The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “I’ll take care of it, old man,” promised Sam stoutly. “Damn it, I nearly went over myself. Of course I’ll tell them.”

  The older man subsided. The younger seemed to fall into busy thought. Kettermann smoked phlegmatically. Peaks lifted their heads toward the heavens all about them, palely phosphorescent in the darkness. Hans said something softly to Kettermann. Again about a wager of some sort.

  “Ja,” grunted Kettermann.

  “Kettermann,” said Sam suddenly, “if I’d stepped off the edge, here, how far would I have fallen before I touched?”

  The guide grunted, drew his pipe from between his teeth, and spat meditatively. Then he said precisely:

  “I think three hundred, maybe three hundred and fifty meters. No less, Mein Herr.”

  “A thousand feet easily. Sheer fall. Any man would be killed instantly. Nobody could fall a thousand feet and live even a second, could he, Kettermann?”

  “It has happened, even that,” said Kettermann, with deliberate precision of utterance. “I would not say how often, Mein Herr.”

  The younger American said vexedly: “It’s hard to believe.…”

  Kettermann scowled at the darkness. Sucking on his pipe, and wrinkled, he looked like a gargoyle in the candlelight.

  “It was a chentleman,” he said with heavy care for his speech, “who was climbing with a friend. He fell. His friend did not. He fell a great way—three hundred meters. He should have died at once. But he did not die.”

  Again it was the younger American who said:

  “Well?”

  “Nobody knows but me,” said Kettermann, sucking absorbedly at his pipe, “because his body is under a cliff that rains rock all the time. It is deadly, that cliff. Deadly! Nobody would go after the body because of the falling rocks, and it is bad business not to bring in a body. It is suspicious.”

  Steve said tonelessly:

  “You see, Sam?”

  The younger man nodded. Kettermann went on again with painful precision :

  “Ladies in the hotels thought that they could see the body with the telescopes on the hotel terraces. They looked, and maybe they saw a flowering bush, but they said, ‘How terrible!’ to one another, with much enjoyment. It was bad business. Bad business! It did not help guides to get work!”

  “Go on!” said the younger American.

  “I told other guides that the poor chentleman’s body should be brought in. And I said that at the coldest part of the night, just before dawn, the rain of rocks is least. It might be done then. And I thought that the chentleman’s family would give a reward. So I went to get the body. I studied the way with a telescope, and I picked a path. I climbed to a place to wait for the safest time—and it was cold! Gott! How cold it was!—and then I finished the climb. It was hard climbing in starlight only. I would not like to do that again! But I got to the body. It was a year and more that the chentleman had fallen. He was only bones and cloth. He should have been easy to carry away. But I did not carry him.”

  “Why,” asked Sam impatiently. “Why not?”

  “He had been murdered. Mein Herr.”

  “But what—how—”

  “He had fallen more than three hundred meters,” said Kettermann with stolid precision, “and yet he lived after he hit. For a while. I do not know how long. I do not know how. But I saw. He was broken and crushed, but somehow he had written with a pencil on a leaf of a notebook, and he had weighted it with a stone that protected the writing. And then he had died. He had written the name of the friend he was climbing with, and underneath he wrote that his friend had murdered him. And I remembered that the man he accused of murder had seemed to be very sorry for the dead chentleman’s death.”

  “But—didn’t you tell the police?” asked Sam uncertainly.

  “It was—” Kettermann counted on his fingers, “last Thursday, Mein Herr. The day you chentlemen employed me to guide you.”

  Silence. Steve, the older man, stood up suddenly.

  “I’m going to turn in,” he said tonelessly. “I’m tired.”

  But he did not go. He stood restlessly on his feet.

  A little wisp of breeze, thin and icy, came out of the quiet solitudes and died away again. It was the precursor of stronger winds to come. Sam frowned. Kettermann’s story contained one point of direct importance to him and to Bella.

  “Look here!” he said. “You’ll tell the police when we get back, no doubt, but meanwhile you said you’d risked going under a disintegrating cliff face at dawn. Is it safe then?”

