“You going to teach me how to handle a Jackson fork?” the driver asked sternly.
“Yeah, and I could do it!” cried the derrick man. “Any ten-year-old kid could teach you things about handling a Jackson fork.”
“Aw, shut up, Pete,” called one from a distance.
“I ain’t going to shut up. He’s trying to stick my team here. He’s trying to fetch off this whole load in two bites.”
There was a sudden down-rushing of a force above Jingo. A weight fell on him.
A knife thrust of pain drove into his right leg. He jerked the leg away from the tine that had hooked it. It was hard to move. It was almost hard to breathe, the hay all about him was so wedged and bound together in a mass.
He thrust a hand upward, forcing it slowly through the most compacted part of the hay until his fingers reached the cold of steel. He closed his grip well up on one tine. In that way, he could hope to keep himself from spilling out of the forkful—if only the horses were able to lift him with the rest of the burden.
“All-l-l right!” yelled the wagoner.
The rope drew up its slack with a jerk. Jingo was wrenched up a yard or so. Then he was dropped again.
The dust forced its way through the bandanna and almost choked him. He was half-blinded, too, and barely made out the distant voice of the derrick driver.
“What you got on that fork? You trying to kill my team?”
The wagoner responded with a roar: “Throw the leather into them cayuses! You try to tell me again how to handle a Jackson fork, and I’ll get down and give you a bust on the nose. Go on!”
“I’m going to talk to you later!” shouted the furious derrick man. “Get up, boys!”
The whip cracked. Jingo was jerked upward again. With a great tearing noise in his ears, the fork-load that included him tore loose.
The load swung in and bumped the side of the barn.
Slowly it began to mount, with a great groaning of the ropes and the pulleys.
“What’s in that forkful?” shouted a distant voice.
Up went Jingo, with a dizziness growing in his head, his grip slipping a little on the polished round of the tine he was grasping. With a bump and a click, the fork jumped into the carrier. The load slid forward. A wave of hotter air bathed Jingo. He seemed to be hurling forward at great speed.
“Dump!” yelled a voice from beneath.
The tine wrenched out of his fingers. He dropped, making himself loose and limp from head to foot.
There was a stunning shock. His knees drove up and rapped against his chin.
Out of the dimness of his mind he heard a man exclaiming: “There was a rock or something in that forkful.”
“Naw. The hay gets wadded sometimes,” said another. “You take where there’s some green, and it gets all wadded up hard. That’s all.”
Sounds of angry wrangling came from outside the barn as Jingo, hearing the footfalls come crunching toward him, tried to wriggle away through the loose masses.
He heard the hiss of pitchfork tines thrust in not far from his head. A mass of hay was flopped down on top of him. Someone was trampling him down, with stamping feet, beating his body, choking him.
Then the footfalls withdrew in the noisy brittleness of the hay.
Jingo lay still. He felt he was stifling. But he swore to himself that there must be air enough percolating through the porous mass. He had only to keep himself in hand and prevent hysteria from grasping him by the throat.
The heat baked him. The chaff itched his skin. The wound in his leg ached and burned.
“Hey!” yelled someone. “There’s blood in this here!”
“Yeah. Somebody pitchforked a field mouse, maybe. I seen that happen,” said another.
The field mouse lay very still, finding it easier to breathe because he wanted to laugh.
Another forkful ran along the carrier with a distant rumbling sound, and then dropped, but not near him. As the men in the barn began to mow away the fresh hay, trampling noisily, Jingo started to wriggle up to the surface, only moving when he heard other sounds.
So he came like a swimmer to such a position that his face was above the level of the hay and at last he could breathe. It was sunset time. Through the great open door of the mow to the west the red light poured and filled the dusty air inside with clouds of smoke and of dim fire. The forms of the men in the mow, as they worked, seemed larger than human. The tines of their pitchforks flashed like thin lights. They were cursing the heat, the length of the day. This sort of thing was a dog’s work and a dog’s life, they said.
Meanwhile the Jackson fork was regularly bringing in fresh loads until the voice of the man on the wagon outside called, thin and far away: “Here’s the last bit, boys!”
It came up with a rush, as though the derrick team were trotting. The fork crashed against the carrier above. The load of hay entered like an armful of flame, swept back into dimness, streamed down when the fork was dumped, like water from a height. The great Jackson fork hung gleaming from the iron runway, swaying back and forth like a great four-toothed jaw opening and closing.
And Jingo had been in the grasp of those teeth!
The men from the mow climbed out and down. The loudness of their voices no longer rolled through the barn as through a cavern. The wagon outside went off on rumbling wheels. Two men were disputing savagely not far away. And Jingo was left to the heat of the haymow, where small rustling sounds and crinkling had already commenced in the hay.
Chapter Seventeen
On a joining of the second-story tie beams, which offered a little platform perhaps two feet square, Jingo made his hasty toilet. It took time, and he had little time to spare. But he could not appear for his call covered with dust and his clothes full of wisps of hay. And there was the matter of his wounded leg, for another thing.
