Page:Weird Tales Volume 26 Number 01 (1935-07).djvu/30

been made by one of your factories, Mr. Harkness, sir.

"You'd never believe what a body can go through before it dies. You'd have to see with your own eyes something like the drawn-out death of Carrigan. But it's hard to see a thing like that and stay sane. At least it was hard for us, his friends.

"All of us were going a little crazy, with the screaming and all, before that hour that sticks in my mind was over. And all of us were showing it in the way kids do in the trenches.

"The boy next to me—seventeen, he was, he'd lied about his age—had bitten through his lips so that I saw the white of his teeth through the red of a gash that was like a second mouth. Beyond him a farm lad a year older than myself was laughing. His laughing mingled with Carrigan's screaming, when both weren't drowned out by artillery fire, and I don't know which was worse. As he laughed he fired at Carrigan, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, and couldn't hit him.

"Down the line a youngster had finally stood up with a yell and climbed over the top to go and bayonet Carrigan. Of course he hadn't lasted very long. Three or four steps, he took, and he went down with something besides blood filling his helmet from a dozen holes in his head.

"That's all, sir. It was right after that that we started to yell as loud as we could, in a kind of chorus. And that drowned out the sound of Carrigan's yelling. It must have been a funny sight—all of us in that trench shouting, anything we could think of from prayers to blasphemy, with the farm lad's crazy laughing sounding above the rest. But then you see funny things in a war."

Waiter number 34 took a step away with his little tray on which the glasses reflected with crystal sleekness the sunlight pouring in the window of the Console Club.

"I hope you didn't mind my telling you these things, sir. I didn't mean to bore you—I just had the picture brought back to me, by your mention of war, of that hour when we yelled and stuffed our fingers in our ears to keep from hearing the screaming of the thing hanging in Mr. Harkness' barbed wire. Just an hour, seen by one man. It means little, of course. . . .

"It was just after we all started our yelling that a big one hit squarely in our trench and exploded."

He nodded subserviently, apologetically, and went off.

Behind him, Kearns sat rigid in his big chair, too angry for a moment to speak. Harkness' full face was apoplectic in hue.

"I'll have the steward fire him if it's the last thing I ever do!" Kearns said at last. "And I'll see to it that he's blacklisted everywhere in town! Such infernal insolence——"

"Fire him, yes," agreed Harkness, whose face had begun to get back some of its normal good-nature. "But let's not have him blacklisted, Kearns. Give the man a chance to find another job, if he can."

For Harkness was a humane and kindly man. . . .

WTemplate:As number 34 went in through the swinging doors of the kitchen and set his tray and the empty glasses on the big dishwasher's rack. Then he moved slowly, wearily, toward the service door that opened onto narrow Eighty-fourth Street.

At the dishwashing machine a man with an artificial hand suddenly clutched the shoulder of the young fellow who assisted him. His fingers bit with a force that made the lad exclaim aloud.