A Thief in the Night

Walter tritka could not have said at what moment he had made up his mind to go to America. But there at the edge of the field, beneath a clump of trees in whose shade they had paused a moment to tighten the harness and turn the plow, he turned to his sister's husband and told him.

The other looked quietly at him. He was a big man, with large, blunt hands. His face, burned by constant sun, weathered to the color and texture of old leather, was gentle, benign almost. "Ahh," he said. "To go to America."

"Yes," Walter said quickly, in a kind of assent almost, as though the other had said it first. He was a young man, almost fifteen years younger than his brother-in-law. He spoke with a young man's eagerness, a young man's utter absence of reflection, the slow fatalism that comes with years. "I have thought it over," he said. "This is no life." He gestured, taking in with his sweeping arm the brown broken earth extending to the horizon between intermittent trees, the intermittent houses, the more substantial clutter of the village beyond.

"What is there here for a man?" he said.

"You are absolutely right," his brother-in-law said, though he did not look up from the harness at which he was bent, his hands did not cease upon the leather. Before him the horse stood immobile, as though carved of wood, the reek of its sweat rising in waves. It blew over them upon the noon's hot, gentle suspiration.

"You work and you work, and you grow old with nothing to show for it," Walter said with bitterness.

"It is the way things are," his brother-in-law said quietly.

"My own father died in this field, dropped dead among the furrows," he said."

The other rose. "I know," he said. He clucked to the horse, the plow lines already settled about him, his back braced to their pull. He held the plow with both hands. "Come," he said. "The day is going, and it is a big field."

But Walter was not through. They moved out from under the trees, advancing across the field into the bright, fecund stillness of midday. They moved slowly, the one rigid against the pull of horse and plow, the other ten feet behind scattering seed, in a tableau as changeless and immemorial as the land itself. That's it, he thought. Am I supposed to die like my father too, falling here among the furrows, with nothing to show for my life? "Is that it?" he said aloud, loudly, so that ahead his brother-in-law half turned and spoke across his shoulder.

"What?" he said.

And without ceasing, his right arm moving in broad, measured arcs above the earth while from his hand seeds fell in flurries gentle as snow, he went on to list the entire harsh catalog of his grievances, while now and then his brother-in-law would reply, not ceasing either, both of them continuing to advance over the field that same, undeviable distance apart, in the same undeviable attitudes of plowing and sowing, so that from afar it was as if they were not even aware of each other's presence.

At the day's close they unharnessed the horse, leaving the plow in the field where it stood. In the distance they could see others doing likewise, the plows upright, standing in silhouette like sudden bizarre shoots. They led the horse from the field, down to the road where they would meet the others, returning also to the village, to home; vague shapes, shadows in movement along the dust, quietly murmurous above the rising click and whir of insects, though Walter knew them all by their voices, their walk. Though their faces were but faint blurs in the dying light he knew as well how each one looked as if it were full day; each turn of mouth, thrust of nose, each worn and irremediable flesh which he believed to be the heritage of his kind so long as they dwelt in this doomed and bitter land, handed from father to son as though it were palpable as family Bible or gold watch. Of course, he thought. It is fine here for the Count and for people like Zemcik. They don't have to sweat in the fields like animals day after day, burning up in the summer, freezing in winter. He thought, I wouldn't have any complaints either if all I did was give parties and ride around in fancy carriages brought from Cracow.

And then he found the word he sought and which best epitomized what he felt and why he knew he must leave. Dignity, he said fiercely, to himself, moving at his brother-in-law's side while about them the swift dust shifted and dissolved, the night came on. It is that a man cannot live here with dignity and hold up his head. What he had in mind were the small, daily gestures of obsequiousness. When they talked to the Count it was with downcast eyes, the shuffling of feet; hands rose to remove hats in a single instantaneous reflex. Once the Count had stopped them in the rain, seated within his carriage, bent forward a little, his hands folded upon the silver head

Walter tritka could not have said at what moment he had made up his mind to go to America. But there at the edge of the field, beneath a clump of trees in whose shade they had paused a moment to tighten the harness and turn the plow, he turned to his sister's husband and told him.

The other looked quietly at him. He was a big man, with large, blunt hands. His face, burned by constant sun, weathered to the color and texture of old leather, was gentle, benign almost. "Ahh," he said. "To go to America."

"Yes," Walter said quickly, in a kind of assent almost, as though the other had said it first. He was a young man, almost fifteen years younger than his brother-in-law. He spoke with a young man's eagerness, a young man's utter absence of reflection, the slow fatalism that comes with years. "I have thought it over," he said. "This is no life." He gestured, taking in with his sweeping arm the brown broken earth extending to the horizon between intermittent trees, the intermittent houses, the more substantial clutter of the village beyond.

"What is there here for a man?" he said.

"You are absolutely right," his brother-in-law said, though he did not look up from the harness at which he was bent, his hands did not cease upon the leather. Before him the horse stood immobile, as though carved of wood, the reek of its sweat rising in waves. It blew over them upon the noon's hot, gentle suspiration.

"You work and you work, and you grow old with nothing to show for it," Walter said with bitterness.

"It is the way things aÈe," his brother-in-law said quietly.

"My own father died in this field, dropped dead among the furrows," he said."

The other rose. "I know," he said. He clucked to the horse, the plow lines already settled about him, his back braced to their pull. He held the plow with both hands. "Come," he said. "The day is going, and it is a big field."

But Walter was not through. They moved out from under the trees, advancing across the field into the bright, fecund stillness of midday. They moved slowly, the one rigid against the pull of horse and plow, the other ten feet behind scattering seed, in a tableau as changeless and immemorial as the land itself. That's it, he thought. Am I supposed to die like my father too, falling here among the furrows, with nothing to show for my life? "Is that it?" he said aloud, loudly, so that ahead his brother-in-law half turned and spoke across his shoulder.

"What?" he said.

And without ceasing, his right arm moving in broad, measured arcs above the earth while from his hand seeds fell in flurries gentle as snow, he went on to list the entire harsh catalog of his grievances, while now and then his brother-in-law would reply, not ceasing either, both of them continuing to advance over the field that same, undeviable distance apart, in the same undeviable attitudes of plowing and sowing, so that from afar it was as if they were not even aware of each other's presence.

At the day's close they unharnessed the horse, leaving the plow in the field where it stood. In the distance they could see others doing likewise, the plows upright, standing in silhouette like sudden bizarre shoots. They led the horse from the field, down to the road where they would meet the others, returning also to the village, to home; vague shapes, shadows in movement along the dust, quietly murmurous above the rising click and whir of insects, though Walter knew them all by their voices, their walk. Though their faces were but faint blurs in the dying light he knew as well how each one looked as if it were full day; each turn of mouth, thrust of nose, each worn and irremediable flesh which he believed to be the heritage of his kind so long as they dwelt in this doomed and bitter land, handed from father to son as though it were palpable as family Bible or gold watch. Of course, he thought. It is fine here for the Count and for people like Zemcik. They don't have to sweat in the fields like animals day after day, burning up in the summer, freezing in winter. He thought, I wouldn't have any complaints either if all I did was give parties and ride around in fancy carriages brought from Cracow.

