Hark! The Rattle!
By Joel Townsley Rogers
WE SAT in the Purple Lily—Tain Dirk, that far too handsome young man, with me.
I drank coffee; Tain Dirk drank liquor—secretly and alone. The night was drenched with sweating summer heat, but I felt cold as ice. Presently we went up to the Palm Grove Roof, where Bimi Tal was to dance.
“Who is this Bimi Tal, Hammer?” Dirk asked me, drumming his fingers.
“A woman.”
“You’re a queer one, Jerry Hammer!” said Dirk, narrowing his cold yellow eyes.
Still he drummed his blunt fingers. Sharp—tat! tat! tat! Something deep inside me—my liver, perhaps—shivered and grew white at hearing that klirring sound.
I didn’t answer him right away. Slowly I sent up smoke rings to circle the huge stars. We sat in a cave of potted palms close by the dancing floor. Over us lay blue-black night, strange and deep. Yellow as roses were the splotches of stars swimming down the sky.
“It shows you’ve been away from New York, Dirk, if you don’t know Bimi Tal. She’s made herself more famous as a dancer than ever was Ynecita. Some mystery is supposed to hang about her; and these simple children of New York love mysteries.”
“I’ve been away three years,” said Dirk sulkily, his eyes contracting....
“That long? It was three years ago that Ynecita was killed.”
“Well?” asked Dirk. His finger-drumming droned away.
“I thought you might have known her, Dirk.”
“I?” His wide, thin lips twitched. “Why, Ynecita was common to half New York!”
“But once,” I said, “once, it may be assumed, she was true to one man only, Tain Dirk.”
“I’m not interested in women,” said Dirk.
That was like him. He drank liquor only—secretly and alone.
“I was interested in Ynecita, Dirk. We used to talk together—”
“She talked to you?” repeated Dirk.
“Strange how she died! No trace, no one arrested. Yet she’d had her lovers. Sometimes I think, Dirk, we’ll find the beast who killed Ynecita.”
Tain Dirk touched my wrist. His blunt fingers were cold and clammy. Incomprehensible that women had loved his hands! Yet they were artist’s hands, and could mold and chisel. Wet clay, his hands!
“What makes you say that, Hammer?”
I looked up at the stars. “It was a beast who killed Ynecita, Dirk. Some vile snake with blood as cold as this lemon ice. Those marks of teeth on her upper arm! Deep in, bringing blood! What madman killed that girl? Mad, I say!”
Dirk twisted. He wiped his brown forehead, on which sweat glistened in little beads like scales. “Too hot a night to talk about such things, Hammer. Let’s talk of something else. Tell me about this Bimi Tal.”
“You’ll see her soon enough,” I said, watching him. “A girl of about your own age; you’re not more than twenty-four, are you?”
“Born first of January, ’99.”
“And famous already!”
“Yes,” said Tain Dirk. “I guess you’ve heard of me.”
“Oh, I’ve heard lots of you,” I said; and saw he didn’t like it.
“You’ve heard I’m fast with women, eh?” asked Dirk, after a pause.
“But Ynecita—”
“Why do you talk of her?” asked Dirk, irritably. “I never knew her.”
“Those marks of teeth on Ynecita’s arm—two sharp canines, sharp and hooked; barely scratching the skin—like fangs of a snake, Dirk—”
Tain Dirk’s hand crept to his lips, which were thin, red, and dry. The light in his eyes darkened from yellow to purple. Softly his blunt fingers began to drum his lips. Tat! tat! tat! But silent as a snake in grass.
“A curious thing about teeth, Dirk—you’re a sculptor; maybe you’ve observed it—a curious thing that no two are quite alike. We took prints, Dirk, of those marks in the arm of Ynecita—”
Dirk’s thin lips opened. His coarsely-formed, but marvelously sensitive, fingers felt the hardness of his teeth. That gesture was sly. At once he knew I’d seen him. He crouched back in his chair, his strong, broad head drawn in between his shoulders.
“Who are you?” he hissed.
Again the klirring of his fingertips—a dusty drumming.
“Why, I am only Jerry Hammer—a wanderer, and a soldier of bad fortune.”
“Who are you!”
“Brother of Stella Hammer, who was known as Ynecita, the dancer.”
Upon the Palm Grove Roof, beneath those gigantic stars the orchestra began to play. A brass and cymbal tune. The air was hot. From far in the pit of streets rose up the noises of the city. Loud! Discord shot with flames. I trembled.
Tain Dirk’s fingers drummed. His head commenced to sway.
II.
BIMI TAL danced barefooted on the glazed umber tiles of the Roof.
Her dark red hair was free on her naked shoulders. Stamp! stamp! stamp! her feet struck flatly on the tiles. Her head was bent back almost to the level of her waist. Bracelets jangled on her wrists and ankles.
“I am the daughter of the morning! I shout, I dance, I laugh away....”
Shaking her clump of red hair; her strong muscled limbs weaving; laughing at me with all her eyes. How like she looked to a man dead long years before! How like her glances to the glances of Red Roane! On her breasts two glittering shields of spangles. About her waist a kirtle seemingly woven of long strands of marsh grass, rustling, shivering with whispers. The sinews of her trunk and limbs rippled beneath her clear brown skin.
The head of Tain Dirk swayed sideways, slowly. The drumming of his fingers on the table was a reiterative rattle. His eyes—liquid, subtle—dulled with a look near to stupidity, then blazed to golden fire. Thin and wide were his unsmiling lips. His tongue flicked them. Tat! tat! tat!
“She’s a beauty!” whispered Dirk.
His terrible eyes seemed to call Bimi Tal as they had called other women. Mesmerism—what was it? Singing, she pranced toward the den of potted palms where we were sitting. Her skirt rustled like the marshes. Wind of summer.
Little searchlights, playing colored lights on Bimi Tal, grew darker. Red and violet deepened to brown and green. Still the hot stars above us. In that artificial paper Palm Grove, with the silky puffy women and the beefsteak-guzzling men looking stupidly, was born the mystery of the great savannahs.
Dirk’s head nodding. Dirk’s thin lips slowly opening. Dirk’s golden eyes glimmering. Tat! tat! tat! Dirk’s steady fingers.
The great savannahs and the tropic marshes. Bimi Tal dancing. Stealthily, the music softened from that brass and cymbal tune. It rustled. It crawled. It reared fanged heads.
For a little while I did not see Bimi Tal nor Dirk, but the steamy Everglades. Winter noon. Grass leaves silvered by sea-wind; puddles stirring at the roots of the grasses. Silence booming like the loud silence of death.
Bimi Tal was dancing her snake dance. Dirk’s lips quivered.
The marsh wind makes a little stir (it is the whispering flute.) The marsh waters make a little moan (it is the violin).
III.
WHERE was the soul of Bimi Tal dwelling that tropic winter so many years ago? On her mother’s breast, a little bud of love, crooned over with the song of sleep? Or meshed in bleeding poinsettia or rose? Or a soul yet unborn?
I close my eyes. The vision does not fade. Florida; the marshlands; winter noon. January’s first day, 1899. Where was lovely Bimi Tal on that stifling day we saw the fanged thing coil, and death struck us there by Okechobee?
Your eyes, Bimi Tal, are the laughing eyes of Red Roane!...
Now the snake dance. The piccolo screams.
Life immortal in your glistening lips, Bimi Tal; in your deep bosom promise of everlasting fecundity. Passion and power of the earth! Life is immortal. Your laughing eyes, Bimi Tal, will never dull. Yet I saw Red Roane die....
Beneath the shifting lights, Bimi Tal leaped and spun, scarcely treading the floor. Her eyes sparkled at me. She did not see Tain Dirk. Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Her bare feet struck the tiles, tightening the muscles of her calves. Her bangles rang.
I could not keep my eyes from Dirk. His broad brown-and-golden head swayed continually. His thin lips worked, and I caught the flash of his teeth. His eyes drowsed, then flashed open with sudden flame. Tat! tat! tat! The rattling of his fingers was never still.
That swaying head! It was loaded with the wisdom of the serpent that harkens to the wind, swaying with the marsh grass, winding its golden coils, curving its neck to the sun—Hark! The rattle!
... Red is the sun. Two men plow through the marshes. O endless pain (the harsh viol quivers), a life struggles in the womb. Who will die, and what will die, that this new life may be born? Whimpering agony. And an old crone singing a song....
All people who sat within the Palm Grove were hushed, watching Bimi Tal. Fat hands fanning powdered breasts; silk handkerchiefs wiping ox necks; sweat beneath armpits. Still heat. Far away thunder. The stars going by.
Music swelled. Beneath its discord sounded a steady drumming rhythm. The arms of Bimi Tal waved about her head. She shouted for joy of life.
The pale eyes of Dirk, basking in mystery, gleamed into fire, blazed up in fury and hate undying! His dry lips opened. I saw his teeth.
... Through the breast-high grasses surge on the two marching men. Their boots sough in the muck. (Softly strums the bass viol.) Something waiting in the marshes! Something with golden eyes and swaying head. Hark! The rattle! Beware, for death is in the path!...
Bimi Tal was close to Dirk, not seeing him. She laughed and waved her jangling arms at me. Dirk’s eyes sparkled with madness, his lips were tightened terribly. Bimi Tal was almost over him. His fingers drummed. Louder played the music.
... Hark! The rattle! Gaily the two men plow through the bladed grasses. The coiled thing waits, hate within its eyes. They are nearer—nearer! (Drums begin to beat)....
In an avalanche of sound, crashed viol and violin, and stammering drum. Dirk’s drawn head lunged upward with his shoulders, his lips opened and lifted.
Venomous his look. Deathly his intensity.
IV.
STRONG and young, fresh from the Cuban wars, Red Roane and I went north from the keys through the Everglades of Florida.
Through the fens as in God’s first day. Through the reptile age, alive yet and crawling. Through strangling vegetation, which steams and rots beneath eternal suns. Through the everlasting Everglades, with their fern and frond and sorrowful, hoary cypress, Red Roane and I went north. Onward with laughter. What joy lay in our hearts! We sang many songs.
