The first thing Linnet felt, as she sprang forward to her husband, who lay dying or dead on the floor in front of her, was a pervading sense, not of sorrow or of affection, but of horror at a great crime successfully accomplished. “You’ve killed him, you’ve killed him!” she cried aloud to Franz. “O Fridolin, quick, quick, run and fetch the Herr Vicar! He’s breathing still; I can hear him ever breathing! Perhaps there’s time yet for him to receive extreme unction.”
To all of them, the sacraments were the chief things to be thought of. Fridolin hurried off as he was bid, rousing the house as he went with a loud cry of alarm to come and look after Linnet. But Linnet herself sat on the ground all aghast, with her husband’s head laid heavy in her lap, trying to staunch his wound helplessly, and wringing her hands now and again in a blind agony of terror. Meanwhile, Franz stood by as if wholly unmoved, regarding the entire scene with a certain sardonic and triumphant self-satisfaction. He wouldn’t die for nothing, as things had turned out now; he had avenged himself at least on his lifelong enemy!
He stood there many minutes, with his hands in his pockets, growing cooler and cooler as he reflected on his deed, and more and more glad in his heart to think he had done it. So Linnet at least would be free! it was ever something to have rid her of Andreas Hausberger! Men and women came in, and lifted Andreas where he lay, and stretched him on the bed in the adjoining room, and stripped off part of his clothes, and washed the wound, and examined it. But nobody as yet thought of arresting Franz or molesting him in any way. He stood there still, the one wholly unconcerned and careless person in that excited assembly. His rage had cooled down by this time, and he was perfectly collected. He was waiting for the village authorities to come and take him into custody.
The priest arrived in due time, with the holy oil and the viaticum; but, pronouncing Andreas dead, refused to administer the sacraments. The doctor came, too, a little later than the priest, and confirmed the Herr Vicar’s unfavourable verdict. Linnet sat and wrung her hands by the bedside where he lay, more at the suddenness of the event, and the unexpected horror of it, than from any real sense of affection or bereavement. The little crowd in the room gathered in small knots and whispered low around Franz. But Franz stood coolly looking on, without making an attempt to escape, less interested in what had occurred than anyone else in the village. What was one murder more to the man who was wanted from Monte Carlo to St Valentin?
By-and-by, a fresh commotion arose outside the inn. The crowd in the room divided, and buzzed eagerly. The Herr Landrath, they said, had come to arrest the murderer. Franz looked around him defiantly, as they whispered and stared at him. But no man laid a hand on him. No man dared to touch him. The Landrath himself hesitated to enter the place where the dead man lay, and arrest the murderer, red-handed, in presence of the priest, the corpse, the widow. “Is Franz Lindner in there?” he asked solemnly from the doorway.
And Franz answered in a firm and unshaken voice, “He is so, Herr Kaiserlich-Königlich Commissary.”
“Come out,” the official said. And with a bold and haughty tread Franz Lindner came out to him.
“In the name of the Emperor-King, I arrest you, Franz Lindner, for the wilful murder of Andreas Hausberger in this village,” the Commissary said sternly, laying his hand on his prisoner’s shoulder.
Franz laughed a discordant laugh. “And, in the name of the Emperor-King, you shall run for it, by Our Blessed Frau,” he answered, contemptuously. He shook the hand from his shoulder with an easy jerk, and pushed back the Landrath, who was a heavy man of more than middle-age, with those two stout arms of his. “Follow and catch me, who can,” he cried, laughing loud once more, “Kaiserlich-Königlich Commissary!” And before they all knew what was happening under their eyes, with a bound like a wild beast Franz had darted to the door, pushed his way through the little group that obstructed the threshold, hit out right and left with elbows and fists against all who strove to stop him, tripped up the first man who tried to seize him by the coat, and sprung by the well-known path up the free mountains behind them.
“Follow him!” the Commissary gasped out, collecting his breath, and pulling himself together again after the unexpected shaking. “In the law’s name and the Emperor-King’s, all good subjects, follow him!”
Three or four of the younger men, thus adjured and called on personally to arrest the criminal, darted after him at full speed up the slope of the mountain. But they followed just at first with somewhat half-hearted zeal; for why should they wish thus to seal the fate of an old friend and comrade? As they advanced, Franz waved his hat derisively a hundred yards in front of them. In his old jäger days, not Fridolin Telser himself was so swift to follow the clambering chamois among the peaks and pinnacles above the pine-clad forest. All those years of indulgence in crowded cities had weakened his bodily vigour and relaxed his muscles; but in soul he felt himself still once more as of old the free mountain hunter. “Come on!” he shouted aloud, with a wild jodel of challenge. “Come, and catch me if you can. Who comes first, gets my fist in his face and knife in his heart. Arrest me if you dare. If you try it, you may sup to-night in purgatory, at a table side by side with Andreas Hausberger!”
