedup in a one-cell log jail. His own cousin was the jailer and ministeredto him kindly. He avoided passing the single barred window of the jailin the daytime or at night when there was a light behind him, and heexpected to "come clear" shortly, as was customary.

  But the Tranthams broke the rules of the game. The circuit judge livedhalf-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he wasnot an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams,disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and askedhim for a change of venue, and got it, which was more; so that insteadof being tried in Clayton County--and promptly acquitted--Anse Dugmorewas taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a shiny new brick jail.Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad hadnosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had madeLoudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the Northhad come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringingwith them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes andan Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and wastalking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. Thefoundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly WoodbineCounty was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of hersisters to the north and west of her.

  In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge ofhomicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers
heardthe stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew.In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth,from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-centdinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant,Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of hisnatural life.

  The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg ironsthat had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and ledhim to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroadtrain; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, headof the other clan, who, having been elected to the legislature whileAnse lay in jail, had come over from Clayton, bound for the statecapital, to draw his mileage and be a statesman.

  It was not in the breed for the victorious Trantham to taunt his hobbledenemy or even to look his way, but he sat just across the aisle from theprisoner so that his ear might catch the jangle of the heavy irons whenDugmore moved in his seat. They all left the train together at thelittle blue-painted Frankfort station, Trantham turning off at the firstcrossroads to go where the round dome of the old capitol showed abovethe water-maple trees, and Dugmore clanking straight ahead, with astring of negroes and boys and the sheriff following along behindhim. Under the shadow of a quarried-out hillside a gate openedin a high stone wall to admit him into life membership with awhite-and-black-striped brotherhood of shame.

  Four years there did the work for the gangling, silent mountaineer. Oneday, just before the Christmas holidays, the new governor of the statepaid a visit to the prison. Only his private secretary came with him.The warden showed them through the cell houses, the workshops, thedining hall and the walled yards. It was a Sunday afternoon; the whiteprisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner onthe white side, where the thin and skimpy winter sunshine slanted overthe stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bonesenclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On hisclose-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched sotight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, glassy and bleared withpain, stared ahead of him with a sick man's fixed stare. Inside hisconvict's cotton shirt his chest was caved away almost to nothing, andfrom the collarless neckband his neck rose as bony as a plucked fowl's,with great, blue cords in it. Lacking a coverlet to pick, his fingerspicked at the skin on his retreating chin.

  As the governor stood in an arched doorway watching, the lengtheningafternoon shadow edged along and covered the hunkered-down figure by thewall. Anse tottered to his feet, moved a few inches so that he mightstill be in the sunshine, and settled down again. This small exertionstarted a cough that threatened to tear him apart. He drew his handacross his mouth and a red stain came away on the knotty knuckles. Thewarden was a kindly enough man in the ordinary relations of life, butnine years as a tamer of man-beasts in a great stone cage had overlaidhis sympathies with a thickening callus.

  "One of our lifers that we won't have with us much longer," he saidcasually, noting that the governor's eyes followed the sick convict."When the con gets one of these hill billies he goes mighty fast."

  "A mountaineer, then?" said the governor. "What's his name?"

  "Dugmore," answered the warden; "sent from Clayton County. One of thoseClayton County feud fighters."

  The governor nodded understandingly. "What sort of a record has he madehere?"

  "Oh, fair enough!" said the warden. "Those man-killers from themountains generally make good prisoners. Funny thing about this fellow,though. All the time he's been here he never, so far as I know, had amessage or a visitor or a line of writing from the outside. Nor wrote aletter out himself. Nor made friends with anybody, convict or guard."

  "Has he applied for a pardon?" asked the governor.

  "Lord, no!" said the warden. "When he was well he just took what wascoming to him, the same as he's taking it now. I can look up his record,though, if you'd care to see it, sir."

  "I believe I should," said the governor quietly.

  A spectacled young wife-murderer, who worked in the prison office onthe prison books, got down a book and looked through it until he came toa certain entry on a certain page. The warden was right--so far as theblack marks of the prison discipline went, the friendless convict'srecord showed fair.

  "I think," said the young governor to the warden and his secretary whenthey had moved out of hearing of the convict bookkeeper--"I think I'llgive that poor devil a pardon for a Christmas gift. It's no more than amercy to let him die at home, if he has any home to go to."

  "I could have him brought in and let you tell him yourself, sir,"volunteered the warden.

  "No, no," said the governor quickly. "I don't want to hear that coughagain. Nor look on such a wreck," he added.

