THE TRAIL’S END

This trampled channel petered out in a comparatively bare area across which was more brush. Almost hidden in this was a tumbled-down shack, hardly bigger than a closet, in which boys who had been wont to dive from the old bridge had donned their bathing suits. It had been thrown together as a storage place for fishing tackle and crab nets and these latter, rotten and gray with age, still hung in the dank, musty place.

Pee-wee paused a moment, irresolute, nervous. He had a strange feeling, a feeling of apprehension which amounted to a certainty. And as he paused two charred bits of timber from the old bridge, still held together by a rusty brace, creaked, and the creaking seemed loud in the stillness of desolation.

A rusty can, the discarded receptacle of bait, lay at his feet, and in his hesitation and transient fear, he kicked it, and followed it, kicking it again.

Then, banishing such cracked-up excuses for delay he put aside his fears and went around the tiny shelter to where the rotted door hung loose upon one broken hinge.

Within lay a human figure. The hair was wet and matted and prickly leaves were stuck in it. The face was streaked with blood, the clothes were torn. One of the legs lay in a very unnatural attitude. The eyes were wide open and staring with a glassy look at some rough fishing rods which lay across the rafters above. One of the arms was outstretched and the hand lay open as if its owner were saying, “Here I am, you see.” There was something very appalling about that dumb attitude of speech and welcome when the voice and the eyes could not speak. For he had “got dead,” this poor troubled creature; “got dead” after committing one hideous crime to hide another.

The people in the nearest house along the now deserted highway came at Pee-wee’s breathless summons and gazed down silently but would not touch the figure with outstretched arm and opened hand that seemed to say, “Step in, you’re welcome, here I am.”

So they called the coroner and the body of Deadwood Gamely was borne away and it was soon known that he had died from injuries received in falling down the embankment which he was scrambling up after setting fire to one of the supports of the old bridge.

He had not done this horrible thing willfully, at least not for money to spend. That very day a warrant was issued for his arrest in Baxter City for embezzlement of funds which he had stolen from the bank in which he had been employed. But the angel of death had traveled faster than the law.

That the contractors, or one of them, who wished to benefit the county with a modern bridge had offered Gamely pay to do this dreadful deed of arson seemed certain. But it seemed equally certain that the wretched boy had balked at this frightful enterprise, putting it off from day to day, until discovery and arrest for his other crime stared him in the face. He had waited till the very night before the day on which his petty thefts would be revealed. Then in frantic desperation he had taken this only means of acquiring a sum of money quickly. No one could say this for a certainty.

But in a story where we have witnessed so many good turns may we not dismiss poor Deadwood Gamely and his tragic end from our thoughts with the hope, nay, even the confidence, that his second crime was not a deed of willing choice? There was more money misappropriated by Tom, Dick and Harry, before the new steel bridge was up than ever poor Deadwood Gamely, with his silly clothes and hat, would have dared to steal. And so the tax rate went up and Commissioner Somebody-or-other got a new automobile and County Engineer Grabson built a big house and so on, and so on, and so on.

But before the new million-dollar bridge was finished the Pepsy Roadside Rest was flourishing as the only real “monolopy” in Everdoze.