Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5

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The night darkened. There was no star to light him. He shouted for a lantern, but got no response. Then he had to fumble about and measure the wood lengths by touch, and place his saw and guide it straight by touch, also. Once he stumbled and cut his shin on the mighty teeth of the saw.

Then, rain blew up. It did not last long enough to give him a drink. It simply struck him with sudden whip-strokes that bit to his skin, and after the wind whistled in his ear and down his wet back.

He began to be frightened. He thought of pneumonia. And now he worked faster to keep the blood in hot circulation.

It was disagreeable. The gloves saved his hands only in places. Wherever there was a seam in the gloves, blisters began to work up. But at least his muscles were not aching too bitterly. The longer he stood there, swaying the massive length of the cross-cut, the more amazed he became, for he knew that he had stepped long beyond the measure of the strength of ordinary men. He was working for two, and had been working so all the night long. Yet as the rusty dawn began to crawl along the horizon and blacken the eastern hills, he still was there at the sawbuck, rocking with the long, rapid stroke.

It was an extraordinary sensation. He could feel the pull of his muscles, interlinked and interchained from his finger tips to the small of his back, as he tugged on the heavy weight, or dragged it by sheer force through a green place in a log, or where the blade had jammed in a wet and narrow cut. He felt the muscles in his legs, too, from hip to toe, supporting him as he swayed. He began to admire his body as a wonderful mechanism—and still wondered why fatigue did not make him drop.

He had broken through the ridge of the wood wall.

By the time the breakfast was started inside the house, he was picking up the last logs at the bottom of the cut.

When Trot Enderby came out to the back porch, rolling a cigarette and then yawning ostentatiously from the goodness of his breakfast and the soundness of his sleep, the tramp had made a clear passage through, and the wood was heaped up high behind him.

“Hey!” said Trot Enderby. “How was the night for you?”

“A good, cool, working night,” said the tramp, smiling. “I enjoyed it a lot. Breakfast ready?”

“Breakfast?” said Trot Enderby. “What’ve you done?”

He stepped down from the porch, puffing at the cigarette. The smell of coffee, and of the smoke, turned the tramp faint with desire.

“Not a dang thing,” cautioned Enderby, “until you’ve cut through that wall of wood—”

He stopped short, for he had come opposite to the place and saw the steep-sided cut which sank to the very floor, with the mass of short lengths heaped behind the sawyer.

Amazement made Enderby hunch his shoulders.

“How did you—” he began.

Then he checked himself, and his lips curled back in malice, like a dog about to bite.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“They call me the Sleeper,” said the tramp, watching, fascinated, the face of the cattleman. He never had seen such hate, not even in a criminal when the hand of the policeman falls on his shoulder, but the hate of the criminal could be understood.

Trot Enderby disappeared into the house and came back with a quart can of water and two pieces of meat. The meat he tossed to the dogs. The water he put on the ground for the tramp.

“There’s a drink for you,” said he.

The Sleeper picked up the can. He drank off that quart of water at a single draught, and could have drunk again, immediately afterward.

“And the chow?” said he.

“You’ve worked for water. Now you start in and out through the other side of the pile,” said Enderby. “That’ll be time to talk about food.”

The Sleeper was stunned. “Is it square?” he asked.

“You’ve got the strength of three men,” said Enderby. “Go ahead and use it. Dang you, I know your kind! You’re sleeked up with the fat of a lazy life. I’ll take that fat off of you faster than a knife. You chicken-stealing, barn-burning dog!”

He left the house. The tramp saw him ride away, only the jogging head and shoulders visible above the top of the corral fence.

He told himself that this was a dream. But he also told himself that there was no chance of escape. The dogs lay on guard, still licking their crimsoned lips. Labor alone could save him, and labor he dreaded more than the surgeon’s knife.

He fell to work again, rocking back and forth with mechanical motion. His knees began to sag. The blisters broke. His hands puffed until the gloves burst, here and there. Sometimes it seemed to him that the erect handle of the saw was fire, and the flames were eating up along his arms, reaching to the heart and the brain.

The day brightened, then turned black again, and another northeaster swooped on him. It flogged him with hail, it whipped him with rain, but still he worked at the saw.

