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-K?niglich 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-K?niglich 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 j?ger 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 ............