Fern and flower embracing in fecundity. Grasses thick with sap. Blossoms wilting at a touch. Mire teeming with creeping life. Above all, the gay sun. Beneath all, the coiling serpent eyes and the opened fangs. Hark! The rattle!
We sailed lagoons in crazy craft; dreamt on shady shores through sultry noons; shouted to the dead logs on river banks till they took fear, and dived and splashed away. We pitched our tents by black waters. We beat brave trails through the fens.
“I’d like to stay here forever,” said Red Roane.
By what way I go, with what drinks I drink, in what bed I lie down, I remember you who got your prayer, Red Roane—you who are in the swamp grass and swamp water forever.
Beating our way slow and heavily, at high noon, of the new year’s first day in 1899, near Okechobee in the marshes, came we two on a hidden hut. It was fashioned of the raff of the slough—dead fronds, rotting branches, withered marsh grasses. Its sad gray-green were in the living wilderness like a monument to death. Better the naked swamp. Better the clean quagmire for bed.
An old crone, moaning within that dreary hut, drowned out the sharp, short gasps of another woman. Red Roane came up singing, slapping his deep chest, swinging his muscular arms. Sunlight on his brown face, and sunlight in his red hair. At the hut’s door, facing us, lounged a man with yellow eyes. Poor white trash. A gun was in his arm’s crook. He spat tobacco juice at the earth. There was loathing, murder venom in his face!
Red Roane faltered back from that stare. He stopped short, and laughter left him. His brave eyes were troubled by that madman’s hate. Yellow eyes staring—eyes of a rattlesnake!
An old Indian crone peered out beneath the crooked elbow of the ruffian in the doorway, she who had been dolorously singing. With a scream, she thrust out her skinny old arm, pointing it at Red Roane.
“He dies!” she screamed. “We want his soul!”
Another woman, hidden, moaning within the hut; a woman in her travail. New life from the womb—a life must die! I grasped the arm of Red Roane.
“Come away!” I said, “Come away from these mad witches!”
In three steps that gray-green hovel was hidden in the cypresses. A dream it seemed. But we could yet hear the old witch woman singing. Something dragged at our heels, and it was not suction of the muck.
Toe to heel, Red Roane paced me, and we sang a song together. A crimson flower, short-stemmed, yellow-hearted, was almost beneath my boot. I stooped—who will not stoop to pick a crimson wild flower? A rattling, like the shaking of peas. A klirring like the drumming of a man’s fingertips. Hark! The rattle!
A yawning head flashed beneath my hand, striking too low. Heavy as a hard-flung stone, the snake’s head struck my ankle; yawning gullet, white-hooked fangs of the deathly rattlesnake. Out of the crimson flower that beast of gold and brown. Its yellow eyes flickered. Its thin lips were dry. How near I had touched to death!
“Thank God for those heavy boots, Jerry!”
With blazing eyes the snake writhed, coiling for another strike. Its sharp tail, pointed upward, vibrated continuously with dusty laughter. Its golden rippling body was thick as my arm.
Red Roane swung down his heavy marching stock. Crash! Its leaden end struck that lunging mottled head. Halted in mid-strike, that evil wisdom splattered like an egg, brain pan ripped wide.
The rattler lashed in its last agony, its tremendously muscular tail beating the ground with thumping blows, its yellow eyes still blazing with hate, but closing fast in doom.
I tried to say “Thanks, Red!”
Some mesmerism in those yellow, dying eyes! Shaking with disgust, Red Roane bent above that foul fen watcher, put down his hand to pick up that stricken skin, over whose eyes thin eye-membrane already lowered in death.
“Don’t touch it, Red! Wait till the sun goes down.”
Hark! The rattle! Those opaque eyes shuttered back. Those yellow glances, though in mortal pain, were still furious and glistening. Those horny tail-bells clattered. Fangs in that shattered, insensate head yawned, closing in Red Roane’s arm above the wrist.
I see him. Sweat upon his broad brown forehead; his laughing eyes astounded; his thick strong body shivering; wind stirring up his dark red hair. Behind him the brown-green marshes, grasses rippling, a stir going through their depths. His cheeks had never been so red.
Before I could move, he unlocked those jaws and hollow fangs, gripped hard in his arm with mortal rigor. He shivered now from the knees. His face went white.
“Cut!” he whispered. “I’ll sit down.”
With hunting knife I slashed his arm, deep driving four crossed cuts. He laughed, and tried to shout. Howling would have been more pleasant. I sucked those wounds, out of which slow blood was spouting from an artery. We panted now, both of us. He leaned heavily on my shoulder—he, the strong. I bound his arm, my own fingers so numb I fumbled at the work. Sweat on Red Roane’s face was cold, and cold his wrists.
My arms clung about him. He swayed, almost toppling, clutching at grass stems with fading laughter. I picked up his marching stock and beat that golden, gory thing within the mire. Beat it till clay-white flesh, and bone and skin were one with the mucky mire of the swamp. But still its heart ebbed with deep purple pulsing. A smashing blow, and that, too, died.
“It’s over!” Grimly I flung the bloody stave into the swaying grass.
“Yes, Jerry,” whispered Red Roane, “it’s nearly over.”
I could not believe it. Red Roane, the strong man, the shouter, the singer, the gay-hearted lover! Is death then, so much stronger than life?
“A woman, Jerry,” he whispered, “in Havana—Dolores! She dances—”
“For God’s sake, Red, wake up!”
“Dances at the—”
“Red! Red Roane! I’m here, boy!”
Out from the way, whence we had come, faintly I heard a cry. Who wept thus for the soul departing, sang paean for the dead? Was it wind over the stagnant grasses? Frail in the solitude, rose that wail again. The whimper of new-born life! In the squatter’s hut the child had found its soul!
“Dolores!” whispered Red Roane. Beneath that brazen sky he whispered the name of love. “Dolores!”
Past a hundred miles of swamp, past a hundred miles of sea, did Dolores, the dancer, hear him calling her?
“Dolores!”
I hope she heard, for he was a lad, though wild.
With a throat strangling in sobs, I sang to Red Roane. His eyes were closed, yet he heard me. Old campaign songs, songs of the march and the bivouac. Marchers’ tunes.
Then he whispered for a lullaby, and, last of all, for a drinking song.
V.
BIMI TAL had danced up to us—Bimi Tal, daughter of Red Roane and of Dolores, the dancer.
She laughed and tossed her dark red hair. Her broad nostrils sucked in the hot night wind.
“I am the daughter of the morning!
I shout, I dance. I laugh away.
Follow, lover! Hear my warnings.
I, the laugher, do not stay....”
Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Her body rippled. She cast her eyes at me.
Tain Dirk’s head was rising. His thin, dry, red lips opened wide. His golden eyes burned with undying hate. Tat! tat! tat! his fingers drummed.
“In a minute, Jerry,” whispered Bimi Tal, not pausing from her dance.
Her lovely eyes looked downward, seeing Dirk. She screamed. The music silenced. She struck her arm at him, not knowing what she did.
Mad! the Man was mad! His jaw was opened wide. He bit her arm above the wrist.
Before the rush of frantic people had fallen over us, I struck his venomous face. With both fists, blow on blow. Blood came from his damned lips.
What madness had seized him I don’t know. Likely it was memory surging back through dead life—the venom of the rattler, hate undying. But of that, who can say? A strange thing is memory.
Yet I knew for sure that to him, the mad sculptor, born in that hut in the hot savannahs, had passed the soul of the dying rattlesnake.
Hands dragged me back from him. I shouted and tore. He quivered, wounded heavily. His nervous fingers faintly clattered on the table, drumming with dreadful music. Police came in.
“Look!” I shouted to them. “Look at those marks of teeth on Bimi Tal’s wrist. Two deep fangs. There’s the man who killed Ynecita, the dancer!”
A “Spooky” Tale With a
Grim Background
The
GHOST GUARD
By BRYAN IRVINE
IF EVERY one of the sixty guards and officials at Granite River Prison had been asked for the name of the most popular guard on the force, there would have been sixty answers—“Asa Shores.” If each of the fifteen hundred convicts in the prison had been asked which guard was most disliked by the convicts, fifteen hundred answers would have been the same—“Asa Shores!”
If some curious person had asked of each convict and each guard, “Who is considered the most desperate, the hardest, the shrewdest criminal in the prison?” the answer would have been unanimous, “Malcolm Hulsey, the ‘lifer.’”
True, it does not seem reasonable that Asa Shores should be liked by every guard and official and disliked by every convict. To those not familiar with the duties of prison guards it would seem that Asa Shores’ method of handling the convicts, if disapproved of by fifteen hundred convicts, would surely be disapproved of by at least one of the sixty guards. But the explanation is simple.
Asa Shores’ great great-grandfather had followed the prisons as mariners follow the seas. Then Asa’s grandfather took up the work and followed it, with an iron hand and an inflexible will, until one day a cell-made knife in the hands of a long-time “con” entered his back at a point where his suspenders crossed, deviating enough to the left to pierce his heart. Came next Asa Shores’ father, who went down in attempting to quell the famous Stromberg break of 1895.
Asa, therefore, his prison methods impelled perhaps by heredity, looked upon every wearer of gray behind the walls as a convict, nothing more, nothing less. He neither abused or favored any convict. A one-year man was to Asa a convict and no better than the man who was serving a life sentence.
The crime for which any convict was sent up was of little moment to Asa; neither did he bother about who among the inmates were considered desperate. The fact that a man wore prison gray was sufficient, whether he be a six-months sneak-thief or a ninety-nine-year murderer.
When Asa shot and killed Richard (“Mutt”) Allison, when the latter attempted to escape, the warden had said:
“There was really no need of killing that half-witted short-termer, Asa. He was doing only a year and was perfectly harmless. A shot in the leg or foot would have been better.”