And then he found the word he sought and which best epitomized what he felt and why he knew he must leave. Dignity, he said fiercely, to himself, moving at his brother-in-law's side while about them the swift dust shifted and dissolved, the night came on. It is that a man cannot live here with dignity and hold up his head. What he had in mind were the small, daily gestures of obsequiousness. When they talked to the Count it was with downcast eyes, the shuffling of feet; hands rose to remove hats in a single instantaneous reflex. Once the Count had stopped them in the rain, seated within his carriage, bent forward a little, his hands folded upon the silver head of his cane, discussing casually the weather and the prospects for the harvest while they stood bareheaded in the road, the mud, replying in slow, respectful tones while the rain streamed and streamed upon them. A man should not have to bear that too, he thought. He did not hate the Count. He didn't even hate his land, his heritage, which condemned him forever to a life abject and straight as a corridor along which there were no turnoffs, no doors through which to step. He abjured them. It was as though he had discovered a turnoff, a door. He thought: A man does not have to live here. This is not the only nation on earth.

At his side his brother-in-law moved without speaking, except to respond to those who greeteÈ him. From across the dusk they called to him, his name. They all knew him; in the dying light they could not mistake the erect figure taller than most, the deliberate, even gait. Though he was only forty they spoke to him as they would to the elders; they came to him for advice. After they had gone on awhile his brother-in-law said, "Have you thought about money?"

"Money?" he said.

"They are still charging for boat tickets, aren't they?" his brother-in-law said.

"Yes. Yes," he said. "Of course."

"Well?" his brother-in-law said.

"I have some money saved," he said. This was not strictly true. He had some money due him for work he had done for Burgomaster Zemcik, but it was already owed. But he spoke at once so as not to appear foolish, to appear as though he had had the money for the tickets in mind all along.

"At least it is a start," his brother-in-law said. And he proceeded to explain how arrangements could be made where-by Walter would not need the entire sum of the three tickets at once, only a down payment, an advance, the balance to be paid once he was in America and he was working; which he, Walter, already knew of and had investigated and realized with a forlorn and sinking despair that even barring such commonplace disasters as illness or drought or simply a poor harvest, it would take him five years at least of constant and unremitting saving, of scraping and hoarding trivial, niggard sums, to accrue enough for the down payment alone.

He had been about to tell his brother-in-law that out in the field. That had been the result of a forlorn hope too. He did not know if his brother-in-law had any money. If he had, neither did he know if he would lend it. Yet so great was his despair, his desperation. He was totally devoid of hope. He was about to tell him now. He slowed, putting his hand upon the other's arm, looking across into the other's face. But even in this there seemed to operate some fatalism, some principle of doomed and inescapable frustration. No sooner did he touch the other's arm than there rose the faint, distant drumming of hoofbeats, so that it must have seemed to his brother-in-law that Walter had touched him only to call attention to that. When his brother-in-law looked up it was to stare along the road; when he paused it was only to listen.

At his side, Walter listened too, though there was no interest in his face. He was thinking how he had been frustrated in this too. He looked at his brother-in-law intent upon the hoofbeats. Now would be a fine time to tell him, he thought. He decided to tell him after whatever it was along the road came and went. It was now almost full dark, the short stark twilights of spring, the sudden stars. In the distance the hoofbeats grew. The carriage appeared suddenly, around a turn, a bulky, darker shape behind the dark shapes of horses, appearing between the trees ranked on either side. They could not have been able to tell, from that distance, in that light, that the carriage was the Burgomaster's. Yet they began at once to step off the road, pausing one by one in the dank growth at the road's edge, stilling the insects there so that silence lay in small patches about them. When they recognized the carriage those who were wearing hats began to remove them. Walter could see in that faint light neither dusk nor dark, the slight stirrings about him, the almost imperceptible movements of hand to head. He stood a little behind and to the left of his brother-in-law. They both wore the same kind of hat, one of light cotton, with a narrow crescent-shaped bill. He was already thinking: This once. Just this once.

When his brother-in-law began to remove his cap Walter stood without moving, his arms at his sides, his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not move when the carriage was upon them. It came by at an even pace, not fast, yet with all the clatter and haste of speed, not five feet away, so that any of them might have bent and reached out and touched it; the surging flanks of the horÈes, the wheels, the embossed door beyond which the carriage's interior appeared completely dark, so they could not see if Burgomaster Zemcik sat within, or his wife, or both. Or neither, he said. He spoke to himself, smiling to himself. That would be a good one, he said. Taking their hats off to an empty carriage.

The carriage swept past, raising the dust. He stood without moving, the cotton cap on his head, a young man's smile of defiance on his lips. Yet for an instant his breathing had almost ceased. Now that the carriage was past he breathed quickly, deeply. He looked at his brother-in-law. He had always felt something a little like awe for him. Seeing him there at the road's edge, standing ankle deep in growth, his cap in his hands, he felt almost contempt. He would have denied that his own defiance had been due to the poor light in which nothing could be clearly seen, to the fact that he stood to the side and a little behind his brother-in-law, partly hidden by him. My God, he thought, as though seeing his brother-in-law for the first time. He's a clod. He will live like this to his dying day, slaving in the fields, taking off his hat to carriages.

By the time he left the others he had made up his mind to rob the Burgomaster's house. He said nothing to his brother-in-law. They came to his house first and he said good night and went up the path, as he always did. The others went on beyond. Halfway to the house he paused and stood listening for a moment, the murmurous voices floating on the air, the faint, occasional jangle of harness. Directly before him was the house. On the left was the small plot in which, in season, he grew the trivial crops of vegetables, the tomatoes, onions and carrots out of the grudging earth, enough for his own needs. He stood a moment thinking of the Burgomaster, the carriage. He did not actually believe the carriage had been empty. The Burgomaster often went on trips at odd hours, on business, up and down the province throughout which he owned lands, forest, interest in a railroad. He thought of the Burgomaster's house, dark within its dark grove of trees, the servants dispersed, empty except for the housekeeper, her son who doubled as gardener and watchman. His breathing suddenly came faster now, his blood faster, as though he and his blood knew at the same instant: There is no other way.

• • •

He was not surprised at himself. At supper, eating the thin potato soup, the coarse bread which were the unvarying staples of his diet, he thought: What am I supposed to do, rot here like the others? Behind the flimsy partition erected to make the single room two, the child cried intermittently. He did not think of himself as a thief, a criminal. So great was his hope, his despair, the robbery seemed to him to be the sole logical course and direction open to him.

