THE WHITE WOLF

by Franklin Gregory

  But Leroy was not found that night.

  It was ten o’clock the next morning when Tip Farney, who worked for the Watermans across from Fountain Head, left the neat, white stone Waterman house and tramped across the east pasture. He had a cross saw with him and he figured on looking over some fallen trees. He came to the woods along Bowling Creek south of the Tilson land and he followed the stream down to its confluence with the Neshaminy in the southeast parcel of the Waterman farm.

  There, by the light of day, lay the mangled blood-coated body of a little child.

  STATE troopers came. Reporters and photographers followed. The State Troopers gathered at the spot.

  “My God!” one exclaimed. “Look at that flesh!”

  Another trooper gasped. And a third, eyes studying the ground said: .

  “God! See them tracks? Looks like the kid was dragged here!”

  “Dog tracks, they look,” said the first trooper.

  “That’s Bryn,” Farney said with conviction.

  “Bryn? Who's Bryn?” one of the troopers demanded.

  “Adolf Mandel’s police clog,” Farney muttered with growing anger. ‘ Lives up next to the Tilsons; dog’s a bad'n.”

  They found a trail of broken twigs and brushed leaves leading uncertainly from the edge of the Tilson yard a mile and a half south to the confluence of the two streams. Hank Tilson looked on in stupor.

  “But why—” he croaked. “Why didn’t we see that last night?”

  “Be hard,” a trooper said, “at night even with a lantern. And maybe you weren't looking for—this.”

  “No, no,” sobbed Hank. “My God, not this!”

  The trooper added, “And some of the men tramped over it. You can see where they obliterated the trail. Now—see there. Here the tracks come out again and that’s where the kid's body was dragged, breaking those twigs.”

  And then, after Hank Tilson went home to break as best as he could the tragic news to Mamie, the coroner arrived from Doylestown.

  “Good Lordl” he cried. “Looks like the kid's been eaten. See those teeth marks. What’s been going on ’round here?”

  Slowly, the troopers absorbed the story: David’s prize Angora goat, Pierre's duck, Nellie’s alarm.

  A trooper who specialized in such things made plaster casts of the animal's prints. They measured the distance between each imprint of each pad.

  “Got a long stride for a dog,” the trooper said.

  “Bryn's a big dog,” Farney said viciously.

  “Were there any prints like this where this girl saw this thing?”

  “Some of the men went down,” Farney replied. “They said they found prints. I dunno. I wasn't there.”

  “We’ll match ’em,” the trooper said with decision. “How about those others?”

  “You’ll have to ask Dave Trent an’ ol’ d’Wigney.”

  There was evidence, from the confusion of prints, that the animal had remained for some time at the confluence of the streams. Then the trail led up the Neshaminy on the north bank. Here the prints in the soft earth were not so deep.

  “Wasn’t carrying the kid’s weight any more,” a trooper said.

  The trail led for perhaps a hundred yards until, in the ooze of the creek’s bank, it disappeared.

  “Smart dog,” a trooper observed.

  “The tracks'll be on the other side,” another said.

  But when the troopers waded across the creek and began to examine the ground with minute care, they were puzzled. There were no tracks.

  “Maybe waded downstream?”

  “Dogs aren't that smart.”

  “Or came back on the side it left on?”

  Two troopers on each side of the creek, they made their way upstream. They progressed another hundred yards. Finally: “Found something,” said a man on the south bank.

  He pointed down to a point between the stream and a path that led west to the State Highway.

  “H’m-m. It’s smudged. Here’s a better one over near the path. Hell! That isn’t what we’re looking for.”

  The other troopers gathered around, looked down. They saw a faint print of a small shoe. Then another and another.

  “Like a kid’s shoe—or a woman’s,” a trooper said.

  Farney announced, “Might be. Kids come down here to play sometimes.’’

  They searched for an hour for a reappearance of the beast’s marks. They found none. So they went to Adolf Mandel’s house. A crowd of angry neighbors stood in the yard.

  Adolf Mandel stood at the front door of his house, facing the crowd.

  He held a shotgun loosely under his arms and he shouted:

  “One step more’n I’ll shoot. I’ll shoot, damn you! I’ll shoot!”

  “We want to see Bryn!” one of the crowd screamed.

  “Bryn’s been in all night, I tell you. I keep him penned up like the commissioners said! An’ you get offa this place.”

  “Get the dog!” a farmer shouted. “Kill the dog!”

  “Thinka that poor Tilson kid!” shrieked an angry voice.

  “Ha. There's Jim, gonna round to the back. He’ll get at him.”

  Red-faced, burning with rage, Mandel glanced to his left. One of the men had detoured and was sneaking toward the rear.