He fled up the mountain with incredible speed for a person so out of training; but his native air braced him, and the double excitement of the last few days seemed to stimulate his nerves and limbs to extraordinary energy. A man runs his best when he runs for his life. On and on Franz mounted, past the pinewood and the boulder where Linnet sat long ago with Will Deverill, and up to the crags beyond, where blank patches of snow still lurked here and there in the sunless crevices. Every now and again he looked back to see how far he had distanced his pursuers. He gained at each step. He had one great advantage. He was flying for dear life, whither or why he knew not; they were following unwillingly, in the name of the law, the footsteps of an old friend and boon companion.
Above, all was snow. In those northward valleys winter loiters late, and spring comes but tardily. Once among the firn, Franz could give them the slip, he felt sure; he could lurk behind rocks, or hide among the klamms, and let the baffled pursuers pass by unnoticing. But no—but no—ach, Gott! the footprints! With a sudden revulsion he realised his error. Those years in milder climates had made him forget for a moment the hopelessness of escaping if once he reached the snow-line. Appalled and dismayed, he turned and hesitated. Then he dashed off at an angle, horizontally along the hill, at the same general level, so as to avoid the snow-covered glaciers. That one false move lost him. His pursuers, seeing him double, headed forward diagonally across the third side of the triangle, and gained on him visibly. Franz was blown and panting. His heart throbbed hard; he had overtaxed it sadly in that first wild burst up the ramping hillside. Again he paused, and looked back. The hopelessness and futility of the whole thing broke in upon him. If he ran all day and all night as well—if he distanced that little body of amateur pursuers for the moment—what would it profit him in the end? Could he evade arrest at last? could he escape the clutches of the Austrian law, shake off the strong hand of the Kaiserlich-Königlich government?
All at once, seized with a sudden little access of despair, he sat down on the hillside, and laughed aloud audibly. “Ha, ha, ha,” he cried, hoarsely, at the very top of his voice, as his antagonists drew nearer, “So you think you’ll catch me! You think you’ll get well paid! You want to earn a reward on me! Well, look here, Ludwig Dangl,” and he shouted through his bent hand to the foremost of his pursuers, “there’s ten thousand florins set on my head already for stabbing a man dead in an hotel at Monte Carlo—and it’s yours . . . if you catch me! Come on, friend, and earn it!”
He had grown reckless now. The dare-devil spirit of the man who knows well he has forfeited his life and has no chance of escape left, had wholly taken hold of him. He sat there, by the Kamin, waiting till the pursuers were almost upon him. “Ten thousand florins!” he shouted aloud once more, waving his hat above his head, as he jumped up when they neared him. “Ten thousand florins is a nice round sum! Will you have it, Ludwig Dangl? will you have it, Karl Furst? will you have it, Fritz Mairhofer?”
His very recklessness appalled them. The men thought he must be mad. They paused, and stared hard at him. There were only three now. Neither liked to advance first. Franz waved his hat frantically, and beckoned them on towards the weathered crags that overlook St Valentin. Great rocks there rose sheer over fissured gullies. The men hardly ventured to follow him up to those frowning heights. Heaven knows what a madman, in such a mood as that, may do or dare among the cleft troughs and gorges! They halted,—debated,—then came on towards him, abreast, more slowly, step by step, in a little formed body. But Franz, now restored by a momentary pause, leaped upward like a chamois over the steep path in front of him. The fresh mountain air seemed to nerve and invigorate him. On, on, he bounded swift over the jagged steps in the rock, till he poised himself at last like a mountain goat on the very edge of the precipice. It was a sheer cliff that looked down on a great snowdrift in a ravine two hundred feet beneath him. The Robbler instinct in Franz’s blood had now gained complete mastery. He waved his hat again, with its feather turned insultingly. “Ten thousand florins!” he cried once more, in his loudest voice. “Ten thousand florins! Who wants them? Who’ll earn them?”
He laughed aloud in their faces. The three men drew on cautiously. Franz waited till they came up. Then Ludwig Dangl, mustering up courage to take the first step, stood forward and laid hands on him. Straightway Franz seized his assailant round the body with a wrestler’s grip. Ludwig tried to disengage himself; but ’twas a narrow and dangerous spot for wrestling. With a sudden wrench, Franz lifted him from the ground. Holding him grasped in his arms, he looked over the edge of the precipice. Next instant, he had leaped, with Ludwig Dangl in his embrace. One loud cry burst at once from both their straining throats. A cry of wild triumph; a cry of fierce despair. Then all was silence.
The other two men, looking awestruck and horrified over the edge of the crag, saw them fall two hundred feet sheer into the soft snow beneath. It received them gently. Not a sign marked the spot where the two bodies sank in. The soft snow closed over them. But they must have been dead many seconds before they reached the bottom.
