The Eye Of The Leopard Read Online Free PDF Page B

steps out of the bushes and shows
himself.
    The boy on the rock regards him with curiosity.
    'Are there any fish here?' he asks.
    Hans shakes his head and decides he ought to hit him. Chase
him away from his private rock. But he stops short, because the
nobleman is looking him straight in the eye, with absolutely no
sign of embarrassment. He reels in his fishing line, pulls the piece
of worm off the hook, and stands up.
    'Are you the one who lives in the wooden house?' he asks, and
Hans nods.
    And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they
fall in together along the path. Hans leads the way, and the
nobleman follows a few steps behind. Hans directs and points
out things; he knows the paths, the ditches, the rocks. Finally
they reach the pontoon bridge that leads over to the People's Park
and then take a short cut across the common until they come to
Kyrkogatan. Outside Leander Nilsson's bakery they stop to watch
two dogs mating. At the water tower Hans shows him the spot
where Rudin the madman set fire to himself a few years earlier,
in protest at Head Physician Torstenson's refusal to admit him
to the hospital for his stomach troubles.
    With undisguised pride Hans tries to recount the most hairraising
events that he knows in the town's history. Rudin wasn't
the only madman.
    He directs their steps towards the church and points out the
hollow space in the masonry of the south wall. As recently as the
previous year one of the trusted deacons, in a fit of acute crisis of
faith, tried to demolish the church one late January evening. With
a pick and sledgehammer he resolutely set to work on the thick
wall. The commotion naturally prompted the police to be called
in, and Constable Bergstrand was forced to button up his winter
coat and venture out into the snowstorm to arrest the man.
    Hans tells the story and the nobleman listens.
    From that day on a friendship grows between this ill-matched
pair, the nobleman and the son of a woodcutter. Together they
surmount the vast differences between them. Not all of them, of
course; there is always a no-man's-land they can never enter
together, but they grow as close to each other as possible.
    Sture has his own room up in the attic of the courthouse. A
large, bright room, with an abundance of curious equipment,
maps, Meccano constructions, and chemicals. There are no toys,
only two model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.
    Sture points to a picture hanging on the wall. Hans sees a bearded
man who reminds him of one of the portraits of the old pastors
that hang in the church. But Sture explains that this is Leonardo,
and he wants to be just like him someday. Inventing new things,
creating what people never even imagined they needed ...
    Hans listens without fully understanding. But he senses the
passion in what he hears, and thinks he recognises in it his own
obsessive dream of getting the miserable wooden house to cut
its moorings and float away down the river towards the sea he
has never yet seen.
    In this attic room they act out their mysterious games. Sture
seldom visits Hans at home. The stuffy smell of elkhounds and wet
woollens bothers him. He says nothing of this to Hans. Sture has
been brought up not to offend anyone unnecessarily; he knows where
he belongs and he's glad he doesn't have to live in Hans's world.
    Early that first summer they begin to go on nightly excursions.
A ladder raised towards the attic window enables Sture to
escape without anyone hearing him, and Hans bribes the
elkhounds with bones he has saved and sneaks out the door. In
the summer night they stroll through the sleeping town, investing
all their pride in never being discovered. Cautious shadows in
the beginning, they develop a less and less restrained audacity.
They slip through hedges and broken fences, listen at open
windows, climb up on each other's shoulders and press their faces
against the windows where the few night-time lamps in the town
are still burning. They see drunken men in