Rifling

“ The wind has been blowing, and the rushes and young plants bowing and bending to it, lest it should do them harm, the cowards—and Grip—ha ha ha!—brave Grip, who cares for nothing, and when the wind rolls him over in the dust, turns manfully to bite it—Grip, bold Grip, has quarrelled with every little bowing twig—thinking, he told me, that it mocked him—and has worried it like a bulldog. ”

“ There was a yard, or spar, in the water alongside of her, the rigging of which had hitched itself in some way about the rail, so that to every lurch on one side the boom rose half its length, with a flash of the sun off the wet end of it, and this went on regularly, till after watching it a bit I turned my eyes away with a shudder, feeling in a sense of creeping that possessed me for an instant the sort of craziness that would come into a dying brain aboard the craft to the horrible maddening monotony of the rise and fall of that spar. ”

“ The body swayed back and forth as he had once seen that of a "rustler" whom a group of cowboys had left hanging to the scraggly branch of a scrub-oak; as a pendulum marks time, measuring the velocity of the prairie wind.
With each recurrence of the vision the perspiration broke out over the man anew, the sunburned forehead paled. This was what it was coming to; he could not escape it. If ever purpose was unmistakably written on a human face, it had been on the face of the man who lay sleeping so near, the man who had trailed him like a tiger and caught him when he thought he was safe. ”

“ A mountain rill, which is almost vertical, comes leaping down in tiny falls, and is then conducted by a little flume into the stone trough. At one time the pass appears to have turned back on itself—at another it is taking a course at right angles—so numerous and acute are its windings as it rounds the heads of the many gullies. ”

“ You will find under your pillow in the morning a looking-glass, a red handkerchief, and an embroidered scarf. Take these three things, but show them to no one, and go to the forest. In that forest you will find a rivulet. Walk by the side of this rivulet until you come to its source; there you will see a girl, as bright as the sun, with long hair streaming down her shoulders. Take care that she does you no harm. Say not a word to her; for if you utter a single syllable, she will change you into a fish, or some other creature, and eat you. Should she ask you to comb her hair, obey her. ”

“ The rope is slipping. No, it is only my imagination. The cliff opposite me is quite still. Twenty feet more. I must pass that tuft of grass. I didn't reach it as quick as I ought. The rope is slipping. Every jerk brings me nearer to destruction. It is cutting into my hands. My arms are coming out of their sockets. My legs are numbed. I must let go. Only two yards more. For her sake! I wonder if she is watching me. I must look down and see. Oh! it has come away in my hand. I am falling, falling through the air. There is nothing to catch hold of. ”

“ His foot touched the snow. For the first time a faint realization of the thing he was choosing came to him. The vicious bite of the frost upon the bare skin was not a possibility of the future, but a condition of the immediate now; and he weakened. But in the moment of his indecision, the wave of stubbornness and of blinding hate again flooded him, and a rush of hot curses left his lips. ”

“ Far away, it is true, from one broad solitary rift, he could see the sunlight pouring on to Helvellyn and tinting its white slopes to a sheet of gold. But there were black masses clustered close above it, as if jealous of its glow, and even as he watched, the rift closed up and the snow was discoloured to a dull, cheerless grey. ”

“ It was Raffles himself!
How it was possible, I did not pause to ask myself; if one man on earth could annihilate space and time, it was the man lying senseless at my feet; and that was Raffles, without an instant's doubt. ”

“ And with that sickening sound came the loudest clap of thunder yet, and a great white glare that showed us our enemy’s body far below, with one white hand spread like a starfish, but the head of him mercifully twisted underneath.
“It was all his own fault, Bunny. Poor devil! May he and all of us be forgiven; but pull yourself together for your own sake. Well, you can’t fall; stay where you are a minute.”
I remember the uproar of the elements while Raffles was gone; no other sound mingled with it; not the opening of a single window, not the uplifting of a single voice. ”

