A stranger passing by the town lock-up would have seen that it had
become the center of town interest. For the lover of the antique, its
architecture might have had something to do with that. It was a square
box, perhaps ten feet by ten, only a single storey high. On its roof the
cedar shingles had turned to a heavy moss green with here and there
ferns or the dried fronds of ferns, standing up. The clapboards with
which the sides had been covered--perhaps the singing heart of the new
wood was not yet dead and was letting in the cool, fresh air to still
the cry of pain, “Aah-yaiah!” so often heard there. There was no paint
to be seen. Years ago had that been washed away by drizzle and drip of
rain and snow from the heavy, over-hanging trees. A long, broken narrow
board walk led from the street to the steps of the lock-up. There was no
stoop. There were no windows. In the heavy door was set an iron-barred
grating, two feet high and a foot and a half wide. From the lock-up, an
eighth of a mile westward, lay the children’s school. An eighth of a
mile eastward the village paper-hanger had his shop.
The citizens of Northerly had not congregated about the lock-up, passed
it and re-passed it and stared at it from every conceivable vantage
point, because they loved the antique--unless by that antique injustice
is meant. They had heard the age-old cry of pain, “Aah-yaiah!” and seen
a hand cling like a bird claw to the bars, and heard repeated that wail,
“Aah-yaiah!”
The Undertaker said, “We hear Stephen Short beat on the soles of the Sun
Chaser’s feet till he woke up and cried.”
“Oh,” objected the paper hanger, “why did he beat on the soles of his
feet--one foot lame, too?”
The first winked. “Well,” he said amiably, “it’s good treatment for
sun-chasing--all they’re fit for anyway.”
“I can remember,” said the paper-hanger, “when Ambrose Clark was the
best of fellows--before he was sunstruck, you know.”
“Go ’long,” laughed a third man coming up, “who ever heard of sunstroke
making a man behave the way Ambrose Clark does?”
“One thing’s sure,” replied the little paper-hanger bitterly, “what most
people don’t know anything about is what they won’t believe in.”
“Oh, come now,” objected the sheriff, “the Sun Chaser’s plain drunk and
you know it.”
“Well, perhaps he is. I didn’t say he wasn’t. But he’s ill. You wouldn’t
beat an insane man, would you? Yet they used to do that here,
Stephen,--whip them till the welts stood out all over them, and starve
them and put them out in the storm and cold to be cured. What’d happen
to you, Stephen, if you did that?” asked the little paper-hanger
wearily.
Their eyes met. To Stephen Short there came a vague
apprehension,--almost fear. Afar off, down a very long, dark road
shadowed at the end in blackness, light appeared, no bigger than the
palm of a man’s hand. The light was wavering and casting strange shadows
on the blackness and traveling feebly up, up, up the hill towards him.
It was five o’clock and school was letting out. The children began to
pass that way. They went by in a whirl of dust, and, making the steps of
the paper-hanger’s in safety, they cried and laughed with excitement.
“Oh, I thought the Sun Chaser’d catch me!” shouted one.
“No, you silly, he’s in the lock-up.”
“Why did you run, then?” asked a third.
“He’s a murderer,” came the reply, “for he tried to kill Pearl.”
“Oh!” chorused the children.
Giggling and squealing, they peeped around the edge of the
paper-hanger’s porch towards the lock-up.
“It isn’t nithe to lath at the Sun Chaser,” lisped the Doctor’s little
grandchild, “’cause he needs help.”
“Pooh!” came the pert reply from a rosy-cheeked little girl, “my mother
said what the Sun Chaser needed wasn’t help but it was hanging.”
In the lock-up the Sun Chaser had fallen back from the bars, and
leather-shod and wooden-shod beat heavily on the floor. In his delirium
too much called for his attention to leave him any interest in what
passed outside.
It was the old, old question of sun chasing,--to fight through all to
the sun at last, and beleaguered and surrounded by camps of enemies, to
find a way through.
In his weakness, because he needed it more, the more violently did he
struggle towards the sun,--ever towards the sun, wooden-shod and
leather-shod beating on the floor, his thoughts molten lava of desire,
of defeat, of hope. Then, convulsed, he flung himself towards the bars,
gripped them with his white fingers and shook them, crying out,
“Aah-yaiah!” and laughed and shook his tawny hair only to fall back in
defeat--the old defeat.
For a time back and forth between the bars and the floor he flung
himself. Beyond the bars the westering sun had slipped behind gray,
snow-laden clouds. Along the floor lay the path out, clip-clop,
clippity-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clippity, clippity-clop to the
west and the sun. Yet within him he felt hope burning to ashes and the
sun gone from him never to return any more.
He lay there, where he had fallen back on the boards, and picked at the
floor--picked incessantly. Faster and faster grew the beat of his
westering running feet; clip-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip and
stop, clip and hop, clip and stop.
Outside, the light had withdrawn quickly behind snow-laden
clouds,--faster than the swiftest flight of any step.
Once in a while from behind the grating of the lock-up came the old
reverberation of lame steps, fleeing home-ward after sunset, fainter and
fainter: clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop, wraith of sound vibrating
from the prison floor where wooden-shod and leather-shod lay twitching
in answer to the maddened brain. The sun, the sun, always the sun still
seething in the fiery furnace of the Sun Chaser’s mind.
Outside, now here, now there, a window brightened with lighted candle or
lighted lamp. Outside, a month ago, leaves had fallen, fallen, fallen
all night long and all day long. Everywhere in the silence of night had
been heard the mysterious creeping sound of their falling. By day when
the Sun Chaser had sped westward, leaves had lain everywhere on the
outstretched arms of spruces and like golden snow upon the roadways and
little paths. Now there had begun a still more mysterious rustle, an
infinite stirring upon the moss-covered roof,--the rustle of the first
snow.