By little and little the sounds of moving in the house above were stilled. Jack’s ears hummed and tingled and buzzed, and he sat there thinking, thinking, thinking, and yet not thinking with any set purpose of thought. What was to happen to him? Oh! if he had not resisted his master! Why had he resisted? If there were only some way in which he could set himself right with that master! If he could only beg and obtain some pardon! And then he realized with despair that there was no way in which he could undo what he had done; that there was no possible pardon for him. He saw as in a mental picture his master rolling over on the floor, and he knew that he would never be forgiven such an insult. Now and then he thrilled almost as with an agony—if he could only escape the inevitable to-morrow! But, no! There was nothing for him to do but to sit there all night waiting for the day. Oh! if he could only stop thinking about it. He might have sat there thinking thus for an hour; he might have sat there ten hours; there was no sequence of thought by which he might measure the length or the shortness of time—nothing but a level stretch of dull and numb despair. Then, suddenly, he felt that he was parched and dry with thirst. He wondered if Peggy Pitcher had brought him anything to drink. He reached over, fumbling in the darkness, and opened the cloth in which was wrapped the food she had brought him. There was a bottle with something in it. It was rum and water, and Jack, as he drank a long draught of it, felt an almost animal gratitude in the quenching of his parching thirst. Presently he began eating some of the food, and before he knew it he had made a hearty meal.
For a while the eating distracted his mind, and his troubles lay big and dumb, brooding within him; but after he had finished the food and sat again in the humming silence, it all came back to him with a renewed and overwhelming keenness. He bowed his head over on his knees. Recollections of the warm, bright day that had just passed—a recollection of the dead turkey as it lay in the grass—came vividly to him. The trivial recollection seemed to make the terror of that which afterward happened all the more tragic by contrast. He felt the hot drops well bigger and bigger under his burning eyelids, and then one fell upon his hand and trickled slowly down across it.