“He planned to,” Sara moaned, “and even if he hadn’t planned it for those poor women, that doesn’t make any difference. They’re just as dead.”
“Just as dead,” Gibby said, toying with the signed releases stacked at Emory Kent’s elbow. He fished Sara’s from the pile. “Just as dead, Muriel. It’s a pity you had to take your gloves off to sign this because now we can match it up with the fingerprint record the State of California has on Muriel Lodge Frail.”
It did match up but we didn’t have to wait till we had the word from California. As soon as Gibby had spoken, the girl who called herself Sara Bardon Frail lunged for that paper. She was clawing like a wildcat.
Nothing could have been simpler. Of course, it hadn’t been the first wife but the second who had been allowed to die before they got her to that doctor. With the first wife talented as she was, they had no need for the unfortunate Sara and when Sara conveniently developed that bad appendix in the High Sierras, that had done it. It was simple enough for Frail to come back for questioning and all that. It was his wife who couldn’t be seen in any of the places in California where she had been known; and it had been safe enough, or so he had thought, to bring her to New York for her grandfather’s last days. She could be stubborn and stay out of the old man’s room and none of the others had ever seen Sara Bardon Frail. Meanwhile, they would be on the spot so they could make certain they weren’t jobbed on the old man’s will.
He’d made his mistake in doing that. She was safe, but he wasn’t. He was taking her into a house where Sara Frail was loved and where her husband was hated. Once he’d established her there, she had no further need of him. She could improvise and for her improvisations she had all those Bardons on whom suspicion could fall.
“His luck ran out,” Gibby said. “But so did hers. Hers ran out when it happened to be cyanide that came ready to hand for murdering her husband. For a Californian cyanide was bad. The stuff has gas-chamber associations. She thought she could take it but when the moment came and she smelled the stuff and saw him drop, she weakened. That’s where her luck ran out. She fainted and while you were helping her, you put up her veil. That did it. Mama Gibbs saw her and that meant Mama Gibbs had to be silenced. Muriel knew the dame well enough to know her preference in liquor and while you were downstairs letting the Gibbses in, she did a quick job of poisoning the bottle and setting it out on the bar.”
So that’s the way it was. For all of Gibby’s brilliance, in this one it was I who cracked the case. I caught the gal when she fell. I lowered her to the sidewalk. I threw back her veil and with that last act, I finished her off. I have my uses.
Sacrifice
by Warren Frost
“There’s the gun, Padre. You want to be a hero, use it.”
The young priest stood perfectly still facing the gnarled, phlegmatic sheriff. Only his clenched fists marred the otherwise placid façade, but his thoughts were racing up and down a scale of emotions he had never encountered before. For the first time in his life he wanted to hurt a man. Reach out with his hands and hurt this tired, inept old man standing before him.
“Well?” the lawman asked. “What are you going to do?”
Words finally came to him and he spoke them softly and slowly, as though testing their truth before he freed them from his mind. “That man is a human being, Sheriff. He’s not an animal. He deserves a trial.” He pointed to the half-breed crouched in the corner of one of the two small cells of the jail. Sweat poured down the faces of the three men for, although not yet eleven, the sun was baking the little town of Dobart for the tenth straight day in 110-degree heat.
“Let me tell you something, young fella,” the sheriff growled. “You can’t come out here with your fancy ideas and change us over in a week. You best let nature take its course like I am.”
“That man is going to be... be murdered!”
“Padre, I’m an old man. I’m tired. I got an eyewitness to the killin’.”
“A simple-minded boy. You can’t take his...”
“I take what I want,” the sheriff interrupted. “I don’t take what I don’t want. My job’s to keep this miserable little town happy as possible. Now I had a killin’ this mornin’. I got a man says he saw that man do the killin’. And I got a town full of men who ain’t happy about the killin’. If I wait for the circuit judge, it might be two, three weeks afore we have a trial, with them same men that ain’t happy today sitting on the jury. I don’t rightly see how it makes much difference whether they hang him today or next month. Do you?”
The noise was growing louder from across the street. All that was missing was the final spark.
The priest turned his back on the law and walked out into the hot, dusty street. He couldn’t take up a gun, but he knew he must at least try to stop it. Perhaps he could reach them before it was too late — but how? At all costs, he had cautioned himself over and over on the trip west, you must avoid a pious attitude. The roughhewed would never understand.
He walked quickly across the deserted street to the saloon that now caged most of the town’s male population. Men, who two hours before had been ordinary, peace-loving citizens, were now turning into animals. Through the swinging doors he saw Jerry, the eyewitness, swaggering up and down on top of the bar, the toast of the town. A simple-minded boy having a moment of glory.
He pushed the doors open and started for the bar. His sudden presence hushed the crowd. For a brief moment the color of his habit made wild men sane and he felt their resentment. They were working toward a goal of courage. Their god was in a bottle now and they wanted no earthly representative of another faith to block their progress.
He walked straight to the bar as the silent men parted to make a path for him.
The trouble had started early that morning when Frank Craven had been shot in the back as he trudged along the old Mesa Pass road near Banner Forks. Frank was old, nobody knew how old, and harmless. Everybody had always accepted Frank as part of the scenery around Dobart. Now that he was dead, he had become everyone’s best friend.
“Great old guy!”
“Never forget him!”
“Poor Frank!”
“Great old guy!”
Tempers had soared with the sudden discovery of the terrible loss of such a great friend.
“Who’d do it?”
“We ought to get a posse.”
“The guy who finds him would be a hero!”
Hero! The man who finds the killer would be a hero!
This oft-repeated word reached the listening ears of the boy named Jerry, age eighteen, who swept stores, ran errands and dreamed of the day he might be a recognized part of Dobart’s male society. His thoughts came slowly, but the pattern began to form.
“Sheriff,” the men said, “we ought to get a posse.”
“Poor Frank.”
“Be calm. It’s a hot day. We’ll find him,” the old sheriff said and went to his office, had a swig from the bottle, mopped his brow and put his feet up on the desk to think, and sleep, or just sleep.
Hero! The man would be a hero. The word echoed louder and louder in the empty caverns of Jerry’s mind.
So, tempers rose and tempers fell and an hour later the incident was almost forgotten. Frank Craven was dead. He had his moment of fond memory and immortality in the minds of his pathetic friends and then he slipped away to be forgotten until his burial later that day.
It was at this moment that the young priest made his first public appearance of the day after an unsatisfactory breakfast of greasy eggs at the hotel, but he accepted this as part of the cross he must bear in order to bring his teachings where they would do the most good. His task was uppermost in his mind this morning, for in two days he would be celebrating his first mass and certain physical necessities would have to be taken care of.