Once she felt that she had decided to reconnoitre at any rate. It was night; the lantern at the barn and the campfires made everything without their circle into masses of heavy mystic blackness. She took two steps toward the door. But there she paused. Innumerable possibilities of danger had assailed her mind. She returned to the window and stood wavering. At last, she went swiftly to the door, opened it, and slid noiselessly into the darkness.
For a moment she regarded the shadows. Down in the orchard the campfires of the troops appeared precisely like a great painting, all in reds upon a black cloth. The voices of the troopers still hummed. The girl started slowly off in the opposite direction. Her eyes were fixed in a stare; she studied the darkness in front for a moment, before she ventured upon a forward step. Unconsciously, her throat was arranged for a sudden shrill scream. High in the tree branches she could hear the voice of the wind, a melody of the night, low and sad, the plaint of an endless, incommunicable sorrow. Her own distress, the plight of the men in gray—these near matters as well as all she had known or imagined of grief—everything was expressed in this soft mourning of the wind in the trees. At first she felt like weeping. This sound told her of human impotency and doom. Then later the trees and the wind breathed strength to her, sang of sacrifice, of dauntless effort, of hard carven faces that did not blanch when Duty came at midnight or at noon.
She turned often to scan the shadowy figures that moved from time to time in the light at the barn door. Once she trod upon a stick, and it flopped, crackling in the intolerable manner of all sticks. At this noise, however, the guards at the barn made no sign. Finally, she was where she could see the knotholes in the rear of the structure gleaming like pieces of metal from the effect of the light within. Scarcely breathing in her excitement, she glided close and applied an eye to a knothole. She had barely achieved one glance at the interior before she sprang back shuddering.
For the unconscious and cheerful sentry at the door was swearing away in flaming sentences, heaping one gorgeous oath upon another, making a conflagration of his description of his troop horse.
“Why,” he was declaring to the calm prisoner in gray, “you ain’t got a horse in your hull damned army that can run forty rod with that there little mar’!”
As in the outer darkness Mary cautiously returned to the knothole, the three guards in front suddenly called in low tones: “S-s-s-h!” “Quit, Pete; here comes the lieutenant.” The sentry had apparently been about to resume his declamation, but at these warnings he suddenly posed in a soldierly manner.
A tall and lean officer with a smooth face entered the barn. The sentry saluted primly. The officer flashed a comprehensive glance about him. “Everything all right?”
“All right, sir.”
This officer had eyes like the points of stilettos. The lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth were deep and gave him a slightly disagreeable aspect, but somewhere in his face there was a quality of singular thoughtfulness, as of the absorbed student dealing in generalities, which was utterly in opposition to the rapacious keenness of the eyes, which saw everything.
Suddenly he lifted a long finger and pointed. “What’s that?”
“That? That’s a feedbox, I suppose.”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“You ought to know,” said the officer sharply. He walked over to the feedbox and flung up the lid. With a sweeping gesture he reached down and scooped a handful of feed. “You ought to know what’s in everything when you have prisoners in your care,” he added, scowling.
During the time of this incident, the girl had nearly swooned. Her hands searched weakly over the boards for something to which to cling. With the pallor of the dying she had watched the downward sweep of the officer’s arm, which after all had only brought forth a handful of feed. The result was a stupefaction of her mind. She was astonished out of her senses at this spectacle of three large men metamorphosed into a handful of feed.
IV
It is perhaps a singular thing that this absence of the three men from the feedbox at the time of the sharp lieutenant’s investigation should terrify the girl more than it should joy her. That for which she had prayed had come to pass. Apparently the escape of these men in the face of every improbability had been granted her, but her dominating emotion was fright. The feedbox was a mystic and terrible machine, like some dark magician’s trap. She felt it almost possible that she should see the three weird men floating spectrally away through the air. She glanced with swift apprehension behind her, and, when the dazzle from the lantern’s light had left her eyes, saw only the dim hillside stretched in solemn silence.
The interior of the barn possessed for her another fascination because it was now uncanny. It contained that extraordinary feedbox. When she peeped again at the knothole, the calm, gray prisoner was seated upon the feedbox, thumping it with his dangling, careless heels as if it were in no wise his conception of a remarkable feedbox. The sentry also stood facing it. His carbine he held in the hollow of his arm. His legs were spread apart, and he mused. From without came the low mumble of the three other troopers. The sharp lieutenant had vanished.
The trembling yellow light of the lantern caused the figures of the men to cast monstrous wavering shadows. There were spaces of gloom which shrouded ordinary things in impressive garb. The roof presented an inscrutable blackness, save where small rifts in the shingles glowed phosphorescently. Frequently old Santo put down a thunderous hoof. The heels of the prisoner made a sound like the booming of a wild kind of drum. When the men moved their heads, their eyes shone with ghoulish whiteness, and their complexions were always waxen and unreal. And there was that profoundly strange feedbox, imperturbable with its burden of fantastic mystery.
