He felt calm now. The first nervous shock had passed. A great coolness was possessing him. What danger could there possibly be? No one had seen, no one knew. And already the body would be hidden. Even without packing down, the avalanche of corn would bury it. Was there ever such wondrous fortune?
He remained there at the foot of the ladder, thinking. There was no hurry. Let the corn pile in, more and more! The hobo’s threats of a year’s standing pictured themselves with what vivid detail! How distinctly Pownall remembered that July night on the other farm, the old Marshfield farm! A year ago? More. Fifteen months!
“That place was no good anyhow,” said Pownall, and bit tobacco from his plug. Yes, a chew would do him good. He never remembered tobacco tasting so fine.
The old farm had been isolated, played out, unproductive. A losing proposition. Even his housekeeper — old, crabbed Mrs. Green — had not wanted to stay there. He had so longed for a fire, for his insurance money, so that he could get away and buy a place elsewhere! And then that night when Mrs. Green had been gone — that high wind, and the crashing thunderstorm at eleven o’clock. The lightning had struck an elm, close to the barn. Half stunned, Pownall had blinked from the house, out into the deluged dark, the flashing dazzle.
God! Why hadn’t that lightning struck the barn?
The thought had flamed into inspiration, whiter than the lightning. A match had done the rest. But the tramp in the haymow had seen. Had understood. Only fifty dollars had shut the tramp’s mouth and had got him away into the night before the old hand-tub had come pelting up from the village, dragged by long lines of drenched, panting men in disarray. Strange sights in the blinding glare of the flame-sheets from the barn. Pownall could still hear the lowing of the terrified cattle he had released. Gould still hear the thud-thud-thud of the pump-bars.
Nothing had availed. The house connected with the barn by a low shed had gone, too. Pownall had toiled, sweating and rain-soaked, with the others. He had labored to exhaustion at the pump-bars. No use! The well, sucked dry by the old leathern hose, had made no impression on the howling flames, storm-driven, that had reddened the whole countryside. The house and barn had gone flat in an hour. No one had suspected anything.
Everybody had been kind. Had commiserated him. Later the insurance company had paid to the last penny, without question. For the policy had covered lightning.
Three thousand dollars. Cash. In place of that useless old set of buildings. Then he had sold the land for eight hundred. He had bought this newer, better farm. He had prospered there.
At first he had been afraid. But in a year, in fifteen months, fear had died. Nothing had remained of it but a few words. The words spoken by the hobo as he had slouched away with the fifty dollars toward the blackness of the wood lot:
“Mum’s the word fer now! But if I need kale, I’ll write. My name’s Ruggles. Lucky Ruggles. You’ll mebbe hear from me ag’in. An’ if you do, you’ll be nice to me, won’t you? An’ shoot me a few bucks? I’ll say you will! S’-long!”
For a whole year, no word of the hobo. Maybe, Pownall had hoped, he had got into jail somewhere, or been killed by a freight. So Pownall had ceased to be afraid. Then the scrawled letter had come, demanding a thousand. Pownall had not answered, but his soul had wilted with the blight of a very great fear. And the hobo had come back, just a few minutes ago. And now —
Now the man he had so cringed from, in terror, was lying dead in the silo. And no one know.
“God!” exclaimed Pownall. “Ain’t that great, though?”
He climbed the ladder; and as he climbed panic struck him again. That shovel! It might have blood on it. Somebody might have climbed into the silo while he had been getting a drink, and might have found it. Might have found the body, too. His mind leaped to those possibilities. He knew that no one had entered the barn, and yet —
His hands shook as he scrambled up the ladder and sprawled into the gloomy damp of the silo. The little doorway into the silo was green. A kind of subconscious vision touched his mind of another little green door. The door of the room where the electric chair was waiting. With a dry throat and hot pulses the farmer stumbled into the soft masses of the chopped corn, not now evenly spread or trampled down.
His relief was immediate, vast. Nobody was there. The shovel still remained just where he had left it, against the curving silo wall. Its blade was already buried deep in the drift of flicking ensilage. The pipe, far aloft, was still whirling corn with a roar and rattle, in stinging blasts. A heap, five or six feet high, now filled the center of the silo. The heap slanted down on all sides to the level of the corn at the walls. This level itself was about eight feet from the cement bottom of the silo.
“God!” grunted Pownall again, and rubbed his palms up and down along his dirty overalls, as if cleansing them of something. Blood, perhaps. But there was no blood on his hands. Nor on the shovel blade either. It looked quite clean and bright.
Pownall was not an imaginative man. He was a hard-fisted, cold-livered New England farmer. He set to work now, once more spreading and trampling down the corn. At his third thrust of the shovel, he encountered something hard. He prodded, poked away the corn, and saw a boot-heel. He laughed then and fell to his task with a good heart.
Quite as if nothing had happened he labored. With sweat and a great joy, he completed the burial of Lucky Ruggles. Pownall was not afraid any more. Not horrified any more. Only glad. Supremely, triumphantly glad!
The feeling of the corn under his feet, under his shovel — green grave, that for long months would hold its inviolable secret till that secret could be well and finally disposed of — afforded him a kind of terrible joy.
He worked without effort, up-borne by calm powers. Sweat streamed down his face and body. He reveled in it as in the roar of the engine, the clatter of the ensilage in the pipe, the cascading flood of corn still shooting down.
As the silo filled, he closed another door. Later, still another. Soon, four feet of packed corn, neatly on a level, lay above the body of the hobo. By noon this had increased to eight feet and more.
The noon whistle, shrilling far from the village sawmill, shut down the corn-cutting and brought the laboring teams and men to rest. Still Pownall worked on, leveling, stamping down, oblivious to the cessation of the floods of corn. His work seemed to have become mechanical, involuntary. His hands and feet toiled, but his brain took no cognizance of that toil. It was busied with the greatest happiness that it had ever known.
When the man from the engine came into the barn to see what progress had been made in filling the silo, and clambered up the ladder, he found Pownall still shoveling, still tramping the corn. This was now sixteen feet above the cement bottom.
“Hey, there!” the engine man laughed, elbows on the bottom of the door into the silo. “What’s the matter o’ you, anyhow? Time to quit. Fine mornin’s work!”
Pownall started, seemed to waken as from a dream.
“You betcha!” he answered, leaning on his shovel. “We’ll pack this to the roof by night. A fine morning’s work is right. The best I ever done!”
III.
OVER AND OVER, all that autumn and half the winter, Pownall calculated everything to a nicety. He did not brood with any regrets, any compunction over the killing. Insensitive, conscienceless, he lost no sleep. But many of his waking hours were devoted to the approaching last chapter of the story. No detail was overlooked.
“He’ll keep fine,” thought the farmer with exultation. An enduring happiness was his now that the sole witness to his arson and his insurance fraud had vanished. “He’ll keep, same as ensilage keeps, in the middle o’ the silo. There’s tons o’ corn on him, an’ it’s reekin’ with alcohol.” The alcohol had, indeed, been so plentiful in this corn that some of it had even run out at the bottom of the silo. “He’s pickled, that’s what he is. He’ll be in good shape when I git down to diggin’ him out. But I got to be ready fer that, too.”
He planned everything to a T. There had been thirty-six feet of corn in the silo, covering eighteen doors up the side. Seventeen cows would eat about three-quarters of the ensilage in four months. The body of Ruggles lay about eight feet from the bottom of the silo. Thus, in the natural course of events, Pownall would exhume the body about the middle of February.
“But I ain’t goin’ to wait exactly fer that,” decided Pownall. “By February fust I’ll git him out, an’ plant him. That’ll be the safest way.”
He arranged every detail, even to having his housekeeper, Mrs. Green, plan on a visit to her married daughter in Haverhill, about that time. He thought even of the blanket he intended to take with him into the silo, to wrap and carry the body in. Nor did he forget that he would dig the grave in the barn cellar, and then install a pigpen over it.
“There ain’t no possible way fer a slipup,” said he to his soul. “This here farm is ’way off the main road. Nobody much comes by here but the R. F. D. man; an’ of a Sunday he don’t come. With the barn door shet, an’ workin’ early of a Sunday mornin’, it’ll go through. Sure as death an’ taxes!
