The hand of God · OmniClassics

THE HAND OF GOD By Murray Leinster Author of “The Skipper Knows Best,” “The Red Stone,” etc. It was very hot when the sheriff sucked meditatively at his pipe in the county jail and listened abstractedly to the buzzing of the mob outside. It was dark, of course. Mobs do not often form in daylight--not mobs who propose to lynch one not especially reputable citizen for the murder of another still less reputable one. The jail was dark and more than a little malodorous. A darky in one of the rear cells whimpered a little in entirely unreasoning terror. A moth blundered heavily about the yellow-flamed lamp. The only other sound was the sucking, bubbling sound of the sheriff’s pipe. He rapped it out and rammed out the stem with a broom straw. There was a knock on the thick outer door. “Huh?” said the sheriff heavily. “Has he come to, yet?” “Not yet,” said the sheriff. He refilled the pipe with care, and struck a match. He had to shift a heavy, blued steel revolver on his desk to get at the matches. He rearranged the matches and the revolver and the box of shells--already opened, so that all three articles would be equally convenient. He leaned back in his chair and smoked and sweated. He left the window of the office down, though. His forehead was creased in an irritated frown. The buzzing of the mob outside the jail kept up. The pounding and thumping of a secondhand car came down the road, growing louder as it came nearer until it stopped with a squealing of brakes. There were voices, new voices and loud ones. “... What in hell difference does that make? ... Might’s well go on an’ get through with it ... Ain’t no diff’rence whether he’s come to or not....” The buzzing rose louder. The sheriff mopped his face and looked speculatively at the blued steel gun. He wished it weren’t undignified to fan himself. Any jury on earth ’ud convict Sam Blake an’ send him to the electric chair. Just cost the county a lot o’ money convicting him an’ the State a lot more electrocuting him. An’ with election comin’ on, an’ a lot o’ folks thinkin’ about votin’ Republican again, an’ all---- It was mighty foolish to try to keep ’em from gettin’ Sam. A banging on the door again. The sheriff hitched himself upright. “He ain’t come to, yet,” he said irritably. “I ain’t lyin’. I ain’t goin’ to let you-all have him, but I’m tellin’ the truth when I say he ain’t come to, yet.” There was no direct reply, but voices growling to one another in the heat outside. Then someone was repeating savagely, over and over: “Want him to know what’s happenin’ to him--want him to know what’s happenin’ to him----” The buzzing of the mob absorbed the sound. The sheriff continued to smoke and frown. A little murmur, different from the buzzing of the mob. A voice protesting. The sheriff grunted. Preacher Bayles outside, arguing with the mob, trying to persuade them not to lynch Sam Blake. His voice was cool and persuasive. But another voice answered him. “Hit was the hand o’ Gawd gave Sam Blake away! Hit was the hand o’ Gawd!” The sheriff lifted his eyebrows. One may be a good church member, but the business of enforcing the law among ten thousand people, white and colored, leads to certain skepticisms. “First time,” grunted the sheriff drily to himself, “I ever knew the Lord to knock a man cold so much longer’n was necessary.” A car cranked up and went sputtering away. To get more people, maybe. If you had half a county mixed up in a lynching, you couldn’t do much about it. Somebody said you couldn’t indict a nation. Well, you couldn’t hang a county, either. Or half of it. Especially for lynching a cold-blooded murderer. * * * * * The killing had happened down in Bethel. And the sheriff, just by luck, had happened to be there, or Sam Blake would have been dead before now, unconscious or not. It was a clear case. Open and shut. Absolute, positive, hanging evidence. The sheriff went over it in his mind. Something of stubbornness made him want to justify himself for what he was going to do. Get killed, pretty certainly. Kill some other people, quite likely. And over a murderer that a jury would send to the electric chair as soon as they left the jury box. Nothing special about the killing itself, of course. Kittinger went into Bethel store to get his mail. He got it, growled at the storekeeper and went out. He stopped on the store porch to fill his pipe, leaning against a pile of newly arrived packing-cases that filled up three-fourths of the porch. And as he tamped down the tobacco with a horny thumb, from somewhere an incisive, spiteful _crack_ resounded. Kittinger shuddered suddenly and moved his head to look astonishedly down at his breast. And then, quite abruptly, he pitched clumsily forward down the rough plank steps into the road. Then he was still. The sheriff had been down in Bethel serving a summons and complaint. He’d heard the shot as a thin, muted, distant _pop_! They’d sent a man racing after him, and he got to the spot within five minutes of the killing. Kittinger’s body was still warm, still flaccid. His face still wore that expression of blank astonishment that would never be wiped off it. Never. The sheriff had been peculiarly shocked by the fact that a dead man’s hand should slip from his own and drop with a sickening, loose-jointed thud in the soft dust. And they’d found Sam Blake in the disused blacksmith shop just across the road from Bethel store. With a gun lying beside him, and his toe caught on a discarded metal wagon tire half buried in the earthen floor. He’d fired his shot and turned to run away, and he’d stumbled over that unimportant obstacle. His head had hit a mass of brickwork as he fell. There was