“To be hung. To be hung by the neck until dead.”
Over and over I say it to myself as I sit here in my room in the
hotel, trying to think connectedly of the events which have led to the
culmination of this awful thing that, in so short a time, is to deprive
me of life.
At eleven o’clock I am to die; to go out of the world of sunshine and
azure seas, of hills and vales of living green, of the sweet breath of
wild flowers and fruit bloom, of light and laughter and the music of
Life, to----what? Where? How far does the Soul go? What follows that
awful moment of final dissolution?
At eleven o’clock I shall know; for I must die. There is no hope,
no help; though my hand has never been raised against mortal man or
woman--never have I taken a human life.
At the stroke of the hour a great crowd will stand in the prison yard,
and gape at the scaffold, and see the drop fall, and--fascinated and
frowning--gaze with straining eyes at the Thing dangling at the end of
a hempen rope. A Soul will go out into immeasurable space. A purple
mark on my throat will tell the story of death by strangulation. Two
bodies will lie stark and dead tonight--his and mine. His will be laid
in the pine box that belongs to the dishonored dead; while mine will be
housed in rosewood, and satin, and silver.
You do not understand?
Listen, let me tell you! Let me go back to the first time we ever
met--he and I.
After college days were over, I left the Atlantic coast and all that
Life there meant to me, and came out to the West of the sagebrush,
and the whirlwinds, and the little horned toads. And there in the
wide wastes where there is nothing but the immensity of space and the
everlasting quiet of the desert, I went into business for myself.
Business there? Oh, yes! for out there where men go mad or die, cattle
and sheep may thrive. I, who loved Life and the association of bright
minds, and everything that such companionship gives, invested all I
had (and little enough it was!) in a business of which I knew nothing,
except that those men who went there with a determination to stick
to the work till success should find them, brought away bags full of
gold--all they could carry--as they came back into the world they had
known before their self-banishment.
So I, too, went there, and bought hundreds of
sheep--bleating--blear-eyed, stupid creatures that they are! I,
essentially a man of cities and of people, began a strange, new life
there, becoming care-taker of the flocks myself.
A lonely life? Yes; but remember there was money to be made in
sheep-raising in the gray wastes; and I was willing to forego, for a
time, all that civilization could give. So I dulled my recollections
of the old life and the things that were dear to me, and went to work
with a will in caring for the dusty, bleating, aimlessly-moving sheep.
I wanted to be rich. Not for the sake of riches, but to be independent
of the toil of bread-winning. I longed with all my soul to have money,
that I might gratify my old desires for travel away to the far ends of
the earth. All my life I had dreamed of the day I was to turn my face
to those old lands far away, which would be new lands to me. So I was
glad to sacrifice myself for a few years in the monstrous stillness of
the gray plains so that I might the sooner be free to go where I would.
Friends tried to dissuade me from the isolated life. They declared I
was of a temperament that could not stand the strain of the awful quiet
there--the eternal silence broken only by some lone coyote’s yelp, or
the always “Baa! Baa!” of the sheep. They told me that men before my
time had gone stark mad--that I, too, would lose my mind. I laughed
at them, and went my way; yet, in truth, there was many a day through
the long years I lived there, when I felt myself near to madness as I
watched the slow-moving, dust-powdered woolly backs go drifting across
the landscape as a gray fog drifts in from the sea. It seemed the
desert was the emptier by reason of the sheep being there, for nothing
else moved. Never a sign of life but the sheep; never a sound but the
everlasting “Baa! Baa! Baa!” Oh! I tell you I was very near to madness
then, and many another man in my place would have broken under the
tension. But not I. I was strong because I was growing rich. I made
money. I took it eastward to the sea, and watched the ships go out. It
was a fine thing to see the great waste of waters move, as the desert
waste never had. There was the sea, and beyond lay far lands! Still, I
said to myself:
“No; not yet will I go. I will wait yet a little longer. I will wait
until I hold so much gold in my hands that I need never return--need
never again look upon the desert and its ways.”
So--though I watched the ships sail away to waiting lands beyond--the
time was not yet ripe for me to go. Back to the money-making a little
longer--back for a while to the stupid, staring-eyed sheep--then a
final good-bye to the desert’s awful emptiness, and that never-ceasing
sound that is worse than silence--the bleating of the flocks!
* * * * *
It was on one of these trips to the Atlantic coast that I saw, for the
first time, him of the Half-a-Soul.
The hour was late afternoon of a hot mid-summer day. The sun was red
as blood and seemed quadrupled in size where it hung on the horizon
with its silent warning of another terrible day on the morrow.
Block-pavements and cobbles radiated heat, and the sidewalks burned my
feet painfully as I stepped on their scorching surfaces coming out of
my friend Burnham’s office. The hot air stifled me, and I flinched at
the dazzling light. Then I stepped in with the throng, and in a moment
more was part of the great surging mass of heat-burdened humanity.
Drifting with the pulsating stream, I was for the time listlessly
indifferent to what might be coming except that I longed for the night,
and for darkness. It might not, probably would not, bring any welcome
cool breeze, but at least in the shadows of the night there would
be a respite from the torturing white glare that was now reflected
from every sun-absorbing brick, or square of granite or stone. I was
drifting along the great current of Broadway life when----
* * * * *
There was a sudden clutching at my heart--a tension on the muscles that
was an acute pain--a reeling of the brain--and I found myself gazing
eagerly into two eyes that as eagerly gazed back into mine. Dark eyes
they were, smoldering with evil passions and the light of all things
that are bad. The eyes of a man I had never known--had never seen; yet
between whom and myself I felt existed a kinship stronger than any tie
that my life had hitherto admitted. For one instant I saw those strange
black eyes, blazing and baleful, the densely black hair worn rather
long, the silky mustache brushed up from the corners of the mouth, the
gleam of the sharp white teeth under a lifted lip, the smooth heavy
eyebrows slightly curving upward at the outer edges, giving the face
the expression we give to the pictures we make of Satan. These I saw.
Then he was lost in the crowd.
Where had I seen him before that these details should all seem so
familiar? I knew (and my blood chilled as I confessed it to myself)
that in all my life I had never seen or known him in the way I had
seen and known others. And, more, I knew that we were linked by some
strange, unknown, unnamed, unnatural tie. It was as though a hand
gloved in steel had clutched my heart in a strangling grip as he moved
past. I gasped for breath, staggered, caught myself, and--staggering
again--fell forward on the pavement.
“Sunstroke,” they said. “Overcome by the heat.”
* * * * *