Drury insisted on knowing where the wild duck fell, and Crosson told him
that it was "near where the crick emptied into the sluice, where the
cat-tails grew extra high."
He went on home to his supper, but the thought of the suffering bird had
seized his mind; it flopped and twisted at the roots of his thoughts.
A few days later Drury met him and asked him again where the duck had
fallen.
"I can't find it where you said," he said.
"You ain't been lookin' for it, have you?"
"Yes, for days."
"What'd you do if you found it?" Crosson asked.
"Kill it," Drury answered. It was a most unexpectable phrase from him.
"That sounds funny, comin' from you," Crosson snickered. Then he spoke
gruffly to conceal his own misgivings. "Aw, it's dead long ago."
"I'd feel better if I was sure," said Drury.
Crosson called him a natural-born idiot, but the next day Crosson
himself was across the river, dragged by a queer mood. He took his
bearings from the spot where he had fired his shot-gun and then made
toward the place where the duck fell.
He stumbled about in slime and snarl for an hour in vain. Suddenly he
was startled by the sound of something floundering through the reeds. He
was afraid that it might be a wild animal, a traditional bear or a big
dog. But it was Drury Boldin. And Irene Straley was with him.
They were covered with mud. Crosson was jealous and suspicious and
indignant. They told him that they were looking for the hurt bird. He
was furious. He advised them to go along about their own business. It
was his bird.
"Who gave it to you?" Drury answered, with a battling look in his soft
eyes.
"The Lord and my shot-gun."
"What right you got to go shootin' wild birds, anyway?" Drury demanded.
Crosson was even then devoted to the Bible for its majestic music, if
for nothing else. He quoted the phrase about the dominion over the fowls
of the air given to man for his use.
Drury would not venture to contradict the Scriptures, and so he turned
away silenced. But he continued his search. And Irene followed him.
In sullen humor Crosson also searched, till he heard Drury cry out; then
he ran to see what he had found.
Irene and Drury were shrinking back from something that even the son of
Nimrod regarded with disquiet. The duck, one wing caked and festered,
and busy with ants and adrone with flies, was still alive after all
those many days.
Its flat bill was opening and shutting in hideous awkwardness, its
hunger-emaciated frame rising and falling with a kind of lurching
breath, and the film over its eyes drawing together and rolling back
miserably.
At the sight of the three visitors to its death-chamber it made a
hopeless effort to lift itself again to the air of its security. It
could not even lift its head.
Drury fell to one knee before it, and a swarm of flies zooned angrily
away. He put out his hand, but he was afraid to touch, and he only added
panic to the bird's wretchedness.
He rose and backed away. The three stood off and stared. Crosson felt
the guilt of Cain, but when Irene moaned, "What you goin' to do?" he
shook his head. He could not finish his task.
It was Drury Boldin, weak-kneed and putty-faced, who went hunting now.
He had to look far before he found a heavy rock. He lugged it back and
said, "Go on away, Reny."
She hurried to a distance, and even Crosson turned his head aside.
On the way home they were all three tired and sick, and Drury had to
stop every now and then to sit down and get strength into his knees.
But there was a sense of grim relief that helped them all, and the bird,
once safely dead, was rapidly forgotten. After that Crosson seemed to
lose his place in Irene's heart, and Drury won all that Crosson lost,
and more. Before long it was understood that Drury and Irene had agreed
to get married as soon as he could earn enough to keep them. All four
parents opposed the match; Irene's because Drury was "no 'count," and
Drury's for much the same reason.
Old Boldin allowed that Irene would be added to his family, for meals
and lodgin', if she married his son; and old Straley guessed that it
would be the other way round, and the Boldin boy would come over to his
house to live.
Also, Drury could get no work in Carthage. Eventually he went to Chicago
to try his luck there. Crosson seized the chance to try to get back to
Irene. One Sunday he took his shot-gun out in the wilderness and brought
down a duck whose throat had so rich a glimmer that he believed it would
delight Irene. He took it to her.
She was out in her garden, and she looked at his gift with eyes so hurt
by the pity of the bird's drooping neck that they were blind to its
beauty.
While Crosson stood in sheepish dismay, recognizing that Drury was
present still in his absence, the minister appeared at his elbow. It was
not the wrecked career of the fowl that shocked the pastor, but the
broken Sabbath.