And Asa’s reply had been:
“I had no idea who the man was, though I have seen him dozens of times, and I did not know how long he was doing. But I would have made no difference if I had known. He was a convict, sir, and he was attempting to escape. If he was only half-witted, as you say, he should have been in the insane asylum, not in the penitentiary.”
So that was that.
If Asa ever gave a convict a smile it had never been recorded. It is a known fact that he was never seen to frown upon a convict. He was, in short, the smileless, unyielding personification of “duty,” and every convict hated him for what he was. When Asa shot he shot to kill—and he never missed. Four little white crosses on the bleak hillside near the prison proclaimed his flawless marksmanship.
Why was this big sandy-haired, steel-blue-eyed, middle-aged Asa Shores liked by his brother guards? There were many reasons why. It was as if Asa’s unnatural, cold, vigilant, unfeeling attitude toward the convicts was offset each day when he came off duty by a healthy, wholesome desire to drop duty as a work-horse sheds an irritating harness. He was the life of the guards’ quarters; a big good-natured, playful fellow, who thoroughly enjoyed a practical joke, whether he be the victim of the joke or the instigator. If he had a temper he had never allowed it to come to the surface. He excelled in all sports in the gymnasium, and somewhere, somehow, he found more funny stories than any other man on the force. The trite old saying that “he would give a friend the shirt off his back” fitted him like a new kid glove. He gave freely to his friends, and, in giving, seemed to find real joy.
After twelve years’ service on the guardline, Asa was still an ordinary wall guard. This would seem discouraging to many; but not so to Asa. It was not generally known that he drew a larger salary than did the other wall guards. He was an excellent wall guard. Hence, he was kept on the wall, while newer men on the force were promoted to better positions. But Asa drew the salary of a shift captain and was therefore content.
He did not even seem to mind when he was taken from comfortable Tower Number One, morning shift, and detailed permanently to Tower Number Three on the “graveyard” shift at night from eight P. M. to four A. M. This change was deemed necessary for several reasons. First, because Asa positively refused to discriminate between short-termers and long-termers, or desperate men and harmless “nuts,” when using his rifle to stop a “break” or the attempt of a single convict to escape.
The men being locked in their cells at night, Asa, as a night guard, would have little opportunity to practice rifle shooting with a running convict as the target. Another reason for detailing him to Tower Number Three was because trouble was expected some night at that point in the yard, and with sure-fire Asa on the job the officials felt that any attempt of the convicts to escape would be promptly frustrated.
One of Asa’s wholesome habits, when no convicts were near him, was singing. It was not singing, really, but Asa thought it was and he shortened the long, lonesome hours at night on Tower Number Three with songs—song, rather, because he knew and sang but one. It was not a late or popular song, and, as Asa sang it, it sounded like the frogs that croak in the marshes at night:
“When I die and am buried deep,
“I’ll return at night to take a peep
“At those who hated me.
“I’ll ha’nt their homes and spoil their sleep,
“Chill their blood; the skin will creep
“On those who hated me.”
Not a pretty song; nor did it make cheerful those guards who passed near Tower Number Three while making the night rounds. But Asa loved that song.
IT WAS while the wall was being extended another two hundred feet to make room within the inclosure for a new cell house that Asa shot the “lifer,” Malcolm Hulsey.
The end wall, extending from Tower Number Three to Tower Number Four, had been torn down and the stones moved two hundred feet farther south to be used on the new wall. A temporary barbed-wire fence had been erected about the area in which the convicts worked on the new wall. Extra armed guards were stationed at intervals of fifty feet outside the inclosure to guard the working convicts.
Malcolm Hulsey had successfully feigned illness one day and was allowed to remain in his cell. Cell house guards had seen him lying in his bunk, only the top of his head showing above the blankets. At lock-up time the cell house guards making the count, saw a foot protruding from under the blankets in Hulsey’s bunk and what they believed to be the top of his head showing at the head of the bed.
At ten-fifteen that night the eagle-eyed Asa Shores, on Tower Number Three, saw a dark figure slip under the lower wire of the temporary fence and run. Asa fired once and saw the man fall.
Then Asa, to comply with the prison rules, yelled “halt!” The command, of course, was needless, Hulsey having halted abruptly when a thirty-thirty rifle ball plowed through his shoulder.
After the convict had been carried to the hospital, his cell was opened by the curious guards. A cleverly carved wooden foot protruded from under the blankets at the foot of the bed, several bags of old clothing reposed under the blankets and a thatch of black horse-hair showed at the head of the bed.
Before Hulsey left the hospital the new wall was completed. Tower Number Four, across from Tower Number Three, had been torn down and a new Tower Number Four built on the new corner of the wall, two hundred feet farther south. On the other corner, across from New Tower Number Four, was New Tower Number Three. Old Tower Number Three was left standing until further orders. Asa Shores remained on the graveyard shift on Old Tower Number Three.
While off duty one day Asa, prowling about inside the walls, met Malcolm Hulsey. The “lifer” was still a bit pale and weak from the gunshot wound.
“One thing I’d like to have you explain, Mr. Shores,” said Hulsey. “You plugged me in the shoulder, then yelled ‘halt!’ Why didn’t you command me to stop before firing?”
“Well, it was this way, Hulsey,” Asa replied, unsmiling and looking the convict squarely in the eye. “I aimed at the spot where I calculated your heart ought to be, but the light was poor and I had to shoot quick. I naturally supposed you were dead when I commanded you to halt, and, believing you dead, I could see no reason for being in a hurry with the command. Sorry I bungled the job that way, but my intentions were good.”
“But,” the scowling “lifer” persisted, “you haven’t told me yet why you shot before commanding me to halt.”
“Oh, that?” Asa drawled with a deprecatory shrug of his massive shoulders. “That is merely a matter of form with me. I very often, after shooting a convict, yell ‘halt’ some time the next day—or week. Besides, if you had a nice chance to bump me off, you wouldn’t say, ‘Beware, Mr. Shores, I’m about to kill you.’”
For a half minute convict and keeper gazed into each others eyes.
“I get yuh,” Hulsey finally said. “And I guess you’re right. I have an idear though that my turn comes next, Mr. Shores; and there’ll be no preliminary command or argument.”
“Fair enough, Hulsey,” Asa replied as he turned away.
AT LAST the big new cell house was completed.
Asa wondered whether he would be left on Old Tower Number Three. It had been decided, he knew, that the old tower would be left on the wall but perhaps not used.
To celebrate the completion of the new building, the warden declared a holiday and issued orders that all the inmates be given the privilege of the yard that day. There was to be wrestling, boxing, foot-racing and other sports.
Asa Shores’ sleeping quarters was a low-ceilinged room on the ground floor in one of the towers of the old cell house. Asa had been warned a number of times that his room was not a safe place to sleep in the day time. Convicts in the yard could enter the room at any time during the day, without being seen by the yard guards or wall guards. Though the one door to the room was thick and heavy, Asa seldom if ever locked it.
Asa had risen in the afternoon, complaining to himself about the noise being made by the convicts in the yard. His peevishness vanished, however, after a cold wash, and he sang as he stood looking out at one of the windows and brushing his hair:
“When I die and am buried deep,
“I’ll return at night to take a peep
“At those who hated me.
“I’ll ha’nt their homes and spoil their sleep,
“Chill their blood, the skin will creep,
“On those who—”
Asa’s song ended there—ended in a horrible gurgle. A “trusty” found him an hour later lying in a pool of blood near the open window.
His throat had been cut by a sharp instrument in the hand of a person unknown.
Hulsey the “lifer” was questioned, of course, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate that it was he who committed the murder.
The guards looked sadly upon all that remained of Asa Shores and said to each other in hushed voices:
“It had to come. Asa was too good a convict guard not to be murdered.”
And though the prison stool pigeons kept their ears and eyes opened, though each guard became a detective, the murder of Asa Shores remained a mystery.
Old Tower Number Three was closed and the doors locked. There was no immediate use for it; but the warden was contemplating the advisability of having another guards’ entrance gate cut through the wall under the tower. In this case, of course, the tower would be used again.
NIGHT Captain Jesse Dunlap sat alone in the guards’ lookout, inside the walls, at one o’clock on the morning following the murder of Asa Shores. Bill Wilton, the night yard guard, was making his round about the buildings in the yard.
Captain Dunlap lazily watched the brass indicators on the report board before him. The indicator for Tower Number One made a half turn to the left and a small bell on the board rang. The captain lifted the receiver from the telephone at his elbow and received the report, “Tower Number One. Anderson on duty. All O. K.”
Dunlap merely grunted a response and replaced the receiver on the hook. Presently the indicator for Tower Number Two turned to the left, the bell tinkled, and Dunlap again took the receiver from the hook.
“Tower Number Two. Briggs on duty. All O. K.” came the report over the wire.
Then came New Tower Number Three; next Tower Number Four. From the three outside guard-posts came the reports, and one from the cell house, each guard turning in his post number, his name and the usual “O. K.”
All the indicators on the board, except that for Old Tower Number Three, were now turned. Captain Dunlap relaxed in his chair, sighed heavily and lit his pipe. Lazily his eyes wandered back to the indicator board.
The unturned indicator for Old Tower Number Three held his gaze and utter sadness gripped him for a moment. Night after night, promptly on the hour, he had seen the indicator for Old Tower Number Three flip jauntily to the left and had heard the tinkle of the little bell on the board. It had always seemed to him that the indicator for Asa Shores’ tower turned with more pep than the other indicators, that the bell had tinkled more cheerily, that good old Asa Shores’ report carried a note of cheerfulness that lightened the lonesome watches of the night.
Now the old tower was cold, even as poor old Asa was cold; the doors were locked and barred. Never again, thought Dunlap, would be heard Asa Shores’ familiar song on the quiet night air. What were the words to that song?
