“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.
“There goes all my show of ever gittin’ that thousand,” he cogitated. “But I’m even with him fer this, anyhow.” He rubbed an ugly scar on his thick skull.
“That was some wallop, believe me! Almost knocked me out. Lucky fer me I had sense enough fer to lay still an’ do the ’possum act. What?”
He smoked out the fag, and tossed it into the fire, then laughed with ugly tusks.
“Nutty!” said he. “Sure, he’s nutty now, an’ he must o’ been then. A guy what’d bean a feller just fer asking fer a thousand must o’ been plumb bugs.
“Gee! I got out of it easy, I’m thinkin’. If he hadn’t of went outa that there silo, an’ gave me a chanst t’ slip off me boots an’ pussy-foot it up that ladder inta that haymow, an’ lay there all day till I could make my getaway that night, God—he sure might o’ bumped me off!
“Lucky, I calls it. Lucky! Lucky Ruggles, that’s me!”
IN MARINERS’ HOUSE
Originally published in The Cavalier, February 7, 1914.
I.
They’ve went and painted Mariners’ House an ugly drab and turned it into cheap rents upstairs; also let the ground floor, where the bar used to be, for junk-shops an’ stuffy little sea-truck stores.
Once I remember it was a good bright red, with chints curtains at the bar winders an’ snug rooms for sailormen—no crimpin’—at the right price. You could feed there, too, front o’ the barroom fire, an’ get a proper meal for two bits. You couldn’t get soused there, though; for they’d chuck you out, neck an’ crop, into Commercial Street if you tried to start anythin’.
No loafers ever used to get their boot-toes turned up there, kickin’ drunken AB’s’ sea-chests open and looting ’em, same as I’ve seen elsewhere. No; it was all straight an’ clean an’ proper, long as Mrs. Hannaford lived. It’s took a mighty long downward slant since them days, Mariners’ House has, believe me!
Even the great b
ig chimneys up through the slate roof, where the pigeons still strut an’ make love on sunny days, has began to shed bricks.
And the old flagpole that once flew the stripes, with weather pennants below, has rotted an’ fell down an’ been used, I make no doubt, for firewood.
Nothin’ to it now—nothin’ at all. But in the old days you could see things at Mariners’ House, an’ hear things, too—things not in the books, things any writer would have gave his eyeteeth to listen to an’ put down in the magazines.
I know, fellas, because many’s the day and evenin’ I used to hang out there. Them times the old hookers an’ windjammers fair crowded the harbor an’ poked their jib-booms over India Street.
The gurry tramps an’ slim liners hadn’t elbowed ’em to the ship-breakers yet. An’ the bar was ’most always full o’ blue-water men.
They’d meet up from Callao to Falkland an’ from Cape Town to Nagasaki—meet up, an’ touch hands and glasses, an’ then go out—lots of ’em to D Jones, who keeps berths always waitin’ at the bottom o’ the seven seas.
But there wasn’t no disorder—none at all. Mrs. Hannaford was master of ’em all, at that. She was loggin’ along toward thirty-eight built, AI, fore an’ aft; had a good wad salted in the Casco National, an’ owned the place.
“Butch” Hannaford left it to her, that time Swenson caved his dome in with a slice-bar. Oh, I ain’t sayin’ she wouldn’t look at a good, upstandin’ man once in a tack or two; and many’s the lad imagined vain things the whiles he was roundin’ Hatteras or maybe the Horn.
But she was right as a trivet, Sallie was, with clean sailin’-papers, an’ not a black mark on anybody’s books in this here whole round terra-cotta.
This brings me to what I was a goin’ to tell you, now they’re all over the bar, all hands concerned—not the house bar, y’understand.
I mean the other bar that What’s-His-Name Sir Alfred Longfellow wrote about once in a poem.
II.
Well, it’s about the time “Shifty” Tripp died upstairs there in one of Sallie’s best beds, I’m comin’ to.
Shifty was mate of the Benicia Boy, you remember—a Bath four-master—the time she lost Trefethen, her cap’n.
They called him Shifty ever since he was knee-high to a pup, mostly because he had peculiar ways to him an’ never did look you in the eye, leastways if he could help it.
He was a raw P. I, six or seven foot long, with a fist onta him like a cobblestone an’ hair like a livin’ flame. But no matter about that.
It’s his death I’m steerin’ for. The course is well buoyed, too. No danger my forgettin’ that!
Shifty, he run down pow’ful fast after Trefethen was took. While I was alive, nobody ever noticed no love lost betwixt ’em, for the old man was some bucko, and him an’ Shifty had a few set-tos now an’ again.
Fact is, once or twice after a mix, when Shifty spit, they was teeth bounced on the deck o’ the Benicia Boy. But all this an’ all that didn’t seem to matter none.
After Tref hove anchor for the last time Shifty failed right up.
He’d never been no great of a hand to wrastle with prayer till then. But afterward he used to spend his evenin’s in port over to the mission loft, an’ several times I heerd he asked for special intercession at th’ throne; an’ at times he’d exhort his own self.
They say he bellered somethin’ fierce, an’ could be heerd ’way down to Front Street, when the spirit operated right lively.
Second voyage after Trefethen’s takin’ off I see Shifty had got mighty pickid, an’ had a cough onta him. But he signed articles again that spring—1887—as mate on the Cyrus Cobb.
Oh, I fergot to say he quit the Benicia Boy right away after the death o’ Tref, an’ never went anigh her again or set foot on her decks when her an’ him happened to be in port together.
There was some talk about it at the time, but folks said it was because he felt so stove up he couldn’t endure for to see the old hooker.
So that passed all right, an’ nobody suspicioned the real reason, which I’m a comin’ to now mighty quick.
As I was sayin’, the spring of ’87 see Shifty in bad shape.