Nor did he tell his wife. Later, at her side, listening to her slow, faintly nasal breathing while she slept, he thought: I will tell her a rich uncle died. Actually he did not know if she desired to go to America. He hadn't asked her, and she had never told him. He assumed it, just as he assumed each day the sun would rise. Just as he assumed certain things about America, though by now these had been transformed into something like actual belief, as unshakable as the (continued on page 36) Thief in the night (continued from page 34) religious man's belief in heaven. He had never been to America. Neither had he spoken to someone who had. In this he was like the religious man, too. The closest he had come was to receive a letter from a friend, a man with whom he had grown up and who had gone to America a year earlier.

That was another thing. He did not think of America so much as a place in which gold lay in the streets. More often than not he didn't even regard it as a place at all; geographic, within fixed latitudes, occupying space and distance upon the earth. Foremost in his mind was the notion of America as a condition, a Ètate of moral purity alongside which the fact that you had to traverse three thousand miles of ocean and you needed a ticket for which you had to pay, to get there, was only incidental. He thought of America as a region of the spirit almost, so firm in his mind was the notion that at least here out of all the corrupt and bitter earth no man need feel greed or malice or deceit, at least here men lived in a state of serene and perpetual rectitude. He believed that. What misled him was the absence of titles, the hard ineradicable lines of privilege, the familiar appurtenances of spoliation generally. It led him to believe that in America no men took bribes, lusted, transgressed. As though all that were necessary to make men better than they were was a span of virgin continent and hope and repudiation of the bitter knowledge it had cost the old world so much to gain, which was them both. That was crucial to him: the belief that men could (and should) be made better than they were. In other circumstances he might have been a revolutionary. When he read the short, scrawled letters of his childhood friend he did not believe they were from the same man he had known. He believed he would not be the same man, once he entered America.

Now he lay contemplating the robbery of Burgomaster Zemcik's house. It seemed easy to him, so that for a moment he wondered why he had waited so long to think of it. I could have been out of here and gone already, he thought. The idea that he had spent the last few months, even years, at his old life needlessly, tormented him. He became impatient. It was as though waiting even mere hours now, was more than he could bear.

He went over the robbery in his mind. He knew exactly how he would manage it, as though he had already done it and returned. At his side his wife breathed heavily, with a harsh, nasal sound; behind the partition his child breathed, stirred. My son, he thought. My son. The words still sounded strange to him. Though the child was now more than a year old, he still had not yet become accustomed to the idea of being a father. He lay with his arms folded under his head, staring up into the darkness. Through the window starlight fell, a faint blue neither light nor dark, suffusing the entire room as beyond the trivial walls, the rough timber and clay thrown up in haste against the seasons, it suffused the entire countryside, hill and dale, brake and brook, so that for an instant it seemed as though the walls too had vanished and he lay open to the immense, calm, inscrutable contemplation of night.

He woke suddenly. One moment he had been thinking of his son and the next he had been asleep. He had no idea how long he had slept. His first thought was that he had slept through the night and it was now almost dawn. I have ruined everything, he told himself quietly, in despair. Yet he rose abruptly. He flung back the cover and sat up, fully awake at once, staring blindly into the darkness. He came immediately off the bed, not waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He moved like a blind man across the room to the window, his hands extended tentatively before him. Suddenly he was at the window. Star and spring sky soared before him in glittering panorama, lighting up the countryside. By the position of the constellations he knew at once it was only a little past midnight. Thank God for that at least, he told himself, letting out his breath.

By then he could see in the dark. He dressed quickly, soundlessly. It was quite cold. The cold seemed to lie along the floor, the earth, as palpable as water and about waist high. He began to shiver. Shivering, he stood a moment over his son before he left, smoothing the covers the child threw off in his sleep. For you it will be different, he said, soundlessly, addressing the sleeping child. A new life. He felt at that moment between himself and the trivial form beneath his hand a bond of pride and hope and responsibility stronger than anything he had felt before. He bent and kissed the cotton cover, where he thouÈht the child's head to be. Then he left.

He struck out directly for the Burgomaster's house. He did not take the road, though it was not likely he would meet anyone on it at this hour. There is no sense in taking chances, he thought. He went in a straight line from the back of his house across a sloping field of flinty earth and grass and random pines in which, in daytime, children played, and into the woods beyond. Looking once over his shoulder in the direction of the village, he saw no lights, only a crazy mosaic of shadow and starlight. It is as if there is no village at all, he thought.

Yet he heard the dogs halfway to the Burgomaster's house. He moved at a fast, steady pace. He carried a flour sack rolled into a tight bundle beneath his arm. He was warm at once, despite the thin jacket, the sudden spring chill which would be frost upon window and leaf by morning. The trees were still quite bare. Beyond a lattice of boughs soared a sky wild with stars, and a thin crescent moon. He did not once lose his way. He was not conscious of giving direction any thought, yet he moved unhesitatingly and in a direct line through woods he would have had trouble keeping his bearing in by day. If he thought of anything at all it was to remember that his wife would not be alarmed to find him gone, since he often rose at night to sit at the window or before the house, brooding mutely upon the village, the countryside, the forlorn and empty prospect of his fate. But no more, he thought. That is over. At that moment he felt something closely akin to actual joy.

He emerged from the woods on the fringe of a plowed field. Again he did not hesitate. He came out from among the trees at full tilt, and at full tilt continued across the field, his face fixed in an expression of calm and unshakable resolve, his jacket flying. Keeping close to the trees he skirted the field, looking neither right nor left, and it was only after he had gone halfway across that he realized he was on the very field he worked by day. Of course, he thought. Then he thought: So this is what it looks like at night. Yet actually it looked no different. Only the furrows appeared deeper, clawed in savage and exactly parallel rows across the earth; suddenly there blew upon him the ancient, rank smell of opened earth. In all he stood there no more than a moment. Yet before he resumed he leaned forward and with unhurried and deliberate calm, he spat upon the ground.

He had to cross two more fields and a vale studded with stone outcroppings, in which only weeds grew and a brook ran, before he came to the Burgomaster's land. Then he was on the estate itself, before the house, within a grove of trees planted in a phalanx about the house for privacy. From among the trees he could see the house, bulked, blotting out a part of the sky, the stars. The house was in complete darkness. Ahh, he thought. That had been his one source of possible concern, that even at such a late hour someone would still be awake, the house still lighted. Specifically he had in mind the housekeeper's son. Sometimes when the Burgomaster left on a trip he invited friends to the house to sit in the kitchen until early morning drinking the Burgomaster's wine, smoking his cigars. He probably didn't get enough notice this time, he thought sar (continued on page 90)Thief in the night (continued from page 36) donically, thinking of the haste, the abrupt, last-minute bolting at twilight. He and the housekeeper's son were childhood friends. The housekeeper's son had given him such invitations too, but he had never accepted, even before he was married. I don't have to come sneaking around like a beggar just for some wine, he said. Now he stood in the copse before the house, breathing lightly, hearing the sound of his breathing in his ears.