"It seems to me, Eddie," he said, "that it is high time you were
beginning to take life seriously. Come to church to-night and make up
for your ungodliness."
Crosson consented. It was a good way of making his escape from Irene's
haunted eyes.
The service that night had little influence on his heart, but a month
later a revivalist came into Carthage with a great fanfare of attack on
the hosts of Lucifer. This man was an emotionalist of irresistible fire.
He reasoned less than he sang. His voice was as thrilling as a trombone,
and his words did not matter. It was his tone that made the heart
resound like a smitten bell.
The revivalist struck unsuspected chords of emotion in Eddie Crosson and
made him weep! But he wept tears of a different sort from the waters of
grief. His unusual tears were a tribute to eloquence. Sonorous words and
noble thoughts thrilled Eddie Crosson then as ever after.
He had loved to speak pieces at school. Whether it were Spartacus
exhorting his brawny slaves to revolt, or Daniel Webster upholding the
Union now and forever, one and inseparable, he had felt an exaltation,
an exultation that enlarged him to the clouds. He loved the phrase more
than the meaning. What was well worded was well reasoned.
His passion for elocution had inclined him at first to be a lawyer, but
when he visited the county courthouse the attorneys he listened to had
such dull themes to expound that he felt no call to the law. What glory
was there in pleading for the honor of an old darky chicken-thief when
everybody knew at once that he was guilty of stealing the chickens in
question, or would have been if he had known of their accessibility?
What rapture was there in insisting that a case in an Alabama court
eight years before furnished an exact precedent in the matter of a
mechanic's lien in Carthage?
So Crosson chilled toward the legal profession. His father urged him to
come into the Crosson hardware emporium, but Eddie hated the silent
trades. The revivalist decided him, and he began to make his heart
ready for the clerical life. His father opposed him heathenishly and
would not pay for his seminary course.
For several months Crosson waited about, becalmed in the doldrums. There
was little to interest him in town except a helpless espionage on
Irene's loyalty to Drury Boldin. Her troth defied both time and space.
She went every day to the post-office to mail a heavy letter and to
receive the heavy letter she was sure to find there.
She became a sort of tender joke at the post-office, and on the street
as well, for she always read her daily letter on the way home. She would
be so absorbed in the petty chronicles of Drury's life that she would
stroll into people and bump into trees, or fetch up short against a
fence. She sprained her ankle once walking off the walk. And once she
marched plump into the parson's horrified bosom.
Crosson often stood in ambush so that she would run into him. She was
very soft and delicate, and she usually had flowers pinned at her
breast.
Crosson would grin as she stumbled against him; then the lovelorn girl
would stare up at him through the haze of the distance her letter had
carried her to, and stammer excuses and fall back and blush, and glide
round him on her way. Crosson would laugh aloud, bravely, but afterward
he would turn and stare at her solemnly enough when she resumed her
letter and strolled on in the rosy cloud of her communion with her
far-off "fellow."
One day Crosson had to run after her, because when she thought she was
turning into her own yard her absent mind led her to unlatch the gate to
a pasture where a muley cow with a scandalous temper was waiting for her
with swaying head.
Irene laughed at her escape, with an unusual mirth for her. She
explained it by seizing Crosson's sleeve and exclaiming:
"Oh, Eddie, such good news from Drury you never heard! He's got a
position with a jewelry-store, the biggest in Chicago. And they put him
in the designing department at ten dollars a week, and they say he's got
a future. Isn't it simply glorious?"
She held Crosson while she read the young man's hallelujahs. They
sounded to Crosson like a funeral address.
Irene's mother was even prouder of Drury's success than the daughter
was. She bragged now of the wedding she had dreaded before. Finally
Irene proclaimed the glorious truth that Drury's salary had been boosted
again and they would wait no longer for wealth. He was awful busy, and
so he'd just run down for a couple of days and marry her and run back
with her to Chicago and jewelry. This arrangement ended Irene's mother's
dreams of a fine wedding and relieved the townspeople of the expense of
wedding-presents.
