Moreover, she would have his body kept unburied for three
days, because the Red Fox said that on the third day he would
arise and go about preaching. So that even in death the Red Fox
was consistently inconsistent, and how he reconciled such a dual
life at one and the same time over and under the stars was, except
to his twisted brain, never known. He walked firmly up the
scaffold steps and stood there blinking in the sunlight. With one
hand he tested the rope. For a moment he looked at the sky and the
trees with a face that was white and absolutely expressionless.
Then he sang one hymn of two verses and quietly dropped into that
world in which he believed so firmly and toward which he had trod
so strange a way on earth. As he wished, the little old woman in
black had the body kept unburied for the three days--but the Red
Fox never rose. With his passing, law and order had become
supreme. Neither Tolliver nor Falin came on the Virginia side for
mischief, and the desperadoes of two sister States, whose skirts
are stitched together with pine and pin-oak along the crest of the
Cumberland, confined their deviltries with great care to places
long distant from the Gap.
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