Part 53 (1/2)
”It is turgid--dark--all is confusion--spirits are a.s.sembling--they are spirits of unrest--there is no peace--no happiness. There is horror in every distorted face--they have met--violent deaths--they want to talk--they clamor to be heard--they--”
”It's a lie!” Mullendore's whisper was shrill, aspirate. ”There ain't no other world! There ain't no comin' back!”
”Clouds roll up--” she went on, ”clouds of red smoke--they shut the spirits out--new ones come--dim at first--but I can't see--yet. Wait!”
The woman's stare seemed to carry her through and beyond the wagon cover into the invisible world she peopled with the dead. Her body was rigid; her face had the ossified gray look of stone; the labored jerks in which she spoke racked her body with the effort that it cost.
”Now--they're coming! The smoke rolls back a bit--I see--quite plain--Oh! Oh!” A look of horror froze on her gray face, and her voice rose to a shriek. ”He says he's Mormon Joe! He cries--Confess! Confess!”
To Mullendore with his inflamed brain and nerves jangling like a network of loose wire, she seemed like a direct emissary from the place of torment, which was as real to him as the wagon in which he lay.
The half-breed had tried to convince himself by saying over and over mechanically: ”There ain't no h.e.l.l--there ain't no comin' back--there ain't nothin' after this,”--but the denial was only of the lips--atavism was stronger than his will. He believed, as much as he believed that on the morrow the sun would rise, in a real and definite h.e.l.l, filled with the shrieking spirits of the d.a.m.ned. In these final hours it had required all his weakened will to hide his fears and keep his tongue between his teeth. Now, like a man clinging by his finger tips to some small crevice in a cliff, he suddenly gave up. As he relaxed his grip he whispered with the last faint remnant of his strength:
”I own up--I set the gun--I--I--”
Teeters slipped an arm about his shoulders and raised him up.
”Where did you git it, Mullendore?”
His answer was a breath.
”Toomey.”
”One thing more--Where does Kate Prentice's father live? His address--quick!” Teeters shook the wasted shoulders in his haste.
The muddy blue-gray iris was divided in half by the closing upper lids.
Beneath the glaze there seemed a last malicious spark. Then his tongue clicked as it dropped to the back of his mouth, and Mullendore was dead.
CHAPTER XXIV
TOOMEY GOES INTO SOMETHING
Few in Prouty denied that there were forty-eight hours in the day that began about six o'clock on Sat.u.r.day night and lasted until the same hour Monday morning. If there had been some way of taking a mild anesthetic to have carried them through this period, many no doubt would have resorted to it, for oblivion was preferable to consciousness during a Sunday in Prouty.
It could not, strictly, be called a Day of Rest, because there was not sufficient business during the week to make any one tired enough to need it.
When the church bells tinkled, the Episcopalians bowed patronizingly to the Presbyterians, the Presbyterians condescendingly recognized the Methodists, the Methodists, by a slight inclination of the head, acknowledged the existence of the Catholics. This done, the excitement of the day was over.
The footsteps of a chance pedestrian echoed in Main Street like some one walking in a tunnel. Children flattened their noses against the panes and looked out wistfully upon a world that had no joy in it.
The gloom of financial depression hung over Prouty like a crepe veil. If Prouty spent Sunday waiting for Monday, it spent the rest of the week waiting for something to happen. Prouty's att.i.tude was one of halfhearted expectancy--like a s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor knowing himself outside the line of travel, yet unable to resist watching the horizon for succor.
The Boosters Club still went on boosting, but its schemes for self-advertis.e.m.e.nt resembled a defective pin-wheel, which, after the first whiz, lacks the motive powers to turn further. The motive power in this instance was money. Prouty wanted money with the same degree of intensity that the parched Lazarus wanted water.
Real estate owners in Prouty regarded their property without enthusiasm, for there were few residences not ornamented with a ”plaster” in the form of a mortgage. Abram Pantin's boast that he never ”held the sack”
was heard but seldom, for there was more than a reasonable doubt that he was able to collect the interest on his farm mortgages, to say nothing of the princ.i.p.al.
The town was at a stage when merely to eat and go on wearing clothes was cause for self-congratulation. It was conceded that a person who could exist in Prouty could live anywhere. Its citizens seemed to partake of the nature of the cactus that, grubbed up and left for dead, always manages somehow to get its roots down again.