The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1889-02-26
CHAPTER XIII.

WHO KILLED SWAN?

head held low. L1JClo naQ lie
ever been to him at best. Life had be-
gun, for him, with death. He now felt
that it must end with him as it had begun.
No, he had not loved this girl, this
angel now; not really loved her. But it
looked to him now as if the sun had gone
down and would never, never rise up any
more. The flowers had been gathered
from his path. The stars had all fallen
out of heaven, and blaekness was IN their
places.
That night as he sat and sat, and still
sat in the solitude of his cabin, even when
the white finger of God came pointing
sharp through a chink in the wall from
out the golden doors of dawn, he could
continually hear a strong man moaning in
a dark corner. He could hear the wild,
passionate appeal of the wretched mother
to the priest. And Farla? And the little
group of children in that awful silence
and darkness about their dead?
He lifted up his head with the rising
sun; and reproducing himself for his sell
fish misery, he resolved if possible to be
of some better use in the world than he
had yet been.
What were all the buried rivers to him
now with their beds paved with gold?
His heart was not down in the deeps of
the earth now. His religious nature, and
his early religious training, too, came to
help him new. And so his thoughts were
not down in the earth, but up, up in that
vague and indescribable Somewhere which
men call heaven.
The singular and isolated man, who had
set his teeth so terribly and clenched his
GoA.oo c.nol-r41oA -3o1A o1o,o - I,n- L.
dead in silence, and almost in secrecy. 1t
would seem that he followed the grave
and laid his lost child away with his own
hands somewhere. It may be that Farla
and he did it together. For the next day
after her death, Mr.. Gray walked up to-
ward the house, where he heard a sound
as of the mailing of boards. But when
Farla and her father, who at that mo-
ment CHANGED to be looking his way, saw
him coming, they closed the door. He
went up to the strong gate, but finding
that, also, firmly fastened, he stood still
for a little time, and then went back home.
1t might have been months after, it
seemed years to Gray, that Farla came to
the cabin door, and hastily and excitedly
looked in where the artist, weary and
desolate, was trying to paint a picture of
the dead girl from memory.
"Swain? Swain has come back" she
Kissed, and was gone.
1t has been said that the murderer can
not keep always away from the scene ofhis
crime, but will sometime return, aver
though it be in his sleep. Two days
after Farla had hastily put her head in at
the cabin door, and as hastily passed on,
the artist saw one, two three men search
ing up and down and securing the hills
and canyons, as if for something lost.
On the third day the coroner came to
impanel ajury down on a grassy bench of
the mountain by a little trout stream,
where Swain the summon before had been
so fond of fishing.
The dead had been found. The rich
mans son from San Francisco had been
found lying dead in the grass, all in a
heap, as if he had been pitched there; as
if he had been shaken as a dog shakes a
drabble-bellied cat, and then throws it far
aside in the grass. Robbers? Murder
ers2 Thieves?
The papers were crowded with &C
counts of the dreadful crime. He was
a good young man of great promise, the
papers said; but too fearless of danger.
And now he had fallen a victim to hiss
w courage and his romantic love of
nature. The desperate outlaws that hung
about the savage haunts of Mount Diablo
had robbed and murdered him.
But the coroner found the costly
diamond still on his. finger. His watch,
too, wasfound close by in the grass. And,
strangest of all, his well filed purse was
still in his pocket!
Farla was not to be seen anywhere
about all this time; neither was her
father. True, little groups of children
dotted the door yard. and looked curious
ly out now and then as men went and
came up and down the green hills, and
round and about the little groves of grace
full redwoods, but that was all. The great,
stout gate was as firmly closed as if the
white bull was still the terror of the hills.
According to the c~oroner's report
columns in length, but which l must COM
press into a paragraph-the jury found
cruel finger marks or the young mans
throat. The distinct marks of three fingers
about the throat, more as if the rope of a
hangman had made them!
The thumb of the dead mans murderer
had almost buried itself opposite the three
red bars across the throat. The mans
back was found to have beer broken?
John Gray had taken intense interest
in all the proceedings. He was on the
ground along with the coroner and his
men from the first; nervous, anxious. He
wore a painters blouse. Up and down
the front of this blouse ran a row of
bright gilt buttons. He kept rolling one
of these over and over, and round about,
between his thumb and finger. In this
nervous way he had worked it loose. 1t
was nearly ready to fall. He was still
twisting it about between his thumb and
finger, when the surgeon announced that
the dead mans back had been broken.
Then he jerked more nervously at the
button than ever. 1t came loose from
the blouse, slipped from his fingers, and
fell to the ground.