The Three Black Pennys | Page 7

were few workmen of his sensitive skill with the charge
and blast. Not only Howat's father, but Abner Forsythe as well, would
search to the end all cause for the founderman's leaving. And, in
consequence of that, any detestable misunderstanding must increase.
He determined, with an effort unaccustomed and arduous, to ignore the
other; after all Gilkan was but an insignificant mouthpiece for the
familiar ineptitude of the world at large. Thomas Gilkan might continue
at the Furnace without interference from him; Fanny marry her stupid
labourer. Howat had seen symptoms of that last night. He would no
longer complicate her existence with avenues of escape from a
monotony which she patently elected.
"Very well, Gilkan," he agreed shortly, choking on his wrath. He turned
and tramped shortly from the interior. A sudden, lengthening sunlight
bathed the open and a sullen group of charcoal burners about Dan Hesa.
Their faces seemed ebonized by the grinding in of particles of
blackened wood. Some women, even, in gay, primitive clothes, stood
back of the men. As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose. He
halted, and met them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the

murmur died in a shuffling of feet in the dry grass. He turned again,
and walked slowly away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled
by his head. In an overpowering rage he whirled about, throwing his
rifle to his shoulder. A man detached from the group was lowering his
arm; and, holding the sights hard on the other's metal-buttoned, twill
jacket, Howat pulled the trigger. There was only an answering dull,
ineffectual click.
The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man he
had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before the
momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man
articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "--saw the
hammer fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a
violent chill overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to
hold him up. He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the
inequalities of the ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken
silence, stumbled away.
He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do,
but from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body
shot through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast
at the unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound
dark by the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such
absolute self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society
to which his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that,
as his peer, would have judged, condemned, him. Hundreds of
faces--faces mean, insignificant, or pock-marked--merged into one
huge, dominant countenance; hundreds of bodies, unwashed or foul
with disease, or meticulously clean, joined in one body, clothed in the
black robe of delegated authority, and loomed above him, gigantic and
absurd and powerful, and brought him to death. Deeper than his horror,
than any fear of physical consequences, lay the instinctive shrinking
from the obliteration of his individual being, the loss of personal
freedom.

II
He was possessed by an unaccustomed desire to be at Myrtle Forge;
usually it was the contrary case, and he was escaping from the
complicated civilisation of his home; but now the well-ordered house,

the serenity of his room, appeared astonishingly inviting. Howat
progressed rapidly past the smithy, and turned to the right, about the
Furnace dam, a placid and irregular reach of water holding the
reflection of the trees on a mirror still dulled by a vanishing trace of
mist, above which the leaves hung in the motionless air, in the aureate
wash of the early sun, as if they had been pressed from gold foil.
Beyond the dam the path--he had left the road that connected Forge and
Furnace for a more direct way--followed the broad, rippling course of
the Canary, the stream that supplied the life of Myrtle Forge. He
automatically avoided the breaks in the rough trail; his mind, a dark
and confused chamber, still lighted by appalling flashes of memory. A
thing as slight, as incalculable, as a loose flint had been all that
prevented.... He wondered if Fanny and Thomas Gilkan were right in
their shared conviction; Fanny half persuaded, but the elder with a
finality stamped with an accent of the heroic. Whether or not they were
right didn't concern him, he decided; his only problem was to keep
outside all such entanglements. And at present he wanted to sleep.
The path left the creek and joined the road that swept about the face of
the dwelling at Myrtle Forge. The lawn, squarely raised from the public
way