THE fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove
that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he
really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit.
His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach
and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering
the situation—the strict confinement of his entire person, the black
darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to
controvert and he accepted it without cavil.
But dead—no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid’s
apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that
had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he—just a plain,
commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological
indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So,
with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep
and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.
But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot
through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud
lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief, stammering
illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments and
headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a
night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a
cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave of
Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.
Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away;
the third was a gigantic negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had
been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was his
favorite pleasantry that he knew “every soul in the place.” From the
nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not
so populous as its register may have shown it to be.
Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public
road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.
The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the grave
had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance and
was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy,
but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully
unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black
trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a
cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong
tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each
in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have
been persuaded to return. But Jess was of another breed.
In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard from
anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously
in their blood, met at the medical college.
“You saw it?” cried one.
“God! yes—what are we to do?”
They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse,
attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the
dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in the
obscurity sat the negro Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth.
“I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.
Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head
defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade.