The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (7 page)

Across the ring of men the mother had fallen suddenly to her knees; her mouth was gabbering breathless words of prayer, her hands outstretched at
arms’ length, her fingers twining and intertwining madly.

“Save … him,” came her voice at last, no louder than a hoarse whisper, yet having a strange quality that seemed to make the very leaves above them stir and rustle. And, with the two completed words, she pitched forward, out of the relaxed hands of the two men who held her, on to her face, with a little
thump, her forehead and nose ploughing into the trampled mud beneath the
tree.

There came a queer, little inarticulate cry from Jem, and he began to
fight desperately, bound hands and feet as he was, towards where his mother lay on her knees and face; but the sheriff and one of the men caught him and
dragged him back beneath the over-reaching bough. The sheriff signed
hastily to old Judge Barclay, and the Judge put his arm about his wife to lead her away. But she tore from him, and faced the sheriff.

“It’ll be all right, mum,” said that man. “You go along quiet now with the
Jedge. We ain’t goin’ to hurt Jem more’n the flap of a fly’s tail. Don’t ye
worrit…”

“You’re going to hang that young man as soon as I’ve gone!” burst in
Mrs Barclay, very white-faced, but with now a strange shining in her eyes.
“That’s what you mean to do!”

“Yep,” said the sheriff, scratching his head, and trying to catch Judge
Barclay’s eye. But Judge Barclay was looking only at his wife, with something
that was new in the way of his look.

“Yep,” said the sheriff again. “Jem’s boun’ to hang, sure, mum, but we
ain’t goin’ to hurt him worth a mench. We’ll turn ‘m off nice an’ easy. You go
along of the Jedge now
…”

But he never finished his piece of excellent and practical advice; for, with a bound astonishing in so elderly a woman, she came at him, and he
gave back helplessly, not knowing how to cope with such an attack. Yet she had no meaning to strike him. Instead, before he knew anything beyond his bewilderment, she had opened his holster and twitched out the heavy Smith and Wesson; then, with a leap, she was back from him, facing the group:

“Hands up!” she screamed, her voice cracking and her old eyes literally blazing, “You shall not murder that boy; not so what he’s done! HANDS UP!
I say, or I’ll surely shoot at you.”

The old woman’s expression was so full of a desperate resolve that the men’s hands went up, though maybe a little hesitatingly and doubtfully. Yet, they had gone up, and up they remained, as the muzzle of the heavy weapon
menaced first one and then another. For suddenly it was very clear to the
men that the woman was wound up to such a pitch of intensity that she
would shoot first and do the thinking afterwards. It is true that several of the men held their revolvers in their hands; but what could they do? They could
undoubtedly have snapped off shots at the old woman, but they were not
going to shoot old Mrs Judge Barclay; the thought was below their horizon of
practical things. Neither would it have done to have attempted to rush her,
for there would have been, most surely, one or two sudden deaths achieved in
the operation, and the after situation also would have to be faced; so, as I
have told, they kept up their hands, and watched the old woman with quite
as much curiosity as rancour. They were very practical men.

Old Judge Barclay, however, failed to realise the entire earnestness of the situation, and, after a moment of stupefaction, began to run towards his
wife in vast distress.

“Anna, Anna!” he cried out. “Anna, my dear, put that down and come
away!”

But she ripped round at him:

“Stand back, John!” she shouted shrilly. “I shall shoot!”

But the old Judge still failed to realise, and continued to come towards
her.

“Stand back, John, or I shall shoot!” she screamed. “I’m fair wound up, an’ you’ll make me do murder! Stand back, John!”

As she spoke, she fired the pistol to frighten him; and because she had never fired a pistol before, she had no suspicion that the reason her husband’s hat flew off was that the bullet had passed clean through the crown of it, just
grazing his bald, old head. If she had thought at all about the displacing of the hat, she would merely have supposed that his sudden start at the shot
accounted for it.

The old Judge came to an abrupt stand, his face grown very white; but
he said not a word more, and his wife took no further notice of him; not even insisting on his putting up his hands. She wheeled round sharply again upon the sheriff and his posse, and discovered the sheriff half way across the grass
towards her; for he had thought to catch and disarm her whilst her attention was taken with the Judge. The old woman’s eyes blazed as she saw how
nearly he had succeeded:

“Back!” she screamed at him, and in the same instant fired. The sheriff reeled a moment; then steadied himself, and thrust his hands earnestly above
his head. The bullet had struck him full in the stomach, but the huge buckle of his belt had turned it, so that it had glanced out through his shirt again harmlessly, a mere half-flattened little chunk of lead.

“Get back to the others!” ordered the old woman, in a voice high and tense. “Turn your backs, all of you!”

As one man, the posse faced about.

“Go off a bit from the young man!” said Mrs Judge Barclay. “Stop there. Keep there!”

She ran swiftly to the prisoner, whirled him round on his heels with one
vigorous hand, and pulled out the sheath-knife, which had never been
removed from his belt. She slashed at the thin rope about his wrists, and all the time she kept a strict watch upon the line of masculine backs before her. She cut the rope at last, and his hands also, but not badly; then pushed the
knife into his cramped fingers, and the lad proceeded to cut loose the
lashings about his ankles.

“Now, GO!” said old Mrs Judge Barclay, fiercely, as he stood free. “An’
mind an’ sin no more. GO!”

She almost shrieked as he stood and stared at her; and she pointed to
the horses of the posse. He looked swiftly towards his mother; but the Judge’s
wife beat him with her free hand fiercely, pushing him towards the horses.
And suddenly, he obeyed, and began to run stiffly towards the animals.