“In the books they allus gits ketched. But I won’t git ketched. Nobody knows he was here. He ain’t got no folks, ner nothin’. There couldn’t be nothin’ safer!”
He carried out his plans with the cold accuracy of a machine. On Friday, February 2, Mrs. Green departed for Haverhill. She left him a pantry full of cooked victuals and an infinitude of directions about household details. When he had driven her to the desolate railroad station and had seen her depart, he returned home, ready for his task. The frozen solitude of the farm did not appall him. It only cheered him with assurances of complete and final success.
*****
That afternoon he built a pigpen in a dry corner of the barn cellar. So far, so good. He slept well that night. Next day, Saturday, he dug a deep, ample grave in the pigpen. Again he slept well. Things were going forward, eh?
Sunday his alarm clock awoke him very early. His nerves were steady as a church, ready for the finis of his book.
He fortified himself with a hearty breakfast and two cups of hot coffee. By lantern-light he went out to the barn, where the blanket was already waiting. A crisp winter morning, long before dawn. Hard stars and a steely, gibbous moon surveyed him as his alert form crossed the yard. His boots creaked the frozen snow.
He foddered and grained the cattle, watered them, and milked, all as usual. Then he tossed the blanket into the silo, climbed up there with his lantern, took his fork and began digging.
The lantern hung on a nail driven into the silo wall, betrayed no anxiety on his bearded face. What anxiety could he feel? So far, all his actions had been quite natural, without suspicion. He reckoned that it would take him only an hour to exhume and carry the body into the cellar, bury it and turn the pigs into the new pen. His chances of discovery were, practically speaking, just nil. Not once had anybody called at the farm so early. No one would call this particular morning.
“Dead easy!” he grunted as he dug.
Pownall was in no sense an emotional man, nor was he given to introspection. The job ahead of him did not even strike him as particularly unpleasant. It was just something that had to be gone through with as efficiently and expeditiously as possible.
The empty silo doors, ranged in a vertical tier, gave him his exact location. Twelve of these doors were now visible. That meant twenty-four feet of the corn had been used. Counting up from the cement floor of the silo, he knew the body lay opposite the top of the fourth door, or about eight feet from the bottom. Pownall had reviewed this fact unnumbered times, and felt as positive of it as of life itself. There could be no slightest question about it. Pownall would have gambled his existence on the fact that Ruggles was about four feet below the present level of the ensilage.
Digging down four feet into a tightly packed mass of fine-cut corn is a fairish job, but not formidable.
“I’ll have him out o’ here, an’ buried, inside of an hour,” Pownall assured himself. He spat on his hands and fell vigorously to work.
Steadily, unemotionally he toiled, his breath steamy on the chill air. His shadow, huge, grotesquely distorted, rose and fell as the smoky lantern — specially filled for the occasion — cast it against the opposite wall. Above a huge black vault peered down at him from the snow-covered, conical roof.
Only familiar sounds came to him from the barn — the lowing of a cow, the trampling of a horse. Outside, silence. And inside the dim wooden cylinder, silence, too; silence, save for the deep breathing of the farmer, or an occasional thud as a forkful of ensilage struck the wooden wall.
Pownall labored for perhaps twenty minutes, in the remembered spot where he had seen the cascades of fresh ensilage — now brown and reeking of fermentation — whirl down on Lucky Ruggles, burying him. In spite of the February cold, sweat began to runnel his face and trickle down his beard. He stopped now and then to smear it off, and spit. Resting on his fork, which he plunged into the corn, he eased his back and recovered his wind.
“I’m ’most down to him now,” he reckoned. “Cal’lated to of found him afore, if I’d knowed where to look exactly. But I’ll git him now, in a few minutes.”
He still felt calm enough, though his heart was beginning to trip a little. After all, he’d rather be working at something else. But — well, it had to be gone through with, hadn’t it?
Again he dug.
“Ha!” he grunted with a leap of the heart. “There’s a boot now!”
He stooped and tugged at the boot. He pulled hard. There was no resistance. The boot came right up, free, in his hand. He all but tumbled backward.