“When I am dead and buried deep,
“I’ll return at night to take a peep
“At those who hated—”
Captain Dunlap suddenly sat erect in his chair. The pipe fell from his lips and clattered on the floor, as his lower jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide to stare at the indicator board; for—
The indicator for Old Tower Number Three was moving—moving, not with a quick turn to the left, but in a hesitant, jerky way that caused the root of every hair on Captain Dunlap’s head to tingle. Never before had the captain seen an indicator behave like that. In fact, the indicator system was designed and constructed in such a way that, being controlled by electric contacts, the various indicators would snap into position when a push button in each tower was pressed by the guard on duty in that tower.
In short, an indicator, in accordance with all the rules of electricity as applied to the system, must remain stationary or jerk to the left when the button in the tower was pressed. But here was indicator for Old Tower Number Three wavering, trembling to the left, only to fall back repeatedly to a vertical position. Then again, jerkily, hesitantly to the left, as if a vagrant soul strove to brush aside the veil that banished it from the living.
Captain Dunlap sat rigid and watched the uncanny movements of the bright brass indicator. Vague, fleeting, chaotic thoughts of crossed wires, practical jokers, wandering souls tumbled one after another through his brain.
If only the bell would not tinkle! If it did ring? Well, death then, though it had taken away what was mortal of Asa Shores, had not conquered his eternal vigilance and strict attention to duty.
Farther to the left wavered the indicator, hesitatingly, uncertainly, then—the bell rang!
A weak, slow ring, it was, that sounded strange and unnatural in the deathlike silence of the dimly lighted lookout.
CAPTAIN DUNLAP was a brave man. He had smilingly faced death a dozen times in Granite River Prison.
But always his danger was known to be from living, breathing men. Abject terror gripped him now; a nameless terror that seemed to freeze the blood in his veins, contract every muscle and nerve of his body, smother his heart.
But even then reasoning struggled for recognition in his mind. What if it were a part of Asa Shores, a part of him that remained on earth to defy death and carry on? Hasn’t Asa always been Captain Dunlap’s friend? Why should he fear the spirit of a friend?
Dunlap reached forth a trembling hand, took the receiver from the hook and slowly, reluctantly, placed it to his ear. How he wished, hoped, prayed that no voice would come over the wire!
But it did come, preceded by a faint whispering sound:
“Old t-t-t-tow—” a long pause, then weakly, almost inaudibly, as if the message came from a million miles away—“Old t-t-tower n-n-n—three. S-S-Sho—”
Another pause, a jumble of meaningless words, then a chuckle. God! Asa’s familiar chuckle!
“On duty. All O-O—all O—”
A light laugh, a sharp buzzing sound, a sigh, the faint tinkle of a bell, then silence!
Dunlap heard no click of a receiver being replaced on a hook. The line was apparently still open.
Still holding the receiver to his ear, the captain moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. His free hand went involuntarily to his forehead in a vague uncertain gesture and came away damp with perspiration. Must he answer that ghost call? Must he speak to the thing that held the line.
When he at last spoke his voice was husky, a strange voice even to him:
“Who—who did it, Asa? Who—who—if you are dead—if this is you, Asa, tell me—who did it.”
Again that queer, unfamiliar buzzing sound. Then, from Old Tower Number Three, or from beyond the grave perhaps, came a faint, whispering, uncertain voice:
“He—he—it was....”
The voice ended in a gurgle.
Dunlap replaced the receiver on the hook, and as he did so his eyes rested on the indicator board and he gasped sharply; for the indicator for Old Tower Number Three went wavering, trembling back to a vertical position on the time dial!
This unheard-of behavior of the indicator was the deepest mystery of all. The indicators, each controlled independent of the others by push buttons in each tower, were constructed mechanically to turn only from right to left.
The indicator for Old Tower Number Three had turned back from left to right!
CAPTAIN DUNLAP made no effort to solve the mystery.
Old Tower Number Three was securely locked and could not be approached except by crossing over the wall from New Tower Number Three on the Southeast corner of the wall, or from Tower Number Two on the Northeast corner of the wall. Dunlap himself had closed and locked the doors and windows of the tower. There was but one key to the tower doors, and that key was in Dunlap’s pocket.
Unlike the other towers, Old Tower Number Three could not be entered from the ground outside the wall. It was built solidly of stone from the ground up, and the only entrances were the two doors communicating with the top of the wall on either side of the tower.
Besides, strict orders had been given that no one enter the tower unless ordered there by a shift captain. And, too, in the glare of the arc lights near the wall, it would be impossible for anyone to cross the wall to the tower, without being seen by other wall guards.
Could the mysterious report have come from one of the other wall towers? Impossible for this reason: When the push button in one of the wall towers—say, that in Old Tower Number Three—was pressed by the man on duty there, the indicator on the board in the captain’s lookout turned to the left a quarter-turn on the time dial, the small bell on the board rang and all telephone connections with the other wall towers were automatically cut off until the captain had replaced the telephone receiver on the hook after receiving the report from Old Tower Number Three.
Dunlap said nothing to Bill Wilton when the latter returned to the yard lookout, after making his round in the yard. It would be best, he reasoned, to say nothing to anybody about the mysterious call. They would only laugh at him if he told them about it. If the indicator had not returned to a vertical position on the time dial he would have some proof on which to base his wild story of the ghost call. But the indicator had, before his own eyes, returned to its former position after the call.
An hour later, at two A.M., Dunlap fearfully watched the indicator for Old Tower Number Three. Reports from all other posts had been received. Then, just once, the indicator trembled uncertainly, made almost a quarter turn to the left and snapped back to a vertical position. At three o’clock it did not move. Nor did it move at four o’clock.
A week passed. Not a tremor disturbed the “ghost tower” indicator.
Then, one morning at one-thirty o’clock, an unearthly, piercing scream in the cell house awaked half the men in the building and sent the cell house guard scurrying down to cell twenty-one on the corridor; for it was from this cell that the blood-chilling scream had come.
The bloodless, perspiration-dampened face of Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer,” was pressed against the bars of the cell door when the guard arrived. The convict’s great hands grasped the bars and his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk, clad in only a regulation undershirt, twitched, started and trembled from head to foot. A horrible fear distended his eyes, his teeth clicked together and the muscles of his face worked spasmodically.
“Sick, Hulsey?” the guard demanded, hardened to such nerve-shattering outbursts in a building full of tortured souls.
“I saw—I saw—” Hulsey began, his teeth chattering and rendering speech well-nigh impossible. “I saw—Oh, Mr. Hill, please give me a cellmate—now, tonight! I—I’m a sick man, Mr. Hill. Nerves all shot to pieces, I guess. Can’t I have a cellmate to talk to, Mr. Hill?”
“What did you see?” the guard asked.
“He was standing right where you are now,” Hulsey whispered hoarsely. “Pointing his finger at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I—I”—a violent shudder—“I could see through him, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him. I—”
“Who? See who?” the guard interrupted.
Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking too much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.
“Why,” he stammered. “I saw—I thought I saw—an old pal o’ mine. He’s been dead a long time. Nerves, I guess. Thinking too much about my old pal and the good old days. Nightmare, I guess.”
“Yeah—nightmare is right!” the unsympathetic guard growled. “But don’t let another blat like that out of you, or we’ll throw you into a padded cell. Got the whole wing stirred up. Get to bed now and forget that good old pal of yours.”
“If I only could!” Hulsey whispered huskily to himself, as he got back into the bunk.
TWO WEEKS passed.
There were no more outbursts from cell twenty-one. The “ghost tower” on the wall was silent, cold.
Then, at two o’clock one morning, Captain Dunlap saw the indicator move. It sickened him, made him wish ardently that he was a thousand miles from Granite River Prison.
The indicator moved slowly, hesitantly, to the left and the bell tinkled weakly. The captain placed the receiver to his ear, but no sound came; the line was dead. The indicator fell back to its original position as the captain replaced the receiver on the crotch.
A few minutes later the yard guard entered the lookout. Bill Wilton, the regular yard guard on the graveyard shift, was away on leave and the substitute guard was new at the prison.
“Didn’t I understand you to say, Mr. Dunlap,” the new guard said, “that there was no one on Old Tower Number Three?”
“You sure did,” Dunlap answered.
The guard pulled his left ear and looked puzzled.
“Funny,” he finally remarked. “Was sure I heard somebody in that tower, singing soft and low like, when I passed under it a few minutes ago.”
“What was he singing?” the captain asked, bending forward and fixing a penetrating gaze on the recent arrival at the prison.
“Let me see now,” said the guard meditatively. “Couldn’t make out much of the song. Something about ‘when I die in the ocean deep,’—No, that wasn’t it. ‘When I die and am buried deep’—that’s it. Then there was something in it about this dead guy coming back to ha’nt people, and a lot of bunk like that.”
“I see,” said Dunlap, as he eased himself out of the chair. “I’m going up and have a look around in that tower. You stay in here until I return.”
Dunlap went outside the walls and up through New Tower Number Three, where he questioned Guard Jim Humphrey. Humphrey had not seen or heard anything unusual in or about Old Tower Number Three.
Captain Dunlap, as he walked over the wall toward the ghost tower, admitted frankly to himself that he was “scared stiff.” Pausing at the door, he glanced nervously through the window.
The yard lights lit up the interior of the tower sufficiently to assure him that no one—or “thing”—was inside. He unlocked the door and entered.
With a flashlight, he thoroughly examined the telephone. Dust had settled on the instrument. The receiver and the transmitter had apparently not been touched since Asa Shores left the tower. Dust had settled on the doorknobs inside. That the knobs had not been touched since Shores’ death was obvious. The one chair, the window-sills, the small washstand and wash basin, all were covered with a thin, undisturbed film of fine dust.
There on the telephone battery box reposed Asa’s old corncob pipe and, near it, a small box of matches. The window latches were just as Dunlap had left them when he closed and securely locked the tower a month before.
It was a puzzled and nervous prison official that left the tower, relocked the doors and returned to the inside lookout.
Next day Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer” was admitted to the hospital. The doctor’s diagnosis was “nervous breakdown.”
BUT HULSEY, though his nerves were all shot to pieces, was still capable of shrewd plotting.
