Henry stared at her, wondering whether he should tell her about the maniac being loose, just to change the subject. No — it would only set Martha off on a lot of damnfool questions, and he didn’t feel like talking to her any more than he had to. He didn’t even want to look at her.
He turned, left the house again and climbed back up in the hayloft. The visit by the constable and the deputy sheriff had almost made him forget about Colleen Kimberly, out there on the knoll beyond the orchard, but now he had an urgent need to look at her again. It would be painful, but it was something he had to do. He hoped she’d still be there — that sun was getting plumb brutal, especially if you were one of these real fair-skinned people, like Colleen.
She was still there, Henry found. She had shifted around on her canvas chair, so that she was facing the barn. The unconscious display of bare legs was more provocative than anything Henry could remember.
“Oh, Lord!” he said to himself in the stifling heat of the hayloft. “What makes me torment myself so?”
He lowered the spyglass a moment, to wipe the sweat from his face — and it was then that he saw the man in the orchard. The man was traveling at a fast lope, and, in his right hand, he carried a large meat-cleaver.
Henry stared at the cleaver, and then at the man’s huge, undershot jaw. “It’s that crazy shovel-face maniac,” he said aloud. “It’s him, surer’n all hell! He’s running through the orchard that way, so’s he can cut around the house and come in the front door.”
Henry came down the ladder fast, smiling broadly. There was no fear in him, no hesitancy. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and the thought pleased him.
You talk about your warm welcomes, he thought. I’ll give you one, mister. I’ll give, you one you ain’t never going to forget. ’Course, you won’t have long to remember it, but you sure’n hell ain’t going to forget it.
He ran to the shelf where he kept his shotgun, jerked the gun from its leather case, and crept to the barn door.
The man with the cleaver was at the far end of the orchard now, crouching down, watching the house from behind an apple tree. Even from this distance, and without the spyglass, Henry could see the crazed look in the big man’s eyes.
He’s a mean one, all right, he reflected. He should of been hung to begin with, like the constable said. Just look at him standing out there, thinking about how he’s going to chop somebody up with that cleaver…
The thought echoed and re-echoed in Henry’s mind. Suddenly he began to sweat even worse than he had in the hayloft. He put the thought into words. “Chop somebody up…” he whispered to himself.
Well, why not?
Martha was there in the house, wasn’t she? And helpless in her wheelchair, wasn’t she? The maniac would kill her with that cleaver — that was sure. And all Martha could do was scream.
Suppose he waited till she screamed, Henry reasoned, and then ran into the house with his shotgun? He’d be too late to save her, wouldn’t he? She’d be dead, and he could blow the maniac’s head off. Then he would have the farm all to himself.
The farm — and Colleen Kimberly.
He could have the girl too, by God! Her pa would be glad to get her off his hands, if he could marry her to a widower with all the land Henry was going to have. It was all so clear, so easy, so sure. Nobody would think a thing about it. He could hear them now—“Old Henry is out in his barn, see, and he hears Martha scream out, and he grabs up his shotgun and comes running, but he’s too late — that maniac has already killed her.”
Henry knelt in the shadow, just inside the barn door, and waited for the lunatic to make his dash for the house. The man moved cautiously around the apple tree, then suddenly broke into a run. But not toward the house — he was racing off in the opposite direction, toward the elm grove just this side of the blacktop.
Henry sprang out of the barn and sprinted after him. No, you don’t! he thought. Oh, no you don’t! You can’t cut out on me now, mister. I can outrun you any day in the week.
He caught up with the man, in the elm grove. The lunatic slipped and fell, and scrabbled to his feet again — too late. Henry shoved the barrels of his shotgun into the crazed face and pulled one of the triggers.
The sight of the man’s face and head sickened Henry, but only for a moment. Almost before the man’s body struck the ground, Henry had whipped out of his shirt and wrapped it around the man’s head. Even so, he couldn’t prevent considerable blood from spilling on the ground. He swore. If the constable or that deputy sheriff should come nosing around out here, a little blood could be just as dangerous as a lot.
He worked rapidly and coolly, knowing the shotgun blast might bring a curious neighbor to investigate. He scooped dried grass and leaves over the place where the blood had spilled. Then he pushed the handle of the meat-cleaver into his belt, hoisted the dead man to his shoulder and picked up the shotgun. And, though he staggered a little under the man’s weight, he was able to move toward the house at something close to a run…
Martha’s eyes rounded, and her face blanched, and her hands clawed at the arms of her wheelchair. “Henry!” she gasped. “Henry, what—”
It was the last thing she ever said. Henry used the cleaver with all the practiced skill of a hundred butcherings. Then he pointed the shotgun at the wall and fired the second barrel.
He didn’t look at Martha, as he ripped the blood-soaked shirt from the dead man’s head and ran to the bedroom. By God, he thought, killing people was easy as hell, once you set your mind to it. He stuffed the bloody shirt into the bottom compartment of his fishing tackle box and pushed the box to the rear of the shelf in the closet. Then he took a clean shirt from the bureau and buttoned it up the front on his way back to the crank phone in the parlor.
This time he did look at Martha, and he smiled a little as he asked the operator in town to ring the constable for him. He was thinking about the way the sun had shimmered on Colleen Kimberly’s thighs. It was going to be hard to keep the happiness out of his voice when he talked to the constable, hard to sound the way the constable would expect him to sound.
“Constable Weber left word he’d be at the Shanley place a while,” the operator told him. “I’ll try to ring him there for you.”
“He got her, Jim!” Henry yelled, when the constable’s voice finally came on the wire. “That maniac! He’s done killed Martha with a cleaver!.. Yeah, I got him, but it was too late. I seen him out in the elm grove, up by the road, and I snuck up there and fired a barrel to scare him into surrendering, but he took off like a goddamn rabbit…
“No, I didn’t have the craw to kill him right then. I should have, God knows, but I just couldn’t do it. He got away from me. I come back to the house — and there’s poor Martha laying there, all chopped to hell and gone, and this crazy bastard coming at me with his cleaver. I just barely had time to get my gun up and pull the trigger…
“Yeah, that’s right. He circled around me out there, somehow, and come back to the house.”
Henry let his voice break. He sobbed for a moment, then went on raggedly. “If’n I’d been another minute sooner, I could have saved her. It was all my own fault, by God, Jim…
“Yes, it was too…
“Yeah, I’ll stay right here.” He hung up, shook a cigarette from his pack and strolled between the bodies toward the door.
It was so easy, he thought — so damned easy. He walked out on the porch and leaned back against a post, to wait for the constable. It wouldn’t be much of a wait, he knew — the Shanley place was less than half a dozen miles away.