Suddenly from down near her feet the girl heard a crunching sound, a sort of nibbling, as if some silent and very discreet terrier was at work upon the turf. She faltered back; here was, no doubt, another grotesque detail of this most unnatural episode. She did not run, because physically she was in the power of these events. Her feet chained her to the ground in submission to this march of terror after terror. As she stared at the spot from which this sound seemed to come, there floated through her mind a vague, sweet vision—a vision of her safe little room, in which at this hour she usually was sleeping.
The scratching continued faintly and with frequent pauses, as if the terrier was then listening. When the girl first removed her eyes from the knothole the scene appeared of one velvet blackness; then gradually objects loomed with a dim luster. She could see now where the tops of the trees joined the sky, and the form of the barn was before her, dyed in heavy purple. She was ever about to shriek, but no sound came from her constricted throat. She gazed at the ground with the expression of countenance of one who watches the sinister-moving grass where a serpent approaches.
Dimly she saw a piece of sod wrenched free and drawn under the great foundation beam of the barn. Once she imagined that she saw human hands, not outlined at all, but sufficient in color, form, or movement to make subtle suggestion.
Then suddenly a thought that illuminated the entire situation flashed in her mind like a light. The three men, late of the feedbox, were beneath the floor of the barn and were now scraping their way under this beam. She did not consider for a moment how they could come there. They were marvelous creatures. The supernatural was to be expected of them. She no longer trembled, for she was possessed upon this instant of the most unchangeable species of conviction. The evidence before her amounted to no evidence at all, but nevertheless her opinion grew in an instant from an irresponsible acorn to a rooted and immovable tree. It was as if she was on a jury.
She stooped down hastily and scanned the ground. There she indeed saw a pair of hands hauling at the dirt where the sod had been displaced. Softly, in a whisper like a breath, she said, “Hey!”
The dim hands were drawn hastily under the barn. The girl reflected for a moment. Then she stooped and w
hispered: “Hey! It’s me!”
After a time there was a resumption of the digging. The ghostly hands began once more their cautious mining. She waited. In hollow reverberations from the interior of the barn came the frequent sounds of old Santo’s lazy movements. The sentry conversed with the prisoner.
At last the girl saw a head thrust slowly from under the beam. She perceived the face of one of the miraculous soldiers from the feedbox. A pair of eyes glintered and wavered, then finally settled upon her, a pale statue of a girl. The eyes became lit with a kind of humorous greeting. An arm gestured at her.
Stooping, she breathed, “All right.” The man drew himself silently back under the beam. A moment later the pair of hands resumed their cautious task. Ultimately the head and arms of the man were thrust strangely from the earth. He was lying on his back. The girl thought of the dirt in his hair. Wriggling slowly and pushing at the beam above him, he forced his way out of the curious little passage. He twisted his body and raised himself upon his hands. He grinned at the girl and drew his feet carefully from under the beam. When he at last stood erect beside her, he at once began mechanically to brush the dirt from his clothes with his hands. In the barn the sentry and his prisoner were evidently engaged in an argument.
The girl and the first miraculous soldier signaled warily. It seemed that they feared that their arms would make noises in passing through the air. Their lips moved, conveying dim meanings.
In this sign language the girl described the situation in the barn. With guarded motions, she told him of the importance of absolute stillness. He nodded, and then in the same manner he told her of his two companions under the barn floor. He informed her again of their wounded state, and wagged his head to express his despair. He contorted his face, to tell how sore were their arms; and jabbed the air mournfully, to express their remote geographical position.
This signaling was interrupted by the sound of a body being dragged or dragging itself with slow, swishing sound under the barn. The sound was too loud for safety. They rushed to the hole and began to semaphore until a shaggy head appeared with rolling eyes and quick grin.
With frantic downward motions of their arms they suppressed this grin and with it the swishing noise. In dramatic pantomime they informed this head of the terrible consequences of so much noise. The head nodded, and painfully, but with extreme care, the second man pushed and pulled himself from the hole.
In a faint whisper the first man said, “Where’s Sim?”
The second man made low reply: “He’s right here.” He motioned reassuringly toward the hole.
When the third head appeared, a soft smile of glee came upon each face, and the mute group exchanged expressive glances.
When they all stood together, free from this tragic barn, they breathed a long sigh that was contemporaneous with another smile and another exchange of glances.
One of the men tiptoed to a knothole and peered into the barn. The sentry was at that moment speaking. “Yes, we know ’em all. There isn’t a house in this region that we don’t know who is in it most of the time. We collar ’em once in a while—like we did you. Now, that house out yonder, we—”
The man suddenly left the knothole and returned to the others. Upon his face, dimly discerned, there was an indication that he had made an astonishing discovery. The others questioned him with their eyes, but he simply waved an arm to express his inability to speak at that spot. He led them back toward the hill, prowling carefully. At a safe distance from the barn he halted, and as they grouped eagerly about him, he exploded in an intense undertone: “Why, that—that’s Cap’n Sawyer they got in yonder.”
“Cap’n Sawyer!” incredulously whispered the other men.
But the girl had something to ask. “How did you get out of that feedbox?”