“ But the fighting man had some fight in him still; and scarcely had I grasped the situation when he hit out venomously behind with the bottle, which was smashed to bits on Raffles's shin. Then I threw my strength into the scale; and before many minutes we had our officer gagged and bound in his chair. But it was not one of our bloodless victories. Raffles had been cut to the bone by the broken glass; his leg bled wherever he limped; and the fierce eyes of the bound man followed the wet trail with gleams of sinister satisfaction.
I thought I had never seen a man better bound or better gagged. ”

“ The creature in the coat and boots had reached the end of our little street, where he appeared to have hesitated, so that Raffles was just in time to see which way he turned. And Raffles was after him at an easy pace, and had himself almost reached the corner when my attention was distracted from the alert nonchalance of his gait. I was marvelling that it alone had not long ago bewrayed him, for nothing about him was so unconsciously characteristic, when suddenly I realized that Raffles was not the only person in the little lonely street. ”

“ It all seems very ancient history now. But I remember nothing better or more vividly than the last words of Raffles upon his last crime, unless it be the pressure of his hand as he said them, or the rather sad twinkle in his tired eyes.
[278]
The Last Word
he last of all these tales of Raffles is from a fresher and a sweeter pen. I give it exactly as it came to me, in a letter which meant more to me than it can possibly mean to any other reader. And yet, it may stand for something with those for whom these pale reflections have a tithe of the charm that the real man had for me ”

“ When Ripple first began her airy journey, heavy clouds lay piled like hills about her, and a cold mist filled the air. Higher and higher they went, and darker grew the air, while a [Pg 60] stormy wind tossed the little traveller to and fro as if on the angry sea.
"Shall I ever see the beautiful world again?" sighed Ripple. "It is indeed a dreadful road, and but for the seasons' gifts I should have died. Fly fast, dear wind, and bring me to the sunshine again." ”

“ Here he removed saddle and bridle, and without lariat or hobble—for they knew each other now, these two—he turned the pony loose to graze. He himself, with the kit and blanket and a handful of dead wood, went to the hill-top, where he could see for miles around, built a tiny fire, an Indian's fire, made a can of strong black coffee, and ate of the jerked beef he had brought. Later, he cleared a spot the size of a man's grave, and with grass and the blanket built a shallow nest, in which he stretched himself, his elbow on the earth, his face in his hand, thinking, thinking. ”

“ Leaping for the axe which is always kept near the bitt, so the rigging can be quickly cut away if need be, I struck down another man; then, with a back stroke, nearly cut off the arm of a man who was rushing upon me, sabre in hand. All this occurred almost in the twinkling of an eye. Taking advantage of the sort of stupor that had seized the crew, and feeling much calmer after this explosion of long-suppressed rage, I could see better where I was, or take my bearings a little, as the saying is. ”

“ I at once spurred alongside Raffles, as he rode, bronzed and bearded, with warworn wideawake over eyes grown keen as a hawk’s, and a cutty-pipe sticking straight out from his front teeth. I can see him now, so gaunt and grim and debonair, yet already with much of the nonsense gone out of him, though I thought he only smiled on my misgivings.
“Did he get the instructions, Bunny, or did we? Very well, then; give the devil a chance.” ”

“ But Raffles raised his eyebrows an eloquent half-inch.
"As much, my dear Bunny? He is not only in it, but of it there's no comparison between us there. Society is in rings like a target, and we never were in the bull's-eye, however thick you may lay on the ink! ”

“ Sometimes, with laughing eyes, she would whirl round like a boolee, or whirlwind. Then suddenly she would change to a stately measure. Then for variety's sake perform a series of swift gyrations, as if, indeed, a whirlwind devil had her in his grip. ”

“ They looted the cabin like fire and then fought among themselves for the plunder. They applied the torch to the shanty's roof as though pressed by the Great Spirit; then capered fiendishly in its illumination, oblivious of time until, tinder
dry, it had burned level with the earth. Last of all, purposely reserved as a climax, they gave their attention to the pair of half-naked, bound and gagged figures in their midst. Then it was the scene became an orgy indeed. The havoc preceding had but whetted their appetite for the finale. ”

“ Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun into a state of blissful indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted by the process as that I can see back to very early days indeed, when my bad dreams—they were frightful, though my more mature understanding has never made out why—were of an interminable sort of ropemaking, with long minute filaments for strands, which, when they were spun home together close to my eyes, occasioned screaming. ”

“ I had, of course, long been used to a halter and a head-stall, and to be led about in the fields and lanes quietly, but now I was to have a bit and bridle; my master gave me some oats as usual, and after a good deal of coaxing he got the bit into my mouth and the bridle fixed, but it was a nasty thing! Those who have never had a bit in their mouths cannot think how bad it feels ”

“ And his face split in another grin from the cropped moustache downward, as I saw no longer by candlelight but by a flash of lightning which tore the sky in two before Raffles could reply.
“You have the bulge at present,” admitted Raffles; “but you have still to lay hands upon your, or our, ill-gotten goods. To shoot me is not necessarily to do so; to bring either one of us to a violent end is only to court a yet more violent and infinitely more disgraceful one for yourself. Family considerations alone should rule that risk out of your game. ”

“ Bobstays, fore-stays—all your rigging may be well fitted, but if the gammoning is wrong you’ll spring your bowsprit to a sartainty; and why then, you sees, your foremast must follow, and your main-topmast follows that. Gammoning, to my mind, is a sort of thing like the heart of the rigging: when it’s finished, it’s hidden from you; but if it goes, all goes. So your heart you can’t see; but if your heart’s wounded, the man dies. ”

“ One fact had repeatedly struck me as significant, and that was the circumstance that every morning between six and half-past, as already narrated, the same cripple went down the street; and in connexion with this, within the last few days of the time, a curious coincidence had revealed itself to me. From the tapping of his crutches on the stones I discovered that while one was shod with iron, the other was not. Now where and when had I noticed that peculiarity in a cripple before? ”

“ Five minutes, ten minutes dragged by; yet no observer, however close, could have seen a muscle stir in the long body of the waiting man. Like a great panther cat he lay there, the blue eyes peering just over the surface of the ambush. Not ten paces away could an observer have told the tip of that motionless sombrero from the protruding top of a boulder. Gradually the approaching figure grew more distinct. A red handkerchief showed clearly about the man's neck. Then a slight limp in the left leg intruded itself, and a droop of the shoulders that spoke weariness. ”

“ The innocent wavelets dancing in the sun, pretty and sparkling, and the huge black rollers, whose crests under the weight of a gale, before they can curl over and break, explode into spindrift, are propagated by the wind blowing obliquely on the surface of the water. ”

“ I breathe more freely when I reach a book-lined library where a mere handful of men do not overflow the Persian rug before the fire. One of them is Raffles, who is talking to a large man with the brow of a demi-god and the eyes and jowl of a degenerate bulldog. ”

“ At times they were entirely hidden by the luxuriant growths, and at times they came out on little bald spots where rock outcropped to the exclusion of vegetation. The boys followed on into the thickets, pausing now and then to listen for the sounds of the advance of the others.
Presently they came to a shelf of rock which overlooked the valley of the rivulet. They paused for a moment to listen for the sounds of those in advance when a strong electric searchlight was thrown on their faces and they saw the grim, round barrel of an automatic pointing at their breasts. ”

“ On one side was a rock, forming a wall rugged and projecting above; at the bottom of the rock was a rift, somewhat resembling a coffin in shape, and not much larger in dimensious: this rift terminated on the opposite side of the rock in an opening that was too small for the body of a man to pass: the distance between each entrance was twice the length of a man. ”

“ But it’s the devil of a hill!”
“And here they come!”
“Let them,” said Raffles, and brandished his electric torch, our only light as yet.
A hill seems endless in the dark, for you cannot see the end, and with the patter of bare feet gaining on us, I thought this one could have no end at all. Of course the boys could charge up it quicker than we could pedal, but I even heard the voice of their stout instructor growing louder through the mist. ”