The Killer
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In many older texts, the character combination "oe" was tied together with a ligature. Such instances are represented in this ASCII text by enclosing them in brackets. Hence in words such as Oedipus, for example, when the 'O' and the 'e' are connected with a ligature, they will be shown as [Oe]dipus. In addition, the text contains a ranch brand consisting of the characters J and H connected (no space between). This brand is shown in the text as [JH].] [Illustration: He had been shot through the body and was dead. His rifle lay across a rock trained carefully on the trail.] THE KILLER BY
battling with handfuls of dust, and now running races on some level
stretch of it, and now standing beside the road while a passing
movers' wagon delayed their play. The movers' wagon was never absent
from the boy's picture of that time and place. Either the
canvas-covered wagon was coming from the ford of Sycamore Creek, or
disappearing over the hill beyond the town, or was passing in front of
the boys as they stopped their play. Being a boy, he could not know,
nor would he care if he did know, that he was seeing one of God's
miracles--the migration of a people, blind but instinctive as that of
birds or buffalo, from old pastures into new ones. All over the plains
in those days, on a hundred roads like that which ran through Sycamore
Ridge, men and women were moving from east to west, and, as often has
happened since the beginning of time, when men have migrated, a great
ethical principle was stirring in them. The pioneers do not go to the
wilderness always in lust of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy
their souls. The spirit of God moves in the hearts of men as it moves
on the face of the waters.
Something of this moving spirit was in John Barclay's mother. For
often she paused at her work, looking up from her wash-tub toward the
highway, when a prairie schooner sailed by, and lifting her face
skyward for an instant, as her lips moved in silence. As a man the boy
knew she was thinking of her long journey, of the tragedy that came of
it, and praying for those who passed into the West. Then she would
bend to her work again; and the washerwoman's child who took the
clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels,
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In many older texts, the character combination "oe" was tied together with a ligature. Such instances are represented in this ASCII text by enclosing them in brackets. Hence in words such as Oedipus, for example, when the 'O' and the 'e' are connected with a ligature, they will be shown as [Oe]dipus. In addition, the text contains a ranch brand consisting of the characters J and H connected (no space between). This brand is shown in the text as [JH].] [Illustration: He had been shot through the body and was dead. His rifle lay across a rock trained carefully on the trail.] THE KILLER BY