LITMIR.BIZ

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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!

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