Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1906-02-18

N of his lost house. was sitting still, in
f=-5S4 an agony Of despair, rocking himself
C5AASAJ to and fro with his head in his hands,
and overwhelmed with this awful
fate Of Bertha and Daisy.
For a long time he sat there, incapable Of
thought act. or motion; sat there like one
dazed by his terrible loss, holding his face be-
tween his palms in his misery, and incapable
even of realizing his own desolate position But
at last he rose. determined to know the worst
and began with a pick that was lying near to
turn over the hot ashes, in the vain attempt to
find some charred and mangled remains of his
wife and child. if anything was left of them. He
turned the ashes over carefully, but the fire had
indeed done its work well. Not a stick or plank
not beam or rafter not leg of chair or sofa
or table, remained distinguishable among all that
heap of gray and calcined relics. Only the
frames of the iron bedsteads and few castors
and other metal objects were to be found in any
recognizable shape. The rest was mere cinder
or white powdery ashes.
In the depths of his despair Dick looked
around for Archie But Archie, too, was no
where to be seen, and Dick remembered he had
talked in the morning about going into Swale-
borough. The first apathy of grief had worn
off now and Dick had reached that second active
stage of wild dependency when a man feels he
he fumbled among the ashes, digging deeper and
deeper, weird idea seemed to frame itself with
in him. Since all that remained of Bertha and
Daisy lay there in those ashes, he would dig a
grave on the very spot where they ded-those
two that were dearest to him--throw the ashes
into it, and then shoot himself there above the
relics Of his loved ones. When Archie came
back with the wagon from Swaleborough, he
would find house, but open grave, and his
brothers dead body, stark and bleeding with
! in it.
1t was one of those awful meo-dramatic ideas
which sometimes occur with irresistible force to
such minds as Dick Prothero's at great crisis
in their lives; and its very weirdness commended
it to his inflamed fancy. He proceeded at once.
with the energy Of despair, to carry the mad no
| ton into actual practice. He took up the spade
which lay in the back yard, untouched by the
fire, and began to dig and dig, to drown his mis-
erv for awhile in the mere act of digging IF
Archie had been there, he might have groaned
and cried but in his utter solitude alone with
the prairie and his vanished wife and child he
dug and dug, with feverish energy, for very need
of some violent occupation. He dug as he never
knew he could dig before, with the wild maniac
strength of terrible sorrow.
As he dug, the ashes and the smoke blinded
his eyes, and the fumes from the fire rose up and
choked him. But still he dug on, going deeper
and deeper and fnging out the earth with fierce
and frantic eagerness. He must get it all done
before Archie came back; and at the very first
sound of Arches wheels in the distance, he
must pull out his revolver, finished or not fin
ished. and shoot himself dead before Archie's
eyes in the grave he had dug himself.
He had got down into deep subsoil
thick and clayey, and hard to cut through; but
he went on nevertheless, digging it square and
even, and taking care to throw the clay well out
of the way. where it wouldn't interfere with