For his part, Wrathwell appeared to be growing increasingly uneasy. By the second week he would sometimes turn to the staring, unmoving, unblinking mountain man and let loose a stream of curses that would cause the women in the ever-growing audience to turn away and blush, or hastily emplace their hands over the ears of wide-eyed children.
“Nobody outsets Versus Wrathwell, do you hear me! Why don’t you move, you chunk of monkey meat? Why don’t you say something, offspring of a whore and a water horse?” Suddenly, he leaned sharply to his right. At this first non-rocking motion, several in the crowd of onlookers gasped and strong men stepped back.
“So it’s a settin’ contest you want, is it? Well and done, then, well and done. Nobody outsets me, and nobody outstills, and by the tip of my beard, I’ll see you move first and surrender, I will! I’ll have your soul for an earring to hang on my own, and you’ll die there dry and desiccated with your black damned eyes wide open!”
At that, Versus Wrathwell stopped rocking.
Gleaming black eyes met rheumy blue. Lids froze high and never blinked. The children who had run and laughed suddenly found reason to return to the safety of home and school. Muttering to themselves, mothers and saloon hookers alike soon followed, until only the strongest of strong men were left in audience.
And still the stares of the two men were locked, hard and unmoving as crossed swords, locked in combat as deadly. Clouds began to gather overhead, and the promise of rain that might refill empty storage barrels and tanks drew still more onlookers away from the confrontation. But while the sky grew dark and lightning began to crackle and wind gusted strong enough to stir beard black and beard white, no rain fell. It was as if such unrelenting stubbornness on the part of the seated pair angered the heavens themselves, and they responded with sizzle and flash, thunder and ground-searing bolt.
“By the scar on my sainted grandmother’s neck,” one man breathed the following morning as he returned to resume gazing upon the unnatural square-off, “the mountain man—he ain’t breathing!”
It was true. Amos Malone’s immense chest had grown still. No air was sucked in through dirty nostrils nor hissed from between slightly parted lips. He was sitting stiller than anyone could set. Across from him, ensconced tightly in his chair, Versus Wrathwell looked momentarily startled. Then, white and gold teeth clenched, he too ceased breathing. Neither man breathing, but neither man dead.
This, the remaining onlookers agreed, was settin’ with a vengeance.
It was a sight so disturbing that it sent all but two friends, among the toughest of all the miners in southern Colorado, fleeing townward.
Malone stared at Wrathwell. Wrathwell glared at Malone. Then the mountain man did something neither miner could quite understand, though they understood it clear. He stopped moving at all.
He stopped moving inside.
Asa Green didn’t quite comprehend what he was experiencing, but his friend Hiram confirmed it. It was as if they could see through parts of the mountain man. As they stared, Malone’s left hand started to detach from his wrist. Fluttering like a flesh-colored butterfly, one ear commenced to shimmy and drift away from the side of his head. When Malone’s right eye began to emerge from its socket, quivering like an orphaned cue ball, Hiram Hopkins let out a tremulous moan and fled. Of the curious, only Asa Green still remained as witness to what followed.
The face of the old man cracked wide in an alternating gold and white smirk. He began to laugh. “Told yez! Told yez, told yez, told yez! Nobody outsets Versus Wrathwell! Nobody! I once blocked a clipper from leaving Boston Harbor. They paid me. Another time was the door to the safe in Philadelphia’s main bank. They paid me. So will these miserable would-be gold-leachers! They’ll pay me. Everybody pays Versus Wrathwell. And you, you’ll pay, big as you are. You’ll pay with… with… what the hell this side of Constantinople is happening?”
Versus Wrathwell was also coming apart. As Green, no longer brave but too terrified to run, looked on, the old man’s eyes drifted out of his head. Then they began to rotate around his skull. They were soon joined by his ears. Then his fingers detached, one by one, from his hands, and commenced to swing moonlike around his jerky-tough body. Above and all around, dark clouds swirled like overcooked chili. Thunder bellowed. Through the flashes of lightning, Asa Green saw more and more of the old man’s body float free, until every digit and external protrusion was orbiting his skinny frame.
Eyes and ears, fingers and toes, nose and hair—all swam circuslike about him. When his torso came apart and his organs began to form a crack-the-whip around the oldster’s now empty center, the miner nearly fainted. That he retained consciousness and memory of the event was due more to the shock that prevented him from passing out than to any innate audacity.
“No!” Detached from his mouth and from the rest of him, Wrathwell’s lips were shouting feebly even as they too began to reduce themselves to their component parts. “It can’t be! This cannot be! Nobody outstills Versus Wrathwell! No—body…”
Flying farther and farther apart, growing smaller and smaller as they did so, the constituent bits and pieces of the curious old man eventually lost all contact with one another, until one by one the individual submicroscopic specks of ugliness that had been Versus Wrathwell let out a crackle and a pop before being sucked up by the swirling, roaring clouds.
Gradually the arid storm began to subside, the clouds to turn first brown and then golden and finally white, until, exhausted, they were much relieved to abdicate their agitation in favor of blue sky and bright sunshine.
Meanwhile Amos Malone’s eye floated back to reinsert itself neatly into its empty socket, massive fingers fastened themselves firmly back to his hand, and he was full restored. Only then, for the first time in nearly two weeks, did he blink.
Something touched the back of Asa Green’s neck. Nudged out of the paralysis into which he had fallen, the hardy, toughened miner screamed once. Whipping around and looking back two sneezes short of a heart attack, he saw that it was only the muzzle of the mountain man’s horse. A great relief wheezed out of him. As he rose shakily to his feet, Malone was doing likewise. The mountain man eyed his mount.
“Yeah, I’m hungry, too. Let’s go get something to eat.” He squinted at the still-trembling Asa Green, then nodded in the direction of the steel control wheel behind the empty chair. “Town’s thirsty. ’Bout time t’ remedy that, wouldn’t you say?”
Fighting to control his shaking, Green cautiously approached the empty rocking chair. There was no sign, anywhere, of the old man who had occupied it so long and so obstinately. Gingerly, the miner reached down. His hands moved freely. Taking hold of the arms of the chair, he pulled. It shifted without resistance. Pulling harder, he lifted the heretofore unapproachable piece of furniture off the ground. It rose without resistance. Then, mindful of the crying children and dry-throated women and his own burning thirst this past unpleasant month, he spun right around and heaved it as far as he could. Describing a high arc, the aged birch struck the surrounding rocks and shattered into kindling.
Turning thankfully back to the stolid, silent mountain man, Asa Green nodded, bent, and began to turn the control wheel. It rotated easily, almost gratefully, in his callused hands. The gush of water as the formerly restrained spring once more filled the pipe with life was like the sound children make when school lets out for summer. From the town below, cries of surprise and then shouts of joy filled the air. It was September in southern Colorado, it was hot, but for the town at the base of the hill it was Christmas come early.