James Hopper

“ Collins listened: there was no crackling of twig, no shout, no cry, not a breath, not a sigh.
He walked to the edge of the plateau and looked down the slopes to the valley beneath. Along the ribbon of road, small like mice, and gliding without rise and fall as upon wheels, he saw specks of horses mounted by dots of men; they were going up and down the road in sudden swift flights, as if bewildered. He had outwitted them.
He returned, dragging his rifle, a little aimlessly to the centre of the plateau. ”

“ Straight for the spot where I stood, señor; straight as your compass needle points to the north, the prao steered from afar, and not a palm's breadth either way did it turn as it foamed toward me. And when, heeling over like a wounded bird, it grounded in the shallows, and ten men jumped out into the water to carry him ashore, he motioned them off, sprang himself into the waves waist-deep, and impatiently, as a horse paws, he forced his way toward me. Then a fear entered my heart and I fled, fled back into the woods, to my hut, and threw myself upon the floor panting, panting and dreaming. ”

“ So he lived, eating but little, sleeping fitfully, like a caged animal, lying on his back staring up into the shadows with eyes dilated with long penetration of gloom, lived with his purpose. But at times an agony of cold sweat poured out upon his skin as he thought that perhaps his knife, his precious file-knife, needle-pointed, razor-edged, so well balanced, toward which he was cutting his way through bars of steel with needles, that his knife might not be there, in the niche behind the water-pipe, where he had left it. ”

“ But this time, under his eyes, the little ship was no longer striving. Listed to port, sails hanging and aback, small rudder loose, it seemed to have given up; and from it there came to him, somehow, mute speech, a silent passion of supplication which drew down his head and his eyes closer to a more careful scrutiny. And, peering close thus, through the green glass, he saw the apprentice boy, Ives-Marie. The little fellow was kneeling on the hard deck, and his clasped hands and his pale face were raised to the observer, and he was begging, begging from his very heart and entrails. ”

“ And as Morton went out he saw the policeman step to the telephone box at the end of the hall. And he knew that with the puerile, nasal voice of the wire the heralding had begun.
Outside, the sun was already pouring its bitterness upon the gleaming city, and the streets were fermenting with feverish humanity—white-garbed men, hurrying to the factories, bright-camisaed women going to the market with baskets upon their heads, naked-busted cargadores with gleaming muscles. Morton plunged ahead through the throng, which broke before him with sullen acquiescence in the right of the strong. ”

“ We went down toward the fire now. We met it on Eighth Street. From Third it had come along in a swath four blocks wide. From Market to Folsom, from Second to Eighth, it spread its heaving red sea, and with a roar it was rushing on, its advance billow curling like a monstrous comber above a flotsam of fleeing humanity. There were men, women, and children. Men, women, and children—really that is about all I remember of them, except that they were miserable and crushed. ”

“ In taking the history of a group of Frenchmen as an example of what we in America have to expect, I am painting this expectation in the blackest hue possible. For it is not at all likely that the United States will be called upon for an effort anywhere equal to that of France, of the sacrificial France which has borne for three years, almost alone for the first two, the brunt of Germania's assault of civilization—an assault formidable not only in its mere weight, but in the sinister cunning of its method and the evil foresight of its preparation. ”

“ The fog had gone with the night and the moon, and upon the green resplendent sea, beneath the joyous sun, they floated embraced, in sight of the whole world.
"Damn!" said the boy. Not a quarter of a mile away the launch was steaming toward them, shrieking its little lungs out in garrulous salutation. At the bow, leaning far over, a coiled rope in his hand, was the red-headed lieutenant.
"Throw out the life-line," said the boy, resignedly. ”

“ The next time, he flew to the peak in a zipping parabola that was as the course of a rocket.
This game was the consummation of the old yearning which, in days gone by, had impelled him to draw lines upon a sheet of paper. Where before, miserably and inadequately, tormented by a sense of impotence, he had drawn with a pencil lines upon paper, he now drew, with his whole gleaming white body, stupendous lines of beauty upon the blue of the sky.
He liked this. He sensed his evolution. He seemed to have within his brain a delicate instrument that recorded the movements of his body. ”

