The Claim Jumpers

Although he had retired so early, and in so exhausted a condition,

Bennington de Laney could not sleep. He had taken a slight fever, and

the wound in his shoulder was stiff and painful. For hours on end he

lay flat on his back, staring at the dim illuminations of the windows

and listening to the faint out-of-door noises or the sharper borings of

insects in the logs of the structure. His mind was not active. He lay

in a semi-torpor, whose most vivid consciousness was that of mental

discomfort and the interminability of time.

The events of the day rose up before him, but he seemed to loathe them

merely because they had been of so active a character, and now he could

not bear to have his brain teased even with their impalpable shadow.

Strangely enough, this altitude seemed to create a certain dead

polarity between him and them. They lay sullenly outside his brain,

repelled by this dead polarity, and he looked at them languidly,

against the dim illumination of the window, with a dull joy that they

could not come near him and enter the realm of his thoughts. All this

was the fever.

In a little time these events became endowed with more palpable bodies

which moved. The square of semilucent window faded into something

indescribable, and that into something indescribable, and that into

something else, still indescribable.

They moved swiftly, and things happened. He found himself suddenly in a

long gallery, half in the dusk, half in the lamplight, pacing slowly

back and forth, waiting for something, he knew not what. To him came a

bustling motherly old woman with a maid's cap on, who said, "Sure,

Master Ben, the moon is shining, and, let me tell ye, at the end of the

hall is a balcony of iron, and Miss Mary will be glad you know that

same." And at that he seemed to himself to be hunting for a coin with

which to tip her. He discovered it turned to lead between his fingers,

whereupon the old woman laughed shrilly and disappeared, and he found

himself alone on the prairie at midnight.

His mind seemed to be filled with great thoughts which would make him

famous. Over and over again he said to himself: "The rain pours and the

people down below chuckle as they move about each under his little

umbrella of self-conceit. They look up to the mountain, saying, 'The

fool! Why looks he so high? He is lost in the mists up there, and he

might be safe and dry with us.' But the mountain has over him the arch

of the universe, and sleeps calmly in the sun of truth. Little recks he

of the clouds below, and knows not at all the little self-satisfied

fools who pity him," and he thought this was the sum of all wisdom, and

that with it would come immortality.