The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions by William Hope Hodgson

was seeing sanely at last), standing noosed within a few yards of her, and already, as it were, looking at his mother from the other side of the Eternity of Death…. And the sheriffs men (the Men of Death they seemed now to her) all around, so dreadly purposeful and obdurate to the Voice of Natural Pity that wailed at them out of the lips of the crazed mother…. This was what she—she, Anna Barclay, had urged her husband towards many and many a time; she had never known; never! Never—NEVER! … She could almost have screamed her denial….
    No wonder John (her husband) had been always so inclined towards mercy…. My God, were there often such scenes as these going on in the same world…. Was there often this weight of terror and complete HORROR bred into being by the deliberate doings of Man, for any purpose whatever— call it Justice or by any other name?… This dreadfulness. This dreadfulness that choked her. This … and suddenly she found her voice:
    “STOP!” she cried, with a voice as deep and hoarse as a man’s. “STOP!” … She waved her hands a moment incoherently, fighting to take control of the fierce passion of horror and agony of pity that beat through every fibre of her, possessing her. “Stop!” she cried again; and then:
    “How dare you! … Oh, how dare all you men be met together here to do this—to do such a thing! To do such a thing … ” She stopped abruptly, and stared at the men, as if they were things incredibly monstrous, and they, on their part, looked round at her and the Judge, only then aware of their advent.
    “Let him go at once!” said old Mrs Judge Barclay, speaking again, as her voice became once more a controllable possession…. “Let him go to his mother…. Let them both go.”
    Across the ring of men the mother had fallen suddenly to her knees; her mouth was gabbering breathless words of prayer, her hands outstretched at arms’ length, her fingers twining and intertwining madly.
    “Save … him,” came her voice at last, no louder than a hoarse whisper, yet having a strange quality that seemed to make the very leaves above them stir and rustle. And, with the two completed words, she pitched forward, out of the relaxed hands of the two men who held her, on to her face, with a little thump, her forehead and nose ploughing into the trampled mud beneath the tree.
    There came a queer, little inarticulate cry from Jem, and he began to fight desperately, bound hands and feet as he was, towards where his mother lay on her knees and face; but the sheriff and one of the men caught him and dragged him back beneath the over-reaching bough. The sheriff signed hastily to old Judge Barclay, and the Judge put his arm about his wife to lead her away. But she tore from him, and faced the sheriff.
    “It’ll be all right, mum,” said that man. “You go along quiet now with the Jedge. We ain’t goin’ to hurt Jem more’n the flap of a fly’s tail. Don’t ye worrit…”
    “You’re going to hang that young man as soon as I’ve gone!” burst in Mrs Barclay, very white-faced, but with now a strange shining in her eyes. “That’s what you mean to do!”
    “Yep,” said the sheriff, scratching his head, and trying to catch Judge Barclay’s eye. But Judge Barclay was looking only at his wife, with something that was new in the way of his look.
    “Yep,” said the sheriff again. “Jem’s boun’ to hang, sure, mum, but we ain’t goin’ to hurt him worth a mench. We’ll turn ‘m off nice an’ easy. You go along of the Jedge now …”
    But he never finished his piece of excellent and practical advice; for, with a bound astonishing in so elderly a woman, she came at him, and he gave back helplessly, not knowing how to cope with such an attack. Yet she had no meaning to strike him. Instead, before he knew anything beyond his bewilderment, she had opened his holster and twitched out the heavy Smith and Wesson; then, with a leap, she was back from him, facing the