His admittance to the hospital had been hastened by a diet of soap. Hulsey was so anxious to get far away from Granite River Prison, and was so certain of his ability to do so if he could only be admitted to the hospital, that he had resorted to the old but effective expedient of soap eating.
Soap, taken internally in small doses, will produce various baffling and apparently serious physiological changes in the body. Hulsey looked sick and felt sick, but he was not dangerously ill.
For many months Malcolm Hulsey had been watching closely the movements of the night guards. During his stay in the hospital, while recovering from the gunshot wound in his shoulder he had “doped out” a possible means of escape, and he was on the point of making the attempt when the doctor pronounced him sufficiently recovered to be returned to the cell house.
The “lifer’s” plan of escape was simply this: At midnight, while Captain Dunlap and his crew were on duty, the yard guard made his round, counted the patients in the hospital and left the yard through the guards’ gate to eat his lunch in the guards’ dining-room outside the walls. When the yard guard returned to the inside lookout he carried with him a hot lunch for Captain Dunlap.
In counting the men in the hospital, the yard guard did not as a rule enter the building. He merely turned on the lights in the one large ward and looked through the window. The convict hospital nurse on night duty stood ready, and when the lights were turned on, proceeded from bed to bed and partly uncovered each patient so that the yard guard outside could see and count them.
There were several factors in Hulsey’s favor now, one being that a new substitute guard was on duty over the guards’ entrance gate during the absence of the regular guard who was away on vacation. There was only one patient in the hospital besides Hulsey. The yard guard must be lured into the hospital, overpowered, his uniform stripped from him, then Hulsey, garbed in the uniform, would attempt to deceive the guard at the gate and be given the keys.
At fifteen minutes to midnight, on Hulsey’s first day in the hospital, the “lifer” quietly rose from his bed while the white-clad convict nurse’s back was turned. Three minutes later the unsuspecting nurse had been neatly laid out from a well-directed blow behind the ear, bound with sheets, gagged, stripped of his white suit and tenderly tucked in the bed recently occupied by Mr. Malcolm Hulsey.
The other patient, a feeble old convict, was gagged and tied down in his bed with sheets. Hulsey then donned the nurse’s white suit and, after arranging the nurse and the old convict in their beds so that they appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the “lifer” lay face down on the floor and awaited developments.
At twelve o’clock the new guard appeared at the hospital window and switched on the lights. Having counted the men in the hospital every hour since eight o’clock, the guard intended now to give the patients a hasty glance and proceed to the gate. There were his two patients, apparently sleeping peacefully. But where was the nurse?
Hulsey’s heart pounded like a riveting hammer as he lay sprawled on the floor. Would the ruse work? Would the guard enter the hospital to investigate, or would he report to Captain Dunlap when he saw the white-clad figure on the floor?
The guard’s eyes then rested on the man on the floor.
“Huh!” he ejaculated. “Funny place for nursie to be sleeping!”
But the nurse’s sprawled form did not indicate slumber. The guard was puzzled. Perhaps the nurse had fainted, or fallen and hurt himself. The guard tapped on the window with a key. No answer, no movement of nurse or patients.
Then the unsuspecting “screw” unlocked the door and entered. An older guard would have reported to the Captain. He was in the act of bending over to turn the pseudo-nurse upon his back when his ankles were suddenly seized and his feet perked from under him.
The guard’s head struck an iron bedstead as he fell, thus relieving Hulsey of the unpleasant job of beating him into unconsciousness.
Several minutes later the “lifer,” wearing the guard’s uniform, boldly approached the gate.
“What’s on the menu tonight, Frank?” Hulsey casually asked, pulling his hat further down over his eyes.
“Same old thing—hash,” the gate guard answered, as he lowered the keys.
Though the suspense, anxiety and uncertainty were terrible, Hulsey whistled calmly as he unlocked the first gate. The large bull lock on the outside gate was not so easily unlocked. Hulsey fumbled, his hands shook, his whistling, in spite of all he could do to keep it up, wheezed, went off key, then died in a discordant wail.
“Say!” the gate guard suddenly blurted. “Look up here! By cracky, your actions don’t look good to me.”
HULSEY did not look up. He gave the key another frantic twist, and the lock opened.
In that short space of time the wall guard had raced into the lookout and seized a shotgun. As he stepped to the door of the lookout, a dark figure disappeared around the corner of a building twenty feet from the gate.
A moment later the alarm in the guards’ quarters rang frantically, and a dozen sleepy-eyed men tumbled from their beds, slipped on shoes and trousers and ran out into the yard.
The gate guard could only tell where he last saw the escaping convict. To capture the man on such a dark night seemed hopeless, considering, too, that the fleeing man had a seven-minute start. However, the half-dressed guards scattered and made for a heavy willow thicket several hundred yards beyond the spot where the convict was last seen.
For five minutes after the pursuing guards disappeared in the darkness, silence reigned over the prison. Then—
From a distant point in the dark thicket a hair-raising, half-animal, half-human shriek of mortal terror shattered the stillness of the night and echoed and re-echoed about the high prison walls.
White faced guards, temporarily unnerved by that fearful wail, crashed through the brush, their flashlights playing about like the eyes of spending demons. Then they found Malcolm Hulsey the “lifer.”
Groveling face down in the mud of a little creek bank, hands clutching at empty air, great spasms of maniacal terror passing through his body, the one time terror of the prison muttered insane, incoherent things.
Two guards pulled him to his knees. Others turned flashlights on his face—a face such as is seen in horrible nightmares; a ghastly face, partly covered with black mud; an avid face where it shown through the grime. The eyes were wide, protruding, glassy.
“See! See!” the convict rasped hoarsely, pointing a mud-smeared hand at a dense black nook in the thicket. “See! He stands there and points at me—and laughs! It’s Asa Shores! He’s been in my cell every night for weeks—laughing at me! He sang a death song to me—always sang—always laughed! Wouldn’t let me sleep! He’s coming toward me! Stop him! Please—”
Then another horrible shriek, a shudder, a gasp, and the guards dropped the lifeless form of Malcolm Hulsey in the mud.
By some queer whim of fate, the speechless guards involuntarily switched off their flashlights. Utter darkness, utter silence enveloped them. Then a faint sound was heard.
“Listen!” came the hoarse voice of Guard Jerry Clark. “Do you hear it?”
Very little of it could be heard. It was a faint sound and growing fainter.
“When I die and am buried deep,
I’ll return at night to ...”
Then it was gone, and all was still again.
Here’s An Extraordinary Yarn—
The Ghoul and
the Corpse
By G. A. WELLS
THIS is Chris Bonner’s tale, not mine. Please remember that.
I positively will not stand sponsor for it. I used to have a deal of faith in Chris Bonner’s veracity, but that is a thing of the past. He is a liar; a liar without conscience. I as good as told him so to his face. I wonder what kind of fool he thinks I am!
Attend, now, and you shall hear that remarkable tale he told me. It was, and is, a lie. I shall always think so.
He came marching into my igloo up there at Aurora Bay. That is in Alaska, you know, on the Arctic sea. I had been in the back-country trading for pelts for a New York concern, and due to bad luck I didn’t reach the coast until the third day after the last steamer out had gone. And there I was marooned for the winter, without chance of getting out until spring, with a few dozen ignorant Indians for companions. Thank heaven I had plenty of white man’s grub in tins!
As I said, here came Chris Bonner marching in on me the same as you would go down the block a few doors to call on a neighbor.
“And where the devil did you drop in from?” I demanded, helping him off with his stiff parka.
“Down there,” he answered, jerking an elbow toward the south. “Let’s have something to eat, MacNeal. I’m hungry as hell. Look at the pack, will you!”
I had already looked at the pack he had cast off his shoulders to the fur-covered floor of the igloo. It was as lean as a starved hound. I heated a can of beef bouillon and some beans, and made a pot of coffee over the blubber-fat fire that served for both heat and light, and put these and some crackers before my guest. He tore into his meal wolfishly.
“Now a pipe and some tobac, MacNeal,” he ordered, pushing the empty dishes aside.
I gave him one of my pipes and my tobacco-pouch. He filled and lighted up. He seemed to relish the smoke; I imagined he hadn’t had one for some time. He sat silent for a while staring into the flickering flame.
“Say, MacNeal,” he spoke at length; “what do you know about a theory that says once on a time this old world of ours revolved on its axis in a different plane? I’ve heard it said the earth tipped up about seventy degrees. What d’you know about it?”
That was a queer thing for Chris Bonner to ask. He was simon-pure prospector and I had never known him to get far away from the subject of mining and prospecting. He had been hunting gold from Panama to the Arctic Circle for the past thirty years.
“No more than you do, probably,” I answered his question. “I’ve heard of that theory, too. I’d say it is any man’s guess.”
“This theory holds that the North Pole used to be where the Equator is now,” he said. “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know anything about it, Chris,” I replied. “But I do know that they have found things up this way that are now generally recognized as being peculiarly tropical in nature.”
“What, for instance?”
“Palms and ferns, a species of parrot, saber-tooth tigers; and also mastodons, members of the elephant family. All fossils and parts of skeletons, you understand.”
“No human beings, MacNeal? Any skeletons or fossils of those up this way?”
“Never heard of it. Prehistoric people are being found in England and France, however.”
“Huh,” he said.
He pondered, puffing at his pipe, his eyes on the fire. He looked perplexed about something.
“Look here, MacNeal,” he said suddenly. “Say a man dies. He’s dead, ain’t he?”
“No doubt of it,” I laughed, wondering.
“Couldn’t come to life again, eh?”
“Hardly. Not if he were really dead. I’ve heard of cases of suspended animation. The heart, apparently, quits beating for one, two or possibly ten minutes. It doesn’t in fact, though; it’s simply that its beating can’t be detected. When a man’s heart stops beating he’s dead.”
Bonner nodded.
“‘Suspended animation,’” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “That must be it. That’s the only thing that’ll explain it; nothing else will. If it could cover a period of ten minutes, why not a period of twenty or even a hundred thousand years—”
“If you’d like to turn in and get some rest, Chris, I’ll fix you up,” I broke in.
