The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
flashing in his eyes. At least, so Jud Carpenter interpreted the mood
which lay upon him; but no one knew the secret workings of this man's
heart, save God.
He had come to them haggard and blanched and with a nameless dread,
his arm tied up where the dog's fang had been buried in his flesh,
his heart bitter in the thought of the death that was his. Already he
felt the deadly virus pulsing through his veins. A hundred times in
the short hour that had passed he suffered death--death beginning
with the gripping throat, the shortened breath, the foaming mouth,
the spasm!
He jerked in the saddle--that spasmodic chill of the nerves,--and he
grew white and terribly silent at the thought of it--the death that
was his!
Was his! And then he thought: "No, there shall be another and quicker
way to die. A braver way--like a Travis--with my boots on--my boots
on--and not like a mad-dog tied to a stake.
"Besides--Alice--Alice!"
She had gone out of his life. Could such a thing be and he live to
tell it? Alice--love--ambition--the future--life! Alice, hazel-eyed
and glorious, with hair the smell of which filled his soul with
perfume as from the stars. She who alone uplifted him--she another's,
and that other Tom Travis!
Tom Travis--returned and idealized--with him, the joint heir of The
Gaffs.
And that mad-dog--that damned mad-dog! And if perchance he was
saved--if that virus was sucked out of his veins, it was she--Helen!
"This is the place to die," he said grimly--"here with my boots on.
To die like a Travis and unravel this thing called life. Unravel it
to the end of the thread and know if it ends there, is snapped, is
broken or--
"Or--my God," he cried aloud, "I never knew what those two little
letters meant before--not till I face them this way, on the Edge of
Things!"
He gathered the mob together and led them against the jail--with
hoots and shouts and curses; with flaming torches, and crow-bars,
with axes and old guns.
"Lynch her--lynch the old witch! and hang that devil Conway with
her!" was the shout.
In front of the jail they stopped, for a man stood at the door. His
left arm was in a sling, but in his right hand gleamed something that
had proved very deadly before. And he stood there as he had stood in
the edge of the wood, and the bonfires and torches of the mob lit up
more clearly the deadly pale face, set and more determined than
before.
For as he stood, pale and silent, the shaft of a terrible
pain,--of broken bone and lacerated muscle--twinged and twitched
his arm, and to smother it and keep from crying out he gripped
bloodlessly--nervously--the stock of his pistol saying over and over:
"I am a Conway again--a man again!"
And so standing he defied them and they halted, like sheep at the
door of the shambles. The sheriff had flown, and Conway alone stood
between the frenzied mob and the old woman who had given her all for
him.
He could hear her praying within--an uncanny mixture of faith and
miracle--of faith which saw as Paul saw, and which expected angels to
come and break down her prison doors. And after praying she would
break out into a song, the words of which nerved the lone man who
stood between her and death:
"'I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry, I can tarry but a night.
Do not detain me, for I am going
To where the streamlets are ever flowing.
I'm a pilgrim--and I'm a stranger
I can tarry--I can tarry but a night.'"
And now the bonfire burned brighter, lighting up the scene--the
shambling stores around the jail on the public square, the better
citizens making appeals in vain for law and order, the shouting,
fool-hardy mob, waiting for Richard Travis to say the word, and he
sitting among them pale, and terribly silent with something in his
face they had never seen there before.
Nor would he give the command. He had nothing against Edward
Conway--he did not wish to see him killed.
And the mob did not attack, although they cursed and bluffed, because
each one of them knew it meant death--death to some one of them, and
that one might be--I!
Between life and death "I" is a bridge that means it all.
A stone wall ran around the front of the jail. A small gate opened
into the jail-yard. At the jail door, covering that opening, stood
Edward Conway.
They tried parleying with him, but he would have none of it.
"Go back--" he said, "I am the sheriff here--I am the law. The man
who comes first into that gate will be the first to die."
In ten minutes they made their attack despite the commands of their
leader, who still sat his horse on the public square, pale and with a
bitter conflict raging in his breast.
With shouts and curses and a headlong rush they went. Pistol bullets
flew around Conway's head and scattered brick dust and mortar over
him. Torches gleamed through the dark crowd as stars amid fast flying
clouds in a March night. But through it all every man of them heard
the ringing warning words:
"Stop at the gateway--stop at the dead line!"
Right at it they rushed and crowded into it like cattle--shooting,
cursing, throwing stones.
Then two fell dead, blocking the gateway. Two more, wounded, with
screams of pain which threw the others into that indescribable panic
which comes to all mobs in the death-pinch, staggered back carrying
the mob with them.
Safe from the bullets, they became frenzied.
The town trembled with their fury.
All order was at an end.
And Edward Conway stood, behind a row of cotton bales, in the
jail-yard, covering still the little gateway, and the biting pain in
his shoulder had a companion pain in his side, where a pistol ball
had ploughed through, but he forgot it as he slipped fresh cartridges
into the chambers of his pistol and heard again the chant which came
from out the jail window, like a ghost-voice from the clouds:
"Of that City, to which I journey,
My Redeemer, my Redeemer is the light.