He stood there watching the house for a full half hour. When at length he emerged from among the trees and started for the house it was at the unhurried, even pace of a man simply strolling about the grounds.ÈHe thought that: the slow stride not even very careful, the easy calm. I am not even nervous, he thought. He had expected at least that. Yet his very composure was an indication of the light in which he regarded what he was about to do; as an act justifiable and even actually right and with that significant difference in shading between it and simply stealing, as that between murder and the killing of men in war. He stayed on the grass, off the gravel carriage path which ran from the road to the house and back to the road again in a broad parabola about an eighth of a mile long. I don't have to announce that I'm coming too, he said, speaking to himself.

Yet he knew he could not keep his presence a complete secret. By the time the dogs came from around the house in a fast silent rush he had already taken the meat from the unrolled flour sack. He watched them slow, then trot across the lawn toward him, paired, almost as if in harness; noiseless as shadows. He counted on those first moments of recognition. Then they were at his feet, nuzzling the meat intended for his own supper table while he bent above them and ran his hands over their hard backs and flanks, whispering to them. He left them there. He went on toward the house, into its shadow and past the shrubs which grew in a line before the front windows, himself a shadow.

He found an unlocked window at once. It was as if the house knew him too, as had the dogs. Why not? he thought. I've been here often enough. He had been to the house as recently as a week before, to weed the garden and turn over the earth for spring seeding. One moment he stood motionless before the unlocked window, the next he was through it and in the house. Except for a sliding sound when the window was pushed open, he entered without a sound. He stood there at the window, breathing lightly, staring straight before him though he could not see a thing. Just outside the window insects resumed, shrilling now from the identical spot on which he had stood, as though he had only to step away from a spot to draw sound out of the darkness after him, as a knife draws blood after it when it lifts from flesh. Though he stood there a full moment, he still could see nothing. He did not need to. It is as if I would have to look at the palm of my hand, to see what it's like, he thought. Though he could see only blurred and indistinct shapes, only a little paler than the darkness itself, as though bleached from it, about him, he believed he could find his way about the room as well as in daylight.

Therefore he remained where he was, not so much waiting for his eyes to adjust so he could make out the shapes about him, as listening. To the right and in back of the room in which he now stood was the kitchen, and beyond that a wing added after the house had already been completed, as though as an afterthought, which gave the house an odd, misshapen appearance and which contained the servants' rooms. Even when both the Burgomaster and his wife were gone and the servants dispersed, the housekeeper and her son stayed on, tending the house, the grounds. He knew that. He stood there listening for them. On the upper floor and to the side of the house, overlooking the garden and the gentle vista of lawn and carriage path extending down to the road, was the Burgomaster's wife's bedroom. He listened for her too. He did not know if she had left with her husband or not. I should have found out, he thought. It would have saved me a lot of useless worry. Actually he was not worried at all. What he felt at that moment was an exultation he could not have put into words. It is as good as done, he thought. It is as good as done and I am gone. He did not mean simply the house. About him, stretching away on all sides in the darkness, to the ultimate sea, was the land which he worked by day and brooded upon by night. It was when he thought of the land, and his old life which was inextricable from it, that he felt actual contempt for his brother-in-law. That his brother-in-law chose to remain on the land and endÈre with the undisheartened fatalism of his kind the constant orderly progression of travail upon travail, which was his lot, he considered the height of folly.

When he had stood so for a full minute, hearing no sound, making none, he started across the room. He believed he was safe. So far, so good, he thought. He believed it would be so from start to finish. He was in the dining room and he went directly to where the huge china cabinet stood against the wall. He knew of the safe in the study. There is nothing in there but peanuts, he thought. Where in the house the Burgomaster kept those enormous sums of cash which were legend in the village and which he used to transact business with in the old manner of his forebears, with the actual heft of silver and banknotes in the hand, buying and selling whole estates, forests, half a railroad, Walter had never found out. This is good enough, he thought. He had in mind the china cabinet, the silver plate, trays, candlesticks, glinting in vivid row on row in the sunlight which fell upon them by day.

Now the cabinet was only a pale smudge in the darkness. He advanced across the room, skirting the long table set in the center of the room, chairs ranked profoundly along its length, as precisely as if he moved in full light, though actually he found his way as a blind man would, by feel, the unconscious balancing of faint resonances, sounds, the unconscious sense of presences before and about him. Yet he should have depended more on sight. In his eagerness his eyes were fixed upon the faint smudge of cabinet when they should have been elsewhere, and so the first he knew of the one chair placed out from the table, as thought by the casual movement of a man rising from his place and leaving the chair where it stood, was when he struck it with his knee and it fell over with what in all that silence and darkness seemed like the force and noise of an explosion.

He stopped moving at once. He did not even wait for the sound of the falling chair. In that hiatus between the time he struck the chair and that of its concomitant noise he seemed to muse in impotent and despairing regret upon the insignificance of all human calculation. There was time enough for that: the vain desire to turn back time only a moment and start over. Then he heard the chair strike the floor. He stood there, immobile, crouched, his breath suddenly rapid and light, hearing the clatter fall in echoes about his ears. God, God, God, he thought. For a moment he did not know whether to stay or run. Beyond the window insects shrilled. But when nothing followed hard upon the noise he began to calm. They are probably dead asleep, he thought after he had stood there a minute or so and still no sound interrupted the insects' high thin crescendo pitched at that single note. He believed the housekeeper's son to be lying drunk in his bed after all. Thank God for the Burgomaster's wine, he thought, smiling now, thinking: I could carry the whole house away and he wouldn't know it. Whereas the moment after he struck the chair he saw clearly and unmistakably the disaster into which his discontent had led him, he now felt more certain of the wisdom of his course than ever. Yet when he resumed he was as careful as ever. Carefully he stepped around the chair he could now see, now that it had fallen, leaving it where it lay.

It was five more steps to the china cabinet. When he came and stood before it he was at such an angle that in the glass doors of the cabinet he saw suddenly the stark, full reflection of the window at his back, and a fragment of the sky and the dark shapes of trees beyond. Like the surface of a still pool, the glass held the image of a night filled with that faint impalpable glow which was light and yet not light, and the glitter of distant stars. When he moved it was gone. He moved to put his hands upon the cabinet. In the last ten years he had seen the cabinet at least twenty times a year. Yet this was the first time he had actually touched it. The wood had a smooth, almost malleablÈ feel like that of old silver, beneath his fingers. He felt for the door frames, standing directly before the glass which now held no reflection at all. In one hand he held a broken spoon handle, ground to a thin, flat blade at one end. He probed along the snug edges of the door frames with it, seeking a space wider than elsewhere. When he found it he wedged in the spoon handle. The doors gave instantly, without effort, springing open with a faint silvery sound, like the jangle of tiny bells.