a great welt on his forehead where he’d struck. “Open an’ shut,” growled the sheriff, sucking at his pipe. Two more cars rolled up to the jail outside. The sheriff pricked up his ears. Sam Blake was still unconscious in the cell to which the sheriff had rushed him. He was the murderer, all right. Even his motives were clear. He’d wanted to marry Lucy Sears, and her father was making her marry Kittinger because Kittinger had more money. He’d have been lynched before now if he’d come to. But it is one thing to drag a scared and babbling man out of a smashed-open jail and hang him to a telegraph pole, riddling his body with bullets to make sure. It is an entirely different thing to haul a limp and unconscious figure, totally unresisting, out to the same fate. No mob is especially honorable, but that last is beneath even a mob. * * * * * Words rose above the murmur of the crowd on the courthouse green. Preacher Bayles was still arguing, trying to convince men that the law should take its course. The sheriff would take a hand in the discussion presently, but his argument would be the blued steel revolver lying handily on his desk, with the open box of cartridges beside it. It was horribly hot to think of fighting. “The hand o’ Gawd----” That was Pete Brown, the nephew of the dead man. He had been the only one to see Kittinger die. He’d seen the killing from his barbershop, fifty yards away, and he’d been the first man to reach the body. When the sheriff got to the spot where the dead man lay in the dust, Pete Brown was still babbling. “I was lookin’ at him on the porch of the store, an’ he was fillin’ his pipe, an’ I heard the shot, an’ he looked down at his chest an’ looked surprised, an’ then he just slumped over an’ went tumblin’ down the steps----” The whole scene came back with the vividness of tragedy. The sheriff felt the hot breeze on his sweating face; felt the curiously liquid feel of soft dust beneath his feet; saw the small, scared crowd parting for him and then seemed to see the still limp figure with the dark spot on its shirt-front, grayed with the dust of the road. There was no dignity in a death like that. One was merely a huddled heap in the dust before a mountainous pile of packing-cases. “He was fillin’ his pipe, an’ I heard the shot, an’ he looked down at his chest----” Something of the sick disgust he had felt returned to the sheriff as he sat smoking his foul old pipe in the sooty jail office. He’d bent down over Kittinger in the roadway, and it had been shocking to find his wrist still warm, still flexible, still limp. He’d stood up. “Who shot him?” Nobody knew, but Pete Brown shivered and pointed to the gray and scabrous walls of the abandoned blacksmith shop across the road. The packing-cases on the store porch made it inevitable. Kittinger could only have been shot from directly across the road. * * * * * The sheriff waddled over to the place. Five minutes, at least, since the shooting. No man would be fool enough to stay where he had hidden to kill another, and the sheriff knew too much about the practical part of man-hunting to think seriously of tracks, of clues, of betraying signs left by a hastily fleeing murderer. It had been almost with incredulity that he saw a man lying on the sun-speckled dirt floor of the abandoned shed. Sam Blake, sprawled out, tripped up by a forgotten piece of scrap iron in the act of flight. His head had hit the corner of a brickwork forge. He was unconscious then, as he had been ever since, but his rifle lay where it had fallen from his hands, with a freshly discharged shell on the floor just a little way off. Hanging evidence. Open and shut. Absolutely positive proof of his guilt. With just enough of the supernatural about his discovery to justify that talk of the hand of God that was being circulated among the members of the mob outside. And enough of the supernatural, too, to weigh powerfully with a jury. “Durned fool,” grunted the sheriff to himself in the dismal lamplit gloom of the jail. “What d’ I want to p’tect him for? Waitin’ theah till ol’ Kittinger come out, an’ drillin’ him, an’ then turnin’ to run before anybody came lookin’. He’d ha’ got away if he hadn’t tripped on that wagon tire an’ cracked his head on the forge.” He stood up uneasily. He saw heads moving outside of the barred window. His pose, the revolver, the lamp, had not been arranged at random. Even the martyrdom of a closed window on a hot night had its purpose. The members of the mob could see him there with the gun and cartridges ready. But they could not talk to him. Moral effect. It is always daunting to see a man with a gun ready, when you cannot reason with him. The sheriff waddled back into the jail proper. He unlocked a cell and went over to the cot against the wall. The fumes of strictly local moonshine arose to his nostrils. Sam Blake had nerved himself up to his bushwhacking by copious doses of corn whisky, it seemed. Still out. No--he was stirring. “Pete, y’ g’dam fool, gimme ’nother----” He relaxed. Snores, vast and stertorous, sounded monstrously loud in the tiny cell. The sheriff grunted. “So drunk he don’t know what he’s done.” * * * * * He went out of the cell again. That fool darky was still whimpering in the stifling darkness. The mob was still waiting grimly. Cousins and neighbors and friends of Kittinger, waiting for Sam Blake to recover consciousness so he’d know he was being lynched. Getting impatient, too, and getting more numerous all the time. All his kinsfolk gathered. All of them suspicious of the law and the Democratic Party. Election coming on, and a proved murderer in the jail, and the sheriff needing re-election. He growled stubbornly to himself.