A rope in the cliff

By Lisett Tapia

Nobody knows

who went up there,

who put the rope

in the top of the cliff.

It was a man

or a young girl

who expect

a warm breeze

or a kind letter?

They lost the hope,

lost the light,

whit the sun,

whit the moon,

whit the sky

in the middle

of the night?

They dead

in the morning,

the rope closed

his eyes...

Or only is

a rope in the cliff,

the wind brought it

and I imagine

horrible things.

The Castle of Wolfenbach

By Eliza Parsons

Part 1

(Fragment)

The clock from the old castle had just gone eight when the peaceful inhabitants of a neighbouring cottage, on the skirts of the wood, were about to seek that repose which labour had rendered necessary, and minds blest with innocence and tranquillity assured them the enjoyment of. The evening was cold and tempestuous, the rain poured in torrents, and the distant thunders rolled with tremendous noise around the adjacent mountains, whilst the pale lightning added horrors to the scene.

 Pierre was already in bed, and Jacqueline preparing to follow, when the trampling of horses was heard, and immediately a loud knocking at the door; they were both alarmed; Pierre listened, Jacqueline trembled; the knocking was repeated with more violence; the peasant threw on his humble garment, and, advancing to the door, demanded who was there? “Two travellers, (answered a gentle voice) overtaken by the storm; pray, friend, afford us shelter”. “O! (cried Jacqueline) perhaps they may be robbers, and we shall be murdered.” “Pho! simpleton, (said Pierre) what can they expect to rob us of.” He opened the door, and discovered a man supporting a lady whoappeared almost fainting. “Pray, friend, (said the man) permit this lady to enter your cottage, I fear she has suffered much from the storm.” “Poor soul, I am sorry for her; enter and welcome, (cried Pierre.) Jacqueline placed her wooden arm-chair by the chimney, ran for some wood, and kindled a blaze in a moment, whilst Pierre put the horse into a little out-house which held their firing and his working implements, and returned with a portmantua  to the lady. They had only some bread and milk to offer, but they made it warm, and prevailed on their guest to take some. The man, who appeared an attendant, did the same. The lady soon got her clothes dry, but she wanted rest, and they had no bed to offer. One single room answered all their purposes of life; their humble bed was on the floor, in a corner of it, but though mean it was whole and clean. Jacqueline entreated the lady to lie down; she refused for some time, but growing faint from exhausted spirits and fatigue, she was compelled to accept the offer; the other sat silently round the fire: but, alas! horror and affliction precluded sleep, and the fair traveller, after laying about two hours, returned again to the fire-side, weary and unrefreshed. “Is there any house near this?” (demanded she.) “No, madam, (replied Jacqueline) there is no house, but there is a fine old castle just by, where there is room enough, for only one old man and his wife live in it, and, Lord help us, I would not be in their place for all the fine things there.” “Why so?” (said the lady.) “O! dear madam, why it is haunted; there are bloody floors, prison rooms, and scriptions, they say, on the windows, to make a body’s hair stand an end.” “And how far from your cottage is this castle?” “A little step, madam, farther up the wood.” “And do you think we could obtain entrance there?” “O, Lord! yes, madam, and thank you too: why the poor old souls rejoice to see a body call there now and then; I go sometimes in the middle of the day, but I take good care to keep from the fine rooms and never to be out after dark.” “I wish, (said the lady) it was possible to get there.” Pierre instantly offered his service to conduct her as soon as it was light, and notwithstanding some very horrible stories recounted by Jacqueline, she determined to visit this proscribed place.

When the morning came, the inhabitants of the cottage set out for the castle. The lady was so much enfeebled, from fatigue and want of rest, that she was obliged to be placed on the horse, and they found it very difficult to lead him through the thickets. They at length espied a fine old building, with two wings, and a turret on the top, where a large clock stood, a high wall surrounded the house, a pair of great gates gave entrance into a spacious court, surrounded with flowering shrubs, which lay broken and neglected on the ground, intermixed with the weeds which were above a foot high in every part.

 Whilst the lady’s attendant lifted her from the horse, Pierre repaired to the kitchen door where the old couple lived, which stood in one of the wings, and knocking pretty loudly, the old woman opened it, and, with a look of astonishment, fixed her eyes on the lady and her servant. “Good neighbour, (said Pierre) here is a great gentlewoman cruel ill; she wants food and sleep, we have brought her here, she is not afeared of your ghosts and so therefore you can give her a good bed, I suppose.” “To be sure I can, (answered Bertha, which was the woman’s name:) to be sure I can make a bed fit for the emperor, when the linen is aired: walk in, madam; you look very weak.”Indeed the want of rest the preceding night had so much added to her former feeble state, that it was with difficulty they conveyed her into the kitchen. Bertha warmed a little wine, toasted a bit of bread, and leaving Jacqueline to attend the lady, she made a fire in a handsome bedroom that was in that wing, took some fine linen out of a chest and brought it down to air. “Dear, my lady, (cried she) make yourself easy, I’ll take care of you, and if you aren’t afeared, you will have rooms for a princess.”Pierre and Jacqueline being about to return to their daily labour, found their kindness amply rewarded by the generosity of the stranger, who gave them money enough, they said, to serve them for six months. With a thousand blessings they retired, promising however to call daily on the lady whilst she staid at the castle, though their hearts misgave them that they should never see her more, from their apprehensions of the ghosts that inhabited the rooms above stairs. When the apartment was arranged, the lady was assisted by Bertha and laid comfortably to rest; she gave her some money to procure food and necessaries, and desired her servant might have a bed also. This the good woman promised, and, wishing her a good sleep, returned to the kitchen.

 “God bless the poor lady, (said she) why she is as weak as a child; sure you must have come a great way from home.” “Yes, (answered Albert, the servant’s name,) we have indeed, and my poor lady is worn down by sorrow and fatigue; I fear she must rest some time before she can pursue her journey.” “Well, (said Bertha) she may stay as long as she likes here, no body will disturb her in the day time, I am sure.” “And what will disturb her at night?”(asked Albert.) “O, my good friend, (answered she) no body will sleep in the rooms up stairs; the gentlefolks who were in it last could not rest, such strange noises, and groans, and screams, and such like terrible things are heard; then at t’other end of the house the rooms are never opened; they say bloody work has been carried on there.” “How comes it, then, (said Albert) that you and your husband have courage to live here?” “Dear me, (replied she) why the ghosts never come down stairs, and I take care never to go up o’nights; so that if madam stays here I fear she must sleepby day, or else have a ground room, for they never comes down; they were some of your high gentry, I warrant, who never went into kitchens.”Albert smiled at the idea, but, resuming his discourse, asked the woman to whom the castle belonged? “To a great Baron”, (said she) but I forget his name,” “And how long have you lived here?” “Many a long year, friend; we have a small matter allowed us to live upon, a good garden that gives us plenty of vegetables, for my husband, you must know, is a bit of a gardener, and works in it when he is able.” “And where is he now?” (said Albert) “Gone to the village six leagues off to get a little meat, bread, and wine.” “What! does he walk?” “Lord help him, poor soul, he walk! no, bless your heart, he rides upon our faithful Little ass, and takes care never to overload her, as we don’t want much meat, thank God. But where will you like to sleep? (added she;) will you go up stairs, or shall I bring some bedding in the next room?”Albert hesitated, but, ashamed to have less courage than his mistress, asked if there was any room near the lady’s? “Aye, sure, (answered Bertha) close to her there is one as good as hers.” “Then I will sleep there (said he.) His good hostess now nimbly as she could, bestirred herself to put his room in order, and was very careful not to disturb the lady. Albert was soon accommodated and retired to rest.

Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf

By George W. M. Reynolds

PART I






PROLOGUE.


It was the month of January, 1516.

The night was dark and tempestuous; the thunder growled around; the

lightning flashed at short intervals: and the wind swept furiously along
in sudden and fitful gusts.


melody no more, but rushed on with deafening din, mingling their torrent
The streams of the great Black Forest of Germany babbled in playful

the howling of the affrighted wolves, and the hollow voices of the
roar with the wild creaking of the huge oaks, the rustling of the firs,
storm.


the vivid lightning gleamed forth with rapid and eccentric glare, it
The dense black clouds were driving restlessly athwart the sky; and when
seemed as if the dark jaws of some hideous monster, floating high above,

they raised strange echoes--as if the impervious mazes of that mighty
opened to vomit flame.

And as the abrupt but furious gusts of wind swept through the forest,
wood were the abode of hideous fiends and evil spirits, who responded in

An old--old man sat in his cottage on the verge of the Black Forest.
shrieks, moans, and lamentations to the fearful din of the tempest.

It was, indeed, an appalling night!


He had numbered ninety years; his head was completely bald--his mouth

last voyage, from which no traveler returns.
was toothless--his long beard was white as snow, and his limbs were
feeble and trembling.

He was alone in the world; his wife, his children, his grandchildren,
all his relations, in fine, _save one_, had preceded him on that long,


discover him seated thus lonely in his poor cottage.
And that _one_ was a grand-daughter, a beauteous girl of sixteen, who
had hitherto been his solace and his comfort, but who had suddenly
disappeared--he knew not how--a few days previously to the time when we

But perhaps she also was dead! An accident might have snatched her away

more--for he had sought her throughout the neighboring district of the
from him, and sent her spirit to join those of her father and mother,
her sisters and her brothers, whom a terrible pestilence--_the Black
Death_--hurried to the tomb a few years before.

No: the old man could not believe that his darling granddaughter was no
Black Forest, and not a trace of her was to be seen. Had she fallen down

that the only being left to solace him on earth, had deserted him; and
a precipice, or perished by the ruthless murderer's hand, he would have
discovered her mangled corpse: had she become the prey of the ravenous
wolves, certain signs of her fate would have doubtless somewhere
appeared.

The sad--the chilling conviction therefore, went to the old man's heart,
his spirit was bowed down in despair.

Who now would prepare his food, while he tended his little flock? who

follow some youthful lover, who will buoy thee up with bright hopes, and
was there to collect the dry branches in the forest, for the winter's
fuel, while the aged shepherd watched a few sheep that he possessed? who
would now spin him warm clothing to protect his weak and trembling
limbs?

"Oh! Agnes," he murmured, in a tone indicative of a breaking heart, "why
couldst thou have thus abandoned me? Didst thou quit the old man to
then deceive thee? O Agnes--my darling! hast thou left me to perish
without a soul to close my eyes?"


and intelligent, but fearful now to meet, so wild and wandering were
It was painful how that ancient shepherd wept.

Suddenly a loud knock at the door of the cottage aroused him from his
painful reverie; and he hastened, as fast as his trembling limbs would
permit him, to answer the summons.

He opened the door; and a tall man, apparently about forty years of age,
entered the humble dwelling. His light hair would have been magnificent
indeed, were it not sorely neglected; his blue eyes were naturally fine
their glances: his form was tall and admirably symmetrical, but

Suddenly the thunder which had hitherto growled at a distance, burst
prematurely bowed by the weight of sorrow, and his attire was of costly
material, but indicative of inattention even more than it was
travel-soiled.

The old man closed the door, and courteously drew a stool near the fire
for the stranger who had sought in his cottage a refuge against the fury
of the storm.

He also placed food before him; but the stranger touched it not--horror
and dismay appearing to have taken possession of his soul.

above the humble abode; and the wind swept by with so violent a gust,

The roar of the thunder past--the shrieking, whistling, gushing wind
that it shook the little tenement to its foundation, and filled the
neighboring forest with strange, unearthly noises.

Then the countenance of the stranger expressed such ineffable horror,
amounting to a fearful agony, that the old man was alarmed, and
stretched out his hand to grasp a crucifix that hung over the
chimney-piece; but his mysterious guest made a forbidding sign of so
much earnestness mingled with such proud authority, that the aged
shepherd sank back into his seat without touching the sacred symbol.


The stranger listened abstractedly at first; but afterward he appeared
became temporarily lulled into low moans and subdued lamentations, amid
the mazes of the Black Forest; and the stranger grew more composed.

"Dost thou tremble at the storm?" inquired the old man.

"I am unhappy," was the evasive and somewhat impatient reply. "Seek not
to know more of me--beware how you question me. But you, old man, are
_not_ happy! The traces of care seem to mingle with the wrinkles of age
upon your brow!"

The shepherd narrated, in brief and touching terms, the unaccountable
disappearance of his much-beloved granddaughter Agnes.


breathed his last, the wolves from the forest would have entered and
to reflect profoundly for several minutes.

"Your lot is wretched, old man," said he at length: "if you live a few
years longer, that period must be passed in solitude and
cheerlessness:--if you suddenly fall ill you must die the lingering
death of famine, without a soul to place a morsel of food, or the
cooling cup to your lips; and when you shall be no more, who will follow
you to the grave? There are no habitations nigh; the nearest village is
half-a-day's journey distant; and ere the peasants of that hamlet, or
some passing traveler, might discover that the inmate of this hut had

the eyes and a ghastly change of the countenance--signs of a profoundly
mangled your corpse."

"Talk not thus!" cried the old man, with a visible shudder; then darting
a half-terrified, half-curious glance at his guest, he said, "but who
are you that speak in this awful strain--this warning voice?"