The sudden announcement of the wedding shocked Crosson. He endured a
jealousy whose intensity surprised him in retrospect. He endured a good
deal of humor, too, from village cut-ups, who teased him because his
best girl was marrying the other fellow.
Crosson felt a need of solitude and a fierce desire to kill something.
He got his abandoned gun and went hunting to wear out his wrath. He wore
himself out, at least. He shot savagely at all sorts of life. He
followed one flitting, sarcastic blue-jay with a voice like a village
cut-up, all the way home without getting near enough to shoot.
He came down the long hill with the sunset, bragging to himself that he
was reconciled to Irene's marriage with anybody she'd a mind to.
He could see her from a distance, sitting on the porch alone. She was
all dressed up and rocking impatiently. Evidently the train was late
again, as always. From where he was, Crosson could see the track winding
around the hills like a little metal brook. The smoke of the engine was
not yet pluming along the horizon. The train could not arrive for some
minutes yet.
To prove his freedom from rancor and his emancipation from love, but
really because he could not resist the chance to have a last word with
Irene, he went across lots to her father's back yard and came round to
the porch. He forgot to draw the shells from his gun.
In the sunset, with his weapon a-shoulder, he must have looked a bit
wild, for Irene jumped when he spoke to her. He sought an excuse for his
visit and put at her feet the game he had bagged--a squirrel, a rabbit,
and a few birds--the last he ever shot.
The moment the dead things were there he regretted the impulse. He was
reminded of his previous quarry and its ill success. Irene was reminded,
too, for she thanked him timidly and asked if he had left any wounded
birds in the field. He laughed "No" with a poor grace.
She said: "I'd better get these out of sight before Drury comes. He
doesn't like to see such things."
She lifted them distastefully and went into the house. She came out
almost at once, for she heard a train. But it was not the passenger
swooping south; it was the freight trudging north. There was only a
single track then, and no block system of signals.
Irene no sooner recognized the lumbering, jostling drove of cattle-cars
and flats going by than she gasped:
"That freight ought not to be on that track--now!"
She was frozen with dread. Crosson understood, too. Then from the
distance came the whistle of the express, the long hurrah of its
approach to the station. The freight engineer answered it with short,
sharp blasts of his whistle. He kept jabbing the air with its noise.
There was the grind of the brakes on the wheels. The cars tried to stop,
like a mob, but the rear cars bunted the front cars forward
irresistibly. The cattle aboard lowed and bellowed. The brakemen, quaint
silhouettes against the red sky, ran along the tops of the box-cars,
twisting the brake-wheels.
Irene stumbled down the steps and dashed across the pastures toward the
jutting hill that she had so often seen the express sweep round. Crosson
followed.
They came to a fence. She could not climb, she was trembling so. Crosson
had to help her over. She ran on, and as he sprawled after, he nearly
discharged the gun.
He brought it along by habit as he followed Irene, who ran and ran,
waving her arms as if she would stop the express with her naked hands.
But long before they reached the tracks the express roared round the
headland and plunged into the freight. The two locomotives met and rose
up and wrestled like two black bears, and fell over. The cars were
scattered and jumbled like a baby's train. They were all of wood--heated
by soft-coal stoves and lighted by coal-oil lamps.
The wreck was the usual horror, the usual chaos of wanton destruction
and mysterious escape. The engineers stuck to their engines and were
involved in their ruin somewhere. The passenger-train was crowded, and
destruction showed no favoritism: old men, women, children, sheep,
horses, cows, were maimed, or killed, or left scot-free.
Some of those who were uninjured ran away. Some stood weeping. Some of
the wounded began at once to rescue others. Crosson stood gaping at the
spectacle, but Irene went into the wreckage, pawing and peering like a
terrier.
She could not find what she was looking for. She would bend and stare
into a face glaring under the timbers and maundering for help, then pass
on. She would turn over a twisted frame and let it roll back. She was
not a sister of charity; she was Drury Boldin's helpmeet.
She kept calling his name, "Drury--Drury--Drury!" Crosson watched her as
she poised to listen for the answer that did not come. He gaped at her
in stupid fascination till a brakeman shook him and ordered him to lend
a hand. He rested his gun against a pile of ties and bowed his shoulder
to the hoisting of a beam overhanging a woman and a suckling babe.
