The night-doings at "Deadman's" - A story that is untrue
It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond.
Clear nights have a trick of being keen. In darkness you may be cold
and not know it; when you see, you suffer. This night was bright
enough to bite like a serpent. The moon was moving mysteriously
along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a
cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the
black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay
the invisible Pacific. The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces
along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave,
and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray
was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from
the snow.
In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp were
obliterated, (a sailor might have said they had gone down) and at
irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles which had
once supported a river called a flume; for, of course, "flume" is
flumen. Among the advantages of which the mountains cannot deprive
the gold-hunter is the privilege of speaking Latin. He says of his
dead neighbor, "He has gone up the flume." This is not a bad way to
say, "His life has returned to the Fountain of Life."
While putting on its armor against the assaults of the wind, this
snow had neglected no coign of vantage. Snow pursued by the wind is
not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges
itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes
a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole
platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall. The devious
old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it. Squadron
upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly
pursuit had ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman's
Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine. Yet Mr.
Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the sole inhabitant.
Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log shanty
projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam of light,
and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle fastened to the
hillside with a bright new pin. Within it sat Mr. Beeson himself,
before a roaring fire, staring into its hot heart as if he had never
before seen such a thing in all his life. He was not a comely man.
He was gray; he was ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was
wan and haggard; his eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had
attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then
corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight.
Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy
undertaker at Bentley's Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at
Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is
dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.
As Mr. Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged knees,
his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no apparent
intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest movement
would tumble him to pieces. Yet during the last hour he had winked
no fewer than three times.
There was a sharp rapping at the door. A rap at that time of night
and in that weather might have surprised an ordinary mortal who had
dwelt two years in the gulch without seeing a human face, and could
not fail to know that the country was impassable; but Mr. Beeson did
not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals. And even when the
door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into
himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather
not see. You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary
chapel, the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.
But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied up in a
handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler, wearing green
goggles and with a complexion of glittering whiteness where it could
be seen, strode silently into the room, laying a hard, gloved hand on
Mr. Beeson's shoulder, the latter so far forgot himself as to look up
with an appearance of no small astonishment; whomever he may have
been expecting, he had evidently not counted on meeting anyone like
this. Nevertheless, the sight of this unexpected guest produced in
Mr. Beeson the following sequence: a feeling of astonishment; a
sense of gratification; a sentiment of profound good will. Rising
from his seat, he took the knotty hand from his shoulder, and shook
it up and down with a fervor quite unaccountable; for in the old
man's aspect was nothing to attract, much to repel. However,
attraction is too general a property for repulsion to be without it.
The most attractive object in the world is the face we instinctively
cover with a cloth. When it becomes still more attractive--
fascinating--we put seven feet of earth above it.
"Sir," said Mr. Beeson, releasing the old man's hand, which fell
passively against his thigh with a quiet clack, "it is an extremely
disagreeable night. Pray be seated; I am very glad to see you."
Mr. Beeson spoke with an easy good breeding that one would hardly
have expected, considering all things. Indeed, the contrast between
his appearance and his manner was sufficiently surprising to be one
of the commonest of social phenomena in the mines. The old man
advanced a step toward the fire, glowing cavernously in the green
goggles. Mr. Beeson resumed:
"You bet your life I am!"
Mr. Beeson's elegance was not too refined; it had made reasonable
concessions to local taste. He paused a moment, letting his eyes
drop from the muffled head of his guest, down along the row of moldy
buttons confining the blanket overcoat, to the greenish cowhide boots
powdered with snow, which had begun to melt and run along the floor
in little rills. He took an inventory of his guest, and appeared
satisfied. Who would not have been? Then he continued:
"The cheer I can offer you is, unfortunately, in keeping with my
surroundings; but I shall esteem myself highly favored if it is your
pleasure to partake of it, rather than seek better at Bentley's
Flat."
With a singular refinement of hospitable humility Mr. Beeson spoke as
if a sojourn in his warm cabin on such a night, as compared with
walking fourteen miles up to the throat in snow with a cutting crust,
would be an intolerable hardship. By way of reply, his guest
unbuttoned the blanket overcoat. The host laid fresh fuel on the
fire, swept the hearth with the tail of a wolf, and added:
"But _I_ think you'd better skedaddle."