  It was then that Klonsterman arrived. He shouldered his apelike self through the crowd. Mandel saw him and cursed:

  “You’re the one done this, damn you! You’n Heinrich Darhammer an’ all your dirty lies!” Klonsterman spoke loudly, but he seemed to whine, too.

  “ ’Tain’t what I come for. I come to tell what’s true.”

  “Git the dog!” a man yelled.

  Klonsterman turned to the others.

  “Lissen, why don’t ya? I know Bryn was in his pen last night. I seen him!”

  Immediate quiet prevailed. Mandel turned amazed eyes toward him.

  “Me’n Adolf was in the inn together, wan’t we, Adolf?” Klonsterman bellowed.

  Slowly, wonderingly, Mandel nodded.

  “We was there when word come the kid was lost, wan’t we?”

  Again Mandel nodded.

  “An' you went out to jine the search, ain't that so, Adolf?” Klonsterman questioned. “An’ then I follered.”

  The restiveness of the crowd was reborn. “Hell!” spat one man. “That don’t mean nothin'. He went home an’ called Bryn in an' then joined the hunt.”

  “No, he didn’t.” bellowed Klonsterman. “No, he didn't. I follered him an’ I seen him on the road and he went right smack past here an’ on up the road to Tilson’s.”

  And the crowd grew quiet.

  “And I come right here myself,” Klonsterman continued, triumphantly, “an' I went ’round in back an’ looked in the pen an' there—by jingo, there was Bryn!”

  THAT night Trent dropped in at Fountain Head. The weather had grown suddenly colder, and a wind had risen and rain had begun to fall. The rain on the roof sounded like the endlessly spasmodic roll of a snare drum.

  The wind grew and the rain fell in waves. And some of the rain found its way down the chimney and fell sizzling on the log on the irons.

  “And they're searching in this!” Trent ex-claimed.

  He walked to the French doors and looked out, his cigar gripped between his teeth. Pierre stood beside him. Together they saw lanterns bobbing in the storm—prints of yellow light, moving erratically,

  “What else can they do?” asked Pierre. “Can’t have that damned thing around.”

  Trent nodded.

  “They’re over at my place, too. There must be two hundred men out—besides the troopers.” He paused to look as a light came nearer along the creek and then disappeared toward the back of the house. “Dave’s out too,’’ he said. “Tramping around.” He laughed shortly, without humor. “Don’t think he’s so much worried about that hound as he is about keeping the men out of his rose garden. He’s awfully proud of that garden.”

  “Reward up?” asked Pierre.

&nb
sp; “Yes,” said Trent, who was a member of the Township Board of Commissioners. “We put a reward up this afternoon when we met. Five hundred dollars. Isn’t much, but the board hasn’t much to spend.”

  He turned toward the heavy smoking stand where a siphon bottle of seltzer water and a decanter of Scotch stood. He mixed a highball. Pierre watched him enviously.

  Trent sat down, stretched out his long legs and sipped at his tall glass.

  “Did you hear it wasn’t Bryn?” he asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “It wasn’t. The police matched those prints they found by the body. They found some where David’s goat was killed and they found those near Lacey's Lane. They said they matched up—same animal and all that—but not Bryn.”

  “I stayed in town after the concert last night,” Pierre said, “and didn’t see a paper till this evening on the train home. Heinrich did say the troopers were over and wanted to see where the duck was killed.”

  Trent got up again and moved to the doors. The rain was slanting into the porch.

  “I’ll put up another five hundred,” Pierre said.

  “Match it.”

  Sara appeared while Pierre and Trent still talked. She shed her raincoat and her rubbers in the hall by the open door. She came into the room quietly, making a wide circuit of the room, keeping her eyes fixed on the fire until she reached a chair in the far corner.

  Trent’s eyes filled with admiration. Here, he thought, was a girl after his own liking. He liked her loose walk, her calm detachment. He liked the look of her body, the way she dressed. Not many girls could boast her style.

  He mixed a drink and offered it to her while Pierre looked on silently. Pierre had noticed on recent evenings—on those rare occasions when he was still up when she came in—that her nocturnal tramps seemed to revive her drooping spirits. Were she pale and restless when she left the dinner table, she had a touch of color in her cheeks when she returned. And her lips would seem even more full and more red and her eyes more bright.

  This was not so now. Pierre said gently: “You weren’t gone long tonight, dear.”

  She touched her lips to the glass rim and shook her head slowly.

  “There are men about,” she said wearily. “They have guns. I was afraid.”

  “You’re right,” Trent said. “Some of those fellows are liable to take a pot shot at anything.”

  She did not respond. She sat and listened to them talk. Or was she listening to them talk? Shortly, Trent left. And for a long time Pierre sat and looked at his daughter.

  His daughter!

  But she was so unlike him. Suddenly, reason deserted Pierre—Pierre, who was so usually reasonable. He did not pause to think. There are times when frayed threads break within even the gentlest nature. He got up and walked to her corner and he faced her and looked down into her smoldering eyes and his own eyes were sultry.

