The Auctioneer

There was no reason why any of them should ever have trusted Perly. He was an outsider with big talk and they should have been more wary. But Mudgett was one of them. Mudgett should have been one of them. And Mudgett’s was the closest house of all to the pines he had in mind.

And John began moving more forcefully through the brush on the old road, his right foot warming up and the sweat starting beneath his shirt and woolen hunting jacket. Even with the brush and the weight of the gas can and his plan, he felt freer than he had in months. The point was not so much to accomplish anything as that it had become necessary to do something. That he must not be pushed to abandon everything without leaving some mark.

John knew that he had entered the stand of pines from the sound of the wind combing the needles, the silence of his footsteps, and, even in the cold, the fragrance of the pitch. Under the pines, the wind at his back was so strong that he never heard the traffic on Route 37, so the lights from Mudgett’s house caught him before he was quite ready. He stopped.

He was there, standing thirty yards back into the woods, staring out past the pines and the abandoned apple orchard at Mudgett’s house. Though it must have been nearly eleven, every light was blazing and the spotlight under the eaves threw long ropes of light into the woods.

To the left was the James place, too big for Ian James and his wife and their one grown son. There was a light on in the ell, probably in the kitchen. The son would be watching television. The house loomed through the dark the color of driftwood, dry as driftwood.

And to the right, Fayette’s, all dark. Adeline must be in bed already. Over the chimney he could see the pale outline of the tower on the old Fawkes barn. Standing still and listening, he could hear, when the wind hushed, the sounds of the town—a distant motor, a door slamming, a cat crying.

John put the gas can down. He would have to build a fire about a hundred feet long; he hadn’t much reckoned on the actual work of it. He began to act, moving stiffly, unconvinced, now that he was about it, that he could do what he had planned. He picked up dead branches from the ground and tossed them into an elongated heap. When the pile was five feet high and six or seven feet long, he stopped, restored by the rhythm of work to a sense of normalcy. He broke two green branches off one of the smaller pines, and using them as a rake, gathered in layers of nearby pine needles and sprinkled them over the top of the dead branches. Then, putting his makeshift rake down where he would recognize it again, he moved back into the woods and began collecting more dead branches to continue his pile. Bending and straightening, bending and straightening, it was like pitching hay or drawing water or splitting firewood. He worked now without weariness, strong in the faith that the long funeral pyre he planned would be complete in time, just as the raked piles of hay ended up in the loft of the barn each year before the weather cooled.

The gusts of wind piled upon each other furiously, then scattered down the hill into the Parade, occasionally leaving John in a hole of silence. In such moments the branches crashed into the pile like thunder and John straightened up and held his breath, waiting for the wind again. Far away, he had been hearing a dog bark. When the wind died, the sound leaped closer. He stopped to listen. Then he whirled to face Mudgett’s house. The back door was pulled ajar and a white husky came bounding toward him, outlined in silver by the spotlight. Then the spotlight and the light in Mudgett’s kitchen went dark, the door clicked, and John felt rather than saw Mudgett standing in the doorway with a rifle. The big dog barked frantically, dashing halfway across the clearing toward him, ghostlike in the dark, then back up again toward the house.

“Hey, King, hey, boy,” he heard Mudgett call. “What’s up, dog?” Then, “Go get him, boy!” The dog went on barking. The wind was blowing John’s scent straight toward the dog.

John took out the knife and the flashlight. If he ran now, Mudgett would hear him. The gasoline can was sitting out in the open, its red clearly visible in the light from the half moon. The dog was getting bolder now, dashing right up to the edge of the woods, so close that John could see the dark shading on the sides of his muzzle.

Mudgett was moving into the yard, his dark shape clear against the yellow house. John crouched, watching Mudgett through the branches he had piled. He should have spent the last money and bought a gun. Mudgett was a perfect target as he peered down the barrel of his rifle into the woods, moving gingerly but steadily toward John.

Suddenly Mudgett dropped the barrel of the gun and grabbed the dog by its collar. “Damn you, King,” he said. “Damn fool dog. Don’t know the difference between trouble and a coon.” He turned and moved rapidly into the house, and the kitchen light went on again.