Chapter XLVIII: Flight Into the Desert

A ringing cry went up from the group of men.

“We will make him confess the truth before we hang him!” they exclaimed, and Ferris who had been listening in silent hopefulness to the colloquy, uttered a howl of rage and fear at learning from those words how determined they were to destroy him.

They crowded Strangemore on one side and said to the prisoner:

“Will you give us a written confession of the murder of Mrs. St. Alban before we hoist you up?”

His face grew dark with vindictive defiance.

“I did not kill her and I will not confess to a lie!” he replied, boldly.

They whispered among themselves several minutes and then they came back to him.

“Will you confess to the murder if we spare your life in return for it?” they asked him, and he burst into a fit of hoarse, dreadful laughter.

“Truly you are terrible tempters,” he said. “You offer me death on the one hand, life and perjury on the other. I am reminded of a certain mythical personage with a cloven hoof who tempted a divine One in the centuries gone by the promise of all things if he would fall down and worship him. But let that pass. Listen to me, my recreant comrades! Listen to me, Talbot Strangemore, while I ask you of what avail would be a confession wrested from me under peril of ignominious death? What court and jury in the realms of free America would accept such a confession at any value if you said to them, ‘We told Oswald Ferris that if he would confess that he murdered Sibyl St. Alban we would spare his life, if not we would hang him to the nearest tree!’ Ha, ha, I think I hear them crying down as a falsehood a confession that a frightened man made to save his life from the violence of an infuriate mob!”

They all remained silent through sheer mortification and disappointment. They knew that every word he had spoken was true. No enlightened jury would pay any attention to a confession extorted from a man under peril of death.

“He is right,” said Talbot Strangemore. “If he made a full confession in order to escape punishment it would not avail my little Nina in her terrible strait. Do you not see, comrades, that you must not take his life because it is worth too much to me? Let him live I pray you, until he repents his sin, or until I can bring it home to him!”

So dark and threatening were the frowns the men cast upon Ferris that if looks could have killed, Talbot Strangemore’s prayer would have availed nothing against their deadly wrath. But they drew aside again and consulted together. Presently one who had been chosen as spokesman approached Ferris and Strangemore where they stood side by side beneath the stately palm-tree, selected for so dreadful a purpose.

“We cannot decide in so great haste to release the prisoner,” he said. “But we will reprieve him until noon to-morrow, and in the morning we will give him a fair, impartial trial that shall decide the case. In the mean time we will hold him under arrest.”

“Thanks for even that respite. I am sure you will consider the case with cooler heads to-morrow,” Strangemore answered, and with his own hands he removed the rope from the neck of his foe, and loosened the painful thongs that bound him.

Too sullen and enraged to utter a word of thanks for this signal interposition in his favor, Oswald Ferris retired to his couch, where he threw himself angrily down and was soon seemingly lost to everything mundane in a deep slumber.

The men all weary with the vigils and excitements of the night followed his example after appointing a posse to guard the prisoner. These few unused to keeping vigil and oppressed with the hot, breathless air, soon slumbered at their posts and the dawn already near broke without rousing one of the camp from the lethargy that seemed to have fallen upon them.

But though seemingly wrapped in the embrace of Morpheus there were two whose minds were too terribly active for repose. They were Oswald Ferris and Talbot Strangemore.

Strangemore had thrown himself down like the rest upon his rude camp-bed and closed his eyes, but not in sleep.

His mind momentarily diverted from the contemplation of Nina’s peril by the episode just related, now recurred with agonizing persistency to her, his beautiful, deeply wronged, and too lately loved wife.

He longed for wings that he might fly to her side, and whisper in her ears while he held her close to his throbbing heart, the story of the deep all-absorbing devotion he felt for her.

“I must go home to her at once, and I will move heaven and earth but that I will secure her acquittal,” he vowed to himself.

It lacked scarce an hour to dawn, but in the burning impatience that possessed him it seemed that the night would never pass, but at last the “stars paled their ineffectual fires,” the dark hour before the dawn came and passed, the grey gleam of the new day appeared in the orient east, and he sprang impatiently from his couch.

“I can dally here no longer. Every hour is an eternity of woe, while I linger!” he exclaimed.

He went to rouse Harvey Wilson to ask him if he could have a guide as far as Khartoom.

Wilson sprang to his feet, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

“A guide? Why of course--” he began, and even while he spoke he looked over toward the posse whom he had set to guard Oswald Ferris. Every man was sleeping serenely on his post.

He looked past them at the camp-bed where Ferris usually slept--it was empty!

With a ringing cry he roused the camp from the weary slumber that brooded peacefully over it.

“Wake, every one of you,” he cried, hoarsely. “The guard have slept upon their posts and the prisoner has fled into the desert!”