There is no sorrow, nor any sighing,
Nor any tears there, nor any dying...,
I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry--I can tarry but a night."
At a long distance they shot at Conway,--they hooted, jeered, cursed
him, but dared not come closer, for he had breast-worked himself
behind some cotton-bales in the yard, and they knew he could still
shoot.
Then they decided to batter down the stone wall first--to make an
opening they could rush through, and not be blocked in the deadly
gateway.
An hour passed, and torches gleamed everywhere. Attacking the wall
farther down, they soon had it torn away. They could now get to him.
It was a perilous position, and Conway knew it. Help--he must have
it--help to protect his flank while he shot in front. If not, he
would die soon, and the law with him.
He looked around him--but there was no solution. Then he felt that
death was near, for the mob now hated him more than they did the
prisoner. They seemed to have forgotten her, for all their cry now
was:
"_Kill Conway! Kill the man who murdered our people!_"
In ten minutes they were ready to attack again, but looking up they
saw a strange sight.
Help had come to Conway. On one side of him stood the old Cottontown
preacher, his white hair reflecting back the light from the bonfires
and torches in front--lighting up a face which now seemed to have
lost all of its kindly humor in the crisis that was there. He was
unarmed, but he stood calm and with a courage that was more of sorrow
than of anger.
By him stood the village blacksmith, a man with the wild light of an
old, untamed joy gleaming in his eyes--a cruel, dangerous light--the
eyes of a caged tiger turned loose at last, and yearning for the
blood of the thing which had caged him.
And by him in quiet bravery, commanding, directing, stood the tall
figure of the Captain of Artillery.
When Richard Travis saw him, a cruel smile deepened in his eyes. "I
am dying myself," it said--"why not kill him?"
Then he shuddered with the hatred of the terrible thing that had come
into his heart--the thing that made him do its bidding, as if he
were a puppet, and overthrew all the good he had gathered there, that
terrible night, as the angels were driven from Paradise. And yet, how
it ruled him, how it drove him on!
"Jim--Jim," he whispered as he bent over his horse's neck--"Jim--my
repeating rifle over the library door--quick--it carries true and far!"
As Jim sped away his master was silent again. He thought of the nobility
of the things he had done that night--the touch of God that had come
over him in making him save Helen--the beautiful dreams he had had. He
thought of it all--and then--here--now--murdering the man whose life
carried with it the life, the love of--
He looked up at the stars, and the old wonder and doubt came back to
him--the old doubt which made him say to himself: "It is nothing--it is
the end. Dust thou art, and unto dust--dust--dust--dust--" he bit his
tongue to keep from saying it again--"Dust--to be blown away and mingle
with the elements--dust! And yet, I stand here--now--blood--flesh--a
thinking man--tempted--terribly--cruelly--poignantly--dying--of a poison
in my veins--of sorrow in my heart--sorrow and death. Who would not take
the dust--gladly take it--the dust and the--forgetting."
He remembered and repeated:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar--"
"'And cometh from afar,'" he whispered--"My God--suppose it does--and
that I am mistaken in it all?--Dust--and then maybe something after
dust."
With his rifle in his hand, it all vanished and he began to train it on
the tall figure while the mob prepared to storm the jail again--and his
shot would be the signal--this time in desperate determination to take
it or die.
In the mob near Richard Travis stood a boy, careless and cool, and
holding in his hand an old pistol. Richard Travis noticed the boy
because he felt that the boy's eyes were always on him--always. When he
looked down into them he was touched and sighed, and a dream of the
long-ago swept over him--of a mountain cabin and a maiden fair to look
upon. He bit his lip to keep back the tenderness--bit his lip and rode
away--out of reach of the boy's eyes.
But the boy, watching him, knew, and he said in his quiet, revengeful
way: "Twice have I failed to kill you--but to-night--my Honorable
father--to-night in the death that will be here, I shall put this bullet
through your heart."
Travis turned to the mob: "Men, when I fire this rifle--it will mean for
you to charge!"
A hush fell over the crowd as they watched him. He looked at his
rifle closely. He sprang the breech and threw out a shell or two to
see that it worked properly.
"Stay where you are, men," came that same voice they had heard so
plainly before that night. "We are now four and well armed and sworn
to uphold the law and protect the prisoner, and if you cross the dead
line you will die."
There was a silence, and then that old voice again, the voice that
roused the mob to fury:
"I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry--I can tarry but a night--"
"Lead us on--give the signal, Richard Travis," they shouted.
Again the silence fell as Richard Travis raised his rifle and aimed
at the tall figure outlined closely and with magnified distinctness
in the glare of bonfire and torch. How splendidly cool and brave he
looked--that tall figure standing there, giving orders as calmly as
he gave them at Shiloh and Franklin, and so forgetful of himself and
his own safety!
Richard Travis brought his rifle down--it shook so--brought it down
saying to himself with a nervous laugh: "It is not Tom--not Tom