Again the thunder rolled, with crashing sound, above the cottage; and
once more the wind swept by, laden, as it seemed, with the shrieks and
groans of human beings in the agonies of death.

The stranger maintained a certain degree of composure only by means of a
desperate effort, but he could not altogether subdue a wild flashing of
felt terror.


all human beings--belongs the means of giving thee new life--of
"Again I say, ask me not who I am!" he exclaimed, when the thunder and
the gust had passed. "My soul recoils from the bare idea of pronouncing
my own accursed name! But--unhappy as you see me--crushed, overwhelmed
with deep affliction as you behold me--anxious, but unable to repent for
the past as I am, and filled with appalling dread for the future as I
now proclaim myself to be, still is my power far, far beyond that limit
which hems mortal energies within so small a sphere. Speak, old
man--wouldst thou change thy condition? For to me--and to me alone of
bestowing upon thee the vigor of youth, of rendering that stooping form

proportion as a rapid glance at his helpless, wretched, deserted
upright and strong, of restoring fire to those glazing eyes, and beauty
to that wrinkled, sunken, withered countenance--of endowing thee, in a
word, with a fresh tenure of existence and making that existence sweet
by the aid of treasures so vast that no extravagance can dissipate
them!"

A strong though indefinite dread assailed the old man as this astounding
proffer was rapidly opened, in all its alluring details, to his
mind;--and various images of terror presented themselves to his
imagination;--but these feelings were almost immediately dominated by a
wild and ardent hope, which became the more attractive and exciting in
condition led him to survey the contrast between what he then was, and

tone. "The first is, that you become the companion of my wanderings for
what, if the stranger spoke truly, he might so soon become.

The stranger saw that he had made the desired impression; and he
continued thus:

"Give but your assent, old man, and not only will I render thee young,
handsome, and wealthy; but I will endow thy mind with an intelligence to
match that proud position. Thou shalt go forth into the world to enjoy
all those pleasures, those delights, and those luxuries, the names of
which are even now scarcely known to thee!"

"And what is the price of this glorious boon?" asked the old man,
trembling with mingled joy and terror through every limb.

"There are two conditions," answered the stranger, in a low, mysterious
one year and a half from the present time, until the hour of sunset, on

world I alone am so deeply, so terribly accurst!" was the ominously
the 30th of July, 1517, when we must part forever, you to go
whithersoever your inclinations may guide you, and I---- But of _that_,
no matter!" he added, hastily, with a sudden motion as if of deep mental
agony, and with wildly flashing eyes.

The old man shrank back in dismay from his mysterious guest: the thunder
rolled again, the rude gust swept fiercely by, the dark forest rustled
awfully, and the stranger's torturing feelings were evidently prolonged
by the voices of the storm.

A pause ensued; and the silence was at length broken by the old man, who
said, in a hollow and tremulous tone, "To the first condition I would
willingly accede. But the second?"

"That you prey upon the human race, whom I hate; because of all the
fearful yet only dimly significant reply.


must invoke to effect the promised change in thee, and by whose aid you
The old man shook his head, scarcely comprehending the words of his
guest, and yet daring not to ask to be more enlightened.

"Listen!" said the stranger, in a hasty but impressive voice: "I require
a companion, one who has no human ties, and who still ministers to my
caprices,--who will devote himself wholly and solely to watch me in my
dark hours, and endeavor to recall me back to enjoyment and pleasure,
who, when he shall be acquainted with my power, will devise new means in
which to exercise it, for the purpose of conjuring up those scenes of
enchantment and delight that may for a season win me away from thought.
Such a companion do I need for a period of one year and a half; and you
are, of all men, the best suited to my design. But the Spirit whom I
can be given back to youth and comeliness, will demand some fearful

particular seasons certain doomed men throw off the human shape and take
sacrifice at your hands. And the nature of that sacrifice--the nature of
the condition to be imposed--I can well divine!"

"Name the sacrifice--name the condition!" cried the old man, eagerly. "I
am so miserable--so spirit-broken--so totally without hope in this
world, that I greedily long to enter upon that new existence which you
promised me! Say, then, what is the condition?"

"That you prey upon the human race, whom _he_ hates as well as I,"
answered the stranger.

"Again these awful words!" ejaculated the old man, casting trembling
glances around him.

"Yes--again those words," echoed the mysterious guest, looking with his
fierce burning eyes into the glazed orbs of the aged shepherd. "And now
learn their import!" he continued, in a solemn tone. "Knowest thou not
that there is a belief in many parts of our native land that at
that of ravenous wolves?"


which---- But hesitate not," added the stranger, hastily: "I have no
"Oh, yes--yes--I have indeed heard of those strange legends in which the
Wehr-Wolf is represented in such appalling colors!" exclaimed the old
man, a terrible suspicion crossing his mind.

"'Tis said that at sunset on the last day of every month the mortal, to
whom belongs the destiny of the Wehr-Wolf, must exchange his natural
form for that of the savage animal; in which horrible shape he must
remain until the moment when the morrow's sun dawns upon the earth."

"The legend that told thee this spoke truly," said the stranger. "And
now dost thou comprehend the condition which must be imposed upon thee?"

"I do--I do!" murmured the old man with a fearful shudder. "But he who
accepts that condition makes a compact with the evil one, and thereby
endangers his immortal soul!"

"Not so," was the reply. "There is naught involved in this condition
time to waste in bandying words. Consider all I offer you: in another

allowing his now uncurbed fancy to change the one single room of the
hour you shall be another man!"

"I accept the boon--and on the conditions stipulated!" exclaimed the
shepherd.

"'Tis well, Wagner----"

"What! you know my name!" cried the old man. "And yet, meseems, I did
not mention it to thee."

"Canst thou not already perceive that I am no common mortal?" demanded
the stranger, bitterly. "And who I am, and whence I derive my power, all
shall be revealed to thee so soon as the bond is formed that must link
us for eighteen months together! In the meantime, await me here!"

And the mysterious stranger quitted the cottage abruptly, and plunged
into the depths of the Black Forest.

One hour elapsed ere he returned--one mortal hour, during which Wagner
sat bowed over his miserably scanty fire, dreaming of pleasure, youth,
riches, and enjoyment; converting, in imagination, the myriad sparks
which shone upon the extinguishing embers into piles of gold, and

He immediately fell back upon the seat, in a state of complete lethargy.
wretched hovel into a splendid saloon, surrounded by resplendent mirrors
and costly hangings, while the untasted fare for the stranger on the
rude fir-table, became transformed, in his idea, into a magnificent
banquet laid out, on a board glittering with plate, lustrous with
innumerable lamps, and surrounded by an atmosphere fragrant with the
most exquisite perfumes.

