The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Damned Thing, by Ambrose Bierce

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Title: The Damned Thing
1898, From "In the Midst of Life"

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23172]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNED THING ***

Produced by David Widger

THE DAMNED THING

By Ambrose Bierce

Reprinted by permission. From "In the Midst of Life," copyright, 1898,
by G. P. Putnam's Sons

I

By THE light of a tallow candle, which had been placed on one end of a
rough table, a man was reading something written in a book. It was an
old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently,
very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of
the candle to get a stronger light upon it. The shadow of the book would
then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of
faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present.
Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent and motionless,
and, the room being small, not very far from the table. By extending an
arm any one of them could have touched the eighth man, who lay on the
table, face upward, partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his sides. He
was dead.

The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all
seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was
without expectation. From the blank darkness outside came in, through
the aperture that served for a window, all the ever unfamiliar noises
of night in the wilderness--the long, nameless note of a distant coyote;
the stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees; strange cries of
night birds, so different from those of the birds of day; the drone of
great blundering beetles, and all that mysterious chorus of small sounds
that seem always to have been but half heard when they have suddenly
ceased, as if conscious of an indiscretion. But nothing of all this was
noted in that company; its members were not overmuch addicted to idle
interest in matters of no practical importance; that was obvious in
every line of their rugged faces--obvious even in the d