Mrs Skaggss Husbands | Page 9

be you?' And I sez, 'Skaggs! damn you, Skaggs!
Look at me! Gimme back my wife and child, gimme back the money
you stole, gimme back the good name you took away, gimme back the
health you ruined, gimme back the last twelve years! Give 'em to me,
damn you, quick, before I cuts your heart out!' And naterally, Tommy,
he can't do it. And so I cuts his heart out, my boy; I cuts his heart out."
The purely animal fury of his eye suddenly changed again to cunning.
"You think they hangs me for it, Tommy, but they don't. Not much,
Tommy. I goes to the biggest lawyer there, and I says to him, 'Salviated
by merkery,--you hear me,--salviated by merkery.' And he winks at me,
and he goes to the judge, and he sez, 'This yer unfortnet man isn't
responsible,--he's been salviated by merkery.' And he brings witnesses;
you comes, Tommy, and you sez ez how you've seen me took bad afore;
and the doctor, he comes, and he sez as how he's seen me frightful; and
the jury, without leavin' their seats, brings in a verdict o' justifiable
insanity,--salviated by merkery."
In the excitement of his climax he had risen to his feet, but would have
fallen had not Tommy caught him and led him into the open air. In this

sharper light there was an odd change visible in his yellow-white
face,--a change which caused Tommy to hurriedly support him, half
leading, half dragging him toward the little cabin. When they had
reached it, Tommy placed him on a rude "bunk," or shelf, and stood for
a moment in anxious contemplation of the tremor-stricken man before
him. Then he said rapidly: "Listen, Uncle Ben. I'm goin' to town--to
town, you understand-- for the doctor. You're not to get up or move on
any account until I return. Do you hear?" Johnson nodded violently.
"I'll be back in two hours." In another moment he was gone.
For an hour Johnson kept his word. Then he suddenly sat up, and began
to gaze fixedly at a corner of the cabin. From gazing at it he began to
smile, from smiling at it he began to talk, from talking at it he began to
scream, from screaming he passed to cursing and sobbing wildly. Then
he lay quiet again.
He was so still that to merely human eyes he might have seemed asleep
or dead. But a squirrel, that, emboldened by the stillness, had entered
from the roof, stopped short upon a beam above the bunk, for he saw
that the man's foot was slowly and cautiously moving toward the floor,
and that the man's eyes were as intent and watchful as his own.
Presently, still without a sound, both feet were upon the floor. And then
the bunk creaked, and the squirrel whisked into the eaves of the roof.
When he peered forth again, everything was quiet, and the man was
gone.
An hour later two muleteers on the Placerville Road passed a man with
dishevelled hair, glaring, bloodshot eyes, and clothes torn with bramble
and stained with the red dust of the mountain. They pursued him, when
he turned fiercely on the foremost, wrested a pistol from his grasp, and
broke away. Later still, when the sun had dropped behind Payne's
Ridge, the underbrush on Deadwood Slope crackled with a stealthy but
continuous tread. It must have been an animal whose dimly outlined
bulk, in the gathering darkness, showed here and there in vague but
incessant motion; it could be nothing but an animal whose utterance
was at once so incoherent, monotonous, and unremitting. Yet, when the
sound came nearer, and the chaparral was parted, it seemed to be a man,

and that man Johnson.
Above the baying of phantasmal hounds that pressed him hard and
drove him on, with never rest or mercy; above the lashing of a spectral
whip that curled about his limbs, sang in his ears, and continually stung
him forward; above the outcries of the unclean shapes that thronged
about him,--he could still distinguish one real sound,--the rush and
sweep of hurrying waters. The Stanislaus River! A thousand feet below
him drove its yellowing current. Through all the vacillations of his
unseated mind he had clung to one idea,--to reach the river, to lave in it,
to swim it if need be, but to put it forever between him and the harrying
shapes, to drown forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to
wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now
he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to
stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld
by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until,
rolling,