THE STEADFAST HEART
“What robber? What have robbers to do with it?”
“The robber I shot…. Mother heard him comin’. He was maybe Jesse James. He wa’n’t goin’ to leave nobody alive to tell the tale.”
“Didn’t you know it was Sheriff Bates?”
“It was a robber. He come after Dad’s money.”
Trueman was nonplussed. He could make nothing of it, yet he knew something lay beneath the surface which it was his duty to reach, and he determined to have it…. By dint of question and answer he drew from the boy the history of that evening—the arrival of his father with the black pills and the mysterious roll of money—the money which had sent Sheriff Bates to apprehend Titus Burke—the departure of Burke and the song of Mrs. Burke (Angus repeated verses of it)—the terrifying stories of hideous crimes, the terror, the woman’s gruesome reveling in fear. So Trueman saw the picture and understood…. Here was no crime, no occasion for the rigid hand of justice to descend in punishment. Here, rather, was a child upon whom the pity of the world might well be lavished—guiltless in thought and in act.
In his mind Trueman acquitted Angus. Death had come by the boy’s hand—as a sort of inevitable accident, an act of God working in His mys-
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