Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/284

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272
RESURRECTION ROCK

the wide window to get air and stood in the dark staring down upon the lake and listening to its tumult. Vaguely in the dim light of the winter stars, he could see the surf leaping landward, hurled by the gale from the north; here and there, near the concrete escarpment of the beach, glints of street lights flickered on the furious up-leap of the halted waves; but old Lucas looked far beyond the near-by fury into the darkness of the distant waters north; and his thoughts and the torment of his breast were bound with the shores far away and with a tiny, long-forgotten hamlet in the pine forest above the lake called long ago, by its Mormon settlers, "Galilee." Nothing had ever happened at Galilee itself,—nothing of extraordinary violence or wrong. It had been a harmless, innocent place; no one could possibly have any particular occasion to recall "Galilee" or connect it with a flaming torch or with any one who displayed the letters "J.Q.",—except Lucas Cullen himself and one other man.

For Lucas never did anything at all at Galilee except meet James Quinlan there and there direct J. Q. to the deed that was to be done.

It was marvellous how, throughout the forty-six years which had passed since that meeting, Lucas had carried consciousness of his own guilt always associated with the place of meeting, "Galilee." He had not known that Quinlan had done so too. He had supposed that Quinlan had lived out his life with a different association. And yet this was natural enough.

"Natural enough!" Lucas muttered to himself. Galilee!

But J. Q was dead; Kincheloe had put his body in the lake. Who, then, knew about Galilee and could associate it with a flaming torch? No one else in all