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I will dismiss the theory that some one had imitated the prisoner's writing in order to do him an injury, and ask if you can see any reason for any one else giving the woman the powder. "There is one fact beyond all dispute: in December the prisoner bought a shilling's worth of strychnine. He said he bought it for rats, but no one on the farm had been called to prove it.
The next time she climbed up to the station she found him boarding up the windows and hanging certain things from the ceiling to keep them away from rats, under the telephone directions of the supervisor. He expected Hank's successor up that afternoon to move down what must be taken to town for the winter.
"Three times," she answered, not removing her eyes; "onct he tooked Rough on Rats and I found it out and I put some apple butter in the place of it, and he kept wondering and wondering how he didn't feel notings, and after awhile I got him off the notion, that time. He wasn't mad at me; he just said: 'Well, I do it some other time.
Accordingly, it was no unusual thing for him to roll off the table in the night, and descend upon the floor with considerable uproar. This was got over by inverting the table at night, and making him recline on the inside of it, with the legs sticking up around him. He does not like this position, though, for he says the rats run across him all night.
Or else those great Cannibal Birds, the Wise Watchers, who eat the flesh of their smaller brothers, as well as of rats, mice, and all such vermin the Hawks and Owls; or else they are Gulls, Terns, Fishing Ducks, and a great many other kinds of sea birds who feed on fish and pick up the scraps floating on the surface of sea, lake, and river."
There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats!
"Did you ever hear," said a gentleman to me, "of rats devouring window-glass, or of anchors and boiler iron blowing away in the wind?" However startling such phenomena, he declared they had been known at Nicolayevsk and elsewhere in the empire. I think if all the truth were revealed we might learn of equally strange occurrences in America during the late war.
"Say, men, how can ye hope to resist the might of the Prince's arm? Say, which will ye do be the free servants of Gaston de Brocas, or die like rats in a hole for the sake of yon wicked madman, whose slaves ye have long been? Which shall it be a De Brocas or a Navailles?" Something in this last appeal stirred the hearts of the men. It seemed as though a veil were torn from their eyes.
The old man kept his winter store of apples and pears, medlars and quinces on heaps of straw in these rooms, where the rats and mice ran riot, so that they exhaled a mingled odor of fruit and vermin.
Three dead rats lay near. "You were right, Ivan," he said with a great shudder. "What is it?" said the Scout who was rubbing him. "Poison," said Warren. "Meant for us." A little at a time he told the newcomers the adventures of the past long hours.
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