The return of the stranger awoke the old man from his charming dream,
during which he had never once thought of the conditions whereby he was
to purchase the complete realization of the vision.

"Oh! what a glorious reverie you have dissipated!" exclaimed Wagner.
"Fulfill but one tenth part of that delightful dream----"

"I will fulfill it all!" interrupted the stranger: then, producing a
small vial from the bosom of his doublet, he said, "Drink!"

The old man seized the bottle, and speedily drained it to the dregs.


But it lasted not for many minutes; and when he awoke again, he

thou hast conferred upon me!"
experienced new and extraordinary sensations. His limbs were vigorous,
his form was upright as an arrow; his eyes, for many years dim and
failing, seemed gifted with the sight of an eagle, his head was warm
with a natural covering; not a wrinkle remained upon his brow nor on his
cheeks; and, as he smiled with mingled wonderment and delight, the
parting lips revealed a set of brilliant teeth. And it seemed, too, as
if by one magic touch the long fading tree of his intellect had suddenly
burst into full foliage, and every cell of his brain was instantaneously
stored with an amount of knowledge, the accumulation of which stunned
him for an instant, and in the next appeared as familiar to him as if he
had never been without it.

"Oh! great and powerful being, whomsoever thou art," exclaimed Wagner,
in the full, melodious voice of a young man of twenty-one, "how can I
manifest to thee my deep, my boundless gratitude for this boon which

"By thinking no more of thy lost grand-child Agnes, but by preparing to

beckoned him imperiously away from the humble cottage.
follow me whither I shall now lead thee," replied the stranger.

"Command me: I am ready to obey in all things," cried Wagner. "But one
word ere we set forth--who art thou, wondrous man?"

"Henceforth I have no secrets from thee, Wagner," was the answer, while
the stranger's eyes gleamed with unearthly luster; then, bending
forward, he whispered a few words in the other's ear.

Wagner started with a cold and fearful shudder as if at some appalling

announcement; but he uttered not a word of reply--for his master
beckoned him imperiously away from the humble cottage.

A Death

By Stephen King

CREDIT DESIGN BY JON GRAY / GRAY318

Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway.

Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. “Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.”

Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with “Hines Mortuary” printed on the side in faded yellow letters.

“I notice you ain’t asked why we’re here,” Sheriff Barclay said.

“Why are you here, Sheriff?”

“Where is your hat, Jim?”

Trusdale put the hand not holding the newspaper to his head as if to feel for his hat, which was a brown plainsman and not there.

“In your place, is it?” the sheriff asked. A cold breeze kicked up, blowing the horses’ manes and flattening the grass in a wave that ran south.

“No,” Trusdale said. “I don’t believe it is.”

“Then where?”

“I might have lost it.”

“You need to get in the back of the wagon,” the sheriff said.

“I don’t want to ride in no funeral hack,” Trusdale said. “That’s bad luck.”

“You got bad luck all over,” one of the men said. “You’re painted in it. Get in.”

Trusdale went to the back of the buckboard and climbed up. The breeze kicked again, harder, and he turned up the collar of his barn coat.

The two men on the seat of the buckboard got down and stood either side of it. One drew his gun; the other did not. Trusdale knew their faces but not their names. They were town men. The sheriff and the other four went into his shack. One of them was Hines, the undertaker. They were in there for some time. They even opened the stove and dug through the ashes. At last they came out.

“No hat,” Sheriff Barclay said. “And we would have seen it. That’s a damn big hat. Got anything to say about that?”

“It’s too bad I lost it. My father gave it to me back when he was still right in the head.”

“Where is it, then?”

“Told you, I might have lost it. Or had it stoled. That might have happened, too. Say, I was going to bed right soon.”

“Never mind going to bed. You were in town this afternoon, weren’t you?”

“Sure he was,” one of the men said, mounting up again. “I seen him myself. Wearing that hat, too.”

“Shut up, Dave,” Sheriff Barclay said. “Were you in town, Jim?”

“Yes sir, I was,” Trusdale said.

“In the Chuck-a-Luck?”

“Yes sir, I was. I walked from here, and had two drinks, and then I walked home. I guess the Chuck-a-Luck’s where I lost my hat.”

“That’s your story?”

Trusdale looked up at the black November sky. “It’s the only story I got.”

“Look at me, son.”

Trusdale looked at him.

“That’s your story?”

“Told you, the only one I got,” Trusdale said, looking at him.

Sheriff Barclay sighed. “All right, let’s go to town.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re arrested.”

“Ain’t got a brain in his fuckin’ head,” one of the men remarked. “Makes his daddy look smart.”

They went to town. It was four miles. Trusdale rode in the back of the mortuary wagon, shivering against the cold. Without turning around, the man holding the reins said, “Did you rape her as well as steal her dollar, you hound?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trusdale said.

The rest of the trip continued in silence except for the wind. In town, people lined the street. At first they were quiet. Then an old woman in a brown shawl ran after the funeral hack in a sort of limping hobble and spat at Trusdale. She missed, but there was a spatter of applause.

At the jail, Sheriff Barclay helped Trusdale down from the wagon. The wind was brisk, and smelled of snow. Tumbleweeds blew straight down Main Street and toward the town water tower, where they piled up against a shakepole fence and rattled there.

“Hang that baby killer!” a man shouted, and someone threw a rock. It flew past Trusdale’s head and clattered on the board sidewalk.

Sheriff Barclay turned and held up his lantern and surveyed the crowd that had gathered in front of the mercantile. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t act foolish. This is in hand.”

The sheriff took Trusdale through his office, holding him by his upper arm, and into the jail. There were two cells. Barclay led Trusdale into the one on the left. There was a bunk and a stool and a waste bucket. Trusdale made to sit down on the stool, and Barclay said, “No. Just stand there.”

The sheriff looked around and saw the possemen crowding into the doorway. “You all get out of here,” he said.

“Otis,” the one named Dave said, “what if he attacks you?”

“Then I will subdue him. I thank you for doing your duty, but now you need to scat.”

When they were gone, Barclay said, “Take off that coat and give it to me.”

Trusdale took off his barn coat and began shivering. Beneath he was wearing nothing but an undershirt and corduroy pants so worn the wale was almost gone and one knee was out. Sheriff Barclay went through the pockets of the coat and found a twist of tobacco in a page of an R.W. Sears Watch Company catalogue, and an old lottery ticket promising a payoff in pesos. There was also a black marble.

“That’s my lucky marble,” Trusdale said. “I had it since I was a boy.”

“Turn out your pants pockets.”

Trusdale turned them out. He had a penny and three nickels and a folded-up news clipping about the Nevada silver rush that looked as old as the Mexican lottery ticket.

