Part 15

She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.

“Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.”

Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.

“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.

“We shall have to drink shortly,” she said, “but it will be warm.”

Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.

“Where is the water?”

The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.

“Where is the water?” he repeated.

“Patience, patience,” she growled, and came a step near to him.

The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.

At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open.

The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand.

“Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to spring.”

He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.

“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.”

“Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely.

“Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.”

He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced; and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.

Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.

“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.

“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?”

He stripped the clothing from the carcass.

Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but more like the underside of an old fox-terrier with puppies, or of a white sow, with her second litter; from collar-bone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy and flaccid.

“What kind of a creature is it?” he asked faintly.

“A Ghoul, my boy,” the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper.

“I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were mythical; I thought there were none.”

“I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,” the consul said gravely. “This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.”

1906

THE PIG-SKIN BELT

THE PIG-SKIN BELT

I

BE it noted that I, John Radford, always of sound mind and matter-of-fact disposition, being entirely in my senses, here set down what I saw, heard and knew. As to my inferences from what occurred I say nothing, my theory might be regarded as more improbable than the facts themselves. From the facts anyone can draw conclusions as well as I.

The first letter read:

“San Antonio, Texas, January 1st, 1892.

MY DEAR RADFORD:

You have forgotten me, likely enough, but I have not forgotten you nor anyone (nor anything) in Brexington. I saw your advertisement in the New York _Herald_ and am glad to learn from it that you are alive and to infer that you are well and prosperous.

I need a lawyer’s help. I want to buy real estate and I mean to return home, so you are exactly the man I am looking for. I am writing this to ask that you take charge of any and all of my affairs falling within your province, and to learn whether you are willing to do so.

I am a rich man now, and without any near ties of kin or kind. I want to come home to Brexington, to live there if I can, to die there if I must. Along with other matters which I will explain if you accept I want to buy a house in the town and a farm nearby, if not the Shelby house and estate then some others like them.

If willing to act for me please reply at once care of the Hotel Menger. Remember me to any cousins of mine you may see.

Faithfully yours, CASSIUS M. CASE.”

The name I knew well enough, of course, but my efforts to recall the individual resulted only in a somewhat hazy recollection of a tall, thin, red-cheeked lad of seventeen or so. It was almost exactly twenty-eight years since Colonel Shelby Case had left Brexington taking with him his son. Colonel Shelby had died some six years later. I remembered hearing of his death, in Egypt, I thought. Since his departure from Brexington I had never heard of or from Cassius.

My reply I wrote at once, professing my readiness to do anything in my power to serve him.

As soon as the mails made it possible, I had a second letter from him.

“MY DEAR RADFORD:

“Your kind letter has taken a load off my mind. I am particular about any sort of arrangements I make, exacting as to the accurate carrying out of small details and I feared I might have difficulty in finding a painstaking man in a community so easy-going as Brexington. I remember your precise ways as a boy and am basking in a sense of total relief and complete reliance on you.

“I should buy the Shelby house and estate on your representations, but I must see for myself first. If they are the best I can get I shall take them anyhow. But please be ready to show me over every estate of five hundred acres or more, lying within ten miles of the Court House. I wish to examine every one which is now for sale or which you can induce the owners to consider selling. I want the best which is to be had. Also I want a small place of fifty acres or so, two miles or more from the larger place I buy. Money is no object to me and the condition of the buildings on the places will not weigh with me at all.

“So with the town house: I may tear it down entirely and rebuild from the cellar up. What I want in the town is a place of half an acre to two acres carrying fine, tall trees, with well-developed trunks. I want shade and plenty of it, but no limbs or branches growing or hanging within eight feet of the ground. I do not desire shrubbery, but if there is any I can have it removed, while I cannot create stout trees. Those I must have on the place when I buy it, for I will have the shade and I will have a clear sweep for air and an unobstructed view all round.

