Tubal Cain Sims’s mind, unaccustomed to morbid influences, could not detach itself from the idea. Despite his absorptions on his own account, he followed as an independent train of thought futile speculations as to where in the building this man might be,--close at hand, and he felt a nervous thrill at the possible propinquity, or in some remote cell and out of hearing; what had he guiltily done, or was he falsely accused; had he been really resuscitated, or had the potentialities of life merely flickered up like the spurious quickening of a failing candle before the moment of extinction, and was he even now, while the officers lingered here, dead again, and this time beyond recall; or would he not, left to his own devices, once more attempt his life? The old mountaineer could not forbear. He turned to the sheriff with an excited eye. “Ain’t ye ’feard he’ll hang hisself again?” he said huskily. The officer stared. “Who?” he inquired, with knitted brow, as if he had forgotten the occurrence absolutely; then with renewing recollection, “You can bet your life he won’t.” “Why not?” asked Sims, the clatter of his boots on the bare floor silent as he stopped short. The deputy gave a fleering laugh, ending in a “ki-yi” of the extremity of derision. He had flung himself into a chair, and, with his elbows on the table, looked up with a scornful grin at Tubal Cain Sims, who seemed to entertain solicitude as to the capacities for management and discipline of Enott Blake, famous as the veriest martinet of a drill-sergeant years before he ever saw the inside of Kildeer County jail. This absurd officiousness, however, met with more leniency from the sheriff. Whether it was that, from his steady diet of commendation, his vanity could afford to dispense with such poor crumbs as Tubal Cain Sims might have it in his power to offer, or whether he was desirous of the emollient effects of indulgence to loosen his visitor’s tongue, he apparently took no heed of this breach of the proprieties. “He’s all right now. You needn’t have no anxiety ’bout him,” he said, as if it were a matter of course to be brought to book in this way. “He can’t hurt himself nor any one else now,” echoed the deputy, taking his cue. Sims turned from one to the other inquiringly. “Got him in a cage,” said the sheriff grimly. For one moment Tubal Cain Sims silently cursed his curiosity that had elicited this fact for his knowledge and provision for future nightmares. It was of the order of things that sets the natural impulses of humanity and sympathy adverse to all the necessities of law and justice. He stared at the two officers, as if they were monsters. Perhaps only his weapon, empty in the deputy’s pistol-pocket, persuaded his apparent acquiescence. “Good Lord!” he gasped, “that’s powerful tur’ble,--powerful tur’ble!” The sheriff was no mind-reader. He deemed that the allusion applied to the unjudicial hanging.