_ CHAPTER XXIII. WHEN THE BLACK SPOT HIT
Teeters moved in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.
Outwardly, there would seem to be no possible connection between his presence in the living room at Happy Wigwam making himself even more than ordinarily agreeable, and the confession he desired to wring from the murderer of Mormon Joe.
Years of "Duding," however, had given Teeters a confidence in himself and his diplomacy which would seem to be justified, for, as he rightly argued, "A man who can handle dudes can do anything."
Now, he knew that if he had come to Mrs. Taylor and bluntly asked the use of her supernatural gifts in Kate's behalf she would have refused him.
Kate had gone to Teeters in despair after her failure with Mullendore, hoping that he might have something to suggest which had not occurred to her. She had told him all that had happened, and among other things, that she knew now that the "breed" had negro blood in him.
"It probably accounts for his secret belief in an old-fashioned, brimstone hell," she had added. "He denies it, of course, but I'm sure it's the one thing he's really afraid of."
The information had impressed Teeters.
"You go back and keep the varmit alive until I git there," he had advised her. "I got a black speck in my brain, and every time it hits the top of my head I get an idea--I think it's goin' to strike directly."
The present visit was evidence that it had done so. The situation was one which demanded all his subtlety, but what possible bearing the deep interest with which he was eying the garment Mrs. Taylor was repairing could have upon it, the most astute would have found it difficult to imagine.
The bifurcated article of wearing apparel was of outing flannel, roomy where amplitude was most needed, gathered at the waist with a drawstring, confined at the ankle by a deep ruffle--a garment of amazing ugliness.
"I suppose," Teeters ventured guilelessly, "them things is handier than skirts to git over fences and do chores in?" Then, with an anticipatory air, he waited.
He was not disappointed. Mrs. Taylor laid down her work and, throwing back her head, burst into laughter that was ringing, Homeric, reverberating through the house like some one shouting in a canyon. It continued until Teeters was alarmed lest he had overdone matters.
She subsided finally and, wiping her streaming eyes on a ruffle, shook a playful finger at him:
"Clarence, you are killing--simply killing!"
Teeters did not deny it. He had not yet recovered from the fear that he might be. But he had accomplished what he had intended--he had furnished Mrs. Taylor with the "one good laugh a day" which she declared her health and temperament demanded.
After a pensive silence Teeters looked up wistfully:
"I wonder if you and Miss Maggie would sing somethin'. I git a reg'lar cravin' to hear good music."
Mrs. Taylor laid down her work with a pleased expression.
"Certainly, Clarence. Is there anything in particular?"
"If it ain't too much trouble, I'd like, 'Oh, Think of the Home Over There.'"
"I'm delighted that your mind sometimes turns in that direction. I've sometimes feared, Clarence, that you were not religious."
Mr. Teeters looked pained at the suggestion.
"I don't talk about religion much," he replied earnestly, "but there's somethin' come up the last few days that set me thinkin' pretty serious."
Mrs. Taylor looked her curiosity.
"It's a turrible thing," Teeters wagged his head solemnly, "to see a feller layin' on his death-bed denyin' they's a Hereafter."
"Why, how dreadful! Who is it?"
"A sheepherder. He says they ain't no hell--nor nothin'."
"The po-oo-or soul! Is there any way I could talk to him?"
"I was hopin' you'd say that, but I didn't like to ask you, seein' as he's a sheepherder."
"They're human beings, Clarence," reproved Mrs. Taylor.
"I've heerd that questioned," declared Teeters, "but anyhow, a person with a heart in him no bigger than a bullet would have to be sorry to see this feller goin' to his everlasting punishment without repentin'. He's done murder."
"Murder!"
"I'll tell you about it to-morrow on the way over."
"Where is he?"
"At Kate Prentice's--at headquarters."
Mrs. Taylor stiffened.
"I shouldn't care to go there, Clarence." Seeing that his face clouded, she added: "Of course, if your heart is set upon it--the woman wouldn't construe it as a 'call' and return it, would she?"
"I hardly think so," replied Teeters dryly.
* * * * *
As a result of this conversation, the following morning Kate saw Teeters driving up Bitter Creek with a second person on the seat beside him. She had just come down from Burnt Basin and was not in too good a humor. Bowers, who was staying with Mullendore, came out of the wagon when he heard her and asked:
"How was it lookin'?"
"The spring was trampled to a bog," she said in an exasperated voice, "and the range is covered with bare spots where that dry-farmer has salted his cattle. I'll throw two bands of sheep in there, and when I take 'em off there won't be roots enough left to grow grass for five years. If it's fight he wants, I'll give him all he's looking for." Her brow cleared as she added:
"Teeters is coming up the road and bringing some one with him." She nodded towards the wagon, "How is he?"
"I doubt if he lasts the day out."
Kate frowned when she recognized Mrs. Taylor. They passed occasionally on the road to Prouty, but always without speaking. Kate never had forgiven the affront at the Prouty House, while Mrs. Taylor preserved her uncompromising attitude towards "rough characters."
Mrs. Taylor looked like a grenadier in a long snuff-brown coat and jaunty sailor hat as she descended from the buckboard without using the step. The benign cow-like complacency of her face always had irritated Kate, and now, as she advanced with the air of a great lady slumming, Kate felt herself tingling.
"How do you do, my dear?" She extended a large hand with a brown cotton glove upon it.
Kate's hand remained at her side, as she said coldly:
"How do you do, Mrs. Taylor?"
Mrs. Taylor's manner said that it was the gracious act of an unsullied woman extending a hand to a fallen sister when she laid her brown cotton paw upon Kate's arm and quavered pityingly:
"You po-oo-or soul!"
