He had a strong sense of commercial values. To let a marketable commodity lie out and be ruined by the rain was repellent to all his convictions of economics. It might have been as much for the sake of the lime itself as from a sort of half-pity for the deserted lime-burner—for Peter Knowles had not the cast of countenance or of soul that preëmpted a fellow feeling—that he caught up a great shovel that lay at hand.
“I’ll undertake to learn the ropes in a trice,” he declared, throwing his coat on the ground.
Knowles only stared at him in surly amazement, but Ormsby, who had often seen the process, threw aside the half-burnt-out logs and followed the lead of the juggler, who, tense, light, active, the white flare, terrible so close at hand, on his face and figure, began to shovel the lumps into the barrow or cart made to receive the lime. Then, as the wind swept by with a warning note, Knowles too fell to work, and added the capacities of his experience to the sheer uninstructed force of the willing volunteers. They made it short work. The two neophytes found it a scorching experiment, and more than once they fell back, flinching from the inherent heat of the flying powder as they shoveled it into the mouth of the grotto.
“I had no idea,” the juggler said, as he stood by the embers when it was all over, looking from one smarting hand to the other, “that quicklime is so very powerful, so caustic an agent. I can believe you when you say that if you should put a body in that bed there it would be consumed by morning,—bones and all?” He became suddenly interrogative.
“Nare toe nor toe-nail lef’,” returned Peter Knowles succinctly, as if he had often performed this feat as a scientific experiment.
The juggler lifted his eyes to the face of the man opposite. They dilated and lingered fascinated with a sort of horror; for that strange anamorphosis had once more possessed it. All at variance it was with its natural contours, as the heated air streamed up from the bed of half-calcined stone,—trembling through this shimmering medium, yet preserving the semblance of humanity, like the face of some mythical being, demon or ghoul. A dawning significance was on his own face, of which he was unconscious, but which the other noted. How might he utilize this property of air and heat and quicklime in some of those wonders of jugglery at which he was so expert? More than once, as he walked away, he turned back to gaze anew at the phenomenon, his trim figure lightly poised, his hand in his belt, his blazer thrown over his arm, that gleam of discovery on his face.
As the encompassing rocks and foliage at last hid him from view, Peter Knowles looked down into the fire.
“That air a true word. The quicklime would eat every bone,” he said slowly. “But what air he aimin’ ter know fur?” And once more he looked curiously at the spot where the juggler had vanished, remembering the guise of discovery and elation his face had worn.
II.
Late that night old Tubal Sims lingered on his hearthstone, brooding over the embers of the failing fire. As he reviewed the incidents of the evening, he chuckled with a sort of half-suppressed glee. His capacities for enjoyment were not blunted by the event itself; the very reminiscence afforded him a keen and acute pleasure. In all his sixty years he had never known such a vigil as this. He could not sleep for the crowding images with which his brain teemed. Each detail as it was enacted returned to him now with a freshened delight. The objections urged by the audience on the score of necromancy gave him peculiar joy; for he and his wife were of a progressive tendency of mind, and had that sly sense of mental superiority which is one of the pleasantest secrets to share with one’s own consciousness. As he sat on a broken-backed chair, his shoulders bent forward and his hands hanging loosely over his knees, the hard palms rubbing themselves together from time to time, for the air was growing chilly, the light of the embers on his shock of grizzled hair, and wrinkled face with its long blunt nose and projecting chin, and small deep-set eyes twinkling under their overhanging brows, he now and again lifted his head to note any sudden stir about the house. So foreign to his habit was this long-lingering wakefulness that it told on his nerves in an added acuteness of all his senses. He marked the gnawing of a mouse in the roof-room, the sound of the rising wind far away, and the first stir of the elm-tree above the clapboards. A cock crew from his roost hard by, and then with a yawn Tubal Sims pulled off one of his shoes and sat with it in his hand, looking at it absently, and laughing at the thought of old Parson Greenought and his interference to discourage Satan. “I wisht I could hev knowed what the boy would hev done nex’, if so be he hed been lef’ alone.” He made up his mind that he would ask the juggler the next day, and if possible induce a private repetition of some of the wonders for the appreciation of which, evidently, the public sentiment of Etowah Cove was not yet ripe. For the juggler was his guest, having reached his house a few evenings previous in the midst of a storm; and asking for shelter for the night, the wayfarer had found a hearty welcome, and was profiting by it. Sims could hear even now the bed-cords creak as he tossed in uneasy slumber up in the roof-room, so still the house had grown.