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By Root 3682 0

his right to do what he was doing. Nothing happened. He caught hold of the window, hoisted it slowly up and the wind blasted his face. He turned to Bessie again and threw the light upon the face of death and blood. He put the flashlight in his pocket and stepped carefully in the dark to her side. He would have to lift her in his arms; his arms hung loose and did not move; he just stood. But he had to move her. He had to get her to the window. He stooped and slid his hands beneath her body, expecting to touch blood, but not touching it. Then he lifted her. feeling the wind screaming a protest against him. He stepped to the window and lifted her into it; he was working fast now that he had started. He pushed her as far out in his arms as possible, then let go. The body hit and bumped against the narrow sides of the air-shaft as it went down into blackness. He heard it strike the bottom.

He turned the light upon the pallet, half-expecting her to still be there; but there was only a pool of warm blood, a faint veil of vapor hovering in the air above it. Blood was on the pillows too He took them and threw them out of the window, down the air-shaft. It was over.

He eased the window down. He would take the pallet into another room; he wished he could leave it here, but it was cold and he needed it. He rolled the quilts and blanket into a bundle and picked it up and went into the hall. Then he stopped abruptly, his mouth open. Good God! Goddamn, yes, it was in her dress pocket! Now, he was in for it. He had thrown Bessie down the air-shaft and the money was in the pocket of her dress! What could he do about it? Should he go down and get it? Anguish gripped him. Naw! He did not want to see her again. He felt that if he should ever see her face again he would be overcome with a sense of guilt so deep as to be unbearable. That was a dumb thing to do, he thought. Throwing her away with all that money in her pocket. He sighed and went through the hall and entered another room. Well, he would have to do without money; that was all. He spread the quilts upon the floor and rolled himself into them. He had seven cents between him and starvation and the law and the long days ahead.

He closed his eyes, longing for a sleep that would not come. During the last two days and nights he had lived so fast and hard that it was an effort to keep it all real in his mind. So close had danger and death come that he could not feel that it was he who had undergone it all. And, yet, out of it all, over and above all that had happened, impalpable but real, there remained to him a queer sense of power. He had done this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes. Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions; never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight.

He had killed twice, but in a true sense it was not the first time he had ever killed. He had killed many times before, but only during the last two days had this impulse assumed the form of actual killing. Blind anger had come often and he had either gone behind his curtain or wall, or had quarreled and fought. And yet, whether in running away or in fighting, he had felt the need of the clean satisfaction effacing this thing in all its fulness, of fighting it out in the wind and sunlight, in front of those whose hate for him was so unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into a corner of the city to rot and die, they could turn to him, as Mary had that night in the car, and say: “I’d like to know how your people live.”

But what was he after? What did he want? What did he love and what did he hate? He did not know. There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had; something spread out in front of him and something spread out in back; and never in all his life, with this