The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

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СКАЧАТЬ old farm had been isolated, played out, unproductive. A losing proposition. Even his housekeeper—old, crabbed Mrs. Green—had not wanted to stay there. He had so longed for a fire, for his insurance money, so that he could get away and buy a place elsewhere! And then that night when Mrs. Green had been gone—that high wind, and the crashing thunderstorm at eleven o’clock. The lightning had struck an elm, close to the barn. Half stunned, Pownall had blinked from the house, out into the deluged dark, the flashing dazzle.

      God! Why hadn’t that lightning struck the barn?

      The thought had flamed into inspiration, whiter than the lightning. A match had done the rest. But the tramp in the hay­mow had seen. Had understood. Only fifty dollars had shut the tramp’s mouth and had got him away into the night before the old hand-tub had come pelting up from the village, dragged by long lines of drenched, panting men in disarray. Strange sights in the blinding glare of the flame-sheets from the barn. Pownall could still hear the lowing of the terrified cattle he had released. Gould still hear the thud-thud-thud of the pump-bars.

      Nothing had availed. The house con­nected with the barn by a low shed had gone, too. Pownall had toiled, sweating and rain-soaked, with the others. He had la­bored to exhaustion at the pump-bars. No use! The well, sucked dry by the old leath­ern hose, had made no impression on the howling flames, storm-driven, that had reddened the whole countryside. The house and barn had gone flat in an hour. No one had suspected anything.

      Everybody had been kind. Had com­miserated him. Later the insurance com­pany had paid to the last penny, without question. For the policy had covered light­ning.

      Three thousand dollars. Cash. In place of that useless old set of buildings. Then he had sold the land for eight hundred. He had bought this newer, better farm. He had prospered there.

      At first he had been afraid. But in a year, in fifteen months, fear had died. Nothing had remained of it but a few words. The words spoken by the hobo as he had slouched away with the fifty dollars toward the blackness of the wood lot:

      “Mum’s the word fer now! But if I need kale, I’ll write. My name’s Ruggles. Lucky Ruggles. You’ll mebbe hear from me ag’in. An’ if you do, you’ll be nice to me, won’t you? An’ shoot me a few bucks? I’ll say you will! S’-long!”

      For a whole year, no word of the hobo. Maybe, Pownall had hoped, he had got into jail somewhere, or been killed by a freight. So Pownall had ceased to be afraid. Then the scrawled letter had come, demanding a thousand. Pownall had not answered, but his soul had wilted with the blight of a very great fear. And the hobo had come back, just a few minutes ago. And now—

      Now the man he had so cringed from, in terror, was lying dead in the silo. And no one know.

      “God!” exclaimed Pownall. “Ain’t that great, though?”

      He climbed the ladder; and as he climbed panic struck him again. That shovel! It might have blood on it. Somebody might have climbed into the silo while he had been getting a drink, and might have found it. Might have found the body, too. His mind leaped to those possibilities. He knew that no one had entered the barn, and yet—

      His hands shook as he scrambled up the ladder and sprawled into the gloomy damp of the silo. The little doorway into the silo was green. A kind of subconscious vision touched his mind of another little green door. The door of the room where the electric chair was waiting. With a dry throat and hot pulses the farmer stumbled into the soft masses of the chopped corn, not now evenly spread or trampled down.

      His relief was immediate, vast. Nobody was there. The shovel still remained just where he had left it, against the curving silo wall. Its blade was already buried deep in the drift of flicking ensilage. The pipe, far aloft, was still whirling corn with a roar and rattle, in stinging blasts. A heap, five or six feet high, now filled the center of the silo. The heap slanted down on all sides to the level of the corn at the walls. This level itself was about eight feet from the cement bottom of the silo.

      “God!” grunted Pownall again, and rubbed his palms up and down along his dirty overalls, as if cleansing them of something. Blood, perhaps. But there was no blood on his hands. Nor on the shovel blade either. It looked quite clean and bright.

      Pownall was not an imaginative man. He was a hard-fisted, cold-livered New En­gland farmer. He set to work now, once more spreading and trampling down the corn. At his third thrust of the shovel, he encountered something hard. He prodded, poked away the corn, and saw a boot-heel. He laughed then and fell to his task with a good heart.

      Quite as if nothing had happened he la­bored. With sweat and a great joy, he completed the burial of Lucky Ruggles. Pownall was not afraid any more. Not horrified any more. Only glad. Supreme­ly, triumphantly glad!

      The feeling of the corn under his feet, under his shovel—green grave, that for long months would hold its inviolable secret till that secret could be well and finally dis­posed of—afforded him a kind of terrible joy.

      He worked without effort, up-borne by calm powers. Sweat streamed down his face and body. He reveled in it as in the roar of the engine, the clatter of the en­silage in the pipe, the cascading flood of corn still shooting down.

      As the silo filled, he closed another door. Later, still another. Soon, four feet of packed corn, neatly on a level, lay above the body of the hobo. By noon this had increased to eight feet and more.

      The noon whistle, shrilling far from the village sawmill, shut down the corn-cutting and brought the laboring teams and men to rest. Still Pownall worked on, leveling, stamping down, oblivious to the cessation of the floods of corn. His work seemed to have become mechanical, involuntary. His hands and feet toiled, but his brain took no cognizance of that toil. It was busied with the greatest happiness that it had ever known.

      When the man from the engine came into the barn to see what progress had been made in filling the silo, and clambered up the ladder, he found Pownall still shoveling, still tramping the corn. This was now six­teen feet above the cement bottom.

      “Hey, there!” the engine man laughed, elbows on the bottom of the door into the silo. “What’s the matter o’ you, any­how? Time to quit. Fine mornin’s work!”

      Pownall started, seemed to waken as from a dream.

      “You betcha!” he answered, leaning on his shovel. “We’ll pack this to the roof by night. A fine morning’s work is right. The best I ever done!”

      III.

      OVER AND OVER, all that autumn and half the winter, Pownall calculated everything to a nicety. He did not brood with any regrets, any compunction over the killing. Insensitive, conscienceless, he lost no sleep. But many of his waking hours were de­voted to the ap­proaching last chapter of the story. No detail was overlooked.

      “He’ll keep fine,” thought the farmer with exultation. An en­during happiness was his now that the sole witness to his arson and his insurance fraud had vanished. “He’ll keep, same as ensilage keeps, in the middle o’ the silo. There’s tons o’ corn on him, an’ it’s reekin’ with alcohol.” The alcohol had, indeed, been so plentiful in this corn that some of it had even run out at the bottom of the silo. “He’s pickled, that’s what he is. He’ll be in good shape when I git down to diggin’ him out. But I got to be ready fer that, too.”

      He planned everything to a T. There had been thirty-six feet of corn in the silo, cov­ering eighteen doors up the side. Seven­teen cows would eat about three-quarters of the ensilage in four months. The body of Ruggles lay about eight feet from the bot­tom of the СКАЧАТЬ