Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

He was all but knocked out. He had mounted as a fighter gets up under the count—and fights on without exactly knowing. The mare was running head down. He tried his strength again. The reins were rigid; she had the bit and meant to end the game.... He loved her wild heart; mourned for her; called her name; told her of wrongs he had done. Again and again, the light went from him; sometimes he drooped forward to her thin, short mane, and clung there, but the heat of her made him ill. They came into hills, passed tiny villages. It was all strange and terrible—a hurtling from high heaven.... Eve was like a furnace....

And now she was weaving on the road—running drunkenly, unless his eyes betrayed.... The rushing wind was cold upon his breast. His coat was gone; his shirt had been cut. He tried to pull the blood-soaked ends together. At this moment the blow fell.

These Chinese had been quick-handed, and they knew where to search for a man’s goods. He was coldly sane in an instant, for the rending of his whole nature; then came the quick zeal for death—the intolerableness of living an instant. The wallet—the big story—some hundreds of tales in paper! It was the passing of these from next his body that had left him cold.... Fury must have come to his arms. The mare lifted her head under his sudden attack.

Yes, he could manage her now. The bloody mouth and the blind-mad head came up to him—her front legs giving like a colt’s. Down they went together. Morning took his fall limply, with something of supremely organized indifference, and turned in the mud to the mare.

She was dead. The gray of pearl was in her eyes where red life had been.... No, she raised herself forward, seemed to be searching for him, her muzzle sickly relaxed. She could not stir behind. Holding there for a second—John Morning forgot the big story.

Eve fell again. He crawled to her—tried to lift her head. It was heavy as a sheet-anchor to his arms.... Her heart had broken. She had died on her feet—the last rising was but a galvanism.... He looked up into the gray sky where the clouds stirred sleepily. He wanted to ask something from something there.... He could not think of what he wanted.... Oh, yes, his book of Liaoyang.

And now his eye roved over the mare.... Her hind legs were sheeted with fresh blood and clotted with dry.... Desperately he craned about to see further. Entrails were protruding from a knife wound. The inner tissues were not cut, but the opened gash had let them sag horribly. She had run from Tawan with that wound.... He had worn her to the quick in night; blinded her for the Hun crossing, when she would have done nobly with eyes uncovered.... He had not been able to keep her from killing herself.... John Morning, the horseman.... He had left a gaping wound in the spirit of Duke Fallows.... All that he had done was failure and loss; all that he had planned so passionately, so brutally, indeed, that the needs and the offerings of others had not reached his heart, because of the iron self-purpose weighed there.

Luban, Lowenkampf, Mergenthaler, even the Commander-in-chief, looked strangely in through the darkened windows of his mind. The moral suffocation of the grain-fields surged over him again.... He caught a glimpse of that last moment in the ravine, but not the taking of the wallet.... Was it just a dream that a native leaped forward to grasp his stirrup, and that he leaned down to fire? He seemed to recall the altered brow.

The pictures came too fast. The sky did not change. The something did not answer.... Eve was lying in the mud. She looked darker and huddled. He kissed her face, and as he gained his feet, the thought came queerly that he might be dead, as she was. He held the thought of action to his limbs and made them move.

When he could think more clearly, he scorned the pain and protest of his limbs. He would not be less than Eve. If he were not dead, he would die straight up, and on the road to Koupangtse.