Free The Main Death and This King Business by Dashiell Hammett Page B

of drawers, rested one elbow beside the pistol, took a corner of his mustache in one big red hand, and addressed the soldier. His voice was kindly, paternal. The soldier, standing rigidly upright in the middle of the floor, replied, whining, his eyes focused on the officer’s with a blank, in-turned look.
    They talked for five minutes or more. Impatience grew in the Colonel’s voice and manner. The soldier kept his blank abjectness. Einarson ground his teeth together and looked angrily at the boy and me.
    â€œThis pig!” he exclaimed, and began to bellow at the soldier.
    Sweat sprang out on the soldier’s gray face, and he cringed out of his military stiffness. Einarson stopped bellowing at him and yelled two words at the door. It opened and the bearded orderly came in with a short, thick, leather whip. At a nod from Einarson, he put the whip beside the automatic on the top of the chest of drawers and went out.
    The soldier whimpered. Einarson spoke curtly to him. The soldier shuddered, began to unfasten his coat with shaking fingers, pleading all the while with whining, stuttering words. He took off his coat, his green blouse, his gray undershirt, letting them fall on the floor, and stood there, his hairy, not exactly clean body naked from the waist up. He worked his fingers together and cried.
    Einarson grunted a word. The soldier stiffened at attention, hands at sides, facing us, his left side to Einarson.
    Slowly Colonel Einarson removed his own belt, unbuttoned his tunic, took it off, folded it carefully, and laid it on the cot. Beneath it he wore a white cotton shirt. He rolled the sleeves up above his elbows and picked up the whip.
    â€œThis pig!” he said again.
    Lionel Grantham stirred uneasily on his chair. His face was white, his eyes dark.
    V
A FLOGGING
    Leaning his left elbow on the chest of drawers again, playing with his mustache-end with his left hand, standing indolently cross-legged, Einarson began to flog the soldier. His right arm raised the whip, brought the lash whistling down to the soldier’s back, raised it again, brought it down again. It was especially nasty because he was not hurrying himself, not exerting himself. He meant to flog the man until he got what he wanted, and he was saving his strength so that he could keep it up as long as necessary.
    With the first blow the terror went out of the soldier’s eyes. They dulled sullenly and his lips stopped twitching. He stood woodenly under the beating, staring over Grantham’s head. The officer’s face had also become expressionless. Anger was gone. He showed no pleasure in his work, not even that of relieving his feelings. His air was the air of a stoker shoveling coal, of a carpenter sawing a board, of a stenographer typing a letter. Here was a job to be done in a workmanlike manner, without haste or excitement or wasted effort, without either enthusiasm or repulsion. It was nasty, but it taught me respect for this Colonel Einarson.
    Lionel Grantham sat on the edge of his folding chair, staring at the soldier with white-ringed eyes. I offered the boy a cigarette, making an unnecessarily complicated operation out of lighting it and my own—to break up his score-keeping. He had been counting the strokes, and that wasn’t good for him.
    The whip curved up, swished down, cracked on the naked back—up, down, up, down. Einarson’s florid face took on the damp glow of moderate exercise. The soldier’s gray face was a lump of putty. He was facing Grantham and me. We couldn’t see the marks of the whip.
    Grantham said something to himself in a whisper. Then he gasped:
    â€œI can’t stand this!”
    Einarson didn’t look around from his work.
    â€œDon’t stop it now,” I muttered. “We’ve gone this far.”
    The boy got up unsteadily and went to the window, opened it and stood looking out into the rainy night. Einarson paid no attention to him. He was putting more