The Bishop of Cottontown Part 90

"It was here--and what was it? Oh, yes:--'Some men repent to G.o.d's smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist?'"--He groaned:--"This is His fist. Never--never before in all the history of the Conway family has one of its women--"

He sat down on the old sofa and buried, again, his face in his hands.

Edward Conway was sober, but he still had the instincts of the drunkard--it never occurred to him that he had done anything to cause it. Drunkenness was nothing--a weakness--a fault which was now behind him. But this--this--the first of all the Conway women--and his daughter--his child--the _beautiful one_. He sat still, and then he grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what this act of his means in the South,--in the unwritten law of our land--as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under its ruins."

He arose and started out. He saw the lap robe in the hall, and this put him to investigating. The mares and buggy he found under the shed. It was all a mystery to him, but of one thing he was sure: "He will soon come back for them. I can wait."

Choosing a spot in the shadow of a great tree, he sat down with his pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder in his heart, bitterness and repentance were his.

He was a changed man. Never again could he be the old self. "But the blow--the blow," he kept saying, "I thought it would fall on me--not on her--my beautiful one--not on a Conway woman's chast.i.ty--not my wife's daughter--"

He heard steps coming down the path. His heart ceased a moment, it seemed to him, and then beat wildly. He drew a long breath to relieve it--to calm it with cool oxygen, and then he c.o.c.ked the five chambered pistol and waited as full of the joy of killing as if the man who was now walking down the path was a wolf or a mad dog--down the path and right into the muzzle of the pistol, backed by the arm which could kill.

He saw Richard Travis coming, slowly, painfully, his left arm tied up, and his step, once so quick and active, so full of strength and life, now was as if the blight of old age had come upon it.

In spite of his bitter determination Conway noticed the great change, and instinct, which acts even through anger and hatred and revenge and the maddening fury of murder,--instinct, the ever present--whispered its warning to his innermost ear.

Still, he could not resist. Rising, he threw his pistol up within a few yards of Richard Travis's breast, his hand upon the trigger. But he could not fire, although Travis stood quietly under its muzzle and looked without surprise into his face.

Conway glanced along the barrel of his weapon and into the face of Richard Travis. And then he brought his pistol down with a quick movement.

The face before him was begging him to shoot!

"Why don't you shoot?" said Travis at last, breaking the silence and in a tone of disappointment.

"Because you are not guilty," said Conway--"not with that look in your face."

"I am sorry you saw my face, then," he smiled sadly--"for it had been such a happy solution for it all--if you had only fired."

"Where is my child?"

"Do you think you have any right to ask--having treated her as you have?"

Conway trembled, at first with rage, then in shame:

"No,"--he said finally. "No, you are right--I haven't."

"That is the only reply you could have made me that would make it obligatory on my part to answer your question. In that reply I see there is hope for you. So I will tell you she is safe, unharmed, unhurt."

"I felt it," said Conway, quietly, "for I knew it, Richard Travis, as soon as I saw your face. But tell me all."

"There is little to tell. I had made up my mind to run off with her, marry her, perhaps, since she had neither home nor a father, and was a beautiful young thing which any man might be proud of. But things have come up--no, not come up, fallen, fallen and crushed. It has been a crisis all around--so I sent for Clay--a fine young fellow and he loves her--I had him meet me here and--well, he has taken her to Westmoreland to-night. You know she is safe there. She will come to you to-morrow as pure as she left, though G.o.d knows you do not deserve it."

Something sprang into Edward Conway's throat--something kin to a joyous shout. He could not speak. He could only look at the strange, calm, sad man before him in a grat.i.tude that uplifted him. He stared with eyes that were blinded with tears.

"d.i.c.k--d.i.c.k," he said, "we have been estranged, since the war. I misjudged you. I see I never knew you. I came to kill, but here--" He thrust the grip of his pistol toward Travis--"here, d.i.c.k, kill me--shoot me--I am not fit to live--but, O G.o.d, how clearly I see now; and, d.i.c.k--d.i.c.k--you shall see--the world shall see that from now on, with G.o.d's help, as Lily makes me say--d.i.c.k, I'll be a Conway again."

The other man pressed his hand: "Ned, I believe it--I believe it. Go back to your little home to-night. Your daughter is safe. To-morrow you may begin all over again. To-morrow--"

"And you, d.i.c.k--I have heard--I can guess, but why may not you, to-morrow--"

"There will be no to-morrow for me," he said sadly. "Things stop suddenly before me to-night as before an abyss--"

He turned quickly and looked toward the low lying range of mountains.

A great red flush as of a rising sun glowed even beyond the rim of them, and then out of it shot tinges of flame.

Conway saw it at the same instant:

"It's the mill--the mill's afire," he said.

CHAPTER XXII

A CONWAY AGAIN

It was a great fire the mill made, lighting the valley for miles. All Cottontown was there to see it burn, hushed, with set faces, some of anger, some of fear--but all in stricken numbness, knowing that their living was gone.

It was not long before Jud Carpenter was among them, stirring them with the story of how the old negro woman had burned it--for he knew it was she. Indeed, he was soon fully substantiated by others who heard her when she had run home heaping her maledictions on the mill.

Soon among them began the whisper of lynching. As it grew they became bolder and began to shout it: _Lynch her!_

Jud Carpenter, half drunk and wholly reckless, stood on a stump, and after telling his day's experience with Mammy Maria, her defiance of the mill's laws, her arrogance, her burning of the mill, he shouted that he himself would lead them.

"Lynch her!" they shouted. "Lead us, Jud Carpenter! We will lynch her."

Some wanted to wait until daylight, but "Lynch her--lynch her now,"

was the shout.

The crowd grew denser every moment.

The people of Cottontown, hot and revengeful, now that their living was burned; hill dwellers who sympathized with them, and coming in, were eager for any excitement; the unlawful element which infests every town--all were there, the idle, the ignorant, the vicious.

And a little viciousness goes a long way.

There had been so many lynchings in the South that it had ceased to be a crime--for crime, the weed, cultivated--grows into a flower to those who do the tending.

Many of the lynchings, it is true, were honest--the frenzy of outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme courts in reversing on these technicalities. All these had thrown the law back to its source--the people. And they had taken it in their own hands.

In violent hands, but deadly sure and retributory.

If there was ever an excuse for lynching, the South was ent.i.tled to it. For the crime was the result of the sudden emanc.i.p.ation of ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators, and attributing a far greater importance to their elevation than was warranted, perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery. And the South arose to the terribleness of the crime and met it with the rifle, the torch and the rope.

Why should it be wondered at? Why should the South be singled out for blame? Is it not a fact that for years in every newly settled western state lynch-law has been the unchallenged, unanimous verdict for a horse thief? And is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?

But from an honest, well intentioned frenzy of justice outraged to any pretext is an easy step. From the quick lynching of the rapist and murderer--to be sure that the lawyers and courts did not acquit them--was one step. To hang a half crazy old woman for burning a mill was another, and the natural consequence of the first.