At Pinneys Ranch | Page 2

you. Oh, John, what does
it mean? Why don't you speak? I shall go mad, if you do not speak.
You were not there! Tell me that you were not there!" The ghastly face
he raised to hers might well have seemed to confess everything.
At least she seemed to take it so, and in a fit of hysterical weeping sank
to the floor, and buried her face in her hands upon a chair. The children,
alarmed at the scene, began to cry. It was growing dark, and as he
looked out of the window, Lansing saw an officer and a number of
other persons approaching the house. They were coming to arrest him.
Animal terror, the instinct of self-preservation, seized upon his faculties,
stunned and demoralized as he was by the suddenness with which this
calamity had come upon him. He opened the door and fled, with a score
of men and boys yelling in pursuit. He ran wildly, blindly, making
incredible leaps and bounds over obstacles. As men sometimes do in
nightmares, he argued with himself, as he ran, whether this could
possibly be a waking experience, and inclined to think that it could not.

It must be a dream. It was too fantastically horrible to be anything else.
Presently he saw just before him the eddying, swirling current of the
river, swollen by a freshet. Still half convinced that he was in a
nightmare, and, if he could but shake it off, should awake in his warm
bed, he plunged headlong in, and was at once swirled out of sight of his
pursuers beneath the darkening sky. A blow from a floating object
caused him to throw up his arms, and, clutching something solid, he
clambered upon a shed carried away by the freshet from an up-river
farm. All night he drifted with the swift current, and in the morning
landed in safety thirty miles below the village from which he had fled
for life.
So John Lansing, for no fault whatever except an error of judgment, if
even it was that, was banished from home, and separated from his
family almost as hopelessly as if he were dead. To return would be to
meet an accusation of murder to which his flight had added
overwhelming weight. To write to his wife might be to put the officers
of the law, who doubtless watched her closely, upon his scent.
Under an assumed name he made his way to the far West, and, joining
the rush to the silver mines of Colorado, was among the lucky ones. At
the end of three years he was a rich man. What he had made the money
for, he could not tell, except that the engrossment of the struggle had
helped him to forget his wretchedness. Not that he ever did forget it.
His wife and babies, from whose embraces he had been so suddenly
torn, were always in his thoughts. Above all, he could not forget the
look of horror in his wife's eyes in that last terrible scene. To see her
again, and convince her, if not others, that he was innocent, was a need
which so grew upon him that, at the end of three years, he determined
to take his life in his hand and return home openly. This life of exile
was not worth living.
One day, in the course of setting his affairs in order for his return, he
was visiting a mining camp remote from the settlements, when a voice
addressed him by his old name, and looking around he saw Pinney. The
latter's first words, as soon as his astonishment and delight had found
some expression, assured Lansing that he was no longer in danger. The

murderer of Austin' Flint had been discovered, convicted, and hanged
two years previous. As for Lansing, it had been taken for granted that
he was drowned when he leaped into the river, and there had been no
further search for him. His wife had been broken-hearted ever since,
but she and the children were otherwise well, according to the last
letters received by Pinney, who, with his wife, had moved out to
Colorado a year previous.
Of course Lansing's only idea now was to get home as fast as steam
could carry him; but they were one hundred miles from the railroad,
and the only communication was by stage. It would get up from the
railroad the next day, and go back the following morning. Pinney took
Lansing out to his ranch, some miles from the mining camp, to pass the
interval. The first thing he asked Mrs. Pinney was if she had a
photograph of his wife. When she brought him one, he durst not look at
it before his hosts. Not till he had gone to his