  “No, Mein Herr. It is never safe. But the least fatal time is before the sun rises.”

  Sam said:

  “The gentleman who fell from this platform was my brother-in-law. I understand his body can still be seen from up here, in daylight. Would you go under this cliff with me, to recover it? I’ll pay well enough, if it can be done! Can we do it?”

  Kettermann smoked. He seemed to be considering. Then he absently brought his ice ax before him. He fingered it thoughtfully.

  “Many places I would not try,” he said deliberately. “But this place, ja. We can reach the chentleman’s body.”

  The older American said harshly: “But I tried to get Bruce’s body right after his fall. No guide would try to approach it. It was agreed to be too dangerous!”

  “It is dangerous, Mein Herr,” agreed Kettermann stolidly. “Ja. But it can be done. I have done it. Thursday!”

  Then the American named Steve made a queer, stricken sound. He had been teetering back and forth on his feet. Now he stood rigid, staring at the grizzled guide. And Kettermann watched him warily, the ice ax in his hand.

  “Mein Herr?” said Kettermann.

  Steve made another queer sound in his throat. Then he turned and walked steadily to the edge of the platform. But he did not pause there. He walked off.

  Kettermann put out his hand as Sam sprang to his feet with a cry, but the young man tore himself free. His ears waited in hysterical frenzy for the sound of an impact to come up from below. He felt that he would go mad when that sound came.

  But no sound came. The young American stood there, panting, and no sound came, and no sound came, and no sound came.… And then the voice of Kettermann beat into his consciousness.

  “You should be calm,” said Kettermann, with heavy precision. “He walked over the cliff by himself, Mein Herr. You saw it. But we will say that he fell like the other chentleman. There will be no scandal. It is bad to have scandal about the mountains.”

  “You mean,” Sam cried thinly, “he pushed Bruce off and—and Bruce lived after that fall—and wrote—”

  “No, Mein Herr,” he said in a queer mixture of pedantic precision and apology. “Only the chentleman believed that he lived and wrote. I would not go under this cliff, Mein Herr! Himmel! Nein! It is too dangerous! But I knew the chentleman Bruce, and he was a good climber. And there were whispers, as that chentleman”—he indicated the cliff edge—“said. And I believed those whispers, but Hans did not, because this chentleman”—again the jerk of the thumb toward the abyss—“was openhanded. So Hans betted with me that I was wrong. And so I told the story of a climb I did not do and a discovery I did not make, to see if Hans was right or I was.”

  “Then you—your story was a damned lie!” cried Sam furiously. But he stopped short suddenly, realizing.

  “Yes, Mein Herr, it was a lie,” admitted Kettermann precisely. “And that is bad. But also it is bad when a chentleman uses the mountains to kill another chentleman. It is murder, and it is bad for the guide business.”

  He said something in his guttural Swiss-German to the younger guide, Hans. Sam snapped in half-mad suspicion :

  “What’s that you’re saying now?”

  “I just reminded Hans, Mein Herr,” said Kettermann stolidly, “that I won the bet he betted me, and he owes me twenty Swis
s francs.”

  GRIST

  Originally published in Short Stories, July 10, 1924.

  CHAPTER I

  He threw back his head and howled eerily. His muzzle lifted to the stars and the most mournful sound known to man poured from his throat and was echoed and reechoed by the hooded cedars and the rocks about him. He could not have told you why he howled. Dogs are not prone to introspection. But he knew that his master, who should be in the cabin yonder, would never come out again. He knew that the dying wisps of smoke from the chimney would never billow out in thick gray clouds again. And he knew that the other man—who had come out so hastily and gone swinging down the river trail—would never, never return.

  Cheechako was chained. It had originally been a mark of disgrace, an unbearable humiliation to a malamute pup, but he did not mind it any longer. His master had made sleeping quarters for him that were vastly warmer than a snow-bed even in the coldest weather, and Cheechako wholeheartedly approved. He was comfortable, he was fed, and Carson released him now and then to stretch his legs and swore at him affectionately from time to time, and no reasonable dog will demand any more. Or so Cheechako viewed it, anyhow.