  “You have to tell me what’s the matter!” he commanded. There was almost a note of anger in his voice. Yet there was frustration in the anger.

  Sara looked straight ahead of her. She said nothing. And Pierre swore.

  “Damn it! You’re the coldest thing I ever saw. Haven’t you any feelings? Don’t you react to anything?”

  Still she remained silent.

  “Do you know a little boy has been killed?” Pierre demanded. “Do you know the whole countryside is out in arms? And you sit and say nothing! Day after day you sit. Week after week goes by and you don’t say half a dozen words! Do you know there’s hell loose in Europe? I doubt it. I haven’t seen you once in the last month look at a newspaper. I haven’t seen you with a book. Day after day you mope in your room. Night after night you go prowling about.”

  He faltered.

  “You never play for me any more,” he said, more quietly. “You don’t eat. You don’t see any of your friends.”

  And then Pierre’s shoulders sagged and the energy left his voice. He placed a hand tenderly upon her shoulder.

  “Oh, my darling,” he pleaded. “My pet, what is the matter?” His eyes glistened. “You’re all that I have, dear. I hate to see you like this. I thought Hardt could tell me. But he can’t.”

  She moved at the mention of Hardt’s name. “Is that why he had been here so often?” Pierre nodded.

  “He is a psychiatrist, isn’t he?” she asked. Again Pierre nodded.

  “And you think—perhaps—I am mad?” Pierre could not bring himself to reply. She said, with such detachment that she might have been examining her soul from a window:

  “I may be. I don't know. I have strange feelings. Sometimes—I think I am living in another life, in another world. And sometimes I feel that all this has happened before. Long ago.”

  Her eyes fell and her long slender hands grew limp. Pierre asked:

  “But where do you go at night, dear?”

  She shook her head vaguely.

  “I don't know.” And when she saw Pierre’s surprise, she said, “I must walk. I've always liked to walk. But—now it seems a passion. I feel I must, I must. When I come back to the house I feel somehow satisfied.” She added: “So satisfied that—that nothing else seems to matter, except—oh, I want David so much.”

  Pierre said nothing. There was nothing tor him to say.

  Chapter Four

  THE rain ended the next noon. A gray December canopy of clouds hung over the countryside. The hunt went on.

  Word spread of the added rewards of Pierre and Trent, and the number of hunters grew. In Philadelphia and in New York, city editors assigned reporters and photographers to the hunt for the duration. Not strangely, for they were newspapermen, they set up headquarters in the Well.

  At first the hunters centered upon and spread out fanwise from the points where the beast had left its tracks. They beat the brush and the woods along the Neshaminy and the Bowling. At first they worked loosely—in pairs and quartets. And it was each man for himself. But on the third night Farney was shot.

  He was shot in the leg by an excited hunter who thought he was the quarry. After that the State Troopers took more rigid control.

  The men then were organized in sections. Each section was led by a trooper. And the troopers studied maps and spotted the sections at widely separated points, so that a great circle with a diameter of four miles was formed. And then each section began to close in toward the center.

  It took two days for all sections to meet at the center. But all that was scared up were a few pheasants and hares. And that night, five miles up the Neshaminy and well outside the original circumference of the circle, a baby cried.

  It was the Heath baby at the Heath home in the village of Melton Crossing.

  The Heaths were young. They had come £rom Canada. Dan Heath operated the village filling station. The station was located at the junction of two pikes. Behind the station the Heath cottage faced the Hatboro Pike. It was a one-story white house of frame with a wide lawn. It stood between the filling station and the Neshaminy and its creek-side lawn was partly lighted by a street lamp down the road.

  Dan Heath was at work at the station when it happened. His pretty wife, Mary, was washing the supper dishes in the kitchen. Little Dan. not a year old, was asleep in his crib in his room. His room faced the creek-side of the lawn and the window was open wide; the night, for December, was warm.

  Mary Heath heard little Dan whimper. And then she heard him cry out in fright. She wiped her hands on her red-checked apron and went into the dining room, and into the living room. She went to the nursery door and she opened it quietly. She looked. And she froze—

  For in the subdued light from the living- room floor lamp she saw a huge white snout framed in the open window. Its jaws hung open and its sharp teeth glittered. Saliva dripped from its limp red tongue and its eyes glared hungrily across the room at the crib where little Dan lay crying. On the sill rested two big white hairy paws.

  Mary Heath screamed.

  She raced across the room and slammed down the window.
The window caught for an instant on a toe of one paw. The beast yelped. Then, tugging free, it shot—a white streak—across the yard and disappeared in the shadows of the brush.

  Dan Heath found his wife unconscious by the window, his son sobbing. And when he had bathed her head in water and she had opened her eyes, she began trembling as though chilled to the bone.