FullReads

The cows, with their heads held in the heavy stanchions, had thrown themselves, strangled themselves, tangled themselves–done everything which the ingenuity of their exuberant fear could suggest to them.

Here, as at the well, the same thing happened to every man save one. Their hands went mad. They became incapable of everything save the power to rush into dangerous situations.

The old man released the cow nearest the door, and she, blind drunk with terror, crashed into the Swede. The Swede had been running to and fro babbling. He carried an empty milk-pail, to which he clung with an unconscious, fierce enthusiasm. He shrieked like one lost as he went under the cow’s hoofs, and the milk-pail, rolling across the floor, made a flash of silver in the gloom.

Old Fleming took a fork, beat off the cow, and dragged the paralysed Swede to the open air. When they had rescued all the cows save one, which had so fastened herself that she could not be moved an inch, they returned to the front of the barn, and stood sadly, breathing like men who had reached the final point of human effort.

Many people had come running. Some one had even gone to the church, and now, from the distance, rang the tocsin note of the old bell. There was a long flare of crimson on the sky, which made remote people speculate as to the whereabouts of the fire.

The long flames sang their drumming chorus in voices of the heaviest bass. The wind whirled clouds of smoke and cinders into the faces of the spectators. The form of the old barn was outlined in black amid these masses of orange-hued flames.

And then came this Swede again, crying as one who is the weapon of the sinister fates: “De colts! De colts! You have forgot de colts!”

Old Fleming staggered. It was true: they had forgotten the two colts in the box-stalls at the back of the barn. “Boys,” he said, “I must try to get ’em out.” They clamoured about him then, afraid for him, afraid of what they should see. Then they talked wildly each to each. “Why, it’s sure death!” “He would never get out!” “Why, it’s suicide for a man to go in there!” Old Fleming stared absent-mindedly at the open doors. “The poor little things!” he said. He rushed into the barn.

When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released from its body–a little bottle–had swelled like the genie of fable. The smoke was tinted rose- hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul.