“To night exactly at eight oclock we are comin after you in full force to give you a sound lickin. Yore wife an childern would be better off without you, and we advise you to leave the country before that time. If we find you at home at eight oclock you may count on a sore back.
“Yours truly, the secretary.”
The spectators observed that Jim Trundle had read every word of the communication. His eyes, in their sunken sockets, darted strange, hunted glances from face to face, as if seeking sympathy; then, as if realizing the futility of the hope, he looked down at the floor. He leaned back against the counter so heavily that Carden’s thread-case rattled its contents and the beam of the scales wildly swung back and forth.
The group furtively feasted themselves on his visible agony, but they got nothing more, for Jim Trundle did not intend to talk. Talking was not in his line. He knew that at eight o’clock that night he was going to be punished in a way that would be remembered against the third and fourth generation of his descendants—that is, if he did not desert his family and leave the country.
“Kin I do anything fer you in the provision line, Jim?” asked Carden, for the entertainment of his customers. “I’ve got some fresh bulk pork. Seems to me you hain’t had none lately.”
Trundle refused to answer. He only stared out into the golden sunshine that lay on the road to his home. He saw through Carden’s remarks, and his heart felt heavier under the thought that before him were some of the faces which would be masked later on. He wondered if those men knew that a lazy, worthless vagabond could feel disgrace as keenly as they could.
There was nothing left for him to do except to go home. He wanted to turn his mind-pictures of his wife and children into helpful realities. Somehow they had always comforted him in trouble. Oh, God! if only he could have foreseen the approach of this calamity! As he moved out of the store he felt vaguely as if his arms, legs, and body had nothing to do with his real, horrible self except to hinder it, to detain it near its spot of torture.
Outside he drew a long, deep, trembling breath. His breast rose and expanded under his ragged shirt and then sank like a collapsed balloon, and lay still while he thought of himself. He was a dead man alive, a moving, breathing horror in the sight of mankind.
He was sure that it was his strange nature that had brought him to it. Nature had, indeed, made him happy in rags, oblivious to material things. Had he been endowed with education he might have become a poet. He saw strange, transcendent possibilities in the blue skies; in the green growing things; in the dun heights of the mountains; in the depths of his children’s eyes; in the patient face of his wife.
What an awakening! A shudder ran over him. He felt the lash; he heard Wade Sim’s voice of command; then his lower lip began to quiver, and something rising within him forced tears into his eyes. He had begun to pity himself. If only those men really understood him they would pardon his shortcomings. No human being could knowingly lash a man feeling as he felt.