Six minutes!
Henry tasted his tea. It was syrupy and nauseous. He spat it out nervously, turned his eyes toward the black window and wrested them away again by main force. He had purposely locked the door and hidden the key in a sack of nails and bolts where it would take half an hour to find it. The front door was locked fast also; indeed the front door had been locked fast for so many years that it was doubtful if the rusty old lock would turn at all.
He had taken off his shoes, carried them deliberately to the attic and hung them over the rafters. Every precaution against a last-minute sagging of his nerve had been taken. He had even dropped the sledge hammer in the cistern, half to guard against his own weakness and half as alibi. The wreck, he had decided, would be laid to train robbers who had been operating on the B. & A. at frequent intervals. Nobody would suspect old Henry Hornbone who fathered every deserted cat for miles around and sat always on the front seat at prayer meeting with his useless ear trumpet slung around his shoulder on a buckskin cord; because nobody ever had suspected him though he had carried on his one-man war against the road for eighteen years.
No one, not even the B. & A. officials themselves, were aware that a state of hostilities had existed between Henry and the road since the first surveyors had come dragging their numbered stakes through his little peach orchard. A few engineers had laughed when they saw the absurd old fellow in his flapping clothes standing beside the new roadbed brandishing angry fists. But when, not long since, a trio of gondolas had broken loose from a slow-crawling freight and gone bumping joyfully down to the station where they crashed through fifty feet of platform, demolished a dozen telegraph poles and a water crane, nobody so much as thought of old Henry. Henry's very appearance was an alibi. He looked like a motherless child, grown to man's stature, grizzled, bewildered, eagerly friendly.
Since his boyhood Henry had been stone deaf. Such fragments of speech as remained to him, made timorous by the vast closing in of silence, were uttered in a shrill yell which the unthinking and strangers assumed to be the babbling of a moron. The amused pity with which his attempts at conversation were received had not escaped Henry's sharp eyes, and he had grown to depend more and more upon his grin as a means of communication with the world, and upon a jerky code of signs and syllables.
No one would have believed that grisly plots were hatched behind the glow of that ingenuous grin. No one in Elsie, he knew, would ever suspect that the sharpened wedge and the plow beams were the work of a simple, grinning old mute. He was safe enough if he could just sit still.
Four minutes!
In four minutes he would be revenged for the invading of his little plot of ground, which his mother had left to him, by men who had cursed him and by steel rails and yelping engines. In four minutes he would have been paid for the dazed wretchedness which had been his when men with law at their backs had come and gabbled things which he could neither hear nor comprehend, but which, it appeared, gave to the B. & A. the little earth he had tended, gave them the right to shower his roof with hot cinders, to slay his quince bushes with sulphurous smoke, to rattle his puttyless window panes loose with the thunder of locomotives.
Four minutes! He held his elbows in a grip that hurt. He twisted his old legs about each other till they ached. His face, with its three-day growth of sandy beard, writhed and twitched. But he sat still.