The helpers dislodged other beams and finished the lives they had meant
to save.
There were no physicians on the train. But a doctor or two from the town
came out and the others were sent for. A telegram was sent to summon a
relief-train, but it could not arrive for hours.
The doctors began at the beginning, but they could do little. Their own
lives were in constant danger from tumbling wreckage, for the rescuers
were playing a game of tragic jackstraws. The least mistake brought down
disaster.
As he worked, Crosson could hear Irene calling, calling, "Drury, Drury,
Drury!"
He left his task to follow her, his jealousy turned into a wild sorrow
for her.
At last he heard in her cry of "Drury!" a note that meant she had found
him. But such a welcome as it was for a bride to give! And such a
trysting-place!
The car Drury was in had turned a somersault and cracked open across
another. Its inverted wheels on their trucks had made a bower of steel
about the bridegroom. The flames from the stove and from the oil-lamps
were blooming like hell-flowers everywhere. And the wind that fanned the
blazes was blowing clouds of scalding steam from the crumpled boilers of
the two engines.
Crosson ran to Irene's side. She was trying to clamber through a trellis
of iron and splintered wood. She was stretching her hand out to Drury,
where he lay unconscious, deep in the clutter. Crosson dragged her away
from a flame that swung toward her. She struck his hand aside and thrust
her body into the danger again.
Crosson, finding no water, began to shovel loose earth on the blaze with
a sharp plank from the side of a car. Finding that she could not reach
her lover, Irene turned and begged Crosson to run for help and for the
doctors.
He ran, but the doctors refused to leave the work they had in hand, and
the other men growled:
"Everybody's got to take their turn."
Crosson ran back to Irene with the news. Drury had just emerged from the
merciful swoon of shock to the frenzies of his splintered bones,
lacerated flesh and blistered skin, and the threat of his infernal
environment.
The last exquisite fiendishness was the sight of his sweetheart as
witness to his agony, her face lighted up by the flames that were
ravening toward him, her hands hungering toward him, just beyond the
stretch of his one free arm.
Crosson heard the lovers murmur to each other across that little abyss.
He flung himself against the barriers like a madman. But his hands were
futile against the tangle of joists and hot steel.
Irene saw him working alone and asked him where the others were, and the
doctors.
"They wouldn't come!" Crosson groaned, ashamed of their ugly sense of
justice.
The girl's face took on a look of grim ferocity. She said to Crosson:
"Your gun--where is it?"
He pointed to where he had left it. It had fallen to the ground.
She ran and seized it up, and holding it awkwardly but with menace,
advanced on a doctor who toiled with sleeves rolled high, and face and
beard and arms blotched with red grime.
She thrust the muzzle into his chest and spoke hoarsely:
"Doctor Lane, you come with me."
"I'm busy here," he growled, pushing the gun aside, hardly knowing what
it was.
She jammed it against his heart again and cried, "Come with me or I'll
kill you!"
He followed her, wondering rather than fearing, and she swept a group of
men with the weapon, and commanded, "You men come, too." She marched
them to the spot where Drury was concealed, and pointed to him and
snarled, "Get him out!"
The men tested their strength here and there without promise of success.
One group started a heap of wheels to slewing downward and Crosson
shouted to them to stop. An inch more, and they would have buried Drury
from sight or hope.
One man wormed through somehow and caught Drury by the hand, but the
first tug brought from him such a wail of anguish that the man fell
back. He could not budge the body clamped with steel. He could only
wrench it. So he came away.
"There's nothing for me to do, Reny," the doctor faltered, and, choked
with pity for her and her lover and the helplessness of mankind, he
turned away, and she let him go. The gun fell to the ground.
The other men left the place. One of them said that the wrecking-crew
would be along with a derrick in a few hours.
"A few hours!" Irene whimpered.
She leaned against the lattice that kept her from the bridegroom and
tried to tell him to be brave. But he had heard his sentence, and with
his last hope went what little courage he had ever had.
He began to plead and protest and weep. He gave voice to all the voices
of pain, the myriad voices from every tormented particle of him.
Irene knelt down and twisted through the crevice to where she could hold
his hand. But he snatched it away, babbling: "Don't touch me! Don't
touch me!"