“Take off your boots.”

Trusdale took them off. Barclay felt inside them. There was a hole in one sole the size of a dime.

“Now your stockings.”

Barclay turned them inside out and tossed them aside.

“Drop your pants.”

“I don’t want to.”

“No more than I want to see what’s in there, but drop them anyway.”

Trusdale dropped his pants. He wasn’t wearing underdrawers.

“Turn around and spread your cheeks.”

Trusdale turned, grabbed his buttocks, and pulled them apart. Sheriff Barclay winced, sighed, and poked a finger into Trusdale’s anus. Trusdale groaned. Barclay removed his finger, wincing again at the soft pop, and wiped his finger on Trusdale’s undershirt.

“Where is it, Jim?”

“My hat?”

“You think I went up your ass looking for your hat? Or through the ashes in your stove? Are you being smart?”

Trusdale pulled up his trousers and buttoned them. Then he stood shivering and barefoot. An hour earlier he had been at home, reading his newspaper and thinking about starting a fire in the stove, but that seemed long ago.

“I’ve got your hat in my office.”

“Then why did you ask about it?”

“To see what you’d say. That hat is all settled. What I really want to know is where you put the girl’s silver dollar. It’s not in your house, or your pockets, or up your ass. Did you get to feeling guilty and throw it away?”

“I don’t know about no silver dollar. Can I have my hat back?”

“No. It’s evidence. Jim Trusdale, I’m arresting you for the murder of Rebecca Cline. Do you have anything you want to say to that?”

“Yes, sir. That I don’t know no Rebecca Cline.”

The sheriff left the cell, closed the door, took a key from the wall, and locked it. The tumblers screeched as they turned. The cell mostly housed drunks and was rarely locked. He looked in at Trusdale and said, “I feel sorry for you, Jim. Hell ain’t too hot for a man who’d do such a thing.”

“What thing?”

The sheriff clumped away without any reply.

Trusdale stayed there in the cell, eating grub from Mother’s Best, sleeping on the bunk, shitting and pissing in the bucket, which was emptied every two days. His father didn’t come to see him, because his father had gone foolish in his eighties, and was now being cared for by a couple of squaws, one Sioux and the other Cheyenne. Sometimes they stood on the porch of the deserted bunkhouse and sang hymns in harmony. His brother was in Nevada, hunting for silver.

Sometimes children came and stood in the alley outside his cell, chanting, “Hangman, hangman, come on down.” Sometimes men stood out there and threatened to cut off his privates. Once, Rebecca Cline’s mother came and said she would hang him herself, were she allowed. “How could you kill my baby?” she asked through the barred window. “She was only ten years old, and ’twas her birthday.”

“Ma’am,” Trusdale said, standing on the bunk so that he could look down at her upturned face. “I didn’t kill your baby nor no one.”

“Black liar,” she said, and went away.

Almost everyone in town attended the child’s funeral. The squaws went. Even the two whores who plied their trade in the Chuck-a-Luck went. Trusdale heard the singing from his cell, as he squatted over the bucket in the corner.

Sheriff Barclay telegraphed Fort Pierre, and after a week or so the circuit-riding judge came. He was newly appointed and young for the job, a dandy with long blond hair down his back like Wild Bill Hickok. His name was Roger Mizell. He wore small round spectacles, and in both the Chuck-a-Luck and Mother’s Best proved himself a man with an eye for the ladies, although he wore a wedding band.

There was no lawyer in town to serve as Trusdale’s defense, so Mizell called on George Andrews, owner of the mercantile, the hostelry, and the Good Rest Hotel. Andrews had got two years of higher education at a business school back East. He said he would serve as Trusdale’s attorney only if Mr. and Mrs. Cline agreed.

“Then go see them,” Mizell said. He was in the barbershop, tilted back in the chair and taking a shave. “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet.”

“Well,” Mr. Cline said, after Andrews had stated his business, “I got a question. If he doesn’t have someone to stand for him, can they still hang him?”

“That would not be American justice,” Andrews said. “And although we are not one of the United States just yet, we will be soon.”

“Can he wriggle out of it?” Mrs. Cline asked.

“No, ma’am,” Andrews said. “I don’t see how.”

“Then do your duty and God bless you,” Mrs. Cline said.

The trial lasted through one November morning and halfway into the afternoon. It was held in the municipal hall, and on that day there were snow flurries as fine as wedding lace. Slate-gray clouds rolling toward town threatened a bigger storm. Roger Mizell, who had familiarized himself with the case, served as prosecuting attorney as well as judge.

“Like a banker taking out a loan from himself and then paying himself interest,” one of the jurors was overheard to say during the lunch break at Mother’s Best, and although nobody disagreed with this, no one suggested that it was a bad idea. It had a certain economy, after all.

Prosecutor Mizell called half a dozen witnesses, and Judge Mizell never objected once to his line of questioning. Mr. Cline testified first, and Sheriff Barclay came last. The story that emerged was a simple one. At noon on the day of Rebecca Cline’s murder, there had been a birthday party, with cake and ice cream. Several of Rebecca’s friends had attended. Around two o’clock, while the little girls were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Musical Chairs, Jim Trusdale entered the Chuck-a-Luck and ordered a knock of whiskey. He was wearing his plainsman hat. He made the drink last, and when it was gone he ordered another.

Did he at any point take off the hat? Perhaps hang it on one of the hooks by the door? No one could remember.

“Only I never seen him without it,” Dale Gerard, the barman, said. “He was partial to that hat. If he did take it off, he probably laid it on the bar beside him. He had his second drink, and then he went on his way.”

“Was his hat on the bar when he left?” Mizell asked.

“No, sir.”

“Was it on one of the hooks when you closed up shop for the night?”

“No, sir.”

Around three o’clock that day, Rebecca Cline left her house at the south end of town to visit the apothecary on Main Street. Her mother had told her she could buy some candy with her birthday dollar, but not eat it, because she had had sweets enough for one day. When five o’clock came and she hadn’t returned home, Mr. Cline and some other men began searching for her. They found her in Barker’s Alley, between the stage depot and the Good Rest. She had been strangled. Her silver dollar was gone. It was only when the grieving father took her in his arms that the men saw Trusdale’s broad-brimmed leather hat. It had been hidden beneath the skirt of the girl’s party dress.

During the jury’s lunch hour, hammering was heard from behind the stage depot and not ninety paces from the scene of the crime. This was the gallows going up. The work was supervised by the town’s best carpenter, whose name, appropriately enough, was Mr. John House. Big snow was coming, and the road to Fort Pierre would be impassable, perhaps for a week, perhaps for the entire winter. There were no plans to jug Trusdale in the local calaboose until spring. There was no economy in that.

“Nothing to building a gallows,” House told folks who came to watch. “A child could build one of these.”

He told how a lever-operated beam would run beneath the trapdoor, and how it would be axle-greased to make sure there wouldn’t be any last-minute holdups. “If you have to do a thing like this, you want to do it right the first time,” House said.

In the afternoon, George Andrews put Trusdale on the stand. This occasioned some hissing from the spectators, which Judge Mizell gavelled down, promising to clear the courtroom if folks couldn’t behave themselves.

“Did you enter the Chuck-a-Luck Saloon on the day in question?” Andrews asked when order had been restored.

“I guess so,” Trusdale said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

There was some laughter at that, which Mizell also gavelled down, although he was smiling himself and did not issue a second admonition.

“Did you order two drinks?”

“Yes, sir, I did. Two was all I had money for.”

“But you got another dollar right quick, didn’t you, you hound!” Abel Hines shouted.

Mizell pointed his gavel first at Hines, then at Sheriff Barclay, sitting in the front row. “Sheriff, escort that man out and charge him with disorderly conduct, if you please.”

Barclay escorted Hines out but did not charge him with disorderly conduct. Instead, he asked what had got into him.

“I’m sorry, Otis,” Hines said. “It was seeing him sitting there with his bare face hanging out.”

“You go on downstreet and see if John House needs some help with his work,” Barclay said. “Don’t come back in here until this mess is over.”

“He’s got all the help he needs, and it’s snowing hard now.”

“You won’t blow away. Go on.”

Meanwhile, Trusdale continued to testify. No, he hadn’t left the Chuck-a-Luck wearing his hat, but hadn’t realized it until he got to his place. By then, he said, he was too tired to walk all the way back to town in search of it. Besides, it was dark.

Mizell broke in. “Are you asking this court to believe you walked four miles without realizing you weren’t wearing your damn hat?”

“I guess since I wear it all the time I just figured it must be there,” Trusdale said. This elicited another gust of laughter.

Barclay came back in and took his place next to Dave Fisher. “What are they laughing at?”

“Dummy don’t need a hangman,” Fisher said. “He’s tying the knot all by himself. It shouldn’t be funny, but it’s pretty comical, just the same.”

“Did you encounter Rebecca Cline in that alley?” George Andrews asked in a loud voice. With every eye on him, he had discovered a heretofore hidden flair for the dramatic. “Did you encounter her and steal her birthday dollar?”

“No, sir,” Trusdale said.

“Did you kill her?”

“No, sir. I didn’t even know who she was.”

Mr. Cline rose from his seat and shouted, “You did it, you lying son of a bitch!”

“I ain’t lying,” Trusdale said, and that was when Sheriff Barclay believed him.

“I have no further questions,” Andrews said, and walked back to his seat.

Trusdale started to get up, but Mizell told him to sit still and answer a few more questions.

“Do you continue to contend, Mr. Trusdale, that someone stole your hat while you were drinking in the Chuck-a-Luck, and that someone put it on, and went into the alley, and killed Rebecca Cline, and left it there to implicate you?”

Trusdale was silent.

“Answer the question, Mr. Trusdale.”

“Sir, I don’t know what ‘implicate’ means.”

“Do you expect us to believe someone framed you for this heinous murder?”

Trusdale considered, twisting his hands together. At last he said, “Maybe somebody took it by mistake and throwed it away.”

Mizell looked out at the rapt gallery. “Did anyone here take Mr. Trusdale’s hat by mistake?”

There was silence, except for the snow hitting the windows. The first big storm of winter had arrived. That was the winter townsfolk called the Wolf Winter, because the wolves came down from the Black Hills in packs to hunt for garbage.

“I have no more questions,” Mizell said. “And due to the weather we are going to dispense with any closing statements. The jury will retire to consider a verdict. You have three choices, gentlemen—innocent, manslaughter, or murder in the first degree.”

“Girlslaughter, more like it,” someone remarked.

Sheriff Barclay and Dave Fisher retired to the Chuck-a-Luck. Abel Hines joined them, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat. Dale Gerard served them schooners of beer on the house.

“No, I don’t want a glass of water, but I’m worried that I might want one.”

“Mizell might not have had any more questions,” Barclay said, “but I got one. Never mind the hat. If Trusdale killed her, how come we never found that silver dollar?”

“Because he got scared and threw it away,” Hines said.

“I don’t think so. He’s too bone-stupid. If he’d had that dollar, he’d have gone back to the Chuck-a-Luck and drunk it up.”

“What are you saying?” Dave asked. “That you think he’s innocent?”

“I’m saying I wish we’d found that cartwheel.”

“Maybe he lost it out a hole in his pocket.”

“He didn’t have any holes in his pockets,” Barclay said. “Only one in his boot, and it wasn’t big enough for a dollar to get through.” He drank some of his beer. The tumbleweeds blowing up Main Street looked like ghostly brains in the snow.

The jury took an hour and a half. “We voted to hang him on the first ballot,” Kelton Fisher said later, “but we wanted it to look decent.”

Mizell asked Trusdale if he had anything to say before sentence was passed.

“I can’t think of nothing,” Trusdale said. “Just I never killed that girl.”

The storm blew for three days. John House asked Barclay how much he reckoned Trusdale weighed, and Barclay said he guessed the man went around one-forty. House made a dummy out of burlap sacks and filled it with stones, weighing it on the hostelry scales until the needle stood pat on one-forty. Then he hanged the dummy while half the town stood around in the snowdrifts and watched. The trial run went all right.

On the night before the execution, the weather cleared. Sheriff Barclay told Trusdale he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Trusdale asked for steak and eggs, with home fries on the side soaked in gravy. Barclay paid for it out of his own pocket, then sat at his desk cleaning his fingernails and listening to the steady clink of Trusdale’s knife and fork on the china plate. When it stopped, he went in. Trusdale was sitting on his bunk. His plate was so clean Barclay figured he must have lapped up the last of the gravy like a dog. He was crying.

“Something just come to me,” Trusdale said.

“What’s that, Jim?”

“If they hang me tomorrow morning, I’ll go into my grave with steak and eggs still in my belly. It won’t have no chance to work through.”

For a moment, Barclay said nothing. He was horrified not by the image but because Trusdale had thought of it. Then he said, “Wipe your nose.”

Trusdale wiped it.

“Now listen to me, Jim, because this is your last chance. You were in that bar in the middle of the afternoon. Not many people in there then. Isn’t that right?”

“I guess it is.”

“Then who took your hat? Close your eyes. Think back. See it.”

Trusdale closed his eyes. Barclay waited. At last Trusdale opened his eyes, which were red from crying. “I can’t even remember was I wearing it.”

Barclay sighed. “Give me your plate, and mind that knife.”

Trusdale handed the plate through the bars with the knife and fork laid on it, and said he wished he could have some beer. Barclay thought it over, then put on his heavy coat and Stetson and walked down to the Chuck-a-Luck, where he got a small pail of beer from Dale Gerard. Undertaker Hines was just finishing a glass of wine. He followed Barclay out.

“Big day tomorrow,” Barclay said. “There hasn’t been a hanging here in ten years, and with luck there won’t be another for ten more. I’ll be gone out of the job by then. I wish I was now.”

Hines looked at him. “You really don’t think he killed her.”

“If he didn’t,” Barclay said, “whoever did is still walking around.”

The hanging was at nine o’clock the next morning. The day was windy and bitterly cold, but most of the town turned out to watch. Pastor Ray Rowles stood on the scaffold next to John House. Both of them were shivering in spite of their coats and scarves. The pages of Pastor Rowles’s Bible fluttered. Tucked into House’s belt, also fluttering, was a hood of homespun cloth dyed black.

Barclay led Trusdale, his hands cuffed behind his back, to the gallows. Trusdale was all right until he got to the steps, then he began to buck and cry.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t kill me.”

He was strong for a little man, and Barclay motioned Dave Fisher to come and lend a hand. Together they muscled Trusdale, twisting and ducking and pushing, up the twelve wooden steps. Once, he bucked so hard all three of them almost fell off, and arms reached up to catch them if they did.

“Quit that and die like a man!” someone shouted.

On the platform, Trusdale was momentarily quiet, but when Pastor Rowles commenced Psalm 51, he began to scream. “Like a woman with her tit caught in the wringer,” someone said later in the Chuck-a-Luck.

“Have mercy on me, O God, after Thy great goodness,” Rowles read, raising his voice to be heard above the condemned man’s shrieks to be let off. “According to the multitude of Thy mercies, do away with mine offenses.”

When Trusdale saw House take the black hood out of his belt, he began to pant like a dog. He shook his head from side to side, trying to dodge the hood. His hair flew. House followed each jerk patiently, like a man who means to bridle a skittish horse.

“Let me look at the mountains!” Trusdale bellowed. Runners of snot hung from his nostrils. “I’ll be good if you let me look at the mountains one more time!”

But House only jammed the hood over Trusdale’s head and pulled it down to his shaking shoulders. Pastor Rowles was droning on, and Trusdale tried to run off the trapdoor. Barclay and Fisher pushed him back onto it. Down below, someone cried, “Ride ’em, cowboy!”

“Say amen,” Barclay told Pastor Rowles. “For Christ’s sake, say amen.”

“Amen,” Pastor Rowles said, and stepped back, closing his Bible with a clap.

Barclay nodded to House. House pulled the lever. The greased beam retracted and the trap dropped. So did Trusdale. There was a crack when his neck broke. His legs drew up almost to his chin, then fell back limp. Yellow drops stained the snow under his feet.

“There, you bastard!” Rebecca Cline’s father shouted. “Died pissing like a dog on a fireplug. Welcome to Hell.” A few people clapped.

The spectators stayed until Trusdale’s corpse, still wearing the black hood, was laid in the same hurry-up wagon he’d ridden to town in. Then they dispersed.

Barclay went back to the jail and sat in the cell Trusdale had occupied. He sat there for ten minutes. It was cold enough to see his breath. He knew what he was waiting for, and eventually it came. He picked up the small bucket that had held Trusdale’s last drink of beer and vomited. Then he went into his office and stoked up the stove.

He was still there eight hours later, trying to read a book, when Abel Hines came in. He said, “You need to come down to the funeral parlor, Otis. There’s something I want to show you.”

“What?”

“No. You’ll want to see it for yourself.”

They walked down to the Hines Funeral Parlor & Mortuary. In the back room, Trusdale lay naked on a cooling board. There was a smell of chemicals and shit.

“They load their pants when they die that way,” Hines said. “Even men who go to it with their heads up. They can’t help it. The sphincter lets go.”

“And?”

“Step over here. I figure a man in your job has seen worse than a pair of shitty drawers.”

They lay on the floor, mostly turned inside out. Something gleamed in the mess. Barclay leaned closer and saw it was a silver dollar. He reached down and plucked it from the crap.

“I don’t understand it,” Hines said. “Son of a bitch was locked up a good long time.”

There was a chair in the corner. Barclay sat down on it so heavily he made a little woof sound. “He must have swallowed it the first time when he saw our lanterns coming. And every time it came out he cleaned it off and swallowed it again.”

The two men stared at each other.

“You believed him,” Hines said at last.

“Fool that I am, I did.”

“Maybe that says more about you than it does about him.”

“He went on saying he was innocent right to the end. He’ll most likely stand at the throne of God saying the same thing.”

“Yes,” Hines said.

“I don’t understand. He was going to hang. Either way, he was going to hang. Do you understand it?”

“I don’t even understand why the sun comes up. What are you going to do with that cartwheel? Give it back to the girl’s mother and father? It might be better if you didn’t, because . . .” Hines shrugged.

Because the Clines knew all along. Everyone in town knew all along. He was the only one who hadn’t known. Fool that he was.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” he said.

The wind gusted, bringing the sound of singing. It was coming from the church. It was the Doxology. ♦

The Iron Man

By Ted Hughes

 (Fragment)

1

The Coming of the Iron Man

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff.

How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows.

Taller than a house, the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, on the very brink, in the darkness.

The wind sang through his iron fingers. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right, slowly turned to the left. His iron ears turned, this way, that way. He was hearing the sea. His eyes, like headlamps, glowed white, then red, then infrared, searching the sea. Never before had the Iron Man seen the sea.

He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff.

And his right foot, his enormous iron right foot, lifted - up, out into space, and the Iron Man stepped forward, off the cliff, into nothingness.

CRRRAAAASSSSSSH!

Down the cliff the Iron Man came toppling, head over heels.

CRASH!

CRASH!

CRASH!

From rock to rock, snag to snag, tumbling slowly. And as he crashed and crashed and crashed.

His iron legs fell off. His iron arms broke off, and the hands broke off the arms.

His great iron ears fell off and his eyes fell out. His great iron head fell off.

All the separate pieces tumbled, scattered, crashing, bumping, clanging, down on to the rocky beach far below.

A few rocks tumbled with him.

Then

Silence.

Only the sound of the sea, chewing away at the edge of the rocky beach, where the bits and pieces of the Iron Man lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving.

Only one of the iron hands, lying beside an old, sand-logged washed-up seaman’s boot, waved its fingers for a minute, like a crab on its back. Then it lay still.