He did not move at once. For a moment or so he merely stood there, the spoon handle in one hand, the yawning cabinet doors before him. Behind him were the traces of his advance; the chair, the open window. Beyond that, on the sparse lawn over which he had come, was the meat he had left for the dogs. He stood as if about to cross some actual boundary, some precise physical demarcation the one side of which was entirely different from the other. It was as if entering the house was one realm, and this another, rather than all of it a single whole; as a man at a river which marks the border of two entirely dissimilar countries will see the same water running along either bank, the same bush and brake growing beyond.

He crossed the river. As he reached into the cabinet he thought: I should have brought a bigger sack. He worked quickly, easily, picking what he sought from the darkness with uncanny deftness, as though the pieces materialized between his fingers by some kind of magic: plate and candlestick and silver. Cool air now filled the room, pouring in through the open window all the while he stood there. In one hand he held the unrolled sack in which he had brought the meat for the dogs; with the other he ransacked the shelves, methodically and with all the aplomb of an experienced housebreaker.

More than cool air entered the room at his back. Beneath the door at the far corner of the room sudden light appeared in a yellow sliver, gleaming upon the polished hardwood floor. He worked on, rhythmic, intent, oblivious to the air and light both. So intent, so exhilarated by his apparent success, that the first he knew of someone else in the room was when he suddenly felt one arm clamp itself about his throat from behind and another pin his own right arm to his body, and he thought, What's this? What's going on? He did not begin to struggle immediately. There was a pause, a momentary hiatus of actual disbelief, as though what was happening to him was contrary to all reason and the laws of nature, during which he permitted himself to be yanked backward and bent upon the fulcrum of a knee in the small of his back.

It was when he realized the sack had been torn from his grasp that he began to struggle. It was as though only the sack, the silver, had any meaning for him. He heard the sack strike the floor as from a great distance. He heard the myriad jangle of silver scattering over the floor in all directions. I will never find it in the dark, he thought. Then he seemed to realize the import of what was happening. I must get away, he thought in alarm. He was strong. Work upon the very earth he disdained and sought to repudiate had toughened him. He broke the hold upon him in an instant. Yet the other continued to flail at him. The hands upon him were like the darkness made palpable. They were at him in a wild flurry, his face, arms, waist; octopus-like. It was as though he struggled with the darkness itself, seeing no face, grasping no shape or body though at last the other clamped a hold upon his chest and they stood locked in each other's embrace chest to chest and thigh to thigh and he could hear the other's breathing going hah hah against his ears. He did not think that he struggled with the man with whom he had grown up and once been quite close. He thought only of the urgent need to be somewhere else, where he did not know.

So when the other called suddenly against his ear, "The light, Mama. Quick, the light, I have him," in a voice as familiar to him as the streets of the village and thÈ land around, he felt the shocking heave and surge of his blood in surprise. I am dreaming, he thought. Yet it was to escape the growing light in the hallway that he struggled again in the other's grasp and freed one arm and struck at the other blindly and with all his force.

The other fell away from him at once, rigid, as a tree topples. He fell with a dull, heavy sound. He made that one sound only; no outcry, no blundering or thrashing upon the floor. It was the utter silence: at once Walter seemed to sense something terrible had happened. Dear God in Heaven, what is it I have done? he thought. Yet he was on his hands and knees, on the floor,reaching out with one hand and feeling for the sack like a blind man, when the light from the hallway fell upon him. He looked up, blinking into its glare. His expression was one almost of embarrassment, like that of a man caught at a child's game. He was in the stance of a child, on all fours, blinking guiltily in the sudden light. He and the woman saw the other at the same instant: he lay sprawled at the foot of the cabinet, his head resting at a bizarre angle, his arms inert as strings at his sides, palms turned up; quite still, bleeding a little from the ear. The woman screamed at once. The lamp wavered, throwing wild shadows over the floor in accompaniment. She screamed three or four times while he continued to gaze in mute astonishment upon the peaceful, open face of the man he had known since childhood and whose death he had now inadvertently caused. He fled without a sound.

He ran headlong from his crouched position, as in a race. His shadow ran before him, around the table, over several upended chairs, leaping when he leaped. Before him was the window: beyond, darkness, the hard shapes of trees. Once on the lawn two shadows ran before him, darker than the darkness. His own was gone. The two shadows were the shapes of dogs and they paced him for a while in soundless pantomime. They moved without effort, untrammeled, as though they did not touch the earth or break the air, first straying far ahead then falling back so that between one and the other he saw the small sudden moons of eyeballs, the sudden glint of teeth.

Behind him the woman continued to scream. He heard her almost to the trees. Her cries had a pierceless, shocking quality, coming so upon the stillness of dead of night. Yet his first concern was the dogs. Though he ran terrified of them. They were German shepherd, savage animals almost the weight of a man. Once he had seen them run down a man, a poacher, knocking him from his feet with the force and speed of a projectile, and upon him in an instant. Be good, he said to the dogs, silently, as if in prayer. Please be good. Yet apparently they did not smell his fear, as he believed. Or perhaps it was simply that they knew him so well, as though being about the house as much as he was gave him a kind of immunity from them, rendered him interdict. They abandoned him suddenly, while he could yet hear the cries. So silent, so ghostlike had they been all the while, he could not say at what moment they were at side and what moment they left him, falling back on the grass. Still he did not slow. He went on at the same pace, running heavily, his body jarring with each step. At his back the house diminished, the single window in which light now shone and flickered and from which the cries continued to emanate, carrying across the stillness. The cries followed him to the trees. It was not until he was among the trees, beyond earshot, that he could permit himself to say that which since the instant of flight he had been trying to deny: She knows me, he said quietly, to himself, in despair. She is calling my name.

