§ 6
They fled through the night; it seemed to Bealby for interminable hours. At last when they were worn out and footsore they crept through a gate and found an uncomfortable cowering place in the corner of a field.
As they went they talked but little, but the tramp kept up a constant muttering to himself. He was troubled by the thought of hydrophobia.
“I know I’ll ’ave it,” he said, “I know I’ll get it.”
Bealby after a time ceased to listen to his companion. His mind was preoccupied. He could think of nothing but that very white man in the chair and the strange manner of his movement.
“Was ’e awake when you saw ’im?” he asked at last.
“Awake—who?”
“That old man.”
For a moment or so the tramp said nothing. “’E wasn’t awake, you young silly,” he said at last.
“But—wasn’t he?”
“Why!—don’t you know! ’E’d croaked,—popped off the ’ooks—very moment you saw ’im.”
For a moment Bealby’s voice failed him.
Then he said quite faintly, “You mean—he’d —. Was dead?”
“Didn’t you know?” said the tramp. “Gaw! What a kid you are!”
In that manner it was Bealby first saw a dead man. Never before had he seen anyone dead. And after that for all the night the old white man pursued him, with strange slowly-opening eyes, and a head on one side and his mouth suddenly and absurdly agape....
All night long that white figure presided over seas of dark dismay. It seemed always to be there, and yet Bealby thought of a score of other painful things. For the first time in his life he asked himself, “Where am I going? What am I drifting to?” The world beneath the old man’s dominance was a world of prisons.
Bealby believed he was a burglar and behind the darkness he imagined the outraged law already seeking him. And the terrors of his associate reinforced his own.
He tried to think what he should do in the morning. He dreaded the dawn profoundly. But he could not collect his thoughts because of the tramp’s incessant lapses into grumbling lamentation. Bealby knew he had to get away from the tramp, but now he was too weary and alarmed to think of running away as a possible expedient. And besides there was the matter of his money. And beyond the range of the tramp’s voice there were darknesses which to-night at least might hold inconceivable forms of lurking evil. But could he not appeal to the law to save him? Repent? Was there not something called turning King’s Evidence?
The moon was no comfort that night. Across it there passed with incredible slowness a number of jagged little black clouds, blacker than any clouds Bealby had ever seen before. They were like velvet palls, lined with snowy fur. There was no end to them. And one at last most horribly gaped slowly and opened a mouth....