But it was more than that.
They now had a profound and bleak gravity as they stood where crowds milled, grave, austere, detached, looking with. blank, bleak eyes at the slow throngs who, feeling, sensing without knowing, drifted before them, slowing, staring, so that they would be ringed with faces rapt and empty and immobile as the faces of cows, approaching and drifting on, to be replaced.
And all morning the voices came and went, in quiet question and answer:
“There he goes.
That young fellow with the automatic pistol.
He’s the captain of them.
Special officer sent by the governor.
He’s the head of the whole thing.
Sheriff ain’t got no say in it today.”
Later, when it was too late, Grimm told the sheriff:
“If you had just listened to me.
Let me bring him out of that cell in a squad of men, instead of sending him across the square with one deputy and not even handcuffed to him, in all that crowd where that damned Buford didn’t dare shoot, even if he could hit a barn door.”
“How did I know he aimed to break, would think of trying it right then and there?” the sheriff said. “When Stevens had done told me he would plead guilty and take a life sentence.”
But it was too late then.
It was all over then.
It happened in the middle of the square, halfway between the sidewalk and the courthouse, in the midst of a throng of people thick as on Fair Day, though the first that Grimm knew of it was when he heard the deputy’s pistol twice, fired into the air.
He knew at once what had happened, though he was at the time inside the courthouse.
His reaction was definite and immediate.
He was already running toward the shots when he shouted back over his shoulder at the man who had tagged him now for almost forty-eight hours as half aide and half orderly:
“Turn in the fire alarm!”
“The fire alarm?” the aide said. “What—”
“Turn in the fire alarm!” Grimm shouted back. “It don’t. matter what folks think, just so they know that something ...” He did not finish; he was gone.
He ran among running people, overtaking and passing them, since he had an objective and they did not; they were just running, the black, blunt, huge automatic opening a way for him like a plow.
They looked at his tense, hard, young face with faces blanched and gaped, with round, toothed orifices; they made one long sound like a murmuring sigh: “There ... went that way ...”
But already Grimm had seen the deputy, running, his pistol aloft in his hand.
Grimm glanced once about and sprang forward again; in the throng which had evidently been pacing the deputy and the prisoner across the square was the inevitable hulking youth in the uniform of the Western Union, leading his bicycle by the horns like a docile cow.
Grimm rammed the pistol back into the holster and flung the boy aside and sprang onto the bicycle, with never a break in motion.
The bicycle possessed neither horn nor bell.
Yet they sensed him somehow and made way; in this too he seemed to be served by certitude, the blind and untroubled faith in the rightness and infallibility of his actions.
When he overtook the running deputy he slowed the bicycle.
The deputy turned upon him a face sweating, gaped with shouting and running.
“He turned,” the deputy screamed. “Into that alley by—”
“I know,” Grimm said “Was he handcuffed?”
“Yes!” the deputy said The bicycle leaped on.
‘Then he can’t run very fast,’ Grimm thought. ‘He’ll have to hole up soon.
Get out of the open, anyway.
He turned into the alley, fast.
It ran back between two houses, with a board fence on one side.
At that moment the fire siren sounded for the first time, beginning and mounting to a slow and sustained scream that seemed at last to pass beyond the realm of hearing, into that of sense, like soundless vibration.
Grimm wheeled on, thinking swiftly, logically, with a kind of fierce and constrained joy.
‘The first thing he will want is to get out of sight,’ he thought, looking about.
On one hand the lane was open, on the other stood the board fence six feet high.
At the end it was cut short off by a wooden gate, beyond which was a pasture and then a deep ditch which was a town landmark.
The tops of tall trees which grew in it just showed above the rim; a regiment could hide and deploy in it.
“Ah,” he said, aloud.
Without stopping or slowing he swept the bicycle around and pedalled back down the lane toward the street which he had just quitted.
The wail of the siren was dying now, descending back into hearing again, and as he slowed the bicycle into the street he saw briefly the running people and a car bearing down upon him.
For all his pedalling the car overtook him; its occupants leaned shouting toward his set, forwardlooking face.
“Get in here!” they shouted. “In here!”
He did not answer.