The old man took a seat by the fire, spreading his broad soles to the
heat without removing his hat. In the mines the hat is seldom
removed except when the boots are. Without further remark Mr. Beeson
also seated himself in a chair which had been a barrel, and which,
retaining much of its original character, seemed to have been
designed with a view to preserving his dust if it should please him
to crumble. For a moment there was silence; then, from somewhere
among the pines, came the snarling yelp of a coyote; and
simultaneously the door rattled in its frame. There was no other
connection between the two incidents than that the coyote has an
aversion to storms, and the wind was rising; yet there seemed somehow
a kind of supernatural conspiracy between the two, and Mr. Beeson
shuddered with a vague sense of terror. He recovered himself in a
moment and again addressed his guest.
"There are strange doings here. I will tell you everything, and then
if you decide to go I shall hope to accompany you over the worst of
the way; as far as where Baldy Peterson shot Ben Hike--I dare say you
know the place."
The old man nodded emphatically, as intimating not merely that he
did, but that he did indeed.
"Two years ago," began Mr. Beeson, "I, with two companions, occupied
this house; but when the rush to the Flat occurred we left, along
with the rest. In ten hours the Gulch was deserted. That evening,
however, I discovered I had left behind me a valuable pistol (that is
it) and returned for it, passing the night here alone, as I have
passed every night since. I must explain that a few days before we
left, our Chinese domestic had the misfortune to die while the ground
was frozen so hard that it was impossible to dig a grave in the usual
way. So, on the day of our hasty departure, we cut through the floor
there, and gave him such burial as we could. But before putting him
down I had the extremely bad taste to cut off his pigtail and spike
it to that beam above his grave, where you may see it at this moment,
or, preferably, when warmth has given you leisure for observation.
"I stated, did I not, that the Chinaman came to his death from
natural causes? I had, of course, nothing to do with that, and
returned through no irresistible attraction, or morbid fascination,
but only because I had forgotten a pistol. This is clear to you, is
it not, sir?"
The visitor nodded gravely. He appeared to be a man of few words, if
any. Mr. Beeson continued:
"According to the Chinese faith, a man is like a kite: he cannot go
to heaven without a tail. Well, to shorten this tedious story--
which, however, I thought it my duty to relate--on that night, while
I was here alone and thinking of anything but him, that Chinaman came
back for his pigtail.
"He did not get it."
At this point Mr. Beeson relapsed into blank silence. Perhaps he was
fatigued by the unwonted exercise of speaking; perhaps he had
conjured up a memory that demanded his undivided attention. The wind
was now fairly abroad, and the pines along the mountainside sang with
singular distinctness. The narrator continued:
"You say you do not see much in that, and I must confess I do not
myself.
"But he keeps coming!"
There was another long silence, during which both stared into the
fire without the movement of a limb. Then Mr. Beeson broke out,
almost fiercely, fixing his eyes on what he could see of the
impassive face of his auditor:
"Give it him? Sir, in this matter I have no intention of troubling
anyone for advice. You will pardon me, I am sure"--here he became
singularly persuasive--"but I have ventured to nail that pigtail
fast, and have assumed the somewhat onerous obligation of guarding
it. So it is quite impossible to act on your considerate suggestion.
"Do you play me for a Modoc?"
Nothing could exceed the sudden ferocity with which he thrust this
indignant remonstrance into the ear of his guest. It was as if he
had struck him on the side of the head with a steel gauntlet. It was
a protest, but it was a challenge. To be mistaken for a coward--to
be played for a Modoc: these two expressions are one. Sometimes it
is a Chinaman. Do you play me for a Chinaman? is a question
frequently addressed to the ear of the suddenly dead.
Mr. Beeson's buffet produced no effect, and after a moment's pause,
during which the wind thundered in the chimney like the sound of
clods upon a coffin, he resumed:
"But, as you say, it is wearing me out. I feel that the life of the
last two years has been a mistake--a mistake that corrects itself;
you see how. The grave! No; there is no one to dig it. The ground
is frozen, too. But you are very welcome. You may say at Bentley's-
-but that is not important. It was very tough to cut: they braid
silk into their pigtails. Kwaagh."
Mr. Beeson was speaking with his eyes shut, and he wandered. His
last word was a snore. A moment later he drew a long breath, opened
his eyes with an effort, made a single remark, and fell into a deep
sleep. What he said was this:
"They are swiping my dust!"
Then the aged stranger, who had not uttered one word since his
arrival, arose from his seat and deliberately laid off his outer
clothing, looking as angular in his flannels as the late Signorina
Festorazzi, an Irish woman, six feet in height, and weighing fifty-
six pounds, who used to exhibit herself in her chemise to the people
of San Francisco. He then crept into one of the "bunks," having
first placed a revolver in easy reach, according to the custom of the
country. This revolver he took from a shelf, and it was the one
which Mr. Beeson had mentioned as that for which he had returned to
the Gulch two years before.
In a few moments Mr. Beeson awoke, and seeing that his guest had
retired he did likewise. But before doing so he approached the long,
plaited wisp of pagan hair and gave it a powerful tug, to assure
himself that it was fast and firm. The two beds--mere shelves
covered with blankets not overclean--faced each other from opposite
sides of the room, the little square trapdoor that had given access
to the Chinaman's grave being midway between. This, by the way, was
crossed by a double row of spike-heads. In his resistance to the
supernatural, Mr. Beeson had not disdained the use of material
precautions.
The fire was now low, the flames burning bluely and petulantly, with
occasional flashes, projecting spectral shadows on the walls--shadows
that moved mysteriously about, now dividing, now uniting. The shadow
of the pendent queue, however, kept moodily apart, near the roof at
the further end of the room, looking like a note of admiration. The
song of the pines outside had now risen to the dignity of a triumphal
hymn. In the pauses the silence was dreadful.
It was during one of these intervals that the trap in the floor began
to lift. Slowly and steadily it rose, and slowly and steadily rose
the swaddled head of the old man in the bunk to observe it. Then,
with a clap that shook the house to its foundation, it was thrown
clean back, where it lay with its unsightly spikes pointing
threateningly upward. Mr. Beeson awoke, and without rising, pressed
his fingers into his eyes. He shuddered; his teeth chattered. His
guest was now reclining on one elbow, watching the proceedings with
the goggles that glowed like lamps.
Suddenly a howling gust of wind swooped down the chimney, scattering
ashes and smoke in all directions, for a moment obscuring everything.
When the firelight again illuminated the room there was seen, sitting
gingerly on the edge of a stool by the hearthside, a swarthy little
man of prepossessing appearance and dressed with faultless taste,
nodding to the old man with a friendly and engaging smile. "From San
Francisco, evidently," thought Mr. Beeson, who having somewhat
recovered from his fright was groping his way to a solution of the
evening's events.
But now another actor appeared upon the scene. Out of the square
black hole in the middle of the floor protruded the head of the
departed Chinaman, his glassy eyes turned upward in their angular
slits and fastened on the dangling queue above with a look of
yearning unspeakable. Mr. Beeson groaned, and again spread his hands
upon his face. A mild odor of opium pervaded the place. The
phantom, clad only in a short blue tunic quilted and silken but
covered with grave-mold, rose slowly, as if pushed by a weak spiral
spring. Its knees were at the level of the floor, when with a quick
upward impulse like the silent leaping of a flame it grasped the
queue with both hands, drew up its body and took the tip in its
horrible yellow teeth. To this it clung in a seeming frenzy,
grimacing ghastly, surging and plunging from side to side in its
efforts to disengage its property from the beam, but uttering no
sound. It was like a corpse artificially convulsed by means of a
galvanic battery. The contrast between its superhuman activity and
its silence was no less than hideous!
Mr. Beeson cowered in his bed. The swarthy little gentleman
uncrossed his legs, beat an impatient tattoo with the toe of his boot
and consulted a heavy gold watch. The old man sat erect and quietly
laid hold of the revolver.
Bang!
Like a body cut from the gallows the Chinaman plumped into the black
hole below, carrying his tail in his teeth. The trapdoor turned
over, shutting down with a snap. The swarthy little gentleman from
San Francisco sprang nimbly from his perch, caught something in the
air with his hat, as a boy catches a butterfly, and vanished into the
chimney as if drawn up by suction.
From away somewhere in the outer darkness floated in through the open
door a faint, far cry--a long, sobbing wail, as of a child death-
strangled in the desert, or a lost soul borne away by the Adversary.
It may have been the coyote.
In the early days of the following spring a party of miners on their
way to new diggings passed along the Gulch, and straying through the
deserted shanties found in one of them the body of Hiram Beeson,
stretched upon a bunk, with a bullet hole through the heart. The
ball had evidently been fired from the opposite side of the room, for
in one of the oaken beams overhead was a shallow blue dint, where it
had struck a knot and been deflected downward to the breast of its
victim. Strongly attached to the same beam was what appeared to be
an end of a rope of braided horsehair, which had been cut by the
bullet in its passage to the knot. Nothing else of interest was
noted, excepting a suit of moldy and incongruous clothing, several
articles of which were afterward identified by respectable witnesses
as those in which certain deceased citizens of Deadman's had been
buried years before. But it is not easy to understand how that could
be, unless, indeed, the garments had been worn as a disguise by Death
himself--which is hardly credible.
-THE END-
Ambrose Bierce's short story: A story that is untrue
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