Short Stories
"What are you snifflin' about?" Matt demanded out of his
agony. "All you got to do is die. An' when you die you're
dead."
"I. . . ain't. . . snifflin' . . . it's. . . the. . . mustard. . . stingin'
my . . . eyes," Jim panted with desperate slowness.
It was his last successful attempt at speech. Thereafter he
babbled incoherently, pawing the air with shaking arms till a
fresh convulsion stretched him on the floor.
Matt struggled back to the chair, and, doubled up on it,
with his arms clasped about his knees, he fought with his dis-
integrating flesh. He came out of the convulsion cool and
weak. He looked to see how it went with the other, and saw
him lying motionless.
He tried to soliloquize, to be facetious, to have his last grim
laugh at life, but his lips made only incoherent sounds. The
thought came to him that the emetic had failed, and that nothing
remained but the drugstore. He looked toward the door and
drew himself to his feet. There he saved himself from falling by
clutching the chair. Another paroxysm had begun. And in the
midst of the paroxysm, with his body and all the parts of it fly-
ing apart and writhing and twisting back again into knots, he
clung to the chair and shoved it before him across the floor. The
last shreds of his will were leaving him when he gained the
door. He turned the key and shot back one bolt. He fumbled for
the second bolt, but failed. Then he leaned his weight against the
door and slid down gently to the floor.
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