But a sinister, opposing fate decreed that Gussie’s final hour had come. A secret snare lay in his path, half-buried in the hard, unyielding mud.
There it lay hidden in the dark, sticking up like a waiting noose to catch his hurrying foot: a treacherous loop of rusty wire discarded from a bale of hay, dropped on the road by a passing wagon; or thrown there by some careless hand,—how long ago, no one could tell.
A running jump, and he’d clear the track!... But tripping on the wire, he was thrown headlong across the rail; his unloved, unregarded body falling an instant victim to the murderous wheels of the heedless engine.
The morning after the raffle at Carmelite’s house, the East Green was in a veritable fever of excitement. Such a number of things had happened, it seemed that all the neighbors of the Green were out-of-doors discussing the strange events. Some amused, others genuinely distressed; all amazed and amazingly voluble.
Nobody appeared to be concerned about work. Women on their way to market stopped at front gates to laugh about the “upsetment” Gussie caused at the raffle. Some stood on street corners rehearsing the account of Tempe’s mysterious drowning in the well, and the new pleasure that awaited them at her approaching funeral. While others spoke in awed tones of the disorderly conduct of Gussie at Carmelite’s house, and the disastrous fate that followed him on his way home.
Where did he go after the women carried him out of Carmelite’s kitchen and left him on the street? They asked one another. Nobody remembered seeing him at Tempe’s wake.... Maybe Gussie was drunk when the engine knocked him down?...
And what made them leave him out there on the track alone? Didn’t nobody on the engine know they had runned over a man?... Who found the body first, and went and carried Aunt Fisky the bad news?
So the comment and questioning continued. But no one seemed to have any definite knowledge of the sad tragedy. All Carmelite knew was what Aunt Fisky had told her when she went to bring her the quilt, early that morning. The old woman said she got up about six o’clock; and when she opened the gate to let the ducks out to the crawfish pond, she saw a crowd of people standing by the switch, across the Green. She went over to see what had happened, and they told her that Gussie had been run over by the switch engine sometime during the night. That just a short while before, the man in charge of the switch lights found the body when he was going his rounds; and they were waiting for the coroner to come before the body could be moved.