PAGE 7
Mrs. Skaggs’s Husbands
by
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, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, rose, staggered forward, and fell again with outstretched arms upon a rock that breasted the swift current. And there he lay as dead.