Part 31 (1/2)
If you'd been men you'd had one long ago, but you're just--just stock. I'd rather be an outlaw on the mountain than any of you; I'd ruther be what you think I am; by G.o.d!” he cried out of his bitterness of spirit, ”but I'd ruther be Valentine Simmons!”
”Have you got the options?” Entriken demanded--”all them that Pompey had and you bought?”
Gordon vanished into the house, and reappeared with the original contracts in his grasp.
”Here they are,” he exclaimed; ”I paid eighty-nine thousand dollars to get them, and they're worth--that,” he flung them with a quick gesture into the air, and the rising wind scattered them fluttering over the sere gra.s.s. ”Scrabble for them in the dirt.”
”You c'n throw them away now the railroad's left you.”
”And before,” Gordon Makimmon demanded, ”do you think I couldn't have gutted you if I'd had a mind to? do you think anybody couldn't gut you?
Why, you've been the mutton of every little storekeeper that let you off with a pound of coffee, of any note shaver that could write. The _Bugle_ says I let out money to cover up the railway deal, but that'd be no better than giving it to stop the sight of the blind. G.o.d A'mighty! this transportation business you're only whining about now was laid out five years ago, the company's agents have driven in and out twenty times....”
”Let him have it!”
”Spite yourselves!” Gordon Makimmon cried; ”it's all that's left for you.”
General Jackson moved forward over the porch. He growled in response to the menace of the throng on the sod, and jumped down to their level. A sudden, dangerous murmur rose:
”The two hundred dollar dog! The joke on Greenstream!”
He walked alertly forward, his ears p.r.i.c.ked up on his long skull.
”C'm here, General,” Gordon called, suddenly urgent; ”c'm back here.”
The dog hesitated, turned toward his master, when a heavy stick, whirling out of the press of men, struck the animal across the upper forelegs. He fell forward, with a sharp whine, and attempted vainly to rise. Both legs were broken. He looked back again at Gordon, and then, growling, strove to reach their a.s.sailants.
Gordon Makimmon started forward with a rasping oath, but, before he could reach the ground, General Jackson had propelled himself to the fringe of humanity. He made a last, convulsive effort to rise, his jaws snapped....
A short, iron bar descended upon his head.
Gordon's face became instantly, irrevocably, the shrunken face of an old man.
The cl.u.s.tered men with the dead, mangled body of the dog before them; the serene, sliding stream beyond; the towering east range bathed in keen sunlight, blurred, mingled, in his vision. He put out a hand against one of the porch supports--a faded shape of final and irremediable sorrow.
He exhibited neither the courage of resistance nor the superiority of contempt; he offered, apparently, nothing material whatsoever to satisfy the vengeance of a populace cunningly defrauded of their just opportunities and profits; he seemed to be no more colored with life, no more instinct with sap, than the crackling leaves blown by the increasing wind about the uneasy feet on the gra.s.s.
He lipped a short, unintelligible period, gazing intent and troubled at the throng. He s.h.i.+vered perceptibly: under the hard blue sky the wind swept with the sting of an icy knout. Then, turning his obscure, infinitely dejected back upon the silent menace of the bitter, sallow countenances, the harsh angular forms, of Greenstream, he walked slowly to the door. He paused, his hand upon the k.n.o.b, as if arrested by a memory, a realization. The door opened; the house absorbed him, presented unbroken its weather-worn face.
A deep, concerted sigh escaped from the men without, as though, with the vanis.h.i.+ng of that bowed and shabby frame, they had seen vanish their last chance for reprisal, for hope.
XIX
The cold sharpened; the sky, toward evening, glittered like an emerald; the earth was black, it resembled a ball of iron spinning in the diffused green radiance of a dayless and glacial void. The stream before the Makimmon dwelling moved without a sound under banked ledges of ice.
A thread of light appeared against the facade of the house, it widened to an opening door, a brief glimpse of a bald interior, and then revealed the figure of a man with a lantern upon the porch. The light descended to the ground, wavered toward a spot where it disclosed the rigid, dead shape of a dog. An uncertain hand followed the swell of the ribs to the sunken side, attempted to free the clotted hair on a crushed skull. The body was carefully raised and enveloped in a sack, laboriously borne to the edge of the silent stream.