In The Grip of the Law

During all the warmth of that day Ben Blair slept on, as a child sleeps, as sleep the very aged; and although the bearded man had freed himself from the gag at last, he did not again make a sound. Too miserable himself to sleep, he lay staring at the other. Gradually through the haze of impotent anger a realization of his position came to him. He could not avoid the issue. To be sure, he was still alive; but what of the future? A host of possibilities flashed into his mind, but in every one there faced him a single termination. By no process of reasoning could he escape the inevitable end; and despite the chilliness of the air a sweat broke out over him. Contrition for what he had done he could not feel--long ago he had passed even the possibility of that; but fear, deadly and absorbing fear, had him in its clutch. The passing of the years, years full of lawlessness and violence, had left him the same man whom bartender "Mick" had terrorized in the long ago; and for the first time in his wretched life, personal death--not of another but of himself--looked at him with steady eyes, and he could not return the gaze. All he could do was to wait, and think--and thoughts were madness. Again and again, knowing what the result would be, but seeking merely a diversion, he struggled at the straps until he was breathless; but relentless as time one picture kept recurring to his brain. In it was a rope, a stout rope, dangling from something he could not distinctly recognize; but what he could see, and see plainly, was a figure of a man, a bearded man--himself--at its end. The body swayed back and forth as he had once seen that of a "rustler" whom a group of cowboys had left hanging to the scraggly branch of a scrub-oak; as a pendulum marks time, measuring the velocity of the prairie wind.