• • •

He ran on. He was beyond the copse now, into actual woods. He could no longer see the house, the lighted window, even if he turned. He saw nothing before him. Stumbling, he put out one hand to keep from falling but his hand seemed to be held back, as if tied to his side and he went lunging and crasÈing on among the trees and undergrowth. He fell heavily, the sky abruptly tilting backward, the dark shapes of trees. He lay there without moving, panting, the harsh sound of panting in his ears, the hard feel of earth and broken undergrowth along the entire length of his body. Lying there, he discovered that his hand held the sack filled with silver. He had forgotten about the sack. Now he contemplated it with an expression of actual horror. He saw again the body sprawled bizarrely and peacefully at the foot of the cabinet, the pale glare of lamplight falling into the room, the woman screaming above it. He threw the sack from him in a reflex of revulsion and dismay. The silver made a light, myriad tinkle in the darkness, among the undergrowth. What have I done? he thought. Dear God, what is it I have done? He lay without moving, in the same position as that in which he had fallen, with his face turned down into the sparse grass and in his nostrils the dank cool smell of earth not often in sunlight, shuddering quietly and steadily until at length his remorse was too much to bear and he thought suddenly: It's not as if I meant to do it. He thought: What's done is done, I can't bring him back now. And he went on to berate his friend for his foolhardiness in coming into the room and his clumsiness in striking his head on the cabinet, as though he had done so intentionally, as though the entire night's mischance of events had been contrived solely for his, Walter's, frustration and denial. He began to curse the other harshly and steadily. "The fool," he said, aloud, raising his face from the ground. "The damned stupid drunken fool." He was now bent fully upon absolving himself. He sat up, the sky overhead, the trees around. "It's his own fault," he said. "He didn't have to come after me. What is it to him if someone robs the house, the Burgomaster won't starve." He went on like that talking and talking to himself, his words gaining in vehemence. At length he ceased. It was as though he finally believed the words. Because when he thought again of his earlier impulse to repudiate the silver and leave it here in the woods, it was with astonishment. What could I have been thinking of? he said, quietly, to himself. He thought of the new life in America of which he had always dreamed and which the silver represented. He thought how now he had the silver, within arm's reach. For the first time since he had fled the house an expression other than of fear and despair came into his face: this time it was elation. For the first time in all the twenty-five years of his life he ceased to conceive of his life as a small dark space within high walls, into which no light shone, from which there opened no door. It was as though suddenly a door had opened, and he could see before him his life straight as a corridor at the end of which shone a glittering vista of trees in sunlight, and open green fields. He believed he need only walk down that corridor. Apparently he had no thought at all, any longer, of all that had happened earlier. Because when he reached over and took the silver again, it was with his old sense of purpose, his old air of calm and easy assurance.

Yet when he rose to his feet and went on, he chose no fixed course. He blundered again, picking his way at random among the trees. What is the matter with me? he thought with irritation. It was not until he found himself on the road to the village that he came to himself. He found himself in the center of the road, in the pale dust, alone in a place where he had never been alone before. Before him the village lay around a turn, invisible beyond invisible trees: overhead the constellations kept time, themselves timeless, sweeping silently and grandly across the sky in their immutable courses. He turned suddenly and crashed into the underbrush at the side of the road. He ran a short distance, then stopped. He crouched in the underbrush, leaves brushing against his face, breathing heavily, thinking, What am I doing? I can't go back there. He believed they already knew of hiÈ deed in the village, as though the old woman had come faster than he.

Yet when he moved again he did not alter his course. He went on toward the village, though now he was more circumspect, coming around behind the village, through those woods into which he had passed earlier, from his house and across the field of flinty earth at its back in which weeds grew almost knee high. He was thinking calmly and evenly: Even if they have already found out they will first have to go to the Count for the dogs and then they will have to bring them to the Burgomaster's house, before they can even begin. He believed he was taking no risk. There is plenty of time, he told himself. At the back of his mind was the one unfading hope that they did not yet know of the housekeeper's son, so that he might see his wife and child once more before he left. The hope died as he stood on the edge of the woods, looking out across the field toward the village, and saw the small rectangles of light where houses were, proliferating even as he watched, and the movements of shadows upon the windows and outside on the paths leading to the village square. Without hope he listened to the faint commotion of men hurrying in the dark, the movement of horses, calls, the opening and closing of doors.

It doesn't matter, he told himself, quietly, without conviction, looking out from the trees upon the men among whom he had spent his life and who now were preparing to hunt him down. All that matters is that I have the silver and then I will be gone from here forever. Yet once all hope had died, what he felt in its place was an anguish so great as to be something almost physical. Even when already deep in the woods, doubling back to the shallow stream which ran in a broken course out of the eastern mountains and over the fields and along which he hoped to lose the dogs, he considered turning back to the house. He relived again those moments before he had left the house, hearing again his wife's mild breathing as he dressed, bending once more over his son, aghast suddenly at how far he had come and his own lonely and irrevocable course, and he thought quietly and with surprise: All I did was step out the door.

He was at the stream then. At his back was a wake of torn leaves and trampled undergrowth, marking his passage. The stream ran quietly before him. Ahead it disappeared in the darkness, as in a cave, though he could see, from time to time, the sudden glint of starlight, reflected on its surface. His way was clear. He knew exactly what he must do, step by step, without alternatives. First he would lose the dogs along the stream. Then he would strike out for Cracow where he would sell the silver. Thinking of Cracow, and of the money for the silver, it seemed at last he could see the end to his harassment and running.

The stream numbed his legs at once. He entered clumsily, slipping a little on the wet grass along the bank, the sack balanced upon his shoulder. Once in the stream he began to run. The water was almost knee high, and icy from the snow's thawing in the eastern mountains. Though he ran on he could feel the numbness continue to rise along his legs, as though the actual level of the water were rising; over his knees, thighs, about his hips. He ran on, clumsily, churning the water, though he could not have given a reason for his urgency. He had determined to elude the others by craft. Yet he ran with desperate urgency and not much progress out in the center of the stream, making a noise loud enough to be clearly heard two hundred yards away, churning the water white in the darkness. He was not even aware that he had panicked until he heard, rising slowly and with a sad, peaceful quality over the woods and the spreading countryside beyond, first the voice of one hound, then another.

He ceased abruptly. He stood a moment, breathing heavily, bent forward in an attitude of listening, while all about him the water continued to move forward into the darkness. He listened to the water. Standing so, the water moving so, Èe had for an instant a sensation as of the entire earth – fields, houses, trees, the very primordial crust itself – poised to move forward, headlong into some empty and terrible void. But he did not hear the dogs again. Yet he knew, as surely as if someone had come and told him, that he had been out-maneuvered.

He had counted on his knowledge of how such man hunts were conducted to elude them. Apparently they, in turn, had counted on his counting. "They are waiting downstream for me," he said, quietly, aloud. So did he know they waited outside the woods, standing in quiet clumps at spaced, regular intervals about the periphery of the woods, within the shadows of trees or sitting patiently along the apron of some plowed field. He left the stream. It was not that he could not have eluded them, slipping out between two trees or along some ridge of undergrowth, since he knew the woods and the land beyond as well as they. It is that the entire countryside will be looking for me, he thought quietly, without hope. He thought how by day, now, there would be no door at which he could stop to ask for food or water, no field in which he dared lie down and rest, that did not contain within its sunny commonplace aspect the threat of sudden alarm and capture.

Twenty minutes later he was squatting beside a dirt road no wider than a single lane and which debouched suddenly from among the trees on one side and vanished after some distance, on the other. Few knew of the road; its sole use now was as a short cut through the woods. He squatted behind a screen of undergrowth and tall weeds, the silver at his feet. Overhead the constellations had shifted, wheeling across the sky and into the west, but he was no longer aware of them. He was no longer aware of time, place, the fundamental co-ordinates by which he marked and measured his existence.