Crosson stayed near, dreading lest Irene's skirts should catch fire.
Twice he beat them out with his hands. She had not noticed that they
were aflame. She was murmuring love-words of odious vanity to one who
almost forgot her existence, centered in the glowing sphere of his own
hell.
Drury rolled and panted and gibbered, cursed even, with lips more used
to gentle words and prayers. He prayed, too, but with sacrilege:
"O Lord, spare me this. O God, have a little mercy. Send rain, send
help, lift this mountain from me just till I can breathe. O God, if You
have any mercy in Your heart--but no, no--no, no, You let Your own Son
hang on the cross, didn't You? He asked You why You had deserted Him,
and You didn't answer, did You?"
Crosson looked up to see a thunderbolt split the dark sky, but the stars
were agleam now, twinkling about the moon's serenity.
Irene put her fingers across Drury's lips to hush his blasphemy. She
tore her face with her nails, and tried for his sake to stifle the sobs
that smote through her.
By and by Drury's voice grew hoarse, and he whispered. She bent close
and heard. She called to Crosson:
"Run get the doctor to give him something--some morphine or
something--quick. Every second is agony for my poor boy."
Crosson ran to the doctor. He stood among writhing bodies and shook his
head dismally. He was saying as Crosson came up:
"I'm sorry, I'm awful sorry, folks, but the last grain of morphine is
gone. The drug-stores haven't got any more. We've telegraphed to the
next town. You'll just have to stand it."
Crosson went back slowly with that heavy burden of news. He whispered it
to Irene, but Drury heard him, and a shriek of despair went from him
like a flash of fire. New blazes sprang up with an impish merriment.
Crosson, fearing for Irene's safety, fought at them with earth and with
water that boys fetched from distances, and at last extinguished the
immediate fire.
The bystanders worked elsewhere, but Crosson lingered to protect Irene.
In the dark he could hear Drury whispering something to her.
He pleaded, wheedled, kissed her hand, mumbled it like a dog, reasoned
with her insanely, while she trembled all over, a shivering leaf on a
blown twig.
Crosson could hear occasional phrases: "If you love me, you will--if
you love me, Reny. What do you want me to suffer for, honey? You don't
want me just to suffer--just to suffer, do you--you don't, do you? Reny
honey, Reny? You say you love me, and you won't do the thing that will
help me. You don't love me. That's it, you don't really love me!"
She turned to Crosson at last and moaned: "He wants me to kill him! What
can I do? Oh, what is there to do?"
Crosson could not bear to look in her eyes. He could not bear the sound
of Drury's voice. He could not even debate that problem. He was cravenly
glad when somebody's hand seized him and a rough voice called him away
to other toil. He slunk off.
There were miseries enough wherever he went, but they were the miseries
of strangers. He could not forget Irene and the riddle of duty that was
hers. He avoided the spot where she was closeted with grief, and worked
remote in the glimmer from bonfires lighted in the fields alongside.
The fire in the wreck was out now, save that here and there little
blazes appeared, only to be quenched at once. But smoldering timbers
crackled like rifle-shots, and there were thunderous slidings of
wreckage.
Irene's mother and father had stood off at a distance for a long time,
but at length they missed Irene and came over to question Crosson. He
knew that Irene would not wish them present at such obsequies, and he
told them she had gone home.
After a time, curiosity nagged him into approaching her hiding-place. He
listened, and there was no sound. He peered in and dimly descried Drury.
He was not moving; he might have been asleep. Irene might have been
asleep, too, for she lay huddled up in what space there was.
Crosson knelt down and crawled in. She was unconscious. He touched Drury
with a dreading hand, which drew quickly back as from a contact with
ice.
A kind of panic seized Crosson. He backed out quickly and dragged Irene
away with him in awkward desperation.
As her body came forth, his gun came too. He thought it had lain
outside. He caught it and broke it at the breech, ejecting the two
shells; one of them was empty. He threw it into the wreck and pocketed
the other shell and tossed the gun under a stack of wreckage.
He was trying to revive Irene when her father and mother came back
anxiously to say that she was not at home. Her mother dropped down at
her side.
Crosson left Irene with her own people. He did not want to see her or
hear her when she came back to this miserable world. He did not want her
even to know what he knew.