He did very little thinking. He had resigned himself, as often before when he clung to the rods, beneath a train in midwinter, and his body turned gradually to ice, while he wondered how long his blue hands could maintain a grip.

In this manner he labored through the day. His lips began to pull back from his teeth in a fixed grin of effort of which he was unconscious. His knees staggered. From the aching small of his back, shooting pains darted up and exploded in his brain.

The sun lowered in the west. The sky cleared. The wind was sharper and colder than ever and blew straight from the north as he reached the ground again through the second cut.

The Sleeper was about to sink to the wet ground, when he heard the slamming of the corral gate, and Trot Enderby came, in again, with his slicker like polished steel from the rains through which he had been riding.

He looked at the new cut in the loose wall of wood. He looked at the tramp. And then Enderby laughed like a snarling dog.

He went into the house and came out again with a raw cut of steak and a second quart tin of water.

“There you are!” said he.

“I’ve got no matches to start a fire and cook this,” said the Sleeper hoarsely. He had to swallow twice before he could speak at all.

“Are you better than those dogs?” asked Enderby. “They eat it raw!”

The Sleeper ate it raw, also. He thought he never had tasted meat so tender or so delicious, and the water was a gift from Heaven. He found himself almost grateful to Trot Enderby for such a delicious gift.

Then he leaned back against the woodpile and his chin fell on his breast.

For twenty-four hours he had labored with very slight intermissions. His strength was gone, and he fell into a heavy sleep.

The burning of his raw hands wakened him at midnight. A fine, small rain was falling and he was wet to the skin, but this had not troubled him. It was the hands which hurt him the most.

Wakening, he told himself that this was no more true fact than any fairy tale. As in such a story, he was given a task beyond human accomplishment, but in the tale there was a reward, and here there was merely more punishment.

More clear-brained, now, he pondered this case, but told himself in the end that the words of Doc must be true. No man, no matter how brave, could treat another human being as he was being treated by Enderby, unless the tormentor possessed some rare gift of immunity from danger.

A gun which could not miss!

He was as skeptical as most. He had not come up from the railroad to this house in any actual hope that he could find and steal such a weapon, but the longer he remained in this unroofed torture chamber, the more mysterious appeared the power of Enderby. Besides, there are strange things to be learned in this world. Wireless— What is too marvelous if that can be true? There are, besides, certain fatal superstitions current among the knights of the road. The Sleeper knew them; he could not help but half believe them.

Then, sighing a little, he stared through the darkness toward his hands. In the morning he would be forced to work with those hands again, and how could he endure even the touch of air?

A whimpering sound near him told him that one of the dogs was asleep. The house was black, but the starlight glimmered on the two kitchen windows, so that they watched him like two empty eyes. The Sleeper decided forthwith that he must strike now, or die to-morrow.

He took off the gloves, and his hands burned naked, and so terribly that it was wonderful that they did not give out a light. Then he tore a strip from the tail of his shirt and bandaged his right hand. Next he picked up the nearest of the two axes. Slowly, sternly he forced himself to close his fingers upon the torment. He gripped them so hard that the heavy ax trembled in his grasp.

All the rest of his body felt light. The only weight was in the ax and the hand that held it as he stepped toward the sleeping hound. Keen were its ears, however. It started up as he came within a stride, but the tramp smote down at the rising head and the dog slumped heavily to the earth.

Never before had the Sleeper killed anything more offensively dangerous than a chicken, or a duck from the duck pond. A shiver of fierce pleasure ran through him. It was no spiritual thing that he felt, but an actual physical sensation in the pit of his stomach and shooting upward through all his nerves until he locked his teeth upon it.

He had opened one side of the woodpile to escape, but he had opened a far wider door in his own heart, through which it seemed to the Sleeper that he saw the stars and the mountains for the first time. He had received ten thousand kicks and fist strokes in his day. Now, for the first time, he tasted retaliation.

In the ecstasy that rushed through him, he wanted to go straight for the house, beat in the door, and find his tormentor, ax in hand.

What held him back was a most tenuous thread of fear. He must, he decided calmly, go about everything in the most careful and thoughtful manner, for as he stood there after dealing that stroke, he had made up his mind that he would never leave the place of Trot Enderby until he had in his hand the gun which could not miss.