The Thunders of Silence Part 2

"Well, I got two there myself," said the policeman; "but that ain't the question now. I see you've got a kind of a little bruised place there on your head. Now then, as a good Amurican tryin' to do your duty to your country at all times, I want you to tell me how you come by that there bruise. Did somebody mebbe hit you, or as a matter of fact ain't it the truth that you jest slipped on a piece of banana peelin' or something of that nature, and fell up against the door jamb of that lunch room out yonder?"

For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a grin of appreciation bisected his homely red-streaked face.

"Why, it was an accident, officer," he answered. "I slipped down and hit my own self a wallop, jest like you said. Anyway, it don't amount to nothin'."

"You seen what happened, didn't you?" went on the policeman, addressing the station master. "It was a pure accident, wasn't it?"

"That's what it was--a pure accident," stated the station master.

"Then, to your knowledge, there wasn't no row of any sort occurring round here to-night?" went on the policeman.

"Not that I heard of."

"Well, if there had a-been you'd a-heard of it, wouldn't you?"

"Sure I would!"

"That's good," said the policeman. He jabbed a gloved thumb toward the two witnesses. "Then, see here, Harris! Bein' as it was an accident pure and simple and your own fault besides, n.o.body--no outsider--couldn't a-had nothin' to do with your gettin' hurt, could he?"

"Not a thing in the world," replied Harris.

"Not a thing in the world," echoed the station master.

"And you ain't got any charge to make against anybody for what was due to your own personal awkwardness, have you?" suggested the blue-coated prompter.

"Certainly I ain't!" disclaimed Harris almost indignantly.

Mallard broke in: "You can't do this--you men," he declared hoa.r.s.ely.

"I struck that man and I'm glad I did strike him--d.a.m.n him! I wish I'd killed him. I'm willing to take the consequences. I demand that you make a report of this case to your superior officer."

As though he had not heard him--as though he did not know a fourth person was present--the policeman, looking right past Mallard with a levelled, steady, contemptuous gaze, addressed the other two. His tone was quite casual, and yet somehow he managed to freight his words with a scorn too heavy to be expressed in mere words:

"Boys," he said, "it seems-like to me the air in this room is so kind of foul that it ain't fitten for good Amuricans to be breathin' it.

So I'm goin' to open up this here door and see if it don't purify itself--of its own accord."

He stepped back and swung the door wide open; then stepped over and joined the station master and the sweeper. And there together they all three stood without a word from any one of them as the fourth man, with his face deadly white now where before it had been a pa.s.sionate red, and his head lolling on his breast, though he strove to hold it rigidly erect, pa.s.sed silently out of the little office. Through the opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the concrete floor of the concourse and pa.s.sed through a gate. They continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.

Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and still is the night marshal in a small town in Iowa on the Missouri River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 G.o.d'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 eyeb.a.l.l.s, 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 ma.s.s of sh.o.r.e 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 ident.i.ty of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason Mallard.

BY IRVIN S. COBB

FICTION

THOSE TIMES AND THESE LOCAL COLOR OLD JUDGE PRIEST FIBBLE, D.D.

BACK HOME THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM

WIT AND HUMOR

"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"

EUROPE REVISED ROUGHING IT DE LUXE COBB'S BILL OF FARE COBB'S ANATOMY

MISCELLANY

THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE "SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"

PATHS OF GLORY

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE A MIGHTY PATIENT LOT.]