One Summer Night - Ambrose Bierce

0:00one summer night by Ambrose Beas. The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to prove that he was dead. He'd always been a hard man to convince. That he was really buried, the testimony of his senses compelled into admit. His posture flat upon his back, with his hands crossed on his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation. The strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence made a body of evidence impossible to contravert and he accepted it without a cavalry. But dead? No. He was only very, very ill. He had with all the invalids' apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon

1:02fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he, just a plain, commonplace person gifted for the time being with a pathological indifference. The organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong. But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning, silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and pretending a storm. Their brief, stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness, the monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straining about a cemetery,

2:08so the three men who were there digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong felt reasonably secure. Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away. The third was a gigantic man known as Jess. For many years, Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man of all work and it was his favourite pleasantry that he knew every soul in the place. From the nature of what he was now doing, it was infurrible that the place was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be. Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public road, where a horse and a light wagon waiting. The work of excavation was not difficult. The earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little

3:09resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out for it was a prerequisite of Jess who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a crackling shock of thunder stunned the world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. Within articulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direction and nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return, but Jess was of another breed. In the grey of the morning, two students palled and haggard from and deity and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their blood met at the college. You saw it, cried one, God yes, what do we to do?

4:14They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting room, mechanically they entered the room, on a bench in the obscurity, sat Jess, he rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth. I'm waiting for my pay, he said. Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade, once some a night by Ambrose Beas.