Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/74



Y, HOW I used to lie awake nights, staring into the darkness of the attic, wishing we hadn't done it!

By staring a long time with eyes stretched wide, I could see the rafters; and hanging to the rafters near the little partition that turned part of the attic into a room, were his pants—brown-striped they showed the day-light—and his white shirt.

There was quite a while before I would admit that we had done it. I kept my mind resolutely bent on believing we hadn't, until by reviewing the circumstantial evidence over and over again I could see no loophole. And when his brother-in-law was reported to have been in the neighborhood asking others about him, and never came near us, I knew it was no use to deny it if any one should accuse us. Yet it would be unfair to confess without the consent of the others involved in the killing.

So I held my peace. With the exception, of course, of the one night at the supper when I blurted out a dead and oppressive silence, "I wish we hadn't killed Thompson."

Every one stopped eating and looked wildly at me. They had not expected me to say this, evidently.

Mother asked harshly: "What do you mean?"

I got up and left the table hurriedly. I hadn't meant to say it. It was unfair to the others.

HOMPSON had come to our house to board. It was spring-time. He was a timber-looker for a spoke and rim company of Portsmouth. People sent him to our house because sometimes we took folks in. We were reputed to have good food, and our little frame home was one of the best in a poverty-ridden vicinity.

Not so much of a home it would appear now. There was a combination of kitchen-dining-room, with an old stove in one corner, the stairway to the attic in the corner nearest to the stove, the gun hanging over the doorway leading to the living room where the big fireplace was, and an out-of-doors door leading to the back porch where the morning wood was piled in the winter. Off from that back porch opened the little room where the boys of the family sometimes slept. Always one or two of us slept there. Then leading back form the living room was the parlor, and back of that the spare bedroom.

On the wall of the living room hung a chromo entitled "Rock of Ages." It consisted of a large lady draped in a single garment, reaching up with bare arms and clinging to a great stone cross on a wave-washed rock 73