  Two days before Christmas the warden sent to the hospital ward for No.874. No. 874, that being Anse Dugmore, came shuffling in and kepthimself upright by holding with one hand to the door jamb. The wardensat rotund and impressive, in a swivel chair, holding in his hands afolded-up, blue-backed document.

  "Dugmore," he said in his best official manner, "when His Excellency,Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your generalhealth was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you anunconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is."

  The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on thewarden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazedshallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.

  "I said the governor has given you a pardon," repeated the warden,staring hard at him.

  "I heered you the fust time," croaked the prisoner in his eaten-outvoice. "When kin I go?"

  "Is that all you've got to say?" demanded the warden, bristling up.

  "I said, when kin I go?" repeated No. 874.

  "Go!--you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!"

  The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of hisindignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk heshoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed himcrossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger anegro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped himput his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap,black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputywarden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the fivedollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He tookthem without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gatethat swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With theinbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for thelittle, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He wentslowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, andsometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window thewondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.

  "Damned savage!" he said to himself. "Didn't even say thank you. I'llbet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than amoccasin snake."

  Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes laterby a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard theeastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping fromweakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush daycoach.

  "Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin," the brakeman wassaying to the conductor, "and the smell of the pen all over him. Neversaid a word to me--just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up atthe far end of the division, accordin' to the way his ticket reads. Idoubt if he lives to get there."

  The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live toget there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspectedthat held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortlessnight in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy,self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuringworm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of thefoothills, on and on through the great riven ch
asm of the gateway into ableak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two badhemorrhages on the way, but he lived.

  * * * * *

  Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, ShemDugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, andinside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by thedaubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours passed and he hardly moved except tostir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory thatleaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limplyagainst the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headedmountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of thetwo windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come.After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound--half knock, halfscratch--at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dogor any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figurerelaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickeringlight, had the greenish shine of an angry cat-animal's.

  "Whut is it?" he called. "And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!"

  HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT MADEA CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.--_Page 197._]

  The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gaspingwhine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caughtthe words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiarcadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully heunbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reachedout, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the shell ofa man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He droppedthe wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second timeat the intruder, who had crawled across the floor and now lay before thewide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no moveuntil the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.

  "How did you git out, Anse?" were the first words he spoke.

  The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swalloweddesperately. "Pardoned out--in writin'--yistiddy."

  "You air in purty bad shape," said Shem.

  "Yes,"--the words came very slowly--"my lungs give out on me--and myeyes. But--but I got here."

  "You come jist in time," said his cousin; "this time tomorrer and youwouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone."

  "Gone!--gone whar?"

  "Well," said Shem slowly, "after you was sent away it seemed like themTranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain'tdead--and that's powerful few--is moved off out of the mountings toWinchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'ma-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at theirChristmas rackets--they'd layway me too ef----"

  "But my wife--did she----"

  "I thought maybe you'd heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,"said Shem in a dulled wonder. "The fall after you was took away yorewoman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with thehead devil of 'em all--old Wyatt Trantham hisself--and she went to liveat his house up on the Yaller Banks."

  "Is she----Did she----"

  The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons ofhands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from hissodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with thereek of the prison dye.

  "Did she--did she----"

  "Oh, she's been dead quite a spell now," stated Shem. "I would haves'posed you'd 'a' heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of arisin' in the breast."

  "But my young uns--little Anderson and--and Elviry?"

  The sick man was clear up on his knees now, his long arms hanging andhis eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem's impassive face.Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his attitude and hiswords, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying manback to _his_ own mountain valley with the breath of life still in him.A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had leftbehind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore'swhole being--bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.

  "My young uns, Shem?"

  "Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em--he's got 'em both now."

  "Does he--does he use 'em kindly?"

  "I ain't never heered," said Shem simply. "He never had no young uns ofhis own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now."

  "I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin--an buyin 'em some littleChrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into hisrasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to--to be thinkin'--of thatthere now?"

  "No 'arthly use at all," said Shem, with brutal directness. "Ef you hadthe strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a ficedog."

  Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards,coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin that brought himback from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.

  For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all hiscleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing manand roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowedwhite corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over himhe told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmercifulwar, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this oneambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten underby weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of theyoung wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.

  "Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?"

  "Nobody--that knowed me--seed me."

  "Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo'o'clock--I seed him passin' over the ridge," went on Shem. "He'll beridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you aheap o' dirt, Anse."