That summer, when he come in from the provinces with the Cyrus Cobb, the hand o’ death had him plumb by the collar of his oilers. He’d fell away so he didn’t no more’n half fill ’em, nohow, an’ he spit blood. But he still signed again.
He was goin’ to croak with his sea-boots on, looked like; but he didn’t, after all, but upstairs in Mariners’ House, in Sallie’s front north room, like I told you already.
That November, the 17th, when the Cyrus Cobb come in again on her last run, Shifty hired the room for a month an’ paid cash down, an’ took to his bed.
He died December 9, about 11.30 p.m., so Sallie was in just a little over a week’s rent. She tried fer to have him get a doctor, or somethin’, but he wouldn’t.
He took them last weeks mighty ca’m, considerin’; just laid there an’ drunk rum an’ molasses, read his Bible, an’ prayed, an’ then banged on the floor, an’ they fetched him another noggin.
Some of us boys used to call in an’ see him every day, an’ them as could prayed with him. I was one as couldn’t, which makes it all the stranger he sh’d send fer me that last night an’ tell me—what he did.
Didn’t seem as I was extry close to him no p’ticular way; an’ yet, after all, he sent fer me. I’m blowed, fellas, if I know why!
Now, I ain’t such a much on this here descriptive business. It’ll take some regular smart Alick with a pen or typewriter to set it all out good an’ proper.
You ask me about cro’jicks, dead-eyes, an’ Plim’s’l-marks, an’ I bate you four fingers on the choppin’-block I’m there with the goods quicker’n white lightnin’. Or anythin’ else belongin’ and appertainin’ to ships, sail or steam. But this storybook business leaves me on a lee shore with all anchors draggin’.
However, I’ll do my best with it. You take it plain, with no trimmin’s, an’ afterward bodge it up to suit yourselves. That’s fair, ain’t it?
Here’s what happened:
III.
SHIFTY SENT FER ME about a quarter to eleven. I was down in the bar playin’ Pede with Lefty Jacobs of the Orient Star an’ a couple o’ stokers from the old Geranium, the lighthouse tender, you know.
Sallie, she sticks her head in the door an’ beckons me, an’ I drops as good a hand as a man could wish to see in a month o’ Sundays an’ goes.
“You’re wanted up in No. 18,” says she. “Shifty Tripp’s askin’ fer you. Couldn’t you let somebody else set in on the game an’ humor him? I’ll have whatever drinks you was goin’ to order,” says she, “sent right up, an’ no extra charge, same as I usually get for what’s served away from the bar.”
She was kind of generous that way at times, Sallie was. I thanked her an’ said I’d give my order later, an’ went on up.
I found Shifty propped in bed, with his long-necker an’ his Bible handy.
Somethin’ in the shine of his eye, as the raw light from the lamp hit it, started me kind of. He looked all fevered up, Shifty did. Thinks I to myself, thinks I: “You’re close to harbor, old buck!”
So his first words don’t take me aback as much’s they might otherwise ha’ done if I hadn’t been expectin’ nothin’.
“Come in,” he croaks very husky, hardly able to talk at all. “Heave a line an’ come alongside, Amos,” says he. “I’m dyin’ this very night. Turn me a drink, there—my hand shakes so I spill a’most every damn drop! That’s right—there! Amos,” says he, “I’m goin’ to glory before twelve on that there clock; that is, if I git this here sin off’n my chest—”
“What sin, Shifty? Which p’ticular one?”
I draws up a chair an’ sets down by the bed, so-fashion.
“My hatches is open a’ready,” says he, not payin’ no heed, “to let the immortal soul out o’ my sin-blackened hold. I want her to come forth a shinin’ with
glory, Amos! I want to sign my articles with my cap’n aloft,” says he, “with no contraband in my dunnage! Lemme clear everythin’ out,” he says; “an’ arter that I’m ready!”
I makes out to grin an’ takes a nip myself.
“Ferget it, Shifty!” says I, tryin’ fer to cheer him, though in my marrer-bones I know it’s gospel he’s as good as pork. I’d seen a plenty go, an’ I knowed. “Ferget. it! You just got one o’ your—”
“Got nothin’!” he wheezes, coughin’ violent an’ swearin’ at the same time. He clutches the Book to his caved-in chest. “I got my walkin’-papers this time, sure, an’ you know it, Ame. Reckon I sense the condition o’ my own hull an’ cargo better’n what you do!” he gasps, resentful.
“I got to have a regular gam with you an’ git it over with, Amos. I’m openin’ up at all seams; the pumps can’t hold me nohow. I’m goin’ down, now, inside of half an hour by that damn chronometer!” An’ he nods at the tin clock on the shelf. “That’s all!”
Comes a little silence, with only the ticking of the clock, the sputter-sputter of the lamp, and the wooo-wooo-ooo of the wind up the stovepipe.
“Down,” says he, “same as the Benicia Boy jest missed doin’ time Gash Trefethen got his! An’ that,” he adds, “is what I wants to gam about ’fore I founders. Un’stand?”
“Why, what about it?” I inquires, wonderin’. “What in Tophet is there to tell?”
He signals for another two fingers o’ rum an’ then thinks a minute.
“Amos.”
“What?”
“I got murder on my soul!”
“Th’ hell you say! Who?”
“Trefethen!”
“Tref— You’re crazy, lad! Why, he—”
“Yes, I know. He died o’ the hydrophoby, all right enough: but I—killed him, jes’ the same!”
I leans forrard an’ grips him by the skin-an’-bone hand.
“You mean that, Shifty?”
“S’help me God! I gotta let it out, Ame! I dassent go aloft an’ drop my mud-hooks in the harbor—an’ mebbe meet up with Gash himself—so long’s—”
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