A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
beyond the second fence. That swelling bulk was dead men! Our
camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead--a bulwark,
a breastwork, of corpses, you may say. One terrible thing about
this thing was the absence of human voices; there were no cheers,
no war cries; being intent upon a surprise, these men moved as
noiselessly as they could; and always when the front rank was near
enough to their goal to make it proper for them to begin to get
a shout ready, of course they struck the fatal line and went down
without testifying.
I sent a current through the third fence now; and almost immediately
through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up.
I believed the time was come now for my climax; I believed that
that whole army was in our trap. Anyway, it was high time to find
out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame
on the top of our precipice.
Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men!
All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living,
who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires.
The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say,
with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize
their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance. You see, in
another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then
they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires
would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them
their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time
was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and
struck the whole host dead in their tracks! _There_ was a groan
you could _hear_! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men.
It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.
A glance showed that the rest of the enemy--perhaps ten thousand
strong--were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing
forward to the assault. Consequently we had them _all!_ and had
them past help. Time for the last act of the tragedy. I fired
the three appointed revolver shots--which meant:
“Turn on the water!”
There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain
brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a
hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.
“Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!”
The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten
thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against
that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and
swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth
part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment;
the three-fourths reached it and plunged over--to death by drowning.
Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance
was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were
masters of England. Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.
But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while--say an hour
--happened a thing, by my own fault, which--but I have no heart
to write that. Let the record end here.
CHAPTER XLIV
A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE
I, Clarence, must write it for him. He proposed that we two
go out and see if any help could be accorded the wounded. I was
strenuous against the project. I said that if there were many,
we could do but little for them; and it would not be wise for us to
trust ourselves among them, anyway. But he could seldom be turned
from a purpose once formed; so we shut off the electric current
from the fences, took an escort along, climbed over the enclosing
ramparts of dead knights, and moved out upon the field. The first
wounded man who appealed for help was sitting with his back
against a dead comrade. When The Boss bent over him and spoke
to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him. That knight was
Sir Meliagraunce, as I found out by tearing off his helmet. He
will not ask for help any more.
We carried The Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was
not very serious, the best care we could. In this service we had
the help of Merlin, though we did not know it. He was disguised
as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife.
In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he
had appeared a few days after The Boss was hurt and offered to cook
for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps
which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving. The Boss
had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with
finishing up his record.
We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed. We
were in a trap, you see--a trap of our own making. If we stayed
where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our
defenses, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered;
in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized this; we all
recognized it. If we could go to one of those new camps and
patch up some kind of terms with the enemy--yes, but The Boss
could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that
were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands.
Others were taken down, and still others. To-morrow--
_To-morrow._ It is here. And with it the end. About midnight
I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about
The Boss's head and face, and wondered what it meant. Everybody
but the dynamo-watch lay steeped in sleep; there was no sound.
The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing
toward the door. I called out:
“Stop! What have you been doing?”
She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:
“Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing
--you also. Ye shall all die in this place--every one--except _him_.
He sleepeth now--and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!”
Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled
about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one
of our wires. His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still
laughing. I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until
the corpse turns to dust.
The Boss has never stirred--sleeps like a stone. If he does not
wake to-day we shall understand what kind of a sleep it is, and
his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses
of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for
the rest of us--well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever
escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and
loyally hide this Manuscript with The Boss, our dear good chief,
whose property it is, be he alive or dead.
THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT
FINAL P.S. BY M.T.
The dawn was come when I laid the Manuscript aside. The rain
had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm
was sighing and sobbing itself to rest. I went to the stranger's
room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar. I could
hear his voice, and so I knocked. There was no answer, but I still
heard the voice. I peeped in. The man lay on his back in bed,
talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms,
which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium.
I slipped in softly and bent over him. His mutterings and
ejaculations went on. I spoke--merely a word, to call his attention.
His glassy eyes and his ashy face were alight in an instant with
pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:
“Oh, Sandy, you are come at last--how I have longed for you! Sit
by me--do not leave me--never leave me again, Sandy, never again.
Where is your hand?--give it me, dear, let me hold it--there
--now all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again--_we_ are happy
again, isn't it so, Sandy? You are so dim, so vague, you are but
a mist, a cloud, but you are _here_, and that is blessedness sufficient;
and I have your hand; don't take it away--it is for only a little
while, I shall not require it long.... Was that the child?...
Hello-Central!... she doesn't answer. Asleep, perhaps? Bring her
when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair,
and tell her good-bye.... Sandy! Yes, you are there. I lost
myself a moment, and I thought you were gone.... Have I been
sick long? It must be so; it seems months to me. And such dreams!
such strange and awful dreams, Sandy! Dreams that were as real
as reality--delirium, of course, but _so_ real! Why, I thought
the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn't get
home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy
of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I and a handful of
my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England!
But even that was not the strangest. I seemed to be a creature
out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even _that_ was
as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that
age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set
down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an
abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! between
me and my home and my friends! between me and all that is dear
to me, all that could make life worth the living! It was awful
--awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy. Ah, watch by me, Sandy
--stay by me every moment--_don't_ let me go out of my mind again;
death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with
the torture of those hideous dreams--I cannot endure _that_ again....
Sandy?...”
He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he
lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death. Presently
his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign
I knew that his end was at hand. With the first suggestion of the
death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed
to listen: then he said:
“A bugle?... It is the king! The drawbridge, there! Man the
battlements!--turn out the--”
He was getting up his last “effect”; but he never finished it.