While the stars went on wheeling through the sky and the wind went on tugging at the grass on the cliff top and the sea went on boiling and booming.

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen.

Night passed.

Just before dawn, as the darkness grew blue and the shapes of the rocks separated from each other, two seagulls flew crying over the rocks. They landed on a patch of sand. They had two chicks in a nest on the cliff. Now they were searching for food.

One of the seagulls flew up - Aaaaaark! He had seen something. He glided low over the sharp rocks. He landed and picked something up. Something shiny, round and hard. It was one of the Iron Man’s eyes. He brought it back to his mate. They both looked at this strange thing. And the eye looked at them. It rolled from side to side looking first at one gull, then at the other. The gulls, peering at it, thought it was a strange kind of clam, peeping at them from its shell.

Then the other gull flew up, wheeled around and landed and picked something up. Some awkward, heavy thing. The gull flew low and slowly, dragging the heavy thing. Finally, the gull dropped it beside the eye. This new thing had five legs. It moved. The gull thought it was a strange kind of crab. They thought they had found a strange crab and a strange clam. They did not know they had found the Iron Man’s eye and the Iron Man’s right hand.

But as soon as the eye and the hand got together, the eye looked at the hand. Its light glowed blue. The hand stood up on three fingers and its thumb, and craned its forefinger like a long nose. It felt around. It touched the eye. Gleefully it picked up the eye, and tucked it under its middle finger. The eye peered out, between the forefinger and thumb. Now the hand could see.

It looked around. Then it darted and jabbed one of the gulls with its stiffly held finger, then darted at the other and jabbed him. The two gulls flew up into the wind with a frightened cry.

Slowly then the hand crept over the stones, searching. It ran forward suddenly, grabbed something and tugged. But the thing was stuck between two rocks. The thing was one of the Iron Man’s arms. At last the hand left the arm and went scuttling hither and thither among the rocks, till it stopped, and touched something gently. This thing was the other hand. This new hand stood up and hooked its finger round the little finger of the hand with the eye, and let itself be led. Now the two hands, the seeing one leading the blind one, walking on their fingertips, went back together to the arm, and together they tugged it free. The hand with the eye fastened itself on to the wrist of the arm. The arm stood up and walked on its hand. The other hand clung on behind as before, and this strange trio went on searching.

An eye! There it was, blinking at them speechlessly beside a black and white pebble. The seeing hand fitted the eye to the blind hand and now both hands could see. They went running among the rocks. Soon they found a leg. They jumped on top of the leg and the leg went hopping over the rocks with the arm swinging from the hand that clung to the top of the leg. The other hand clung on top of that hand. The two hands, with their eyes, guided their leg, twisting it this way and that, as a rider guides a horse.

Soon they found another leg and another arm. Now each hand, with an eye under its palm and an arm dangling from its wrist, rode on a leg separately about the beach. Hop, hop, hop , hop they went, peering among the rocks. One found an ear and at the same moment the other found the giant torso. Then the busy hands fitted the legs to the torso, then they fitted the arms, each fitting the other, and the torso stood up with legs and arms but no head. It walked about the beach, holding its eyes up in its hands, searching for its lost head. At last, there was the head - eyeless, earless, nested in a heap of read seaweed. Now in no time the Iron Man had fitted his head back, and his eyes were in place, and everything in place except for one ear. He strode about the beach searching for his lost ear, as the sun rose over the sea and the day came.

The two gulls sat on their ledge, high on the cliff. They watched the immense man striding to and fro over the rocks below. Between them, on the nesting ledge, lay a great iron ear. The gulls could not eat it. The baby gulls could not eat it. There it lay on the high ledge.

Far below, the Iron Man searched.

At last he stopped, and looked at the sea. Was he thinking the sea had stolen his ear? Perhaps he was thinking the sea had come up, while he lay scattered, and had gone down again with his ear.

He walked towards the sea. He walked into the breakers, and there he stood for a while, the breakers bursting around his knees. Then he walked in deeper, deeper, deeper.

The gulls took off and glided down low over the great iron head that was now moving slowly out through the swell. The eyes blazed red, level with the wavetops, till a big wave covered them and foam spouted over the top of the head. The head still moved out under water. The eyes and the top of the head appeared for a moment in a hollow of the swell. Now the eyes were green. Then the sea covered them and the head.

The gulls circled low over the line of bubbles that went on moving slowly out of the deep sea.

Churchill´s Grave

By Lord Byron

I stood beside the grave of him who blazed

The comet of a season, and I saw

The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed

With not the less of sorrow and of awe

On that neglected turf and quiet stone,

With name no clearer than the names unknown,

Which lay unread around it; and asked

The Gardener of that ground, why it might be

That for this plant strangers his memory tasked

Through the thick deaths of half a century;

And thus he answered -"Well, I do not know

Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so;

He died before my day of sextonship,

And I had not the digging of this grave."

And is this all? I thought, -and do we rip

The veil of Immortality? and crave

I know not what of honour and of light

Through unborn ages, to endure this blight?

So soon, and so successless? As I said,

The Architect of all on which we tread,

For Earth is but a tombstone, did essay

To extricate remembrance from the clay,

Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought,

Were it not that all life must end in one,

Of which we are but dreamers; -as he caught

As 'twere the twilight of a former Sun,

Thus spoke he, -"I believe the man of whom

You wot, who lies in this selected tomb,

Was a most famous writer in his day,

And therefore travellers step from out their way

To pay him honour, -and myself whate'er

Your honour pleases," -then most pleased I shook

From out my pocket's avaricious nook

Some certain coins of silver, which as 'twere

Perforce I gave this man, though I could spare

So much but inconveniently: -Ye smile,

I see ye, ye profane ones! all the while,

Because my homely phrase the truth would tell.

You are the fools, not I -for I did dwell

With a deep thought, and with a softened eye,

On that Old Sexton's natural homily,

In which there was Obscurity and Fame, -

The Glory and the Nothing of a Name.

The Great Gatsby

By Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

--THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

(Fragment)

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said,

"Why--ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a Little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion.

Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.

It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.

She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again--the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear Wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's----"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.

"I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.

Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single----"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compeled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."

She looked at us all radiantly.

"Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly.

"What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a----"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here--and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the

West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.

"I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read

'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.

It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them.

What was that word we----"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California--" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "--and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization--oh, science and art and all that.

Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.

He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose----"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation.

"An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.

"I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away----" her voice sang "----It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.

"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I KNOW.

I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."

Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.

It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"--the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester."

"Oh,--you're JORdan Baker."

I knew now why her face was familiar--its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."

"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of--oh--fling you together. You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing----"

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."

"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way."

"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her."

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white----"

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know----"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later

I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait!

"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true."

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich--nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.