Shefford experienced a horrible curiosity.

“Say, Beal, I’ve fetched Shefford over,” said Lake.  “He’s pretty much cut up.”

Beal wagged a solemn head, but said nothing.  His mind seemed absent or steeped in gloom, and he looked up as one silently praying.

Joe Lake strode upon the little porch and, reaching down, he stripped the blanket from the shrouded form.

Shefford saw a sharp, cold, ghastly face.  “Waggoner!” he whispered.

“Yes,” replied Lake.

Waggoner!  Shefford remembered the strange power in his face, and, now that life had gone, that power was stripped of all disguise.  Death, in Shefford’s years of ministry, had lain under his gaze many times and in a multiplicity of aspects, but never before had he seen it stamped so strangely.  Shefford did not need to be told that here was a man who believed he had conversed with God on earth, who believed he had a divine right to rule women, who had a will that would not yield itself to death utterly.  Waggoner, then, was the devil who had come masked to Surprise Valley, had forced a martyrdom upon Fay Larkin.  And this was the Mormon who had made Fay Larkin a murderess.  Shefford had hated him living, and now he hated him dead.  Death here was robbed of all nobility, of pathos, of majesty.  It was only retribution.  Wild justice!  But alas! that it had to be meted out by a white-soled girl whose innocence was as great as the unconscious savagery which she had assimilated from her lonely and wild environment.  Shefford laid a despairing curse upon his own head, and a terrible remorse knocked at his heart.  He had left her alone, this girl in whom love had made the great change—­like a coward he had left her alone.  That curse he visited upon himself because he had been the spirit and the motive of this wild justice, and his should have been the deed.

Joe Lake touched Shefford’s arm and pointed at the haft of a knife protruding from Waggoner’s breast.  It was a wooden haft.  Shefford had seen it before somewhere.

Then he was struck with what perhaps Joe meant him to see—­the singular impression the haft gave of one sweeping, accurate, powerful stroke.  A strong arm had driven that blade home.  The haft was sunk deep; there was a little depression in the cloth; no blood showed; and the weapon looked as if it could not be pulled out.  Shefford’s thought went fatally and irresistibly to Fay Larkin’s strong arm.  He saw her flash that white arm and lift the heavy bucket from the spring with an ease he wondered at.  He felt the strong clasp of her hand as she had given it to him in a flying leap across a crevice upon the walls.  Yes, her fine hand and the round, strong arm possessed the strength to have given that blade its singular directness and force.  The marvel was not in the physical action.  It hid inscrutably in the mystery of deadly passion rising out of a gentle and sad heart.