His face was snarling and savage, and his eyes were crazy. He had risen to avenge himself, to wipe out his shame, to destroy his enemy. One look was enough for Johnny. Wunsch raised a chair threateningly, and Johnny, with the lightness of a PICADOR, darted under the missile and out of the open window. He shot across the gully to get help, meanwhile leaving the Kohlers to their fate.
Fritz, upstairs, heard the chair crash upon the stove. Then he heard doors opening and shutting, and some one stumbling about in the shrubbery of the garden. He and Paulina sat up in bed and held a consultation. Fritz slipped from under the covers, and going cautiously over to the window, poked out his head. Then he rushed to the door and bolted it.
“MEIN GOTT, Paulina,” he gasped, “he has the axe, he will kill us!”
“The dresser,” cried Mrs. Kohler; “push the dresser before the door. ACH, if you had your rabbit gun, now!”
“It is in the barn,” said Fritz sadly. “It would do no good; he would not be afraid of anything now. Stay you in the bed, Paulina.” The dresser had lost its casters years ago, but he managed to drag it in front of the door. “He is in the garden. He makes nothing. He will get sick again, may-be.”
Fritz went back to bed and his wife pulled the quilt over him and made him lie down. They heard stumbling in the garden again, then a smash of glass.
“ACH, DAS MISTBEET!” gasped Paulina, hearing her hotbed shivered. “The poor soul, Fritz, he will cut himself. ACH! what is that?” They both sat up in bed. “WIEDER! ACH, What is he doing?”
The noise came steadily, a sound of chopping. Paulina tore off her night-cap. “DIE BAUME, DIE BAUME! He is cutting our trees, Fritz!” Before her husband could prevent her, she had sprung from the bed and rushed to the window. “DER TAUBENSCHLAG! GERECHTER HIMMEL, he is chopping the dove-house down!”
Fritz reached her side before she had got her breath again, and poked his head out beside hers. There, in the faint starlight, they saw a bulky man, barefoot, half dressed, chopping away at the white post that formed the pedestal of the dove-house. The startled pigeons were croaking and flying about his head, even beating their wings in his face, so that he struck at them furiously with the axe. In a few seconds there was a crash, and Wunsch had actually felled the dove-house.
“Oh, if only it is not the trees next!” prayed Paulina. “The dove-house you can make new again, but not DIE BAUME.”
They watched breathlessly. In the garden below Wunsch stood in the attitude of a woodman, contemplating the fallen cote. Suddenly he threw the axe over his shoulder and went out of the front gate toward the town.
“The poor soul, he will meet his death!” Mrs. Kohler wailed. She ran back to her feather bed and hid her face in the pillow.
Fritz kept watch at the window. “No, no, Paulina,” he called presently; “I see lanterns coming. Johnny must have gone for somebody. Yes, four lanterns, coming along the gulch. They stop; they must have seen him already. Now they are under the hill and I cannot see them, but I think they have him. They will bring him back. I must dress and go down.” He caught his trousers and began pulling them on by the window. “Yes, here they come, half a dozen men. And they have tied him with a rope, Paulina!”
“ACH, the poor man! To be led like a cow,” groaned Mrs. Kohler. “Oh, it is good that he has no wife!” She was reproaching herself for nagging Fritz when he drank himself into foolish pleasantry or mild sulks, and felt that she had never before appreciated her blessings.
Wunsch was in bed for ten days, during which time he was gossiped about and even preached about in Moonstone. The Baptist preacher took a shot at the fallen man from his pulpit, Mrs. Livery Johnson nodding approvingly from her pew. The mothers of Wunsch's pupils sent him notes informing him that their daughters would discontinue their music-lessons. The old maid who had rented him her piano sent the town dray for her contaminated instrument, and ever afterward declared that Wunsch had ruined its tone and scarred its glossy finish. The Kohlers were unremitting in their kindness to their friend. Mrs. Kohler made him soups and broths without stint, and Fritz repaired the dove-house and mounted it on a new post, lest it might be a sad reminder.
As soon as Wunsch was strong enough to sit about in his slippers and wadded jacket, he told Fritz to bring him some stout thread from the shop. When Fritz asked what he was going to sew, he produced the tattered score of “Orpheus” and said he would like to fix it up for a little present. Fritz carried it over to the shop and stitched it into pasteboards, covered with dark suiting-cloth. Over the stitches he glued a strip of thin red leather which he got from his friend, the harness-maker. After Paulina had cleaned the pages with fresh bread, Wunsch was amazed to see what a fine book he had. It opened stiffly, but that was no matter.
Sitting in the arbor one morning, under the ripe grapes and the brown,
curling leaves, with a pen and ink on the bench beside him and the Gluck
score on his knee, Wunsch pondered for a long while. Several times he
dipped the pen in the ink, and then put it back again in the cigar box
in which Mrs. Kohler kept her writing utensils. His thoughts wandered
over a wide territory; over many countries and many years. There was no
order or logical sequence in his ideas. Pictures came and went without
reason. Faces, mountains, rivers, autumn days in other vineyards far
away. He thought of a FUSZREISE he had made through the Hartz Mountains
in his student days; of the innkeeper's pretty daughter who had lighted
his pipe for him in the garden one summer evening, of the woods above
Wiesbaden, haymakers on an island in the river. The roundhouse whistle
woke him from his reveries. Ah, yes, he was in Moonstone, Colorado. He
frowned for a moment and looked at the book on his knee. He had thought
of a great many appropriate things to write in it, but suddenly he
rejected all of them, opened the book, and at the top of the
much-engraved title-page he wrote rapidly in purple ink:—
EINST, O WUNDER!—
A. WUNSCH.
MOONSTONE, COLO.
SEPTEMBER 30, 18—
Nobody in Moonstone ever found what Wunsch's first name was. That “A” may have stood for Adam, or August, or even Amadeus; he got very angry if any one asked him.
He remained A. Wunsch to the end of his chapter there. When he presented this score to Thea, he told her that in ten years she would either know what the inscription meant, or she would not have the least idea, in which case it would not matter.
When Wunsch began to pack his trunk, both the Kohlers were very unhappy. He said he was coming back some day, but that for the present, since he had lost all his pupils, it would be better for him to try some “new town.” Mrs. Kohler darned and mended all his clothes, and gave him two new shirts she had made for Fritz. Fritz made him a new pair of trousers and would have made him an overcoat but for the fact that overcoats were so easy to pawn.
Wunsch