He undressed, tore up his undershirt, and made a bandage. The wound had closed its small mouth, and only a trickle of blood was coming from it after the first gush. There was a big, dark, wet spot of it on the inside of his trousers leg. But since he was to make his call just at twilight, he would have to hope that it would not be seen as a discoloration.
He picked the bits of hay out of his clothes and shook the dust from them before he dressed again.
One part of his way was clear before him. High above, there was a trap door in the roof, and to this he mounted, climbing up a ladder. He looked from the door into the smoking red of the dying sunset. He looked down toward the ground and saw men already walking back and forth. A long, loose line of them extended as far as he could see around the barns and the house, which was the building next to him. He saw the glimmer of the barrels of rifles and shotguns. They would be on the alert now, as the right season of the day approached for Jingo’s well-advertised attempt to call on Judge Tyrrel’s daughter.
The distinguishing feature of the roof of the barn that Judge Tyrrel had decided to use for a house was a little roof garden or captain’s walk that had been built out around the trap door such as that through which Jingo was looking. And Tyrrel had set off the high platform with a flagstaff from which a big silk American flag bloomed and faded as the wind extended it or let it shrink from the sunset light.
Jingo saw his chance. There was no way of getting to the house of the judge by walking on the ground—not under the eyes of all the men who were surrounding the place. Already they were bringing out lanterns, encircling the house with a cordon of light.
But there was another possibility of entering the place.
Jingo went back inside the barn and worked his way to the runway of the Jackson fork, and then cut a great length of the derrick rope. This he coiled around his shoulder. With that weight, he returned to his trap door in the roof. He made a running knot, shook out a noose, then pushed the trap door wide open and stepped out on the slant of the roof.
It was not easy. The roof slanted so that it made it hard for him to stand and also constricted the area in which he could swing his noose. Above all, he stood up there on the roof with the dull light of the horizon encircling him—and below, pacing the ground, there were expert marksmen looking for just such a target.
However, he widened his noose, swung it until it was hissing in the air about his head, then threw it with all the strength of his arm.
He threw it with so much strength, in fact, that the impetus jerked him off his feet. He fell flat, skidding down over the shakes that covered the roof. Only at the rain gutter, his fingers got a grip and saved him from diving headlong to the ground.
He looked up and saw that his noose had fallen fair and true over the flagstaff of Judge Tyrrel. It seemed to him that he had put out a long, thin arm on the judge.
Then he heard, from beneath, voices talking.
“What’s that rope doing?” asked one.
“I never seen it before.”
“I’ll go up and take a look.”
“There ain’t any light in the barn to climb by. You’ll break your neck.”
“I’ll get Tom Farrell, then. Farrell will know if that rope had oughta be there.”
“Yeah, you go that way, and I’ll go this, and we’ll get Tom Farrell.”
Jingo was already crawling back up the sharp slope of the roof. He pulled the length of derrick rope taut and fastened it to a beam inside the trap door. After that he walked down the roof and began to swing himself hand over hand along the rope.
It swayed up and down, it vibrated under his hands, as though it were endowed with a snaky life and with an urgent desire to shake him from his grasp. The rope was worn. The frayed strands bristled like a steel cable and cut the palms of his hands. And every moment he waited to hear from beneath the outcry that would announce that he was discovered.
Then his feet no longer dangled over nothingness. They struck the slant of the opposite roof. A moment later, he was on the captain’s walk of Judge Tyrrel’s house. And, right before him, an open door offered a way into the place.
He crouched for a moment, breathing hard. He had come a good distance, to be sure, but he was by no means safe; he was by no means at the end of his journey, and the day was darkening fast. He looked up, and could see a fine golden point of light in the sky. Arcturus was already beginning to shine.
Well, there was still plenty of green light banding the horizon, and it must be called dusk until the full battery of the stars had begun to shine.
Where would the girl be?
Alone in her room perhaps, or else in the midst of many others.
He entered the darkness and the warm air inside the house. There was a long flight of steps that turned into a hall. The hall ended at a door. He opened it and stepped out on a narrow balcony that overlooked the huge central hall of the judge’s house. There were little round circles of lamplight, here and there. A long table was being set. And as the chill of the evening commenced, a great fire had been lit on a hearth of such dimensions as Jingo never had seen before in all his life.
He saw the judge seated beside the fire and was surprised by the shabbiness of his clothes, but he recognized the face that had appeared so often in newspaper photographs. He knew the great spacious brow and the thoughtful inclination of the head.
Then he saw young Wheeler Bent talking with the girl, who sat with her back to the biggest pillar in the room, the huge central support that upheld the middle of the roof and for which a great tree had been felled and squared. It was, in fact, like the mast of a ship.
How could the girl have been placed in a position more difficult for him to reach? Or should he content himself with simply calling to her from the balcony where he then stood?
No, what was in his mind was suddenly to appear before her, while the twilight was still in the sky, and offer his greeting in the most casual manner.
