“Well?” the sheriff questioned, at length. “What was it? What killed him, Horace?”
“Bless me if I know, Bert. I never saw anything like this before in all my experience. It was an animal of some kind, I should say; a wolf, perhaps, although, as you said, the few wolves we have hereabouts have never been known to attack humans. But the man is frightfully mangled, his jugular vein is quite torn out of him. Had his gun in his hand, too. It’s empty. He must have fought the thing hard, whatever it was. I wonder—could it have been the ‘plague’?”
Sheriff Parker nodded in an absent way, his eyes still fixed on the faint trail through the trees and weeds.
“I think it was,” he said. “This spot is only a little way removed from where the creature has been in the habit of roaming, and poor Smith, I suppose, was caught here after dark. These tracks match those we found near Moore, and they look pretty fresh. How long should you say he has been dead?”
“Killed early last night, I should judge,” was the doctor’s answer. “He died hard, too, poor chap. Look at that ground.”
Jess Benson, with horror written all over his honest features, had been staring at the two men as they talked. Big, burly, outdoor giant that he was, he seemed to be in the grip of a kind of terror—or was it awe?—that made him incapable of speech.
“Heavens, what an end!” he burst out at length. “What are we going to do, sheriff? How’ll we ever get the thing that killed him?”
Sheriff Parker made no answer. He merely continued to search the ground around the body for a few minutes longer, as though he wished to make doubly sure that his suspicions were correct; then he helped the others wrap the body in a blanket and stow it in the car. Five minutes later, save for the trampled ground and some dull-brown, ominous stains on the grass, there was no sign of the tragedy apparent.
Two hours later, seated at his own desk with a cigar between his teeth, Sheriff Parker squinted through his glasses at Doctor Morse, who sat opposite.