"You stupid woman!" Kate's eyes at the moment looked like steel points emitting sparks.
Mrs. Taylor drew herself up haughtily and was about to retort, but thought better of it. Instead, she declared with noble magnanimity:
"I am not angery. I have not been angery in thirty years. You are very rude, but I can rise above it and forgive you, because I realize you've had no raising."
"I hope," said Kate hotly, "that you realize also that you are not here by my invitation."
Mrs. Taylor looked as if she was not only about to forget that she was a saint but a lady, while Teeters had a sensation of being rent by feline claws.
It seemed like a direct intervention of Providence when Bowers hung out of the door of the wagon and called excitedly:
"I believe he's goin'!"
The exigencies of the moment, and curiosity, combined to make Mrs. Taylor overlook temporarily that she had been insulted, and she hastened with Teeters to the dying man's side.
Emaciated, yellow, Mullendore was lying with closed eyes when they entered.
"Say, feller--" said Teeters, hoping to rouse him.
Only Mullendore's faint breathing told them that he was living.
Mrs. Taylor laid her hand upon his damp forehead and withdrew it quickly.
"The po-oo-or soul! I'll sing something."
"It might help to git
ong rapport with the sperrits," agreed Teeters.
As Mrs. Taylor droned a familiar camp-meeting hymn, Mullendore opened his eyes and looked at her dully:
"Who are you?" he whispered.
Mrs. Taylor quavered, "I've come to bring the Truth to you."
Mullendore looked at her, uncomprehending.
Teeters thrust himself in the sick man's line of vision and elucidated:
"Feller, I'm sorry to tell you you ain't goin' to 'make the grade'--they's no possible show fur you--an' Mis' Taylor here, who's a personal friend, you might say, of all the leadin' sperrits in the Sperrit World, has come to kind of prepare you--"
Mullendore's lips moved with an effort:
"There ain't nothin' after this."
"Oh, my!" Teeters ejaculated in a shocked voice. "Don't say heathen things like that! If you'd seen half of what I've saw you couldn't nowise doubt."
"There ain't no hell--there ain't no comin' back." The voice was stronger, and querulous.
Teeters wagged his head in horrified reproach.
"Mis' Taylor, do you think the sperrits are goin' to take holt?"
Turning to the lady who hoped to be his mother-in-law, Teeters's eyes started in his head. He was familiar with weird gyrations of the kitchen table, and messages received through the medium of the ouija board, but he never had seen the mysterious force which Mrs. Taylor referred to as her "control" evidence itself in any such fashion as this.
With her lank six feet sunk upon the side bench and her supine hands lying limply in her lap, Mrs. Taylor's chest was rising and falling in convulsive heaves; the nostrils of her large flat nose were dilated, and her wide mouth, with its loose colorless lips, was slightly agape. Her eyes were open and staring fixedly straight ahead. Mrs. Taylor was in a trance.
Teeters had long since given over trying to explain what he did not understand, but in a vague way he regarded Mrs. Taylor as an unconscious fakir, whose spiritual communications bore the earmarks of something she had learned in a quite ordinary way.
There was, however, nothing of charlatanry in her present state. Teeters was convinced of that. She caught and held the gaze of Mullendore's dull eyes. Suddenly she stiffened out like a corpse galvanized into life by an electric charge, then again sank back, and said thickly between labored breaths:
"It is turgid--dark--all is confusion--spirits are assembling--they are spirits of unrest--there is no peace--no happiness. There is horror in every distorted face--they have met--violent deaths--they want to talk--they clamor to be heard--they--"
"It's a lie!" Mullendore's whisper was shrill, aspirate. "There ain't no other world! There ain't no comin' back!"
"Clouds roll up--" she went on, "clouds of red smoke--they shut the spirits out--new ones come--dim at first--but I can't see--yet. Wait!"
The woman's stare seemed to carry her through and beyond the wagon cover into the invisible world she peopled with the dead. Her body was rigid; her face had the ossified gray look of stone; the labored jerks in which she spoke racked her body with the effort that it cost.
"Now--they're coming! The smoke rolls back a bit--I see--quite plain--Oh! Oh!" A look of horror froze on her gray face, and her voice rose to a shriek. "He says he's Mormon Joe! He cries--Confess! Confess!"
To Mullendore with his inflamed brain and nerves jangling like a network of loose wire, she seemed like a direct emissary from the place of torment, which was as real to him as the wagon in which he lay.
The half-breed had tried to convince himself by saying over and over mechanically: "There ain't no hell--there ain't no comin' back--there ain't nothin' after this,"--but the denial was only of the lips--atavism was stronger than his will. He believed, as much as he believed that on the morrow the sun would rise, in a real and definite hell, filled with the shrieking spirits of the damned. In these final hours it had required all his weakened will to hide his fears and keep his tongue between his teeth. Now, like a man clinging by his finger tips to some small crevice in a cliff, he suddenly gave up. As he relaxed his grip he whispered with the last faint remnant of his strength:
"I own up--I set the gun--I--I--"
Teeters slipped an arm about his shoulders and raised him up.
"Where did you git it, Mullendore?"
His answer was a breath.
"Toomey."
"One thing more--Where does Kate Prentice's father live? His address--quick!" Teeters shook the wasted shoulders in his haste.
The muddy blue-gray iris was divided in half by the closing upper lids. Beneath the glaze there seemed a last malicious spark. Then his tongue clicked as it dropped to the back of his mouth, and Mullendore was dead. _