“I am not at the Menger as you naturally suppose. I merely have my mail sent there. I am living in a tent half a mile or more from the town. At Los Angeles I had the luck to fall in with a Brexington nigger, Jeff Twibill. He knew of another, Cato Johnson, who was in Frisco. I have the two of them with me now, Jeff takes care of the horses and Cato of me and I am very comfortable.

“That brings me to the arrangements I want you to make for me. Buy or lease or rent or borrow a piece of a field, say four acres, free of trees or bushes and sloping enough to shed the rain. Be sure there is good water handy. Have four tents; one for me, one for the two niggers (and make it big enough for three or four); one to cook in and one for my four horses, they are luxurious beasts and live as well as I do. Have the tents pitched in the middle of the field so I shall have a clear view all around. The field must be clear of bushes or trees, must be at least four acres and may be any size larger than that: forty would be none too big for me. I want no houses too close to me.

“You see I am at present averse to houses, hotels and public conveyances. I mean to ride across the continent camping as I go. And in Brexington I mean to tent it until I have my own house ready to live in. I am resolute to be no man’s guest nor any man’s lodger, nor any company’s passenger.

“I am coming home, Radford, coming home to be a Colonel with the rest of them. And I shall be no mere colonel-by-courtesy: I have won my right to the title, I won it twice over, years ago in Egypt and later in Asia.

“Thank you for all the news of the many cousins, I did not realize they were so very numerous. I am sorry that Mary Mattingly is dead, of all the many dear people in Brexington I loved her best.

“I shall keep you advised of my progress across the continent. And as questions come up about the details of the tent-equipment you can confer with me by letter.

“Gratefully yours, “CASSIUS M. CASE.”

I showed the letters to one and another of my elder acquaintances, who remembered Cassius.

Dr. Boone said:

“I presume it is a case of advanced tuberculosis. He should have remained in that climate. Of course, he may live a long time here, tenting in the open or living with the completest fresh air treatment. His punctiliousness in respect to self isolation does him credit, though he carries it further than is necessary. We must do all we can for him.”

Beverly said:

“Poor devil. ‘Live if he can, die if he must.’ He’ll die all right. They’d call him a ‘lunger’ out there and he had better stay there.”

The minister said:

“The lode-star of old sweet memories draws him homeward. ‘Mary Mattingly,’ yes we all remember how wildly he loved Mary Mattingly. While full of youth he could find forgetfulness fighting in strange lands. Now he must be near her although she lies in her grave. The proximity even of her tomb will be a solace to his last days.”

We were prepared to do all that sympathy could suggest. Mr. Hall and Dr. Boone gravely discussed together the prolongation of Case’s life and the affording of spiritual support. Beverly I found helpful on my line of finances and creature comforts. As Case’s leisurely progress brought him nearer and nearer our interest deepened. When the day came on which he was to arrive Beverly and I rode put out to meet him.

II

Language has no words to picture our dumbfounded amazement. And we were astonished in more ways than one. Chiefly, instead of the lank invalid we expected to see, we beheld a burly giant every characteristic of whom, save one, bespoke rugged health. He was all of six foot three, big boned, overlaid with a surplus of brawn, a Samsonian musculature that showed plain through his negligent, loose clothing; and withal he was plump and would have been sleek but for the roughness of his weather-beaten skin.

He wore gray; a broad-brimmed felt hat, almost a sombrero; a flannel shirt, a sort of jacket, and corduroy trousers tucked into his boots. It was before the days of khaki.

His head was large and round, but not at all a bullet head, rather handsome and well set. His face was round too, and good-natured, but not a particle as is the usual round face, vacuous and like a full-moon. His was agreeable, but lit with character and determination. His neck was fat but showed great cords through its rotundity. He had a big barrel of a chest and his voice rumbled out of it. He dominated the landscape the moment he entered it.

Even in our astonishment three things about him struck me, and, as I afterwards found out, the same three similarly struck Beverly.