He smiled. “Well, when you put us in there, we was just in a minute when we allowed it wasn’t a mighty safe place, and we allowed we’d get out. And we did. We skedaddled ’round and ’round until it ’peared like we was going to get cotched, and then we flung ourselves down in the cow stalls where it’s low-like—just dirt floor—and then we just naturally went a-whooping under the barn floor when the Yanks come. And we didn’t know Cap’n Sawyer by his voice nohow. We heard ’im discoursing, and we allowed it was a mighty pert man, but we didn’t know that it was him. No, m’m.”
These three men, so recently from a situation of peril, seemed suddenly to have dropped all thought of it. They stood with sad faces looking at the barn. They seemed to be making no plans at all to reach a place of more complete safety. They were halted and stupefied by some unknown calamity.
“How do you raikon they cotch him, Sim?” one whispered mournfully.
“I don’t know,” replied another in the same tone.
Another with a low snarl expressed in two words his opinion of the methods of Fate: “Oh, hell!”
The three men started then as if simultaneously stung, and gazed at the young girl who stood silently near them. The man who had sworn began to make agitated apology: “Pardon, miss! Ton my soul, I clean forgot you was by. ’Deed, and I wouldn’t swear like that if I had knowed. ’Deed, I wouldn’t.”
The girl did not seem to hear him. She was staring at the barn. Suddenly she turned and whispered, “Who is he?”
“He’s Cap’n Sawyer, m’m,” they told her sorrowfully. “He’s our own cap’n. He’s been in command of us yere since a long time. He’s got folks about yere. Raikon they cotch him while he was a-visiting.”
She was still for a time, and then, awed, she said: “Will they—will they hang him?”
“No, m’m. Oh, no, m’m. Don’t raikon no such thing. No, m’m.”
The group became absorbed in a contemplation of the barn. For a time no one moved or spoke. At last the girl was aroused by slight sounds, and, turning, she perceived that the three men who had so recently escaped from the barn were now advancing toward it.
V
The girl, waiting in the darkness, expected to hear the sudden crash and uproar of a fight as soon as the three creeping men should reach the barn. She reflected in an agony upon the swift disaster that would befall any enterprise so desperate. She had an impulse to beg them to come away. The grass rustled in silken movements as she sped toward the barn.
When she arrived, however, she gazed about her bewildered. The men were gone. She searched with her eyes, trying to detect some moving thing, but she could see nothing.
Left alone again, she began to be afraid of the night. The great stretches of darkness could hide crawling dangers. From sheer desire to see a human, she was obliged to peep again at the knothole. The sentry had apparently wearied of talking. Instead, he was reflecting. The prisoner still sat on the feedbox, moodily staring at the floor. The girl felt in one way that she was looking at a ghastly group in wax. She started when the old horse put down an echoing hoof. She wished the men would speak; their silence reinforced the strange aspect. They might have been two dead men.
The girl felt impelled to look at the corner of the interior where were the cow stalls. There was no light there save the appearance of peculiar gray haze which marked the track of the dimming rays of the lantern. All else was somber shadow. At last she saw something move there. It might have been as small as a rat, or it might have been a part of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly, and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously disheveled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter like silver. The girl’s heart pounded so that she put her hand over it.
The sentry and the prisoner remained immovably waxen, and over in the gloom the head thrust from the floor watched them with its silver eyes.
Finally, th
e prisoner slipped from the feedbox and, raising his arms, yawned at great length. “Oh, well,” he remarked, “you boys will get a good licking if you fool around here much longer. That’s some satisfaction, anyhow, even if you did bag me. You’ll get a good walloping.” He reflected for a moment, and decided: “I’m sort of willing to be captured if you fellows only get a damned good licking for being so smart.”
The sentry looked up and smiled a superior smile. “Licking, hey? Nixey!” He winked exasperatingly at the prisoner. “You fellows are not fast enough, my boy. Why didn’t you lick us at—? and at—? and at —?” He named some of the great battles.
To this the captive officer blurted in angry astonishment: “Why, we did!”
The sentry winked again in profound irony. “Yes—I know you did. Of course. You whipped us, didn’t you? Fine kind of whipping that was! Why, we—”
He suddenly ceased, smitten mute by a sound that broke the stillness of the night. It was the sharp crack of a distant shot that made wild echoes among the hills. It was instantly followed by the hoarse cry of a human voice, a faraway yell of warning, singing of surprise, peril, fear of death. A moment later there was a distant fierce spattering of shots. The sentry and the prisoner stood facing each other, their lips apart, listening.
The orchard at that instant awoke to sudden tumult. There were the thud and scramble and scamper of feet, the mellow, swift clash of arms, men’s voices in question, oath, command, hurried and unhurried, resolute and frantic. A horse sped along the road at a raging gallop. A loud voice shouted, “What is it, Ferguson?” Another voice yelled something incoherent. There was a sharp, discordant chorus of command. An uproarious volley suddenly rang from the orchard. The prisoner in gray moved from his intent, listening attitude. Instantly the eyes of the sentry blazed, and he said with a new and terrible sternness: “Stand where you are!”
The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane Page 36
