“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.