LITMIR.BIZ

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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 big 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.

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