He proceeded to affix his signature, continuing with a sort of deadly composure:  “I have endorsed and executed many death-warrants in my time—­in my capacity of Deputy-Sheriff—­I little thought that some day I might be called upon to sign my own . . . which this document virtually is. . . .”

He reared himself up to his huge, gaunt height, and with a sweeping glance at his captors added:  “Nothing remains for me now I imagine, but to shake hands with—­Radcliffe.[1] . . .”

And his dreadful voice died away like a single grim note of a great, deep-toned bell, tolled perchance in some prison-yard.

“Eshcorrt!  Get ready!” boomed out Sergeant Slavin’s harsh command.  The party was on the station platform.  Yorke and McSporran fell in briskly on either side of their heavily-manacled prisoner, and stood watching the distant lights of the oncoming east-bound train as it rounded the Davidsburg bend.

One last despairing glance Gully cast about him at the all familiar surroundings, then he raised his fettered hands on high and lifted up his great voice: 

“I have striven!  I have striven!—­and now!—­Oh! there is no God!  Bear witness there is no God!  No God! . . .” he cried to the heavens.

The wild, harsh, dreadful blasphemy rang far and wide out into the night, floating over the nearby river and finally dying away a ghastly murmur up among the timber-lined spurs of Crag Canon.

And a huge, gaunt lobo wolf, lying at the crest of the draw, flung up his gray head and howled back his awful note—­seemingly in echo:  “There is no God! no God!”

[1] Note by Author—­Canada’s official executioner at this period.

CHAPTER XVI

  “Feel my pulse, sir, if you want to,
          but it ain’t much use to try—­”
  “Never say that,” said the Surgeon,
          as he smothered down a sigh: 
  “Chuck a brace, for it won’t do, man,
          for a soldier to say die!”
  “What you say don’t make no diffrunce, Doctor,
          an’—­you wouldn’t lie. . . .” 
                                        “THE OLD SERGEANT”

“Git there!  Come a-Haw-r-r, then!  Whoa!” With a flourish, Constable Miles Sloan, the Regimental Teamster, swung the leaders of his splendid four-in-hand and pulled up at the front entrance of the Holy Cross Hospital.  Slewing around on his high box-seat he addressed himself to the drag’s occupants, Slavin and Yorke.

“I don’t know whether they will let you see him, or not,” he remarked doubtfully, “he’s a pretty sick man.”

“We will chance ut, anyway,” mumbled Slavin, as he and Yorke climbed out of the rig.  “Ye’d best wait awhile, Miles!  We shan’t be long.”

Quietly—­very quietly, Sister Marthe opened the door of room Number Fifty-six, and with list-slippered noiselessness stepped out into the corridor.