Insensibly this consideration had the greatest possible effect on his conduct.  Without advancing step by step in a reasoned progress, he understood that any one holding his views on human life generally should not attach an excessive value to his own individual life.  He must carry his life lightly, and be ready to lay it down without a lot of fuss.  Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  He acted on the maxim, risking his life freely, courting dangers that he would have avoided in the days before the day on which he executed Mr. Barradine.

Executed—­yes.  But God would not have authorized him, although Judge Lynch would.  God would say:  “It must be left to Me.  I will attend to it in My own good time.  From My point of view perhaps, keeping the man alive is in truth his punishment, and to kill him is to let him off.  You have come blundering with your finite intelligence into the department of omniscient wisdom.  Instead of interpreting My laws, you have set up a law of your own invention.”

And Dale sometimes thought:  “But there isn’t any God.  All that is my eye and my elbow.  I believed it once, but I shall never believe it again.”

His thoughts about God’s laws were curious, and baffling to himself.  They had been always there, always active, but in a manner secondary and faint when compared with his thoughts about his infringement of men’s laws.  Faith in God had seemed to be quite gone.  It used to permeate his entire mind; and yet it dropped out as though it had been only in one corner of his mind, and a hole had been made under that corner for it to fall through.  Now he sometimes had the notion that it went out through many holes, as if it had been forcibly ejected, and that his whole mind was left in a shattered and unstable condition.

Then it began to seem that the faith had not truly been altogether got rid of.  Fragments of it remained.

Rapidly then he reached the certainty that he wished to have the faith back again.  His was an orderly solid mind that could not do with cracks and holes in it, trimness, neatness, and firmness of outer wall were necessary to its well-being; openness to windy doubts ruined it.  He felt that an accidental universe was the wrong box for it.  He wanted to believe in the God who created order out of chaos, the God who settled cut-and-dried plans for the whole of creation—­yes, the God made in man’s image, and yet the Maker and Ruler of man.

And some days he did believe, and some days he couldn’t.  But all at once an idea came, first soothing then cheering him.  He thought:  “Whether I believe or not, I’ll take it for granted.  I’ll act as if God is real.”

He did so, acting as if God were believed in as truly by him as by the most stanch believers.  He clung to the idea.  It seemed to be the way out of all his troubles.  He would make peace with God—­then there would be no need to bother about men, or offer any confession of his guilt to them.