A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain [little readers .TXT] 📗

As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering our side of the great dynamite ditch.  I crept to the top of it and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch.  But it was too dark to see anything.  As for sounds, there were none.  The stillness was deathlike.  True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country—the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine—but these didn’t seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.

I presently gave up looking, the night shut down so black, but I kept my ears strained to catch the least suspicious sound, for I judged I had only to wait, and I shouldn’t be disappointed. However, I had to wait a long time.  At last I caught what you may call in distinct glimpses of sound dulled metallic sound. I pricked up my ears, then, and held my breath, for this was the sort of thing I had been waiting for.  This sound thickened, and approached—from toward the north.  Presently, I heard it at my own level—the ridge-top of the opposite embankment, a hundred feet or more away.  Then I seemed to see a row of black dots appear along that ridge—human heads?  I couldn’t tell; it mightn’t be anything at all; you can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.  However, the question was soon settled.  I heard that metallic noise descending into the great ditch.  It augmented fast, it spread all along, and it unmistakably furnished me this fact:  an armed host was taking up its quarters in the ditch.  Yes, these people were arranging a little surprise party for us.  We could expect entertainment about dawn, possibly earlier.

I groped my way back to the corral now; I had seen enough.  I went to the platform and signaled to turn the current on to the two inner fences.  Then I went into the cave, and found everything satisfactory there—nobody awake but the working-watch.  I woke Clarence and told him the great ditch was filling up with men, and that I believed all the knights were coming for us in a body. It was my notion that as soon as dawn approached we could expect the ditch’s ambuscaded thousands to swarm up over the embankment and make an assault, and be followed immediately by the rest of their army.

Clarence said:

“They will be wanting to send a scout or two in the dark to make preliminary observations.  Why not take the lightning off the outer fences, and give them a chance?”

“I’ve already done it, Clarence.  Did you ever know me to be inhospitable?”

“No, you are a good heart.  I want to go and—”

“Be a reception committee?  I will go, too.”

We crossed the corral and lay down together between the two inside fences.  Even the dim light of the cave had disordered our eyesight somewhat, but the focus straightway began to regulate itself and soon it was adjusted for present circumstances.  We had had to feel our way before, but we could make out to see the fence posts now. We started a whispered conversation, but suddenly Clarence broke off and said:

“What is that?”

“What is what?”

“That thing yonder.”

“What thing—where?”

“There beyond you a little piece—dark something—a dull shape of some kind—against the second fence.”

I gazed and he gazed.  I said:

“Could it be a man, Clarence?”

“No, I think not.  If you notice, it looks a lit—why, it is a man!—leaning on the fence.”

“I certainly believe it is; let us go and see.”

We crept along on our hands and knees until we were pretty close, and then looked up.  Yes, it was a man—a dim great figure in armor, standing erect, with both hands on the upper wire—and, of course, there was a smell of burning flesh.  Poor fellow, dead as a door-nail, and never knew what hurt him.  He stood there like a statue—no motion about him, except that his plumes swished about a little in the night wind.  We rose up and looked in through the bars of his visor, but couldn’t make out whether we knew him or not—features too dim and shadowed.

We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down to the ground where we were.  We made out another knight vaguely; he was coming very stealthily, and feeling his way.  He was near enough now for us to see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend and step under it and over the lower one.  Now he arrived at the first knight—and started slightly when he discovered him.  He stood a moment—no doubt wondering why the other one didn’t move on; then he said, in a low voice, “Why dreamest thou here, good Sir Mar—” then he laid his hand on the corpse’s shoulder—and just uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead.  Killed by a dead man, you see—killed by a dead friend, in fact.  There was something awful about it.

These early birds came scattering along after each other, about one every five minutes in our vicinity, during half an hour. They brought no armor of offense but their swords; as a rule, they carried the sword ready in the hand, and put it forward and found the wires with it.  We would now and then see a blue spark when the knight that caused it was so far away as to be invisible to us; but we knew what had happened, all the same; poor fellow, he had touched a charged wire with his sword and been electrocuted. We had brief intervals of grim stillness, interrupted with piteous regularity by the clash made by the falling of an iron-clad; and this sort of thing was going on, right along, and was very creepy there in the dark and lonesomeness.

We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences.  We elected to walk upright, for convenience’s sake; we argued that if