Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/258

 wished he could throw Jurko into the bloody track of the poacher, so that he should know what had come of his omniscient babbling, and suck up and get thoroughly saturated with the evil consequences of it. He had a bad night. He went to sleep, but was startled by a dream. Some one was stepping on his heart, penetrating his chest. He tried to realize what it was that was hurting him, and found that a block of wood with a plank across it was standing on his chest. On the two ends of the see-saw were Jurko the fool and a man without a head. The blood was streaming down over his coat. They went on perpetually see-sawing, and each wanted to go higher than the other. Why must they put this plaything on top of his chest?

Jurko was crying: ‘Rabbit-food, rabbit-food!’ and cackling his thin, wise, old-man’s cackle.

He was sure it had been Jurko who had brought it all about, because he knew everything and could see into the future; he had known exactly how he would set impulse after impulse throbbing in his heart.

Martin awoke and could not go to sleep again.

‘I’ve killed a man, that’s it,’ he remembered,