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Concerning the Carnival of Crime in Connecticut 311
many a long year ago. He always lovingly trusted in you with a fidelity that your manifold treacheries were not able to shake. He followed you about like a dog, content to suffer wrong and abuse if he might only be with you; patient under these injuries so long as it was your hand that inflicted them. The latest picture you have of him in health and strength must be such a comfort to you ! You pledged your honor that if he would let you blindfold him no harm should come to him; and then, giggling and choking over the rare fun of the joke, you led him to a brook thinly glazed with ice, and pushed him in; and how you did laugh! Man, you will never forget the gentle, reproachful look he gave you as he struggled shivering out, if you live a thousand years ! Oho ! you see it now, you see it now !"
" Beast, I have seen it a million times, and shall see it a million more ! and may you rot away piecemeal, and suffer till doomsday what I suffer now, for bringing it back to me again !"
The dwarf chuckled contentedly, and went on with his accusing history of my career. I dropped into a moody, vengeful state, and suffered in silence under the merciless lash. At last this remark of his gave me a sudden rouse:
"Two months ago, on a Tuesday, you woke up, away in the night, and fell to thinking, with shame, about a peculiarly mean and pitiful act of yours toward a poor ignorant Indian in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains in the winter of eighteen hundred and—"
" Stop a moment, devil! Stop! Do you mean to tell me that even my very thoughts are not hidden from you?"
" It seems to look like that. Didn't you think the thoughts I have just mentioned?"
"If I didn't, I wish I may never breathe again! |
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