  The prostrate man was listening hard.

  "Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git upthar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, youcould git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back."

  And now a seeming marvel was coming to pass, for the caved-in trunk wasrising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched,reaching for something.

  Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifleand began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.

  * * * * *

  A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted "dead'ning"--AnseDugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so thatits butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail ofa crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. Hecoughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to hiscough.

  From out of the slitted door Shem watched him until the scrub oaks atthe edge of the clearing swallowed him up. Then Shem fastened himself inand made ready to start his flight to the lowlands that very night.

  * * * * *

  Just below the forks of Pigeon Roost Creek the trail that followed itsbanks widened into a track wide enough for wagon wheels. On one side laythe diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On theother the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallendead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, fromthe clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen,half-melted yellow mire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. Thebarrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing rootends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit placein the road. Its stock was pressed tightly against Anse Dugmore'sfallen-in cheek; the trigger finger of his right hand, fleshless as ajoint of cane, was crooked about the trigger guard. A thin stream ofblood ran from his mouth and dribbled down his chin and coagulated in asticky smear upon the gun stock. His lungs, what was left of them, weredraining away.
/>   He lay without motion, saving up the last ounce of his life. The coldhad crawled up his legs to his hips; he was dead already from the waistdown. He no longer coughed, only gasped thickly. He knew that he wasabout gone; but he knew, too, that he would last, clear-minded andclear-eyed, until High Sheriff Wyatt Trantham came. His brain wouldlast--and his trigger finger.

  Then he heard him coming. Up the trail sounded the muffled music of apacer's hoofs single-footing through the snow, and after that, almostinstantly Trantham rode out into sight and loomed larger and larger ashe drew steadily near the open place under the bank. He was wavering inthe saddle. He drew nearer and nearer, and as he came out on the widepatch of moonlit snow, he pulled the single-footer down to a walk andhalted him and began fumbling in the right-hand side of the saddlebagsthat draped his horse's shoulder.

  Up in its covert the rifle barrel moved an inch or two, then steadiedand stopped, the bone-sight at its tip resting full on the broad of thedrunken rider's breast. The boney finger moved inward from the triggerguard and closed ever so gently about the touchy, hair-filedtrigger--then waited.

  For the uncertain hand of Trantham, every movement showing plain in thecrystal, hard, white moon, was slowly bringing from under the flap ofthe right-side saddlebag something that was round and smooth and shonewith a yellowish glassy light, like a fat flask filled with spirits. AndAnse Dugmore waited, being minded now to shoot him as he put the bottleto his lips, and so cheat Trantham of his last drink on earth, asTrantham had cheated him of his liberty and his babies--as Trantham hadcheated those babies of the Christmas fixings which the state's fivedollars might have bought.

  He waited, waited----

  * * * * *

  This was not the first time the high sheriff had stopped that night onhis homeward ride from the tiny county seat, as his befuddlementproclaimed; but halting there in the open, just past the forks of thePigeon Roost, he was moved by a new idea. He fumbled in the right-handflap of his saddlebags and brought out a toy drum, round and smooth,with shiny yellow sides. A cheap china doll with painted black ringletsand painted blue eyes followed the drum, and then a torn paper bag, fromwhich small pieces of cheap red-and-green dyed candy sifted out betweenthe sheriff's fumbling fingers and fell into the snow.

  Thirty feet away, in the dead leaves matted under the roots of an uptorndead tree, something moved--something moved; and then there was a soundlike a long, deep, gurgling sigh, and another sound like some heavy,lengthy object settling itself down flat upon the snow and the leaves.

  The first faint rustle cleared Trantham's brain of the liquor fumes. Hejammed the toys and the candy back into the saddlebags and jerked hishorse sidewise into the protecting shadow of the bluff, reaching at thesame time to the shoulder holster buckled about his body under theunbuttoned overcoat. For a long minute he listened keenly, the drawnpistol in his hand. There was nothing to hear except his own breathingand the breathing of his horse.

  "Sho! Some old hawg turnin' over in her bed," he said to the horse, andholstering the pistol he went racking on down Pigeon Roost Creek, withChristmas for Elviry and little Anderson in his saddlebags.

  * * * * *

  When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen onhis back and he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever; but the bonyfinger was still crooked about the trigger, the rusted hammer was backat full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock. So,from these facts, his finders were moved to conclude that the freedconvict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff everpassed, which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thingfor the sheriff.