Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/215

 That is an absolute certainty; he wishes everything else were as firmly settled as that.

There is the place where he will be drenched in his own blood; where he will bleed to death like an ox, there, inside the machine, with just room enough underneath the cylinders for a man to crouch and insert the paper by the light of an electric lamp.

Kuba has seen it done once when he was working at a cotton printer’s, and knows what the power of these cylinders is when they are at work.

Cotton had been printed in this manner long before it had occurred to any one that newspapers might be produced in the same way. One of the workmen there had let the cylinders down on an overseer who had worried him; it had torn off his arm ‘as though it had been a travelling bag,’ and the machine had gone on as though nothing had happened.

Spattered Kuba can do it when he likes, at any of the shifts of paper rolls; he will have time to do it until four o’clock in the morning; any one of the white rolls with which the yard is filled may bring death to the tyrant.

It is going to happen in exactly an hour’s time, and death is approaching in the shape of