His time was short, not only because the day was dying rapidly, but also because that fellow Tom Farrell might even at this moment be staring up from the ground toward the mysterious rope that extended still from the opposite barn to the house of the judge. Should he have cut that rope away from the flagpole? Well, in that case it would have been found dangling along the side of the barn, to cause even more suspicion than before.
He looked desperately about the hall. He could get out on the big beams. He could descend from one story of them to the other, and if he were sufficiently silent, he might accomplish most of his journey without attracting attention. But how was he to descend the final stage from the lowest beams to the floor?
His wandering eye settled on the only note of color in the entire room—a pair of great, striped curtains that soared upward across the windows that faced the entrance door. It looked like an Indian pattern. It even looked like Indian blanket stuff.
In that case it could be used perhaps.
He was at work in an instant, his boots off and tied about his neck, while he stole like a huge, prowling cat out along the comfortable bulk of the first beam beneath the balcony.
He got out to the center of the room, slid down an upright to the beams beneath, and crossed the next huge beam until he found himself right at the head of the big curtains.
By the wavering firelight, he could see the strength of the big iron rings that fastened the curtains to their pole. He gripped the cloth and found the fabric of heavy wool.
Well, perhaps he had found the ladder that would take him almost the rest of the way.
The judge was saying: “Cheer up, Eugenia. It’s drafty over there. Come here by the fire or you’ll be catching cold.”
“I’ll stay where I am,” she answered. “I can look out through the doors, from here, and see the end of the day.”
“It’s ended now,” said the judge, “and your friend Jingo is not going to appear. Eh, Wheeler?”
Wheeler Bent laughed.
“He’s a wild rascal, but of course he’s not an absolute fool,” said Wheeler Bent. “The night has started now.”
“Look again, Wheeler,” said the girl. “You can still see green in the sky. That isn’t in the color of the night sky, is it?”
“Well, grant him five minutes more,” Wheeler Bent said.
“I’m glad he hasn’t come,” said the girl. “If he had come ... if one of those men had dared to shoot at him ... Father, will you answer me one thing?”
“Perhaps,” said Tyrrel.
“You’ve put those men on guard only as bluff, of course. They wouldn’t dare to shoot, would they?”
“I won’t answer that,” Tyrrel said. “I want no trespassers on this place and no young ruffians walking into it.”
The girl had started up from her chair. Jingo, letting himself down from the beam, got inside one half of the curtain and, gripping the big, stiff folds of it, began to lower himself. It was hard work. The cloth, coarse as canvas, was plenty strong enough to support him, but his weight kept pulling the stuff away from the strongest grip he could fasten on the folds.
He heard the girl crying out: “Father, I’m going out there now and tell them not to shoot. Great heavens, don’t you see what that wild man will do? He’ll wait till the last minute of the twilight, and then he’ll make a dash for the house.”
“In that case,” the grim voice of Tyrrel said, “it will be about the last dash that he makes at anything. Those men out there will blow him to bits.”
“Nonsense, Gene,” Wheeler Bent said. “Are you trying to make a hero out of your cowboy tramp? He has too much sense. He won’t try to run such a gantlet even to get a smile from you, my dear.”
She cried to them again: “None of you understands! He said he would be here, and he’ll come. If you had the whole army waiting for him with guns, he would come, nevertheless. Father, you’ve got to go out now ... now ... and tell your men to drop their g
uns, if he comes ... because he must be on the way this instant.”
The judge was sufficiently moved to stand up by the hearth. And Jingo now stood on the floor inside the curtains. The red firelight shook in great tangible waves through the room and set it wavering like images in deep water. Over the dishes and the glasses that had been set out on the long table the light ran like gilding. The glass seemed to burn.
Jingo pulled on his boots and stepped quietly out from his hiding place, walking toward the central pillar so that the light from the hearth would still be divided to either side away from him. In a shuddering, narrow ravine of darkness he stealthily stepped toward the pillar.
The judge answered his daughter: “When a man puts his will against my will, Eugenia, he has to take the chances that luck give him ... and the troubles that I can put in his way. If your friend Jingo, or Jingle, or whatever his name may be, manages to get to this house, I’ll welcome him with an open hand ... for this evening at least. But if my men can stop him on the way, they’re going to blow him to bits as a trespasser. The law supports them. A man’s house can be kept sacred from intrusion.”
A big fellow, with bells chiming on his spurs, came striding suddenly through the open doorway.
“Judge Tyrrel,” he said, “we gotta go up and have a look at the roof. There’s a rope running from the next barn over to your house.”
“The devil there is!” the judge cried. “Who put it there?”
“I did,” Jingo said, stepping out from the pillar at the side of the girl. “Good evening, Gene. I think I’m just on time?”
Chapter Eighteen
It was like the sudden striking of a blow after the sparring has continued a long time. A quick tension jerked every head. And Jingo watched all of these results from the corner of his eye while he considered the girl, first of all. The shock of his appearance made her rigid for an instant. Then her head tilted back a little, and she began to laugh. She held out her hand, and he took it gravely.
Wheeler Bent got hold of the back of a chair and supported himself. The big fellow by the door was gibbering something.
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