The hand of God

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.