He caught the significance of my tone and grinned.
“You think I’m crazy, eh?” he said. “I’m not. It’s a wonder, though, considering what I’ve seen and what I—here, let me show you something!”
HE THRUST a hand into his lean pack and brought forth an object that at first glance I thought to be a butcher’s knife.
He handed it to me and I at once saw that it was not a butcher’s knife as I knew such knives. It was a curious sort of knife, and one for which a collector of the antique would have paid good money.
It was a very dark color, almost black; corroded, it seemed to me, as if it had lain for a long time in a damp cellar. It was in one piece, the handle about five inches long and the blade perhaps ten inches. Both edges of the blade were sharp and the end was pointed like a dagger. And it certainly wasn’t steel. I scratched one side of the blade with my thumb nail and exposed a creamy yellow under the veneer of black.
“Part of that’s blood you scraped away, MacNeal,” Bonner said. “Now what’s that knife made of?”
I examined the yellow spot closely. The knife was made of ivory. Not the kind of ivory I was acquainted with, however; it was a very much coarser grain than any ivory I had ever seen.
“That came out of a mastodon’s tusk, MacNeal,” Bonner said.
I looked at him. He was nodding, seriously. He apparently believed what he said, at any rate.
“Nice curio, Chris,” I commented, handing the thing back to him. “Heirloom, no doubt. Picked it up in one of the Indian villages, eh?”
He did not speak at once. He sat puffing, looking at the fire. Once he puckered his brows in a deep frown. I waited.
“I’ve been prospecting, as usual,” he said at length. “Down there around the headquarters of the Tukuvuk. It’s an awful place; nobody ever goes there. The Indians tell me the spirits of the dead live there. I can believe it; it’s an ideal place for imps and devils. And I was right through the heart of it. I believe I’m the first. No matter how I got there; I came up from the south last summer. You see, I had an idea there was gold in that country.
“The place where I finally settled down was in a little valley on one of the branches of the Tukuvuk between two ranges of hills running from five hundred to maybe three thousand feet high. Messy-looking place, it was; all littered up, as if the Lord had a few sizable chunks of stuff left over and just threw ’em down there to be out of the way.
“But the gold was there; I could almost smell it. I’d been getting some mighty nice color in my pan; that’s what made me decide to stay there. I got there about the middle of July, and I spent the rest of the summer sinking holes in the edge of the creek and along the benches above. What I found indicated that there was a mighty rich vein of the yellow metal thereabouts, with one end of it laying in a pocket of the stuff. If I could locate that pocket, I thought, I’d have the United States treasury backed off the map. But I wasn’t able to run the pocket down by taking bearings from my holes, because the holes didn’t line up in any particular direction.
“What with my interest in trying to get a line on that pocket, I didn’t notice that the season was getting late. But I’d brought in enough grub to last the winter through, so that didn’t matter. Just the same it was up to me to get some sort of shelter over my head, so I hustled up a one-room shack about twelve by twelve I cut from the timber on the slopes with my hand-ax. Nothing fancy, but tight enough. I put in a fireplace and cut and stacked a lot of wood outside.
“That done, winter was on me; I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to have one more try at finding the pocket that spewed the yellow metal all around there. As I said, I got no information from the holes sunk, and it was pure guesswork. I guessed I’d find my pocket on the side of a certain hill, about two hundred feet above creek level. A glacier flowed down the side of that hill through a little gulley, and my idea was that the ice ground away at the pocket and brought the metal down to the creek, and the creek scattered it. This theory was borne out to some extent by the fact that my best showings of color always came from a point a little below the conjunction of the creek and glacier.
“It was snowing the morning I took my pan and shovel and started up the side of the hill, keeping to the edge of the glacier. It wasn’t much of a glacier for size; say, about fifteen feet wide. I could see it winding up the side of the hill until it went out of sight through a cleft about a thousand feet up. Fed by a lake up there, probably.
“I had climbed the hill maybe a hundred feet, following the edge of the glacier, when I caught sight of a dark blotch in the edge of the ice. It was about two feet under the surface. I brushed away the film of snow to have a look. The ice was as clear as a crystal, of a blue color. And what d’you think, MacNeal? It was a man’s body!”
He paused and gave me a quick glance. He wanted to see how I took that, I presume.
“The body of a man,” he went on. “And the queerest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He was lying on his belly and I didn’t get a look at the front of him just then, but I knew it was a man all right. He was covered all over with long hair like a—well, like a bear, say. Not a stitch of clothes.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Why, I was that surprised I let my pan and shovel drop and stared at the damn thing with the eyes near popping out of my head. What would anybody do, finding a hair-covered thing like that frozen in a glacier? I won’t deny I was a bit scared, MacNeal.
“Well, I stood there staring at the thing for I don’t know how long. It didn’t occur to me, then, to ask myself how the thing got there. Certainly the idea of fossils or prehistoric men didn’t enter my head. I didn’t think much about anything; I just stood there gaping.
“You know me, MacNeal; I guess I’m pretty soft-hearted in some respects. I’d stop to bury a dead dog I found in the road. I knew I wouldn’t rest easy until I’d cut that thing out of the glacier and given it decent burial. Moreover, I didn’t want it where I’d be seeing it when I went to work on that hillside in the spring; and it would surely be there in the spring, because I imagine that glacier didn’t move an inch a year.
“So I went back to the shack and got my ax, and with none too good a heart for the job turned to and made the chips fly. It took me about three hours to get the thing out of the glacier. You see, as I came down to it I went slow; I don’t care to hack even a dead man.
“Say, MacNeal, can you imagine what it meant to me, digging a corpse out of a glacier down there on the side of a hill in that devil-ridden country? No, you can’t, and that’s the truth. You’d have to go through it to know. It was hell. I don’t want any more of it in mine. Nor what followed, either.”
“What was that?” I asked when he deliberated.
“You’ll hear,” he answered, and went on: “I got the thing out at last, little chunks of ice clinging to it, and dragged it ashore, if a glacier has a shore. It froze me to look at the thing with those little chunks of ice sticking to the long hair. Once, at Dawson, I’d seen a man pulled out of the Yukon, ice clinging to him. That was different, though; at Dawson there was a crowd to sort of buck a man up. I turned the thing over on its back to see what it looked like in front.”
“Well?” said I.
“You’ve seen apes, MacNeal?”
“This thing looked like that?” I countered, beginning to connect up his first queer questions with what he was telling me. “You don’t mean it, Chris!”
“I’m telling you,” he nodded solemnly. “An ape man, that’s what it was. More man than ape, if you ask me. For instance, the face was flatter than an ape’s, and the forehead and chin were more pronounced. The nose was flat, but it wasn’t an ape’s nose. And the hands and feet were like those of a man. Oh, it was a man, all right. The thing that convinced me, I think, was the knife gripped in its hand.”
“The knife you have there?” I inquired.
“This very knife,” he answered.
“What then, Chris?” I urged him to go on.
“I had a good look at that thing and started for my shack. Yes, MacNeal, I ran, and I’m not ashamed to say so. It scared me. Ugliest thing I ever saw. Eyes wide open, glaring and glinting, and the thick lips parted to show the nastiest set of fangs I ever saw in the mouth of man or beast. Why, I tell you the damned thing looked alive! No wonder I scooted. You would have done the same. Anybody would.
“Back in the shack, I sat down on my bunk to think it over. And it was while I sat there trying to puzzle it out that I remembered that theory about the earth tipping over. That gave me a hint of what I had run up against. Of course, I’d heard about fossils and parts of the skeletons of prehistoric men being found. Had I found, not a fossil or part of a skeleton, but the prehistoric man himself? That knocked the wind out of me. If that were the case my name would go down in history and I would be asked to give lectures before scientific societies and such. Consider it, MacNeal.
“I tell you, I couldn’t quite grasp the thing. It was incredible. There I was in this year of our Lord, with the intact corpse of a man who had lived God only knows how many centuries ago. That body, understand, could well be the key to the mystery of the origin of mankind. It might possibly settle the Darwinian theory forever, one way or the other. It was a pretty serious business for me, don’t you see?
“Well, I decided to preserve the thing until I could get out and make a report of the find. But how to preserve it? Of course if I had left it in the glacier it would have kept indefinitely, like a side of beef in cold storage. I was afraid to put it back in the hole in the glacier and freeze it in again with water I carried from the creek; the creek water might exert some chemical action that would ruin the thing. And if I let it lay where it was the snow would cover it, form a warm blanket, and probably cause it to decompose, then I’d have nothing left but the skeleton. I wanted to save the thing just as I’d found it; maybe the scientists would find a way to embalm it.
“I finally hit on the plan of keeping it in an ice pack. That would turn the trick until the weather took on the job. It hadn’t turned bitter cold yet. I tell you, it was a nasty job keeping that thing iced with chunks I chopped from the glacier, and to make it worse the weather stayed moderate for a couple of weeks. Then, suddenly, the mercury in my little thermometer went down with a rush and it got stinging cold. I carried the thing to the shack and stood it up against the wall outside where it couldn’t be covered with snow, and lashed it there.
“Can you imagine me going to sleep in my bunk in the shack every night after that, with that thing standing against the wall outside not two feet away? Of course you can’t. It frazzled my nerves, and more than once I was tempted to cut a hole in the ice on the creek and chuck the damn thing in where I’d never see it again. But no, I had to save it for the scientists and get my name in history; that idea got to be an obsession with me. I knew well enough that if ever I told people the tale I’m telling you now, without some proof of it, I’d get laughed at.”
“No doubt of it,” I sneered.
“The days went by,” he continued, ignoring my sneer, “and more and more that thing outside kept getting on my nerves. The sun went south, and from one day to another I never saw it. The never-ending night was bad enough, but when you add the northern lights and the howling of the wolves you’ve got a condition that breaks a man if he’s not careful. Furthermore, there was that ugly-looking devil outside to think about.
