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While the match flickered in the little girl's hand, the eldest brother again moved eyes and pistols in a half-circle. But as the lamp was lifted and its light dispelled the darkness, he saw that they were alone. To remove every doubt, he looked under the bed and the cot and behind the headboard.
No one else knew how miserable a travesty on sleep his sleep had been, first reading until a heavy physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose.
He left his room in perfect order except for one thing: one of the knobs on the headboard of the old fashioned bed was broken off short. He didn't mention the matter to the hotel people." "What do you make of that?" "It was a stout knob. Only a considerable effort of strength exerted in a peculiar way would have broken it as it was broken.
In the dead ashes of the Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of their old extravagant devotion all a mute protest to the change.
No one else knew how miserable a travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose.
A heavy cannonading began at 4.30 A. M. it literally tore us from sleep, for it seemed as if the very house were tumbling down about our ears and the singing and whizzing of those big shells was bizarre, to put it mildly. One did not know whether to get up or efface one's self in the blankets. I remember having the utmost confidence in the headboard of my bed, which was toward the window.
Let me repeat again what I have said in a previous paper the inscription which Doc Peets inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished "Wolfville" with its first funeral: "JACK KING, DECEASED. Life ain't the holding of a good hand, But The playing of a poor hand well." And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of the talents.
It always gave small Peter an uncomfortable sensation to trace that name, which was also his own, on his father's headboard. It was as if something of himself stayed out there, very lonesomely, in the deserted burying-ground. The word "father" never conveyed to him any idea or image except a crayon portrait and a grave, he being a posthumous child.
Snawdor's heavy feet descending the stairs, and then she crept across the hall and sat on the side of Fidy's bed, waiting to give her the next dose of medicine. Her eyes were fixed on the bare lathes over the headboard where she had once knocked the plaster off tacking up a tomato-can label. But she did not see the hole or the wall. Calvary Alley and Cemetery Street had ceased to exist for her.
We rode together to the old fort and I pointed out to him the very spot on which he stood on that spring morning long ago when we first saw our "Brother Andrew." We visited the graveyard and I showed him the grave of his brother John, which having no headboard or name, could only be identified by its being next to the little stone inscribed "E. S.," which I knew marked the grave of Mrs.
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