One was his complexion. He had that build which leads one to expect floridity of face, a rubicund countenance or, at least, ruddy cheeks. But he was dead pale, with a peculiar tint I never had seen before. His face showed an abundance of solid muscle and over it a skin roughened by exposure, toughened, even hardened by wind and sun. Yet its color was not in agreement with its texture. It had the hue which belongs to waxy skin over suety, tallowy flesh, an opaque whiteness, a pallidity almost corpse-like.

The second was his glance: keen, glittering, hard, blue-gray eyes he had, gallant and far younger than himself. But it was not the handsome eyes so much as their way of looking that whetted our attention. They pierced us through and through, they darted incessantly here and there, they peered to right and left, they kept us generally in view, indeed, and never let us feel that his attention wandered from us, yet they incessantly swept the world about him. You should say they saw all they looked at, looked at everything seeable.

The third was his belt, a mellowed old belt of pig-skin, with two capacious holsters, from each of which protruded the butt of a large-calibre revolver.

He greeted us in the spirit of old comradeship renewed. Behind him Jeff and Cato grinned from their tired mounts. He sat his big horse with no sign of fatigue and surveyed the landscape from the cross-roads’ knoll where we had met him.

“I seem to recall the landmarks here,” he said, “the left hand road by which you came, would take me through to Brexington.”

Beverly confirmed his recollection.

“The one straight ahead,” he went on, “goes past the big new distillery you wrote me about.”

“Right again,” I said.

“The road to the right,” he continued, “will take us by the old mill, and I can swing round to my camp without nearing town.”

“You could,” Beverly told. “But it is a long way round.”

“Not too far for me,” he announced positively. “No towns or distilleries for me. I go round. Will you ride with me, gentlemen?”

We rode with him.

On the way I told him I expected him to supper that evening.

“With all my writing, Radford,” he said. “You don’t seem to get the idea. I flock by myself for the present and eat alone. If you insist I’ll explain to-morrow.”

Beverly and I left him to his camp supper.

Dr. Boone and Mr. Hall were a good deal taken aback upon learning that their imagined invalid had no existence and that the real Colonel Case needed neither medical assistance nor spiritual solace. We four sat for some time expressing our bewilderment.

Next morning I drove out to Case’s Camp. I found him sitting in his tent, the flaps of which were looped up all around. He was as pale as the day before. As I approached I saw him scrutinize me with a searching gaze, a gaze I found it difficult to analyze.

He wore his belt with the holsters and the revolver-butts showed from those same holsters. I was astonished at this. When I saw it on him the day before I had thought the belt a piece of bad taste. It might have been advisable in portions of his long ride, might have been imperatively necessary in some districts; but it seemed a pose or a stupidity to wear it so far east. Pistols were by no means unknown in our part of the world, but they were carried in the seclusion of the hip-pocket or inside the breast of one’s coat, not flaunted in the face of the populace in low-hung pig-skin holsters.

Case greeted me cheerily.

“I got up too early,” he stated. “I’ve had my breakfast and done my target practice twice over. Apparently you expect me to go with you in that buggy?”

I told him that I did.

“Come in and sit down a moment,” he said in a somewhat embarrassed way. “This suggestion of our driving together is in line with your kind invitation for last night. I see I must explain somehow.”

He offered me a cigar and though I seldom smoke in the morning, I took it, for, I thought smoking would fill up the silences I anticipated.

He puffed a while, in fact.

“Have you ever been among feudists in the mountains?” he queried.

“More than a little,” I told him.

“Likely enough then,” he went on, “you know more about their ways than I do. But I saw something of them myself, before I left America. Did you ever notice how a man at either focus of a feud, the king-pin of his end of it so to speak, manifests the greatest care to avoid permitting others to expose themselves to any degree of the danger always menacing him; how such men, in the black shadow of doom, as it were, are solicitous to prevent outsiders from straying into the penumbra of the eclipse which threatens themselves?”

“I have observed that,” I replied.

“Have you noticed on the other hand,” he continued, “that they never show any concern for acquaintances who comprehend the situation, but pay them the compliment of assuming that they have sense enough to know what they are doing and to take care of themselves?”

“I have observed that same too,” I affirmed.

