“Cut that out!” retorted Pownall. “I got nothin’ to say to you!”
The men’s voices were hardly audible over the droning roar of the machinery, the whirring of the corn. This racket had kept Pownall from hearing Ruggles as the hobo had climbed the ladder into the silo.
Unseen by the workers in the yard, Ruggles had crept up through the meadow, skirted the stone wall and gained the south side of the barn. Here a door had admitted him. The rest had been easy. Now, with that grin of conscious and cruel power, he confronted the gray-faced victim of his blackmail.
“What d’you want o’ me?” Pownall demanded.
“Oh, you don’t know! Oh, no! My letter—you got it, all right.”
“T’hell with your letter, an’ you, too!”
“You ain’t gonna come across with that thousand?”
“Git out o’ here!”
“All right,” grinned the tramp with yellowed snags of teeth. “Suits me! But I’m goin’ right from here to them insurance people. An’ they’ll slip me a few, fer wisin’ ’em up. I’m playin’ in luck, either way. Lucky Ruggles, that’s me!”
“They won’t believe no bum like you!”
“We’ll see about that, mister. An’ when you’re doin’ a five-year bit you’ll reckon a thousand bucks is pretty small money to be holdin’ out on me. A man what’ll stay in the big house ruther’n cough up at the rate o’ two hundred bucks a year, ain’t much!”
“I’ll say you set the fire! I’ll—”
“Ta-ta, mister!”
Lucky Ruggles turned to go. Then Pownall struck.
II.
A shovel blade may be a murderous weapon in strong hands of hate and terror.
The hobo crumpled forward. He fell, facedown, in the soft ensilage. Immediately a storm of tiny fragments of corn sprayed itself over his motionless body.
Pownall recoiled against the sweeping curve of the silo wall, his eyes white-rimmed with horror. He dropped the shovel. Flat against the wall his calloused fingers extended widely. His back pressed that wall, as if he were trying to push further away from the silent figure.
“Ruggles!” he cried.
No answer. Then Pownall laughed explosively.
It came as a relief after all. Now that the thing, often dreamed, was really done, the farmer felt a vast lightening of his soul’s burden. It wasn’t hard, was it, to kill a man? Why, an ox required twice as hard a blow! And a man—but was this blackmailing snake a man?
“Damn you!” mouthed Pownall, and stumbled toward the body.
Already it was half hidden by the tornado of ensilage. Pownall understood where his own safety lay, and laughed again. No one had seen the tramp. No one knew. And here, actively at hand, was burial.
He dragged the body, still facedownward, more into the direct line of discharge of the pipe. He stood up and watched the swift drive of the cut fodder over it. Then an idea whipped him to the quick. What if somebody had happened to see, to know? That might be possible. Somebody might have been in the barn. Might be there, even now.
Pownall’s heart thrashed, sickeningly. An obsession clutched him that somebody really was in the barn. Quivering, he recoiled. He must know!
He stumbled to the tall row of openings that, one above the other, extended up one side of the great cylindrical pit. Through one of these openings—later to be closed by doors, as the silo should fill—he swung himself to the ladder. His legs shook so that he could hardly clamber down. His hands felt putty-like and lax. He dragged himself out to the barn floor. Horribly afraid, he peered up and down.
His terror had him as a dog has a rat, shaking him. But in spite of everything he felt the surge of an immeasurable gladness. Ruggles was dead! Dead, and well punished for all his threats of blackmail, ruin, imprisonment.
“He was a skunk, anyhow,” thought the farmer. “I kill skunks on sight. Damned, egg-suckin’ skunks! He’s only gittin’ what was comin’ to him!”
Pownall was sick and weak. His mouth felt baked. He swallowed hard. What he wanted was a drink. Water! He walked unsteadily to the faucet that supplied the horse trough near the big barn door. He drew a dipper of water, and gulped it. The water slopped down his neck and chest, wetting his beard, his shirt. That felt good! He smeared his mouth with his hairy hand, and grew calmer.
“It was comin’ to him all right,” he repeated, and blinked at the October sunshine, golden through the crimsoned maples by the roadside. “Comin’ to him!”
What made Pownall’s head feel so queer? He wondered dully. For a few minutes he stood there at 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 rai
n-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 it had ever known.
When the man from the engine came into the barn to see what progress had been made in filling the silo, and clambered up the ladder, he found Pownall still shoveling, still tramping 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 ver
y 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.
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