“ The little hut in the bamboos by the river sagged, drooped, rotted; till there was left nothing but the four big corner-posts of narra standing upright, with between them a little mound upon which the grass grew high, a little mound like a grave, the grave of our love. I grew old with the waiting, the longing; my heart was all alone, all alone; and when he landed again, in the green dawn, one day, he did not know the woman squatting on the beach, so near that one of his soldiers pushed her away with his foot to let him pass. ”

“ He smoked; the blue haze of his cigar blended with the blue rays of the moon, and the murmur of their voices harmonized caressingly with the whisper of wavelets along the boat's dark flanks. Then, one white and gold dawn, there was a running clang of anchor, a long roaring blast of the siren; the quarantine launch steamed back toward the Pasig as if in panic, and the little steamer began to glide. ”

“ Ryan dropped her hand and twined a curl about her finger in soothing caress. The child was stilled.
Collins scowled at them—at the mother, standing there, one hand soothing, her whole body tense before her children, a defense, a barrier; at the man, red-faced, perplexed, horror-stricken yet pitying; at the child up in its cot, at the child sleeping with its head among the dishes on the table. Then, warning them once more in terrible and grotesque pantomime with his revolver, he stepped backward through the door, which immediately slammed shut upon the group, petrified in bronze attitudes. ”

“ The rose halo deepens along the mountain top; the dark-blue dome of the sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and Charles-Norton Sims appears at the door.
Immediately, the little donkey, rousing to life, comes braying to him across the green. ”

“ She redressed the wound, placed fresh bandages about the shoulder; but the fever did not abate. All day she fought it, handicapped by her poverty of means. And then as the sun had set in black-and-blood-portent and the night fell like a great velvet cloak from the sky, Fear crept into the little hut; and all night as she sat there by the cot, it was at her elbow, spectral, dilated-eyed, and cold. ”

“ There was a shock forward, the launch came almost to a dead stop, then churned on again; there was another shock, then shock after shock, the boat recoiling to each and charging on again. A ringing tattoo, as if some giant forward with a hundred arms were beating with clubs the bow of the boat, resounded, then a fusillade of crackling wood. Things scraped along the flanks, like the tentacles of a devil-fish. The boy peered out to the right, and in the luminous smother he made out a long line of bamboo poles sticking out of the sea. "A fish-corral," he cried. ”

“ A rat! That was it. A look such as one gets from a rat in a dusky corner.
The murderer was staring dully, past the red flowers and the jetting water which he did not see, staring at the gray walls beyond which he would never pass again. Along the summit of the wall a blue-clad man was pacing slowly, sharply silhouetted; he held in his right hand a rifle, carrying it loosely, like a hunter. The garotter leaned and grinned into the murderer’s face. ”

“ On the other side of the lake, to the east, the land continues to rise, in accelerated assault, first in long lustrous leaps of glacier-polished granite, then in a chaos of dome and spire, and finally breaks up against the sky in a serrated edge like the top-crest of a great wind-flagellated wave which, attacking Heaven, should have been suddenly petrified by a Word. ”

“ One man crawled back, two followed, ten in a bunch, and in another minute the tall grass was all alive with sinuous movements and there was nobody in the trench, nothing except limp heaps of what looked like cast-off clothing.
The door of the hut marked by Roberts flew open as if by explosion and the Maestro burst out, a smoking gun in his right hand, a revolver in his left, another revolver and a bolo in his belt. With a piratical yell he raced across the plaza, his long legs working smooth as well-greased machinery, his red hair flying behind him. ”

“ In the centre of the yard, high on a slim mast, a cluster of arc-lights threw frozen blue rays wide into the sea of darkness below. They revealed harshly everything they touched: the beaten path in the yard, the stones of the high granite wall, the guard, his rifle-barrel gleaming cold, the “Stone Building,” hard and high, the cell-house, black-patched with barred windows, the cluster of outhouses before him, and especially, with a frigid intensity, an uncompromising malevolence, the stretch of beaten ground between him and his goal. ”

“ They drew together again little by little as they wandered over the clearing, in a close examination of their domain, which Charles-Norton, with his passion for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the edge of forest and grass, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. ”