He puffed again for a while.

“My father,” he returned presently, “used to say that there are two ends to a quarrel, the right end and the wrong end, but that either end of a feud is the wrong end. I am one end of a feud. Wherever I am is one focus of that feud. The other focus is local, and I have removed myself as far as may be from it. But I am not safe here, should not be safe anywhere on earth; doubt if I should be safe on the moon, or Mars, on a planet of some other sun, or the least conspicuous satellite of the farthest star. I am obnoxious to the hate of a power as far-reaching” ... he took off his broad felt hat and looked up at the canvas of the tent-roof ... “as far-reaching as the displeasure of God.”

“And as implacable,” he almost whispered. “As the malice of Satan.”

He looked sane, healthy and self-possessed.

“I am nowhere safe,” he recommenced in his natural voice, “while my chief adversary is alive. My enemies are many and malignant enough, but their power is negligible, and their malignancy vicarious. Without fomenting their hostility would evaporate. Could I but know that my chief enemy were no more I should be free from all alarm. But while that arch-foe survives I am liable to attack at any moment, to attacks so subtle that I am at a loss to make you comprehend their possible nature, so crude that I could not make you realize the danger you are in at this instant.”

I looked at him, unmoved.

“I shall say no more to you,” he said. “You must do as you please. If you regard my warnings as vapors, I have at least warned you. If you are willing to share my danger, in such degree as my very neighborhood is always full of danger, you do so at your own risk. If you consider it advisable to have no more to do with me, say so now.”

“I see no reason,” I told him without even a preliminary puff, “why your utterances should make any difference in my treatment of you.”

“I thought you would say that,” he said. “But my conscience is clear.”

“Shall we proceed to business?” I asked.

“There is one point more,” he replied. “Have you ever been in mining camps or amid other frontier conditions?”

“Several times,” I answered, “and for some time at that.”

“Have you ever noticed that when two men have been mutually threatening to shoot each other at sight, pending the final settlement, neither will expose women or children to danger by being in their neighborhood or permitting them in his, if he can prevent their nearing them?”

“Such scrupulosity can be observed,” I told him dryly, “nearer home than mining camps or frontier towns.”

“So I have heard,” he replied stiffly. “When I left America the personal encounter had not yet taken the place of the formal duel in these regions.”

He puffed a bit.

“However,” he continued, “it makes no difference from what part of the world you draw the illustration; it is equally in point. The danger of being near me is a hundred times, a thousand times greater than that of running the risk of stopping a wild or random bullet. I cannot bring myself to expose innocent beings to such danger.”

“How about Jeff and Cato?” I asked.

“A nigger,” declared Colonel Case (and he looked all the colonel as he spoke it) “is like a dog or a horse, he shares his master’s dangers as a matter of course. I speak of women and children and unsuspecting men. I am resolute to sit at no man’s table, to enter no man’s house, uninvited or invited. All who come to me knowingly I shall welcome. When you bring any one with you I shall assume that he has been forewarned. But I shall intrude upon no one.”

“How then are you to inspect,” I queried, “the properties I expected to show you?”

“Business,” said Colonel Case, “is different. When people propose to do business they assume any and all risks. Are you afraid to assume the risk of driving me about in that buggy of yours?”

“Not a particle,” I disclaimed. “Are you willing to expose the people of Brexington to these dangers on which you descant so eloquently and which I fail to comprehend?”

Colonel Case fixed me with a cold stare. He looked every inch a warrior, accustomed to dominate his environment, to command and be obeyed, impatient of any opposition, ready to flare up if disbelieved in the smallest trifle.

“Radford,” he said, slowly and sternly, “I am willing to take any pains to avoid wronging anyone, I am unwilling to make myself ridiculous by attempting impossibilities.”

“I see,” I concluded. “Let us go.”

III

As we drove through the town he said:

“This is like coming back to earth from another world. It is like a dream too. Some streets are just as they were, only the faces are unfamiliar. I almost expect to see the ghosts of thirty years ago.”