Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/16

 dreaded "chopper"—had been busy all day long.

On his way back from his bureau by the waterfront he had passed the tumbrils, eight of them, bumping heavily across the filthy flints on their way to the scaffold set in the Place de la Revolution, and the milling, jostling, screaming, cursing, bestial-throated crowd had caught him up and borne him like a chip dropped in the brook right to the line of civil guards that ringed the place of execution. The sight was sickening, but fascinating. He wished to look away, to shut his eyes, or hide them with his hands, but he could no more forbear staring at the chopper's grisly work than the charmed bird can avert its eyes from the approaching serpent.

Sanson—"Monsieur de Paris"—was in charge, and with him his full crew of "valets" in their crimson smocks, and the three knocks sounded swiftly, rhythmically, like the ticking of some monster clock of doom — the slapping knock of the long plank to which the valets strapped the victim prone, the clack of wood on wood as the neckpiece was adjusted, then the thud that sounded as the chopper fell. Two — four — a score — two score and ten and six victims strapped face-downward to the plank, their necks latched in the pillory, then the thumping of the dropping blade. A pile of twitching corpses, gaping necks cascading blood, fifty-six heads in the baskets; the scaffold and the plank, even the side-posts with the grooves in which the chopper slid, reeking, splashed and steamed with gore. And accompanying the carnival of death the yells and howls of obscene laughter from the mob that gathered around the scaffold like patrons at a comedy.

Mordecai was almost fainting when the orgy finally ended, and fought his way through the dispersing crowd with desperate roughness. Even now the memory of the grisly spectacle struck at his stomach like an ice-cold blade, and despite the rising storm he stopped to lean against the wall and drink the cold air in with shuddering gasps. He was sick of Paris, sick of France, eager with a longing almost past endurance for the cleanness of New England and the freedom of America.

The spell of nauseating weakness passed and he bent his shoulders to the rain which now came down in almost drowning torrents. As he plodded through the storm his resolution strengthened. He had a job of work to do, and he would do it. England's cruisers had swept the French ships from the seas and, desperate for imports, France had opened her West Indian ports to neutral traders. New England skippers and shipowners were not backward in response, and a bridge of Yankee clippers carried cinnamon and coffee, sugar, rum, vanilla and tobacco from Martinique and Haiti to the ports of France, returning to their home docks with choice wines, louisine and kindred luxuries. Foremost in the fleet of carriers were the ships of Westhorne & Sons, shipowners of Boston, and while old Ezekiel Westhorne supervised the trade, and his sons Hezekiah, Obadiah and Micah sailed the clippers, Mordecai, the youngest, was in Paris as their representative, bargaining with shippers, supervising return loads, seeing that prompt payments were made in good hard louis and not in paper assignats. The Westhorne fortune increased steadily, and he was here to help it grow. He hated Paris, loathed the Frenchmen and longed for home until the longing hurt, but the family must be represented. French frugality—to use no harsher term—must be met with Yankee