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Updated: May 23, 2025
And so Hale at the head of the disappointed Guard went back to the Gap, and when, next day, they laid Mockaby away in the thinly populated little graveyard that rested in the hollow of the river's arm, the spirit of law and order in the heart of every guard gave way to the spirit of revenge, and the grass would grow under the feet of none until Rufe Tolliver was caught and the death-debt of the law was paid with death.
Before sunset he died with those boots on, while the sweetheart, unknowing, was bound on her happy way homeward, and Rufe Tolliver, who had shot Mockaby, was clattering through the Gap in flight for Lonesome Cove.
Ten minutes later, as Mockaby was passing down the dummy track, a whistle was blown on the river bank, a high yell was raised, a pistol shot quickly followed and he started for the sound of them on a run.
Early that morning, Mockaby, the town-sergeant, had stepped into the street freshly shaven, with polished boots, and in his best clothes for the eyes of his sweetheart, who was to come up that day to the Gap from Lee.
Rufe had told the jailer, his one friend through whom he had kept in constant communication with the Tollivers, how on the night after the shooting of Mockaby, when he lay down to sleep high on the mountain side and under some rhododendron bushes, a flock of little birds flew in on him like a gust of rain and perched over and around him, twittering at him until he had to get up and pace the woods, and how, throughout the next day, when he sat in the sun planning his escape, those birds would sweep chattering over his head and sweep chattering back again, and in that mood of despair he had said once, and only once: "Somehow I knowed this time my name was Dennis" a phrase of evil prophecy he had picked up outside the hills.
A few minutes later three more pistol shots rang out, and Hale rushed to the river bank to find Mockaby stretched out on the ground, dying, and a mountaineer lout pointing after a man on horseback, who was making at a swift gallop for the mouth of the gap and the hills. "He done it," said the lout in a frightened way; "but I don't know who he was."
So the testimony of the latter that Mockaby without even summoning Rufe to surrender had fired first, carried no conviction. And yet Rufe had no trouble making it almost sure that he had never seen the dead man before so what was his motive?
His best friends put his victims no lower than thirteen, and there looking up at him were three women whom he had widowed or orphaned, while at one corner of the jail-yard stood a girl in black the sweetheart of Mockaby, for whose death Rufe was standing where he stood now. But his lips did not open. Instead he took hold of the side of the window and looked behind him.
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