“Huh! That’s funny!”
Furiously he shoveled, breathing hard. Another boot — also empty.
“Lord! What —”
He remained there, peering down at something he could not understand.
He stumbled over to the lantern, his face gray. He unhooked the lantern, carried it to the trench he had dug in the ensilage. Its smoky red gleam revealed the terror on his face. Panting, now, with sweat clabbering on his forehead, he swung the lantern down into the vacancy of the empty trench.
“Jest two boots, an’ that’s all!” he mouthed. “But — God — it can’t be so! It can’t! He was here an’ I killed him. An’ buried him. A dead man can’t git out of his boots an’ dig through tons o’ fodder, an’ git away! He can’t. He can’t!”
Pownall hung up the lantern again with sick hands. He hurled the boots to one side. Half blind with horror that could not reason, he flung himself once more into his labor.
As he dug he wheezed. Disjointed words came gulping from his throat, a throat constricted as by a cold and lifeless hand:
“A dead man can’t — he can’t — he can’t —”
They found him, late that night, still digging.
The mooing and trampling of the untended cattle brought a couple of passing neighbors into the barn. A gleam of light from the silo, and the sound of laughter, drew them thither.
A great mound of ensilage had been tossed out, on to the barn floor. Tons of it. They climbed this, to the open door, and peered in.
Below their level, they looked down on the madly toiling figure of a man who dug aimlessly, tossing the fodder back and forth, sifting it, sometimes even scraping to the very bottom of the silo. This man dug, staggered, laughed, wept, dug again, and called with horrible blasphemies on the name of God to witness that a dead man cannot move.
By the smoldering rays of the expiring lantern the sight appalled them.
“Hey, Pownall! Hey, you, Pownall!” shouted the bolder of the two neighbors. “Whatcha doin’? What’s the matter o’ you?”
Pownall answered nothing. It seemed as if he could not even hear them. Haggard, with sweat-blinded and ghastly face, he labored aimlessly. A creature wounded to the death, a mole that perishes even as it digs, he groveled in the corn. He flung himself on hands
and knees, shoved his arms into the fodder, pawed and clutched and cursed, prayed, laughed again. The laughter was worst of all. That froze the neighbor’s blood.
Suddenly the lantern shot a sick flame up, quivered and went out. Utter dark fell in the silo. Through the dark the curses and laughter echoed.
The men recoiled, horror-stricken. Clinging to each other, they stumbled down the pile of ensilage, and to the door. To the blessed freedom of the wintry night.
“Gawd A’mighty!” quavered one, his face twitching. “He’s went plumb crazy! Run fer Dr. Abbott!”
“I — I dassen’t go alone, Ed! You come, too!”
Thus quaking to the roots of their souls they ran through the snow for help. And as they ran a horrible voice echoed dully through the blackness of the silo of the barn:
“I got him, anyhow! He’s somewheres here — if I — could only find him. A dead man can’t — he can’t — can’t —”
IV.
THE OLD NEWSPAPER, wrapped round the “hand-out” that a good wife had given the hobo at a Connecticut back door, furnished that knight of the road a few minutes’ literary diversion.
Seated by a little fire of chips alongside the railroad, in the afternoon sunshine of late April, he read the paper as he leisurely devoured the good wife’s meat and bread.
All at once he grinned, with narrowing eyes that watered rheumily.
“Well, by the livin’ jing!” he grunted. “That must be him! John W. Pownall — that is him!”
With keenest interest and enjoyment he reread the article, then glanced at the dateline of the paper.
“Two months ago, huh? An’ nutty! An’ in the nut-foundry at East Bridgewater, incurable! I allus thought the squirrels’d git him if he didn’t watch out!”
Ruminatively, the hobo pondered. He swallowed the last of his snack, wiped his unshaven lips on his sleeve, and produced part of a cigarette from a formless pocket of his black coat. He lit the cigarette with a blazing chip, and inhaled smoke. His mind worked but slowly. He was conscious now of mingled pain and pleasure.
THE SUPREME GETAWAY AND OTHER TALES FROM THE PULPS Page 4