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The Thunders of Silence
by
On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven o’clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon a sleeping town on a winter’s night was all about him. But as he turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into Sycamore Street, a short byway running down between scattered buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town’s second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving–he was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down upon his head.
Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the suspect. The suspect returned the look.
What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard face covered to the upper bulge of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general unkemptness of the stranger’s aspect was the look out of his eyes. They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep, and they glared into Waggoner’s with a peculiar, strained, hearkening expression. There was agony in them–misery unutterable.
Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical falsetto:
“Why don’t you say something to me, man?” he cried at the startled Waggoner. “For God’s sake, why don’t you speak to me? Even if you do know me, why don’t you speak? Why don’t you call me by my name? I can’t stand it–I can’t stand it any longer, I tell you. You’ve got to speak.”
Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound issued from his mouth.
The stranger, glaring into Waggoner’s face with those two goggling eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full length and gave a great gagging outcry.
“It’s come!” he shrieked; “it’s come! The silence has done it at last. It deafens me–I’m deaf! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
He turned and ran south–toward the river–and Waggoner, recovering himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could utter no words; the other man did not.
A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice, then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled yellow waters beyond.
The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing.
The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason Mallard.