Crouched on the floor between gear-shift lever and right front door, he drove with a hand stretched up to the wheel. Drove blind, with the car dipping into the shallow ditch first on one side and then the other and being brought back to the unseen road again by the deft steely hand.
The back window of the sedan flashed out. The windshield seemed to explode and disappear! Holes ripped into back and front cushions. Then there was neither sound nor violence. He had gotten out of range.
He raised back up to the driver’s seat just in time to avoid a head-on collision with another car in which women were screaming at sight of an apparently driverless machine rocketing toward them. He roared on till the shot-riddled gas tank was empty; then he left the car and went back to town in an obliging farmer’s produce truck.
In a grim, dark cellar, the face of death grinned fiendishly from a deep, black chasm which led to an underground river. But death has many faces. It showed another the next afternoon, at a place where its grimacing features had been seen before.
At the Garfield Gear plant.
Josh Newton had been told to look around the plant, and keep an eye on the executives. On the face of it, that would seem to be an impossible job. The place was guarded and fenced because of the war orders it handled. How could a Negro get in and watch the officials? But Josh handled it very simply.
He picked up a shoe-shine stand in the morning; the kind of portable box in which are polishes, brushes and rags, and on which is a foot-standard. He showed up at the plant gate at noon. He asked humbly for permission to take care of the shines within the office — and got it.
So now he was in the general office, at work. He had shined the shoes of the superintendent, a young hard-jawed driver who barked orders to underlings while he shifted his feet for Josh to work on. He had taken care of the black high-tops of the old office manager. And now he was in the office of the president, Mr. Jenner.
There were three men in the office — Jenner, Josh and the anemic-looking secretary. And Jenner was dictating a letter while Josh began on the right foot.
“Testing Laboratories
“United States Government
“Washington, D.C.
“Gentlemen:
“We are at a loss to understand the complaints regarding the Cranlowe torpedo controls sent to you over the past five weeks. The release-pin holes were inspected as usual here, along with other general inspection, and each checked for accuracy before being shipped. Each was carefully gauged, as were the release pins themselves. We cannot, therefore, understand why any of the pins should stick and fail to function. We can only assume that a mistake has been made in your testing laboratory, and hope that it will be straightened out very soon. Mr. Cranlowe extends the same hope, through us, as he is being badly embarrassed financially by the withholding of the usual royalty payments.
Josh tapped the right foot, to indicate that he was through with that. Jenner raised it, and then the left, while Josh slid the stand under it. And with the move, the plant president seemed, for the first time, to become really conscious of the Negro’s presence.
“Are you a newcomer to Garfield City?” he asked pleasantly.
“Yas, suh,” replied Josh, with a wide grin.
Though an honor grad of Tuskeegee and as intelligent as most professors, Josh always acted as people expect a Negro to act — when he was with strangers. Good protective coloration, he called it.
“You seem to be the first with initiative enough to think of working up a little business out here. It’s a nice idea, too. We’re on the edge of town, and it’s hard to get in for a shine.”
“Ah hopes to give full sat’sfaction, suh,” said Josh, polishing industriously.
“Is there anything else, Mr. Jenner?” asked Grace, the president’s secretary.
“No, that’s all,” Jenner said.
Stanley Grace went out to type the letter to Washington.
“I’m sure you’ll give satisfaction,” said Jenner to Josh. “And I hope you will come regularly — be, in a way, one of the plant employees.”
“Thank you, suh.”
Jenner’s smile deepened a little.
“It might not be a bad idea for you to look over some of the plant you’ll be visiting regularly,” he said. “I have a little time. Would you like to see it?”
“Very much, suh,” said Josh, who was thoroughly bewildered behind his sleepy-looking face, but naturally didn’t want to refuse such a thing.
It all seemed extremely kindly and democratic.
Jenner led the way through departments where gears were being stamped, ground or cut, depending on precision required and temper of alloy used. He went leisurely on into the plant’s big foundry.
“We make all our own castings,” the president said genially to the increasingly perplexed Negro. “See — there’s a cauldron that will handle forty tons of molten steel.”
The huge kettle in question was being swung by a crane at the moment. It came toward a row of forms where the metal was to be poured into molds. Next to the forms was a stairway, up an end wall, with a catwalk about ten feet up.
“We can see them pour from the catwalk,” said Jenner pleasantly. “It’s quite a sight. Come on up.”
Josh decided it was the most peculiar thing that had ever happened to him. But he went up, with Jenner beside him, talking, as if piloting any regular plant visitor around.
They got to the catwalk as the swinging cauldron of molten metal stopped over the forms. It was terrifically hot on the catwalk; the cauldron was very near. Josh stared down into its white-hot incandescence.
Jenner smiled beside him. And then his arms shot out.
“Look out! Don’t fall!” he screamed.
And he pushed Josh powerfully off the catwalk, straight toward the terrible cauldron a little below and beyond!
It was the last thing in the world Josh was expecting. It caught him completely off guard. It was simply impossible that any man, high or low, would have the ruthless nerve to try murder in a shop full of men. Impossible-but it had happened.
The only thing that saved Josh, where it looked as if nothing could possibly have saved him, was the fact that tons of molten metal in a ponderous pot need suspension. A great chain, in this case, stretched taut and quivering by the weight it bore.
Josh’s body shot out and down toward the white-hot, molten surface. And it seemed as if he must plummet into it. But Josh had the strength and quickness of a black panther.
In midair, his body, like a cat’s body, turned a little so that he was facing in the direction of his wild fall. His arms snapped out and his hands clawed for the chain.
There was an instant of searing heat and reeking gas as he shot over the cauldron. There was an instant of blinding pain as his hands gripped the chain, almost red-hot itself. Then he had swung himself beyond, twenty feet past the waiting forms on the foundry floor.
He lit running like a black streak, but with his face taking on a grayish tinge as he realized just what he had almost come to. He kept on running, out of the foundry, through the plant and out the gate.
This face of death — where death seemed utterly fantastic and out of picture — had worn so fiendish a look that Josh knew he’d be a long time getting over it. But that knowledge didn’t slow him any as he sped to report to the man with the white hair and blazing, colorless eyes that was to Josh like some kind of God.