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He
could not have said if he were getting farther away from the town or going
back to it--a most important matter to Orrin Brower. He knew that in
either case a posse of citizens with a pack of bloodhounds would soon be
on his track and his chance of escape was very slender; but he did not
wish to assist in his own pursuit. Even an added hour of freedom was worth
having.
Suddenly he emerged from the forest into an old road, and there before him
saw, indistinctly, the figure of a man, motionless in the gloom. It was
too late to retreat: the fugitive felt that at the first movement back
toward the wood he would be, as he afterward explained, "filled with
buckshot." So the two stood there like trees, Brower nearly suffocated by
the activity of his own heart; the other--the emotions of the other are
not recorded.
A
moment later--it may have been an hour--the moon sailed into a patch of
unclouded sky and the hunted man saw that visible embodiment of Law lift
an arm and point significantly toward and beyond him. He understood.
Turning his back to his captor, he walked submissively away in the
direction indicated, looking to neither the right nor the left; hardly
daring to breathe, his head and back actually aching with a prophecy of
buckshot.
Brower was as courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged; that was
shown by the conditions of awful personal peril in which he had coolly
killed his brother-in-law. It is needless to relate them here; they came
out at his trial, and the revelation of his calmness in confronting them
came near to saving his neck. But what would you have?--when a brave man
is beaten, he submits.
So
they pursued their journey jailward along the old road through the woods.
Only once did Brower venture a turn of the head: just once, when he was in
deep shadow and he knew that the other was in moonlight, he looked
backward. His captor was Burton Duff, the jailer, as white as death and
bearing upon his brow the livid mark of the iron bar. Orrin Brower had no
further curiosity.
Eventually they entered the town, which was all alight, but deserted; only
the women and children remained, and they were off the streets. Straight
toward the jail the criminal held his way. Straight up to the main
entrance he walked, laid his hand upon the knob of the heavy iron door,
pushed it open without command, entered and found himself in the presence
of a half-dozen armed men. Then he turned. Nobody else entered.
On a
table in the corridor lay the dead body of Burton Duff.
Compiled and
edited by
Kathy Weiser/Legends
of America, updated
November, 2010.
Excerpted from the book Present at a
Hanging and Other Ghost Stories, by Ambrose Bierce, 1913. (now
in the public domain)
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