Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/297

 beyond the wagon cover into the invisible world she peopled with the dead. Her body was rigid; her face had the ossified gray look of stone; the labored jerks in which she spoke racked her body with the effort that it cost.

" Now — they're coming! The smoke rolls back a bit

— I see — quite plain — Oh! Oh! " A look of hor- ror froze on her gray face, and her voice rose to a shriek. " He says he's Mormon Joe! He cries — Confess! Confess! "

To Mullendore with his inflamed brain and nerves jangling like a network of loose wire, she seemed like a direct emissary from the place of torment, which was as real to him as the wagon in which he lay.

The half-breed had tried to convince himself by saying over and over mechanically: "There ain't no hell — there ain't no comin' back — there ain't nothin' after this,"

— but the denial was only of the lips — atavism was stronger than his will. He believed, as much as he be- lieved that on the morrow the sun would rise, in a real and definite hell, filled with the shrieking spirits of the damned. In these final hours it had required all his weakened will to hide his fears and keep his tongue between his teeth. Now, like a man clinging by his finger tips to some small crevice in a cliff, he suddenly gave up. As he relaxed his grip he whispered with the last faint remnant of his strengtfi :

" I own up — I set the gun — I — I — " Teeters slipped an arm about his shoulders and raised him up.

" Where did you git it, Mullendore? " His answer was a breath. " Toomey."

"One thing more — Where does Kate Prentice's