Part 38 (2/2)
His touch sobered her quite suddenly.
”Kind to 'em--?”
She repeated his words vaguely as though not fully conscious of their actual meaning.
The grip of his fingers tightened cruelly about her arm.
”Ain't I--kind--to--'em?”
”Oh, my Gawd,” she whimpered. ”Oh, my Gawd,--yes.”
He went back to the center of the room and lighted the lamp on the bare-boarded, pine-wood table. Its light flickered in a sickly, yellow glow over the straight-backed chairs, across the unpapered walls, and dribbled feebly upwards to where the heavy rafters of the ceiling were obliterated in a smothering thickness of shadows.
”What're you standing there for? Pull down that blind! Come here, I say!”
The faint, motionless form there beside the dog-house. The wooden, stiffened att.i.tude of it. The great ma.s.s of the chow's rigid body that was gradually becoming absorbed into the gray shadow; that was slowly losing its faint outline in the saturating, blurring darkness.
She did as she was told; hastily, nervously. And then she came and stood beside the table. Try as she would to prevent it her eyes kept on staring through the curtained window.
Again she became conscious of the yelping, the prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling.
”I can't stand it no more!” she shrieked. ”It's too much,--so it is! I just--can't--stand--it--no--more!”
He looked up at her, startled.
”What under the canopy's eating you?”
She sank into a chair. The palms of her hands pounded against each other. In the lamplight her face showed itself pale and drawn with the eyes pulling out of its deadened setness in live despair.
”You got to do something for me, James.” Her voice shook. ”You simply got to do it. I ain't never asked nothing from you before this. I've been a good wife to you. I've stood for a lot,--Gawd knows I have. I ain't never made no complaint. You got to do this for me, James.”
”Got to,--huh? Them's high words, my lady. There ain't nothing what I got to do. You ain't gone plum crazy, have you?”
”Crazy?” She muttered. ”No, I ain't gone crazy;--not yet, I ain't. Only you got to do this for me, James.”
”What're you driving at,--huh?”
She rose to her feet then. When she spoke her tone was quite controlled.
”You got to let that chow-dog go.”
The man sprang erect.
”What d'you mean?”
”You--got--to--let--China-Ching--go! You got to let him get away. You got to make that China-Ching--free.”
He laughed. The laugh had no sound of mirth in it. The laugh was long and loud; but its loudness could not cover the insidious evil of it.
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