  But now his muzzle tilted up. His eyes half-closed, and from his throat those desolate and despairing howls poured forth. A-a-o-oooo-e-e! A-a-o-oooo-e-e! They were a dirge and a lament. They were sounds of grief and they were noises of despair. Cheechako could not explain their meaning at all, but when a man dies they spring full-bodied from that man’s dog’s throat.

  The hooded cedars watched, and echoed back the sound. The rocks about him watched, and gave tongue stilly in a faint reflection of his sorrow. The river listened, and babbled absently of sympathy and rippled on. The river has seen too many men die to be disturbed. The wilds listened. For many miles around the despairing, grief-stricken howling reached. To tree and forest, and hill and valley, the thin and muted wailing bore its message. Only the cabin seemed indifferent, though the tragedy was within it. Somewhere within the four log walls Carson lay sprawled out. Cheechako knew that he was dead without knowing how he knew. There had been a shot. Later, the other man had come out hastily with a pack on his back. He had taken the river trail and disappeared.

  And long into the night, until the pale moonlight faded and died, Cheechako howled his sorrow for a thing he did not understand. Of his own predicament, the dog had yet no knowledge. It was natural to be chained. Food was brought when one was chained. That there was now no one to bring him food, that no one was likely to come, and that the most pertinacious of puppy teeth could not work through the chain that bound him; these things did not disturb him. His head thrown back, his eyes half-closed, he howled in an ecstasy of grief.

  And while he gave vent to his sorrow in the immemorable tradition of his race, a faint rumbling set up afar off in the wilds. It was hardly more than a murmur, and maybe it was the wind among the trees. Maybe it was a minor landslide in the hills not so many miles away—a few hundred tons of earth and stone that plunged downward when the thaw of spring released its keystone. Maybe it was any one of any number of things, even a giant spruce tree crashing thunderously to the ground. But it lasted a little too long for any such simple explanation. If one were inclined to be fanciful, one would say it was the mill of one of the forest gods, grinding the grist of men’s destinies, and set going now by the murder of which Cheechako howled.

  Certainly many unrelated things began to happen which bore obscurely upon that killing. The man who had fled down-river reflected on his cleverness and grinned to himself. He opened thick sausage-like bags and ran his fingers through shining yellow dust. Remembering his security against detection or punishment, he laughed cacklingly.

  And very far away—away down in Seattle—Bob Holliday found courage to ask a girl to marry him, and promised to go back to Alaska only long enough to gather together what capital he had accumulated, when they would be married. Most of what he owned, he told her, was in a placer claim that he and Sam Carson worked together. He would sell out to Sam and return. But he would not take her back to the hardships he had endured. He was filled with a fierce desire to shield and protect her. That meant money, Outside, of course. And he started north eagerly for the results of many years’ suffering and work, which Sam Carson was guarding for him.

  And again, in a dingy small building a sleepy mail clerk discovered a letter that had slipped behind account-books and been hidden for months on end. He canceled its stamp and dropped it into a mail bag to go to its proper destination.

  Then, the rumbling murmur which might have been the mill of a forest god off in the wilds stopped abruptly. The grist had had its first grinding.

  But the mill was not put away. Oh, no. Cheechako howled on until the moonlight paled and day came again. And the letter that had lain so long was dropped into a canoe and floated down to the coast in charge of a half-breed paddleman. And Bob Holliday sped north for Alaska and his partner, Sam Carson, who guarded a small fortune that Holliday had earned in sweat and agony and fierce battle with the wilds and winter snows. Holliday was very happy. The money his partner held for him would mean comforts and even luxuries for the girl he loved.

  The mill of the forest god was simply laid aside for a little while. They grind, not slowly—these mills of the gods—but very swiftly, more swiftly than the grist can come to their grinding stones. Now and then they are forced to wait for more. But everything upon the earth comes to them some time. High ambitions and most base desires, and women’s laughter and red blood gushing, and all hopes and fears and lusts and terrors together disappear between the millstones and come out transformed into the product that the gods desire.

  The mill was merely waiting.