When he reached them he displayed a little of that sense and ability
which I have hinted lay cloaked so securely below his somewhat habitually
sullen expression, for, having freed all the reins, he gathered them into his hand, and mounted the finest of the horses, which belonged to the sheriff; then, leading the rest, he went off at a fast trot.

The line of silent men began to stir uneasily, and old Mrs Judge Barclay steadied them with her voice. For a space of fifteen minutes, timed by her
old-fashioned gold watch, she stood on guard. At the end of that time the
mother of Jem came-to, and lifted a muddy face, stiffening sharply into terror with suddenly returned memory. She hove herself up giddily on to her knees,
and glared upwards and round her, expecting dreadfully to see something
that swayed, writhing, above her from the great branch.

Said Mrs Judge Barclay:

“Your son’s gone, ma’am. He’ll be well down the trail by this.”

Her voice began to shake curiously as she spoke; and suddenly she
reached her breaking-point, and collapsed, settling all in a heap on the
muddy ground. She never heard the dazed, crazy words of fierce gratitude that the other woman gave out as she bent over her, aiding the old Judge to
lay her down straight.

Old Mrs Judge Barclay came round some minutes later, to find her
mouth uncomfortably full of bad whisky, and her husband still anxiously
loosening garments that Jem’s mother had already loosed quite sufficiently. His clumsy old fingers shook as he fumbled, and she put up a sudden hand
of tenderness, and caught the fumbling fingers and held them with an almost
hysterical firmness. In a little she rose to a sitting position, and looked round
at the ring of men, who stood, each with his whisky-flask in his hand, ready, as it might be thought, to insure that the supply of restorative should not run
dry.

Presently Mrs Judge Barclay spoke:

“Now,” she said, turning her white, plucky old face towards the sheriff,
“if you must hang somebody, hang me; not a bit of a young boy like that!”

But they hanged neither old Mrs Judge Barclay nor young Jem Turrill;
for the latter got clear away. And concerning the former, if the truth must be
known, the sheriff and his men entertain for her a respect few women have ever screwed out of their somewhat rugged-natured hearts. Moreover, they
kept the affair strictly quiet, for it was not one in which any of them was able to discover undue credit to himself. As for old Judge Barclay, he had nothing of reproach for his wife. In his heart he was unfeignedly thankful that young
Jem had got away; and equally glad, in another fashion, that Providence or kind Chance had ordered it that his wife should witness the working of the unmitigated Justice that she had so often upheld.

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The Getting Even of Tommy Dodd

I
believe the young beggar will, too!” said James, the eldest ’prentice.

They were in the glory hole of the “Lady Hannibal,” and Dayrin, the youngest ’prentice, aged fourteen, and known aboard by the name of Tommy Dodd, had been expounding a plan “to get level” with everybody in general, it seemed; for Tommy had been tasting another dose of that gross injustice which is dealt out so liberally to the boys in some ships.

“I’ll fairly make the old man a fool, you’ll see,” he said. “And as for that old bo’sun and the third mate and the steward, I’ll make them wish they’d never been born. Fancy the pig breaking all the stops on the fore, main, and mizzen, just at eight bells as I was coming below to dinner, and then sending me up to put new ones on! It’s taken me two hours, and now the beastly dinner’s cold, and I’ve no time for a sleep, or anything. And he’s done that every day this week for my afternoon watch below. I told him he was a bully when he did it again to-day, and look what he’s done!”

And Tommy rolled up his trousers to show a great abraided bruise where the third mate had kicked him with his heavy boots. “I hit him twice in the stummick, but he held my hands, and kicked me till I was sick. Look at my shins!” And he showed his shins, cut and bruised in a dozen places by the third mate’s boots.

James and the other ’prentice in the port watch bent and looked at the boy’s legs, nodding their heads with a sort of savage sympathy.

“If Tommy tries that idea of his for the homeward passage, I guess I’ll help him for all I’m worth,” said James.

“I will say that for the old man,” remarked Tommy; “he sung out to the third to go steady when he was kicking me. But all the same, he turned on me himself, and told me I deserved what I’d got. I was in such a wax I told him straight out that if I’d been even half his size I’d have wiped the deck with both him and the third mate. He kicked me bang off the poop then, down the poop ladder on to the main deck, when I said that; but when I got to the bottom I told him that, after I’d wiped the deck with them, I’d make him kiss my feet to teach him to know a man when he saw one.”

“You know, Tommy,” said James, “you’re a plucky kid; but you’ll be murdered outright one of these days if you don’t mind. I wouldn’t have said what you said to the old man for the value of the ship.”

“Anyway,” ended Tommy, “the first mate likes me. I know that.”

A few days later Tommy got across the bo’sun’s hawse concerning the cleaning of the pigsty, which the bo’sun had set Tommy to do every morning watch for a fortnight past, and which, properly, should have been done by the hands when they washed the decks. When the bo’sun came forrard from washing down the poop, he found, to his pained amazement, that Tommy had not touched the pigsty except with the seat portion of one of his garments, for the boy was sitting calmly on the top of the sty smoking a cigarette, his bucket and broom reclining beneath him on the deck. The bo’sun expressed fluently his distress at this condition of affairs, and suggested, with the aid of the broom-handle, that Tommy Dodd should get to work at his accustomed dirty task.

“Clean it yourself!” said Tommy the instant the bo’sun had loosed him. “Clean it yourself, you old bully, if your back ain’t too fat to bend!”

He avoided further acquaintance with the broom-handle, and, catching up his bucket of water, hove the contents in the bo’sun’s face, then made a sprint for the poop, dodged the broom which the bo’sun threw, and returned the bucket as interest, cracking the bo’sun on the shin, and afterwards continuing at top speed to the poop.