The lamp flickered and jumped at the stamping in the bar.
There was a frantic quality in that noise, laughter and exclamation mixed with a wild shouting that made the crazy partition quiver. It was a mad reaction from the common weight of despair.
From the bed in the room behind you could watch the door....
Paradise Town was a broken link in the chain of civilization; it might have been written in letters of rusted blood on the map. Its pioneers had forsaken it cursing, its trees had been burned for firewood, its earth had been riddled in vain for gold. All that was left of it was huddled near the shanty where men could buy drink and blur the spell of awful loneliness that shut them away from life. It was worse at night. With the darkness fell a heavier sense of the distance of human help, and Paradise was an island in a black sea of haunted land. East and west, wide and silent, the unknown emptiness lapped it in.
Ill-luck and some bitter trick had stranded the M'Kune Tragedy Company in this dreadful place. Night after night they played in a shingle hut with their useless scenery stacked outside; night after night M'Kune broke it to his scared company that they hadn't yet got their fares. Fear and a kind of superstition worked in their minds until they were seized with panic. In the daylight the men hung about the bar, muttering; and the women herded by themselves, packed like hens in a strange run, hysterically afraid. Prisoners in a desert, when night had fallen they wandered away to the railroad track and watched. Towards midnight would rise a red gleam on the far horizon, and they would hear a distant rumbling, gathering to a roar, till the darkness was split by a whizzing bar of light. By it went, the great, glaring thing full of life, terrible in its rush, and leaving the night immeasurably darker. Among the watchers the men would affect to whistle. If they couldn't board her to-night they might manage it to-morrow.... But the women caught each other's hands fast, and shuddered. Latterly they had felt as if the train were a devil that counted and kept them there.
But their desperate plight inspired them. Never in their lives had these poor mummers so hurled themselves into their parts; never again would they murder and cheat and punish with such passionate realism. Their fate hung upon it. Penniless and trapped, their solitary chance of rescue lay in witching all Paradise to stare at them and furnish the wherewithal.
"Keep it up," urged M'Kune when a tired actress flagged. The hut was full and airless, but a few men were sullenly hanging back in the doorway, drawn thither, but arguing if it was worth it to step inside. "Keep it up!" hissed M'Kune.
And the heroine flung herself between the hero and the villain's knife, slipped as she ran, and was hurt, but struggled up and cried out her tottering defiance, bringing the house down before she dropped on her face.
That was the last night of crazed endeavour. The curtain came rocking down, and the villain—M'Kune—cheated the gallows to run feverishly through his receipts. All Paradise was vociferating behind that flapping rag, but amidst the din the players had heard their manager's yell of triumph. They had made up their fares at last.
The Tragedy Company scattered and fled, each in search of his own belongings; but they had little to gather, and the night wind blew them together like drifting leaves. They durst not squander their means of escaping, durst not loiter. The train, thundering by in its midnight passage, must lift them out of this nightmare town. Waiting they filled the bar, singing and shouting like lunatics, beside themselves with joy.