“I was thinking about that thing constantly, and got so I couldn’t sleep. If I shut my eyes I’d see it, anyhow, and if I went to sleep I’d have a nightmare over it. Now and then I’d go out and stand there in the starlight or the aurora looking at it. It fascinated me, yet the sight of the thing gave me the creeps. Finally I began taking a club or my rifle along when I went to look at it; got afraid the thing would come alive and try to murder me with that knife.
“And that’s the way of things for maybe three months and more. My thoughts all the time on that thing outside.
“Well, that couldn’t go on, you know. One morning I woke up with the worst headache a man ever had. I thought my head would split wide open. My blood was like molten iron flowing through my veins. I knew what it was. Fever. I had thought and worried about that thing outside until it got me, and I was in for a brain-storm. I was as weak as a cat, but managed to build up a good fire and pack my bunk with all the blankets and furs I had and crawl in. I only hoped I wouldn’t freeze to death when the fire went out.
“I no sooner got all set in the bunk than things let go; I went completely off. I can’t say positively what happened for a few days after that. Seems like I remember, though, periods when I was semi-rational. I think once I got up to put more wood on the fire. Another time I saw that thing standing in the doorway grinning at me like the devil it was. I shot at it with my rifle and later found a bullet in the door. My shooting couldn’t have been a delusion, at any rate. But the door was still fastened against the wolves and there were no tracks in the snow outside.”
Bonner paused to light his pipe, and then went on:
“I don’t know exactly how long I was out of my head. I’d wound my watch before I crawled into the bunk the first time, and I half remember I wound it again when I got up to put wood on the fire, and it was pretty well run down. It goes forty hours without winding, yet when my head cleared it had stopped. I must have been off my nut about four days.
“Well, you can lay your bottom dollar I’d had enough of prehistoric men hanging around the shack by that time. Let the scientists be damned; I was determined to get rid of that thing the quickest way possible. The quickest way, I thought, would be to get the corpse warm so it would decompose rapidly, then I’d put it outside where the wolves and ravens would pick the bones clean. The scientists would have to be satisfied with the skeleton.
“So I made a big fire in the fireplace and got the shack good and hot, then went out and brought in the corpse. I got sick at the stomach on that job, but that was the only way. I didn’t have the heart to leave the thing outside and build a fire over it out there. I try to respect the dead, even if the corpse is that of a man who had been dead several thousand years and looked more like an animal than a human being.
“I laid the thing on the floor before the fireplace, then sat down on the bunk to wait. I watched it pretty close, because, being dead so long, I thought when it got warm and started to decompose it would go like butter; I didn’t want the shack to be all smelled up with the stink of it. Probably half an hour went by, then all of a sudden I saw the thing quiver—”
“Your brain-storm returning,” I interposed.
“Wait,” said Bonner sharply. “It quivered; not much, but enough to notice. That sort of got me, then I reasoned that anything thawing out like that would naturally quiver a little. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes passed, then one of the legs moved. Jerked, sort of. It startled me. Remember, there I was down there in those hills alone with that thing. I was pretty susceptible to weird influences, understand. Anyhow, the leg moved, and—”
“It sat up and asked for a drink of water.” I could not help putting in. Bonner continued, paying no attention to my sarcasm. He seemed to be talking aloud to himself:
“I watched it like a hawk for some time after that, then as I didn’t see it move any more I stepped outside to get some more wood for the fire and to pull a few good breaths of cold air into my lungs. That shack was like the inside of an oven.
“When I went in again I saw that the damned thing had turned over on its back.
“Turned over on its back, I say. And there was a change in the eyes, too; they had a half-awake sort of look in them; a more alive look, understand. And breathing! Yes, sir, breathing! Why the thing didn’t see me when I came in and shut the door I don’t know, but apparently it didn’t. And, believe me or not, the hand that had held the knife was open and the knife was lying on the floor apart from the body.
“Crazy? I tell you no! I was as sane as I am now. I tell you I saw these things with my own two eyes; saw them just as plain as I see you now. I see you don’t believe me, MacNeal. Oh, well, I don’t blame you; I hardly believe it myself sometimes.”
He uttered a little laugh.
“But there it was, just as I’m telling you. And I was that gone when I saw that the thing had turned over on its back that I dropped the wood I had in my arm. The crash of it on the floor brought the thing to its feet on the jump. You needn’t look at me like that; I tell you it did. I take my oath it did! There it was, crouched like a panther ready for the spring, the eyes of it flashing like fire, its lips pulled back tight across the gums and the yellow fangs showing. Can you see that? No, you can’t.”
Bonner made an expressive gesture with one hand.
“Remarkable, but the thing hadn’t seen me yet. It was looking at the fire; it was half turned toward me so I could see that. Suddenly it screamed in an outlandish gibberish and leaped to the fireplace and tried to gather in an armful of flames. I take it the thing had never seen fire before; didn’t know what it was; probably imagined it some kind of wild animal. Naturally the only thing it got out of that play was burned arms and hands, and the long hair sizzled and curled. It leaped back with a snarl, spitting that funny gibberish. Talk, I guess it was; it came from way down in the belly and sounded like pigs grunting.
“I tell you, MacNeal, I was fair dazed. But I had the sense left to try to help myself. My rifle was leaning against the bunk and I made a quick dive for it. Then, apparently, the thing saw me for the first time. The way it glared at me with those glittering eyes was a caution. I didn’t stop to argue; I snatched up the rifle, cocked it and made a snap shot. The bullet caught the thing in the left breast and the blood gushed. Of course you don’t believe it. But blood, I tell you, gushed from the breast of a thing that had been frozen in a glacier for thousands of years!
“Well, here it came like a cyclone. I didn’t have time to shoot again. Smell? That thing smelled like carrion; almost strangled me. Maybe you know how the cage of a wild animal stinks if it ain’t cleaned out for a week or two. This thing smelled like that, only worse. I can smell it yet. Lord!”
Bonner wrinkled his nose and shivered.
“But there we were at grips, the thing making those belly noises and smelling like a thousand garbage piles. It had the strength of ten men; I sensed that. It jerked the rifle from me and bent the barrel of it double with a twist of the wrists. The barrel of a thirty-eight caliber Winchester rifle—bent it as easy as you or I would bend a piece of copper wire.
“Then we were at it, fighting like a couple of wild cats all over the shack. I’m no slouch of a man myself, MacNeal, when it comes to a rough-and-tumble; but that thing handled me like a baby. I could see my finish. We threshed about the floor, me fighting like a devil, it fighting like forty devils. We kicked into the fire and out again and scattered live coals all over the place, and the shack took fire.
“I was just about gone when my hand accidentally fell on the handle of the knife the thing had dropped on the floor. I hung on to it and poked away at that thing for all I was worth, driving the blade clean up to the hilt with every punch.”
“That knife?” I broke in.
“This knife,” answered Bonner. “There’s the dried blood on it yet. But I think it was really the bullet that did the work. It must have cut an artery. Anyhow, the blood kept gushing out of the thing’s breast; it got on my hands and made ’em slippery. I knew the thing couldn’t pour out blood like that and keep going; that’s what put the heart in me to keep on fighting. And, as I say, I think it was the bullet that did the work in the long run. A lucky shot, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.
“I felt the thing sagging and going limp in my hands, and its grip began to relax. I saw my chance and put up a knee and broke the grip and kicked it away. It staggered around a moment or two, clutching its breast with its bloody paws, gnashing its fangs and glaring murder at me; then it crashed down to the floor and fell smack into the flames.
“I saw plain enough there was no chance of saving the shack, so I snatched up what I could lay my hands on in the way of food and clothing and blankets, and tore out. I don’t remember putting the knife in my pocket, but that’s where I found it later. The shack burned down to nothing, and that thing burned with it; probably not a bone of it left. The scientists were out of luck and the mystery of mankind would remain unsolved.
“I didn’t stop to investigate, of course; my job was to make tracks. I knew about this village and came on. How I got here I don’t know; this is a terrible country to cross afoot in the winter. I’d turned my ten huskies adrift to shift for themselves when I reached the valley where all this happened; I didn’t have the grub to keep them going. I had to walk here.
“And that’s all, MacNeal. You can say what you please; I know what I saw with my own eyes and you can’t change my mind about it. Suspended animation? Yes, for a period covering many centuries. It would be a mighty fine thing if we could picture what happened away back there when this old earth tipped over.
“Perhaps we’d see a man, a man that was half ape, crossing a creek with a knife in his hand on the way to murder an enemy sleeping on the opposite bank. Then suddenly the earth tipped over—climatic conditions in those days were such as to freeze things up in a flash—things are held in the grip of the ice just as the dust and lava held ’em in the days of Pompeii, and—
“Well, who’s to say what happened? Anything was possible. We don’t know the conditions of those days. Anyhow, here I come thousands of years later and dig a man, with a knife in his hand, out of a glacier. I heat his body in order to decompose the flesh. Instead of decomposing; he comes to life and I have to kill him. He’s been hibernating in a glacier for centuries. I don’t know what to think about it.”
Bonner refilled and lighted his pipe, then looked at me questioningly.
“Chris,” I said, “I tell you frankly that I don’t believe a word you have said. You tell me you were out of your head for a few days. That accounts for it. You had the jim-jams and imagined all that, then try to spring it on me as actual fact.”
He looked hurt. He looked at the knife in his hand steadily for several long moments, then thrust it toward me, his eyes boring into mine.
“Then where in hell,” he demanded, “did I get this knife?”
FEAR
By David R. Solomon
THERE were only five words.
They neither affirmed nor denied what had gone before. But they changed the whole trend of the argument.
The men of the engineering gang were lying around the camp-fire, preparatory to going out on the job. It was cool in the shade of the thick trees, with the damp feel of early morning hanging over everything. Further out, over the river, the sun gave promise of better weather later in the day.
Smoking, waiting for the laggards to clean up their plates, the engineering gang—according to invariable man-custom—had begun experiences, jokes, arguments. Over all hung the pungent smell of strong, fresh coffee, and much frying bacon.