He was not aware that he had gone to sleep. It was as if sleeping and waking were but different names for the one unbelievable nightmare which his life had now become, so that he could pass from one to the other by the mere closing of an eye and yet remain where he had always been. He slept suddenly, in squatting position, with his back against a tree and his head resting upon his arms. His clothing was still damp from the stream, and iron-cold. In the sudden dank chill of just before dawn, he began to shiver. Asleep, he was still pursued, still harried from this side and that. Asleep or awake there were moments when despite all despair he imagined himself in Cracow at last, in dry clean clothing from which even the very smell of earth had been scoured, having supper in some fine expensive restaurant and with money enough to take him, and his wife and child afterward, when at length he could send for them, safely to America.

So it was not surprising that at first he believed he was dreaming that the sun had risen and it was day and a wagon was coming along the road. I am dreaming it, he told himself, as a man will in his sleep. But the warmth upon his face and arms from where the sun came through the trees persisted and grew so that at last he stirred and looked up. He had to close his eyes immediately against the sun. It stood just above the trees, in a flat pale-colored sky empty of all clouds. "It will be a fine day today," he said quietly, into the stillness of mid-morning. He caught himself at once. For a moment he had believed that this morning was like all the other mornings of his life, with nothing before it save the peaceful orderly routine with which he filled his days, passing in unbroken succession one into another. "What can I have been thinking?" he said in astonishment.

It was as though only then did everything fall into place: time and place were now fixed in his mind as unchanging and precise as lines drawn on a map, longitude in its way, latitude transverse to it. He was here, hidden in the woods, cut off from his old life as completely and immutably as though he were on another planet, though it was but an hour or two iÈ any direction to the countryside he knew and had grown to manhood in. Even the woods were a part of his remembering, his past, so that within them yet irrevocably separate from them, he was like a ghost revisiting the scenes of its former life. That's it, he thought. I might as well be dead. But that was only an expression of the despair which sleep had engendered. But when he stood up and moved his stiffened limbs and looked across the calm sunny panorama of midmorning while birds wheeled and called across the stillness in the treetops, hope returned. Yet it was the sound of a wagon along the road more than anything else. It was closer now, carrying over the stillness; the creak of bed and axle, the even, un-hurrying clop of hoofs upon hard earth.

He made no attempt to hide. He stood, waiting beside the road, the screen of bushes behind which he had slept not even chest high. Above the bushes, fixed in passive and waiting attentiveness in the direction of the increasing noise, stared a countenance haggard, unshaven, caked with the dirt and stubble of a night's running. He saw the horse first, emerging from among the trees, around a turn, as from between the painted props of a not very professional play; head and neck first, in harness, then flank and back, then the ramshackle wagon itself with its fanfare of clatter and rattle despite its moundlike load of full sacks and the two men who sat unmoving and quiet behind the horse, appearing not to see him and jolting each time the wagon jolted.

Yet they reined the horse immediately at a signal from him. They were not two men: one was a boy, the height of a man but with the gawky, unfleshed aspect of an adolescent. Their faces were alike; he knew they were father and son at once. They stopped almost abreast of him. Yet he had smelled the wagon sooner than that. Still he began talking at once. He scrambled hastily and clumsily from behind the bushes, talking all the while. His story had already been prepared. He had awakened with it in his mind, as though he had made it up while sleeping, as though, being inter-changeable, sleeping could do waking's work. It was the measure of his desperation that he could believe the other would take at face value so implausible a story as that he was hiding there in the woods from the irate brothers of a girl he had loved and then forsaken.

The other listened in silence. He was a big man, though slack. He sat hunched upon himself, on the frail slat of wagon seat, his torso rising mountainously out of the flaccid rolls about his waist; motionless, only changing hands upon the reins. He listened attentively. Yet his expression was neither one of belief or dis-belief. So that as he piled one fabrication upon another, listening to himself, his voice upon the sunny stillness there in the clearing, Walter began to feel his talking was only something on the air, without meaning or credibility, carrying no weight or substance to the ear. He doesn't believe a word I'm saying, he thought.

Yet no sooner did he finish than the other bent forward and made a gesture with his hand, smiling suddenly with brown, gapped teeth. "I know how it is," he said in a loud, cheery voice. "I was young once too," and he winked, his face turned from the boy, smiling at Walter as though with that simple reflex of the eye he created some bond between them, conspiratorial and profound. "What can I do to help?" he said.

"Help?" Walter said in quiet surprise, after him. All along he had been hoping for such a response as this. It was the very reason he had dared signal the wagon. Yet so long had he been in flight, desperate, harassed, solitary, he had almost come to believe it would always be so; pursued forever through one dark wood or another, along icy streams, fleeing through brush and bramble, unshaven, dirty, with no voice save his own despairing cries coming on the air, filling the silence. And so the words, the offer, spoken mildly and casually on the bright morning air, came to him with a shock.

Yet he did not ceasÈ. It was as though he had developed too much momentum by now to stop for shock and surprise even. At once he stepped to the wagon, into the pale dust of the road, as through an open door; above him the other waited, watching, the boy at his side watching. Whereas before the words had rushed out of him pell mell, he now became calculating. He looked furtively up and down the road, dissembling. "Her brothers," he said, gesturing, speaking suddenly in whispers. "They're all over in the woods, and outside watching the road." "Ahh," the other said. "Of course," and he looked too, along the empty road dwindling among the trees, at the trees themselves, as if someone might be lurking there, in the shadows, among the dark trunks, that very moment. Then he looked back. They looked at each other; the one haggard, in the soiled and irredeemable garments he had worn through the night and slept in, waiting there beside the wagon not yet hopeful but with that expectancy in his face as if he could sense again the moment when hope would return: the other with that benign expression of a tolerant uncle who has caught his young nephew smoking or playing cards for money and will not only admonish him, but will abet him at doing it better. It was as though they could read each other's minds. "The wagon," the other said, "you would be safe among the sacks."

Then he was clambering into the wagon. Again he had that sensation as of moving in a dream, as though the wagon, the calm sunny space about him, himself beginning to clamber into the wagon, were but figments of his vain and desperate imagining. It is too good to be true, he told himself. But beneath his hand the old smooth wood of the wagon was real enough, the wheel hub upon which he boosted himself, the sunlight on his face. Yes, he thought. There is no disputing that.

He began thanking the other before he was even in the wagon. In this, at least, he was honest. Though he dissembled everything else, even to holding the sack with that alert and unceasing craft so the silver in it should not clatter, he felt toward the other a gratitude deeper than he had ever felt before in his life. The other quite him with a motion of his hand. "That's all right," he said in a clear hearty voice. "My pleasure. I am always glad to do a favor." And when Walter mounted over the side he offered him his hand, steadying him as he stopped down among the sacks. He stepped gingerly, like a bather entering cold water, setting his mind against the smell which, having had time to emanate and spread, now lay over the clearing like smoke. Well, beggars can't be choosers, he thought.

"It's not the nicest place in the world to lie down," the other said, as though reading his mind.

"It's all right," he said. "It will be fine."

