LITMIR.BIZ

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the door, breathing hard. No one passed along the lonely road. He could hear the engine and the cutter still at work back of the barn; the shouts of a teamster, bringing up still another load of corn from the field. He grinned, crookedly. He couldn’t think very straight, but still he realized that he was safe and that Rug­gles had only got what was coming to him.

      “Lucky Ruggles!” he gulped. “He played it once too often. Out o’ luck fer once. Huh!”

      It struck him as something of a joke after all. A grim jest. He was laughing a little as he turned back into the barn.

      Was there anybody on the barn? Of course not! What an idea, eh? This was a relief. The empty stalls and stanchions peered at him vacantly. The haymows lis­tened. But no human face was visible. In the silo the corn was still rattling down the pipe, whickering on to the pile.

      “Only a tramp,” thought Pownall. “Got no home, no folks. I’m a damn fool to worry!”

      He breathed deep, and returned to the silo. He felt so glad! Glad it was all over and done with. Glad he was free at last.

      “An’ it was comin’ to him all right!”

      He approached the ladder, up along the staring row of openings into the silo. The four lowest openings were closed by doors, each two feet high. That meant eight feet of corn already lay in the silo. He squinted up the ladder, past the haymow, to the roof, where the pipe came through.

      “That’s great stuff, that corn,” he real­ized. “It’ll bury him in no time. Gosh, but this is lucky fer me!”

      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

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