Baldy Jenkins, the eighteen-year-old had started it.
“Wish I had a million dollars,” he remarked.
Red Flannel Mike gave the ball a roll.
“You do not,” he denied stoutly. “Be givin’ you a million—and the Lord hisself only knows what you’d be a-doing wid it.”
“Hell I don’t,” said Baldy. “Bet I could tell you right now how I’d spend every penny of it.”
“Bet you don’t,” broke in another of the gang. “Fellow never does know what he’s goin’ to do till it hits him, square between the eyes.”
“Offer me a million,” insisted Baldy Jenkins.
“Aw, not that way. Take somep’n where two men might act different. You don’t know what you’d do. I don’t. No man does—no more’n that kid over there does.”
His lazy gesture indicated a small, khaki-trousered figure. The eyes of the rest of the gang followed.
At first glance she might have been a lad of ten or eleven years. Closer inspection, however, showed the mop of flaxen hair, bobbed off at the level of her ears, and the tender, little-girl face. She was marching around the camp like an inspector-general of an army, into this, that, everything.
“’Cert she wouldn’t,” affirmed Red Flannel Mike. “Coulter’s kid’s just like you or me. She’d have to be up against it to know—an’ maybe not then.”
“Huh! Even that kid....” Baldy snatched up the gauntlet.
They were off. Hot and royally raged the battle.
The advocates of the unexpected gained ascendancy. Louder and more extravagant grew their claims. No man could predict anything. No man knew what he would do. Put him face to face with any situation, any danger, and he would act differently from the way he thought he would.
It was then that Coulter spoke.
He did not raise his voice. If anything, it was lowered. Hitherto, he had sat, silent, listening to the battle of words, his bandaged left arm swung tightly at his side.
“I don’t know about that,” was all he said.
Sudden quiet fell. There came a restless stirring, then tacit agreement. These men of rougher employment—axmen, chainmen, engineers—centered their gaze upon Coulter’s bandaged left arm.
They knew what he was thinking about. They, too, had seen. They agreed with him that he could have but one possible reaction to one set of circumstances.
All of them were employees, of one branch or the other, of the Consolidated Lumber Company. Coulter was in the legal department. There had arisen a nice question as to the exact ownership of a certain tract. Rather than take chances with the heavy statutory penalties for cutting trees upon another’s land, they had sent a lawyer upon the ground. His work was finished. He was ready—more than ready—to return.
City-bred, city born, Coulter had welcomed the chance to see a Southern swamp. He had read, all his life, of Dixie, the land of the magnolia and cotton, of the mockingbird and the honeysuckle. He had welcomed his mission. He had even brought his daughter, Ruth, along.
That was not at all unnatural, however. Wherever Coulter had gone for the last ten years, there, too, had gone Ruth. They had not been separated longer than a day since the gray dawn that the other Ruth had placed the tiny bundle in his arms and turned her face to the wall.
The child was all that was left of their love save memories. She was Coulter’s sole interest in life.
Coming to this camp, Coulter had clad her in khaki, and turned her loose in the open. It had done her good.
The eyes of the stained figures around the camp-fire followed his gaze. They knew something of what he was thinking. They had heard him, in the midst of his pain, setting his teeth, gasp: “Get—Ruth away—where she—can’t hear!”
That, from a man whom they had to restrain from killing himself to get freedom from the torture, was enough.
Coulter’s ignorance of the South and of the woods had been, perhaps, to blame. He did not know. All that he could remember was that he had been bending over the spring, his left arm resting upon the brink. He had not seen the moccasin until it was too late.
Vividly, even yet, he saw the darkish head and body, the supple, writhing, the swift dart and the flash of pain—and then agony; much agony, deep, soul-biting torture.
THERE was no doctor at the camp. There had been a delay before, stupefied, he thought to let them know he had been bit. And then—more agony; agony piled upon agony.
Not concealing their doubts as to their chances of saving his arm or him, they had slapped the rough tourniquet upon his arm, and had twisted down upon the stick until he moaned, unwillingly, in pain. Then they had dipped one of the big hunting knives into boiling water, and had cut his arm at the bite marks—gashing it across, with great, free-handed strokes, then back again at right angles; squeezing the cuts to make him lose the poisoned blood.
Then they had cauterized the wound. Sick, half afaint, to Coulter it seemed that they were deliberately thinking up additional tortures. The white-hot iron that seared his flesh, tormenting the agonized ends of nerves that already had borne past the breaking point, was the final, exquisite touch of agony.
Coulter was one of those men who bear pain—even a slight pain—with difficulty. Even the sight of blood made him faint. This was horrible beyond anything he had ever dreamed. The physical racking; the feel of the steel blade cutting through his own flesh and sinew, down to the bone, made him bite his lips till they spurted blood, in the effort to keep from screaming aloud.
He had not known they were through. He thought they were preparing additional crucifixion for him.
Red Flannel Mike had slapped the gun from his hands and made him understand, somehow, that it was all over; that they were through. But they watched him the rest of the night.
That was why, as the argument rose around the morning camp-fire, Coulter was very sure that he knew what he would do under one set of circumstances. He knew one experience that nothing on earth could send him through again. All that, and more, was in his tone, as he spoke.
At his words there came a restless stirring around the fire. Those men of the engineering gang had seen something of his experience. They knew what he was thinking. The abrupt ending of their argument showed that they agreed with Coulter.
He saw, and understood; and, seeing, smiled bitterly. They knew only a part of it.
To every man there is his one fear. The bravest man that ever trod the earth had his one especial dread. To some, it is fire; to others, cold steel; others still, the clash of physical contact. But, probe deep enough beneath the skin of any man alive, and you find it.
Snakes were Coulter’s fear.
He could not explain it. He did not know why he, a man city-bred and born, had this obsession. It had been with him since he could remember. As a child, once he had gone into a convulsion of fear over some pictures of snakes in a book.
The old women of the family nodded their heads wisely, and muttered things about a fright to his mother before his birth. Coulter did not know. All that he was certain about was that the thought, even, of the writhing, slippery squirming bodies, made his whole being shudder with revulsion, made tingles of absolute horror go up and down his back.
Yes, the gang agreed with him. Yet they had seen only a part of what he had gone through. They had seen and appreciated only his physical suffering—and that was the least part.
Coulter’s nerves were in ragged shreds. He started and jumped at the slightest sound. His experience had intensified a thousandfold his nervous horror of reptiles.
The woods, the swamp, were full of them. He ran upon them constantly. All the time he was longing for his hour of liberation, when he could return to the city and to freedom.
The unexpected flutter of a thrush, as he walked through the woods, would send his heart into his throat and his pulse to pounding in fear. Night after night he woke, chained hand and foot with dread that a snake had crawled up, in the dark, beside him. All the stories he had ever read of their crawling up into camps and getting into the bedding, came to him, lingered with him, tortured him. He was no more asleep before he would awake, bathed in a cold sweat, afraid to move, afraid to lie still.
All that, subconsciously, was in his words, in his manner, in his whole expression, as he said:
“I don’t know about that.”
THERE came the silence of conviction. Even Red Flannel Mike, most zealous exponent of man’s lack of knowledge of himself, was silenced.
“Somebody said something about the kid.” Baldy, the eighteen-year-old, seized his advantage. “I’ll bet that even she—”
Baldy stopped abruptly. His whole frame stiffened. His eyes were riveted upon little Ruth. One by one, the rest of the gang turned to follow his gaze. Each followed his example.
Ruth’s scream cut the air a moment before Baldy’s gasp of horror:
“My God! The kid’s got a moccasin on her!”
The child was close enough for the group to see clearly. Her head was bent back, straining away from the writhing horror. The sleek head slithered to and fro, darting, threatening, winding here and there about her. She seemed frozen with fear.
Baldy had started forward. He stopped.
“I—get me a gun!” he barked. “Get a gun! Quick!”
The reptile drew back its head. There came an interruption:
White to his lips, staggering upon his feet, Coulter came forward. His face was ghastly pale. His unwilling feet buckled under him, threatening, each moment, to give way and pitch him forward upon his face.
Slowly he edged closer. The slender head poised, watchful. Coulter’s movements were scarcely discernible. Suddenly his well arm shot out, seizing, snatching at that loathsome body.
There was a quick movement of the snake, far too rapid to be anticipated or avoided. The head drove forward. He felt the white hot flash of pain.
The rest was a haze of horror to him. It was rather as if he were a spectator at something concerning someone else. He did not command his body. He knew only, vaguely, what was happening.
There came the feel of a sleek body in his hands, the lash and writhing against his arms of something that fought to break away; then the grinding of his heel upon a head, and the flinging, against him, in death agony.
Everything faded out, then.
HIS RETURN to consciousness was marked by a hazy lightness of memory.
In the bitten arm he could feel, mounting higher and higher, the numbness that had marked the other experience. His heart, too, seemed to be acting queerly—just as it had done before.
Red Flannel Mike’s broad back was bent from him as he mixed at something in a basin. They had carried him to his own tent.
Coulter’s holster was hanging from the tent pole. The numbness crept higher in his arm. Soon would begin the cutting of his flesh, the darting flames of pain....
He could not go through with that again! He could not bear it. Better far to finish with the gun what Mike had stopped before.
Softly he slid the gun from the holster, and raised it for action. His finger pressed upon the trigger.
The weapon was dashed suddenly from his hand.
“What the hell!” roared Mike. “You fool, what’s the matter with you?”
“Give—give me that gun!”
“You’re as bad as Baldy Jenkins. Been in the woods all his life—and mistakes a coach whip for a moccasin, just because both of ’em are darkish.
“That wasn’t any more moccasin than a polar bear.... Yes, ’course he struck you. Any snake ’ll do that—but it ain’t always poison. Your arm ain’t even go’ner be sore.
“Never mind about this gun. I’ll give it back to you—later on.”
You’ll Be Thrilled and Mystified
By Hamilton Craigie’s New Novelette