Yet still he could not advance among the sacks. This time it was not his doing, his distaste. He is holding my hand, he thought in surprise. He turned. The other was turned toward him; straddling the seat, one hand clasping his, just as he had left him when he stepped down into the wagon bed, even to the expression of open and hearty amiability. He had begun to sweat in the increasing Playboy sun, his shirt blotched now where it lay against his flesh. "Your bundle," he said.

"I can keep it up here for you."

"That's all right, I can manage," Walter said. He had begun to think the other hadn't even noticed the sack. He was not alarmed. He is just being helpful, he thought.

"I could put it under the seat where it would be out of your way," the other said.

"Thank you. but I would rather have it with me," Walter said. "Besides, her brothers might recognize it."

"Of course. Her brothers," the other said.

But when Walter tried to draw his hand free the other bent suddenly toward him and spoke in a flat, cold, level voice entirely unlike his voice before. "All right," he said. "That's enough of playing games. Just let me have the sack. I don't want to have to break your arm, too." But it was not until the oÈher spoke to the boy – a single phrase, not even peremptory, abrupt; simply loud – who turned and came down from the seat as at a command, toward him, to take the silver, that Walter realized the full import of the other's intent: so utter had been his astonishment. So astonished, so stunned, by the other's sudden transformation in tone and manner and intent, he could only stand there, immobile, gaping, while from the treetops above there broke upon the clearing the abrupt, shrill sounds of birds quarreling; thinking: It's a game. He is playing some kind of game. That's what it is, must be. Then he thought: It's not a game. He means every word. And he began to struggle.

He had the advantage. He was apparently more agile. And the other was seated, half straddled on the slat of wagon seat. Perhaps it was simply that the night's events had exhausted him more than he knew. Perhaps it was that his will, the sheer singlepurposedness of his every action and thought, had flagged for an instant, as it had earlier, that time shortly after he had (led the Burgomaster's house. Because the other managed, without too much effort, using his vast bulk as a fulcrum, to immobilize Walter within a space of twenty seconds, twisting up his arm and pinning it behind his back. Above them, in the trees, the birds had ceased; they could hear distinctly the click and buzz of insects in the sudden silence. It was as though they had paused to listen: Walter on his knees among the sacks of manure, panting, his eyes wild, glancing this way and that; the other at his back, panting too, looking down out of a countenance scornful and cold and as different from his earlier expression as night from day. Looking down too, standing with one foot on the seat and one in the wagon bed, his expression the pair to his father's, was the boy, holding a pitch-fork he had produced suddenly, as out of the air itself.

While he watched in utter helplessness the boy came and took the silver from among- the other sacks, where he had finally dropped it. Watching the boy, the sack which contained the silver, he experienced a fall and cessation of his blood such as he believed came with death. Why not? he said quietly, to himself. I might as well be dead. Yet when the other bent across his shoulder and spoke in his ear, he felt a wild and desperate rage. "What kind of a fool do you think I am?" the other said, his voice contemptuous, harsh, setting up a ringing in his ears. "All that nonsense about a girl, and brothers out for revenge. It would not fool a child." He said, "The whole countryside is looking for you, did you know that? They are out for your blood. They are going to kill you when they catch up with you. Did you know that?" Then he said, "Look in the sack."

His face was gone from Walter's ear; the warm and cool of his breathing was gone. Then Walter could hear the thin clear ringing of silver upon silver as the boy emptied the sack on the wagon seat. "Ahh," the other said, softly. "Ahh." Then he was back again, his breathing on Walter's ear again. "I will make you a proposition," he said. His voice was exuberant; almost light, almost joyful. "Your life for the silver. How is that? I will get you out of the province and for that I keep the silver. Well?" Then he laughed. It was when he began to laugh that Walter, in a sudden fury born of frustration and despair and self-pity, began to shout, his voice ringing over the clearing, yet with a thin, trivial quality, ephemeral, come and swiftly gone on the air, the sunlight, with no echo, no trace left behind. "All right," he shouted. "Kill me already. What are you waiting for? Do it and get it over with."

In contrast the other's tone was one of mild and inveterate reasonableness; almost surprised. "Kill you?" he said. "I'm no murderer." He said, "I don't have to kill you. You're not going to tell the authorities about me. You are not going to tell anyone anything, because they are looking for you. They wouldn't let you say five words." There was no hint in Èis tone, his voice; beyond Walter's shoulder his face remained mild, faintly mocking, sweating a little. So when he made a small, quick, upward motion with the hand at Walter's back, deftly and effectively breaking his arm, Walter had no warning at all. He did not even cry out. He felt only a single hard jolt, as from a blow, at his shoulder, then his entire right side went numb. "That's in case you get any ideas about trying to get the silver back," the other said.

Though he lay upon the hard planking of the wagon bed, the wagon lurching and jolting beneath him upon the hard and rutted earth, the sacks of manure heaped on top of him, he felt no sensation at all in his arm and shoulder for a long time after. He lay in the position in which he had fallen, tumbled huggermugger by them, as into a grave, into a space they had cleared among the sacks. Then they had piled the sacks over him, leaving a small opening for breathing, where his face was. He could see through the opening: hexagonal bits of sky, clouds, the distant edges of trees. It must be like this in a coffin, he thought. But the odor about him was not that of earth. In his nostrils even the rough planking beneath his head gave off the rich, ineradicable smell of manure, ranker than that of earth. I would be better off in a coffin, he told himself. He seemed to see himself as in a coffin: tumbled to one side, unshaven, dirty, in the rent and soiled garments he had been out of but two hours in the past twenty-four. "Dear God," he said, aloud, into the sacks. "Dear God in Heaven." So great was his self-pity at that moment, tears came to his eyes.

At length he calmed. He lay watching the sky, the slow intermittent procession of overhanging leaf and bough. He did not know how long he lay so, nor how far they had come. Maybe we are out of the province, he thought. The he possibility no sooner occurred to him than he thought again of the other's duplicity and his own unwariness, and he began again to curse the entire mischance of events which had led to this moment. All I wanted was to get enough money for a boat ticket, he thought. He had always been an honest man. It was because his sense of justice had been outraged by the inequities he saw all about him that he determined to go to America in the first place. Now he lay brooding upon the enormity of his deprivation, thinking of the night's events and all that he had dared and endured for the silver only to lose it in a single moment's remissness. "He will not get away with it," he said, aloud, bitterly. Still he knew he was no match for the other. The wagon did not cease. It went on, now smooth, now lurching and pitching so that firmament and frond succeeded each other in the winking of an eye. With his good hand he could touch the spoon handle in his jacket pocket, filed down at one end. He touched the handle, the filed edge sharp as a knifeblade. Touching the handle, there came to him what he must do if he were to redeem any part of what it had cost him to obtain the silver; and he spoke it.

"There is nothing else," he said, quietly, aloud. "I will have to kill him."