and I don’t know what-all.” And here he laughed hoarsely again, his derisive and falsetto laugh, and said: “Boy! You’ve got’em! You’ve got’em bad! You’ve been seeing things!”
“Robert, God-damn it!” Eugene now fairly screamed, “I tell you he was here! I tell you I saw him standing in the cell when I came in! I know what I’m talking about, Robert!—there was a nigger here when I came in!”
“Why, hell, Eugene!” Robert said more kindly, but with a hoarse derisive laugh, “you’ve just been seeing things, son. There was no one there; you just imagined it. I reckon you just passed out and dreamed it happened!”
“Dreamed! Dreamed!” Eugene shouted, “God-damn it, Robert, don’t you think I know when I’m dreaming? I’ll show you if it was a dream! I’ll prove it to you that it really happened! I can prove it by Blake!” he cried. “Ask Blake!… Blake! Blake! Blake!” he shouted.
And grey time slid with its slow sanded drop around them.
Blake did not answer: he had not heard their conversation and now they heard him talking softly, slowly, murderously to himself.
“Yes, sir,” he was saying, in a low, quiet, drunkenly intent soliloquy. “Yes, sir, I’ll kill him!… So help me, God, I’ll kill him dead, as sure as my name is Emmet Blake!… I’ll pull out my forty-five…. I’ll get my forty-five out when I go home… and I’ll go Ping! Ping! Ping! the minute that I see him. I’ll go Ping! Ping! Ping!” cried Blake. “I’ll kill him dead, so help me, God, if it’s the last thing that I ever do!”
“I’ll kill him!” Blake continued in a tone of dogged, drunken repetition, still talking to himself. “When I get home I’ll kill him if it’s the last thing I ever do!”
“And I’ll kill you, too,” Blake muttered in this same brooding and intent oblivion of drunken soliloquy. “You God-damned whore, I’ll kill you, too! I’ll kill the two of you together!… The bitch! The bitch! The dirty bitch!” the man now screamed, starting to his feet, and now really with a tortured note of agony and desperation in his voice. “I know where you are this minute! I know you’re with him! I know you’ll sleep with him tonight, you—dirty—low-down—”
“Emmet, you damned fool, shut up!” Robert now said, with a troubled and protesting laugh. “Do you want everyone in the whole damned place to hear you?” The dreadful shame and anguish in the man’s desperate life had burst nakedly through his drunkenness, and the hideous mutilation of his soul was suddenly stripped bare—“Don’t talk like
