The Auctioneer

The dog stopped bounding at the woods, but went on barking. Gradually it dawned on John that the other noise, the new noise underneath the barking and the thud of the jumping dog, was the sound of a chain pulled and loosened, pulled and loosened, as the dog strained toward him.

John rose stiffly and went to work again as quietly as he could. He swept the pine needles away from the base of a tree and buried the gas can under them. Then he stood still until the dog got tired of barking. When he grew bold enough to take up the rake again, the dog started again. He stopped and the dog stopped. He started and the dog started. This time he kept working. Suddenly the woods were lit up and John jumped. They had turned the spotlight on again. Mudgett’s wife came out in a red robe, screaming, “Shut up. Shut up. You son of a bitch. You’re drivin’ me crazy. You’re worse’n him.” The dog yelped. She hit him across the nose with the flat of her hand. The dog rolled over on his back whining.

Then Mudgett was standing in the doorway, careless of his outline in the light from the kitchen. “God damn you!” he shouted. 111 lock the both of you in the cellar. Get him in here.”

And, in the brightness from the spotlight, Mudgett’s wife dragged the cringing dog into the kitchen after her.

John laughed. The work did not seem so hard now he was used to it. And eventually he found that he was working in back of James’s house. The light was out in the ell now. And all of Mudgett’s lights except the spotlight in the back yard were out as well.

It was about four o’clock in the morning and still pitch dark when John finished his work—a seventy-foot-long arc of piled branches stretching around the backs of Mudgett’s and James’s houses. In an admission that Perly was beyond his reach, John did not continue the pile, as he had planned, behind Fayette’s, which was the house directly opposite Perly’s. The firemen would never let the fire jump the road. He would have to settle for Mudgett and James.

John walked back the length of his pile, giving it a kick here and there, shaky at the thought of setting it on fire. He poured a trickle from the can of gasoline along the back edge of his heap, careful not to leave any gaps. Then he walked back the length of the pile again, dribbling out the gasoline until it was gone.

He carried the can a good way back up the road, screwed on the cap, and left it there. He dropped his gasoline-soaked gloves beside it, and fished the big box of wooden kitchen matches out of his jacket pocket as he walked back. He listened. All he could hear was the wind. The town at that hour was as silent as the woods. The line of gasoline smelled so strongly that he wondered if the town weren’t rousing itself for the chase already, alarmed by the fumes.

He backed up six paces. Then he struck the match on the box and threw it as it flared, starting to run with the same motion. He was almost to the gasoline can before he paused to look over his shoulder. Darkness and silence. He stopped. The match must have fizzled.

He returned, moving cautiously, to within eight feet of the gasoline. If he stood too close there wouldn’t even be any bones to tell the tale. He struck and threw.

This time, before he had run four steps, the earth shuddered and he was knocked forward by the whoop of the explosion. The woods before him lit up with a flash of yellow light. John could feel the flickering light of the gasoline-fed flames burning into his back, framing him with brightness. He caught up the can as he went and kept on running.

The pine crackled and split loudly as it burned. Mudgett’s dog was howling frantically. John crashed through an almost solid wall of juniper. Now Mudgett was hollering. He must be at the door already. John kept running. It was harder and harder to find his footing as the layers of brush accumulating between him and the fire began to obliterate the light. Finally, John risked one quick look over his shoulder as he ran.

He stopped short. Through the brush he could see the ragged wall of flame rising higher and higher. He stood a moment, mesmerized, held by the beauty of the fire he had made. High above the soaring needletips of flame, the green branch of a pine caught fire and a shower of sparks ran off before the wind in the direction of Mudgett’s.

John ran then. He ran wildly, leaping through raspberry brakes as if they weren’t there, barely feeling the thorns as they raked his face. He ran until his chest was burning and he had left behind the last trace of light from the fire. Then he stopped, confused, and found he was already at the wall. He went on, pushing hard but too spent to run, stumbling against stones, bumping into trees. He turned on the flashlight and raced along the wall within its jerky light a hundred yards, then fell full length and smashed the face of the flashlight on a boulder.