Pee-wee Harris

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

Pee-wee paused a moment, irresolute, nervous. He had a strange feeling, a feeling of apprehension which amounted to a certainty. And as he paused two charred bits of timber from the old bridge, still held together by a rusty brace, creaked, and the creaking seemed loud in the stillness of desolation.

A rusty can, the discarded receptacle of bait, lay at his feet, and in his hesitation and transient fear, he kicked it, and followed it, kicking it again.

Then, banishing such cracked-up excuses for delay he put aside his fears and went around the tiny shelter to where the rotted door hung loose upon one broken hinge.

Within lay a human figure. The hair was wet and matted and prickly leaves were stuck in it. The face was streaked with blood, the clothes were torn. One of the legs lay in a very unnatural attitude. The eyes were wide open and staring with a glassy look at some rough fishing rods which lay across the rafters above. One of the arms was outstretched and the hand lay open as if its owner were saying, “Here I am, you see.” There was something very appalling about that dumb attitude of speech and welcome when the voice and the eyes could not speak. For he had “got dead,” this poor troubled creature; “got dead” after committing one hideous crime to hide another.

PEE-WEE SUMMONED THE NEAREST PEOPLE TO THE OLD SHACK.

The people in the nearest house along the now deserted highway came at Pee-wee’s breathless summons and gazed down silently but would not touch the figure with outstretched arm and opened hand that seemed to say, “Step in, you’re welcome, here I am.”

So they called the coroner and the body of Deadwood Gamely was borne away and it was soon known that he had died from injuries received in falling down the embankment which he was scrambling up after setting fire to one of the supports of the old bridge.

He had not done this horrible thing willfully, at least not for money to spend. That very day a warrant was issued for his arrest in Baxter City for embezzlement of funds which he had stolen from the bank in which he had been employed. But the angel of death had traveled faster than the law.

That the contractors, or one of them, who wished to benefit the county with a modern bridge had offered Gamely pay to do this dreadful deed of arson seemed certain. But it seemed equally certain that the wretched boy had balked at this frightful enterprise, putting it off from day to day, until discovery and arrest for his other crime stared him in the face. He had waited till the very night before the day on which his petty thefts would be revealed. Then in frantic desperation he had taken this only means of acquiring a sum of money quickly. No one could say this for a certainty.