  CHAPTER II

  The place had that indefinable air of desertion that comes upon a wilderness cabin in such an amazingly short time. The wood pile, huge, yet clearly but the remnant of a winter’s supply, had not yet sprouted any of the mosses and lichens that multiply on dead wood in the short Alaskan summer. The axe, even, was leaned against the door. Chips still rested on blades of the quickly-growing grass that comes before the snow has vanished. A pipe rested on a bench before the house. But the place was deserted. The feel of emptiness was in the air.

  Holliday had drawn in his breath for a shout to announce his coming when the curious desolation all about struck home.

  It was almost like a blow. Every sign and symbol of occupancy. Every possible indication that the place was what it seemed to be—the winter quarters of an old-timer thriftily remaining near his claim. And then, suddenly, the feeling of emptiness that was like death.

  He disembarked in silence, his forehead creased in a quick and puzzled frown. He was walking swiftly when he climbed the bluff, glancing sharply here and there. A sudden cold apprehension made him hesitate. Then he shook himself impatiently and moved more quickly still.

  Within ten yards of the door he stopped stock-still. And then he fairly rushed for the cabin and plunged within.

  It was a long time later that he came out. He was very pale, and looked like a man who has been shaken to the core. He was swearing brokenly. Then he made himself stop and sit down. With shaking fingers he filled his pipe and lighted it.

  “In his bunk,” he said evenly to the universe. “A bullet through his head. No sign of a fight. It isn’t credible—but there isn’t a sign of any dust or any supplies, and somebody else had been bunking in there with him. Murder, of course.”

  He smoked. Presently he got up and found a path which he followed. At its end he saw what he was looking for. He poked about the cradle there, and expertly fingered the heap of gravel that had been thawed and dug out to be washed when summer came again.

  “He’d cleaned up,” he said evenly. “He must have had a lot of dust, and the man with him knew it. I’ve got to find that man.”

  His hands clenched and unclenched as he went back toward the cabin. Then
he calmed himself again. His eyes searched for a suitable spot for the thing he had to do.

  And then, quite suddenly, “My God!” said Holliday.

  It was Cheechako, who had dragged himself to the limit of his chain and with his last atom of strength managed to whimper faintly. Cheechako was not pretty to look at. It had been a very long time since the night that he howled to the stars of his grief for the man who was dead. And he had been chained fast. Cheechako was alive, and that was all.

  He lay on the ground, looking up with agonized, pitiful eyes. Holliday stared down at him and reached for his gun in sheer mercy. Then his eyes hardened.

  “No-o-o. I guess not. You’ll be Sam’s dog. You’ll have to stay alive a while yet. Maybe you can pick out his murderer for me.”

  He unbuckled the collar that Cheechako’s most frenzied efforts had not enabled him to reach, and took the mass of skin and boniness beneath down toward his canoe. With a face like stone he tended Cheechako with infinite gentleness.

  And that night he left Cheechako wrapped up in his own blankets while he carved deeply upon a crudely fashioned wooden cross. His expression frightened Cheechako a little, but the dog lay huddled in the blankets and gazed at him hungrily. Cheechako hoped desperately that this man would be his master hereafter. Only, he also hoped desperately that he would never, never use a chain.

  CHAPTER III

  Cheechako learned much and forgot a little in the weeks that followed. When he could stand on his wobbling paws, Holliday took him off invalid’s diet and fed him more naturally canine dishes—the perpetual dried or frozen fish of the dog-teams, for instance. Cheechako wolfed it as he wolfed everything else, and in that connection learned a lesson. Once in his eagerness he leaped up to snatch it from Holliday’s hand. His snapping teeth closed on empty air, and he was soundly thrashed for the effort. Later, he learned not to snarl or snap if his food was taken squarely from between his teeth. When he had mastered that, he was tamed. He understood that he was not to try to bite Holliday under any circumstances whatever. And when he had mastered the idea he was almost pitifully anxious to prove his loyalty to Holliday. The only thing was that in learning that he got it into his head that he was not to snarl at or try to sink his teeth in any man.