Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  “Then how do you expect to get him?” I asked, perhaps a little irritated. “This is a very big country, Mr. Mycroft and, hereabouts, an empty one.”

  “That is why,” he replied, “trailing will be easier.”

  “But he could hide out anywhere for, literally, a thousand miles.”

  My acquaintance with the huge Southwest, though slight, made me feel that I must impress my superior knowledge on a fellow countryman who, as it were, had maybe only just stepped out from the close, inch-measured confinements of our native isle.

  “That man of ours,” said the old fellow, “isn’t hiding out. He’s going to a hiding place, maybe, but not to hide himself. All right, I’ll give you some proof to go on. Why did we watch that instrument store all these days and why for just those hours? Have you ever heard of the Etvos Balance? It was the first and father of a number of superfine detectors. There are the electromagnetic detectors which are so sensitive to electric currents that they can record an addition to the general earth-current when they are above streams, above water running at great depths, water which is showing that it is in touch with ore because a current is being so given off. There are the gravimetric detectors which will show the presence of a mass of ore or a coal seam a thousand and more feet down, by the slight change in the gravitation-field made by the buried mass which weighs a little more—or less—than the main mass of rock around it.”

  I hadn’t heard of these super-gadgets and didn’t very much want to. To hurry on the story, I asked, “Granted that Intil was buying one of these, why should he not get it at any hour of the day?” “That’s why,” said my old dominie, the “step-by-step” and “you mustn’t be in a hurry” lecturer coming back on him, “that is why you must first understand the nature of these new detectors. Some people think that instruments supersede men. That is just the reverse of the truth. The finer the instrument, the more skilled must be the user. Indeed, some of these machines are almost human in their delicacy and intuitive power. Some are too sensitive, like great scholars, to work save at night; and one of these superfine gravimetric instruments has actually taken its own initiative in discovery and found things which we had never asked it to find, for we never knew they were to be found.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But what about Intil?”

  He chuckled. “We have time, Mr. Silchester. Let an old man refresh and unbend his mind by glorifying his profession. ‘What a piece of work is man.’ I have had so often to look at him misusing his gifts and all toiled and snarled because he let the net of his own cunning (a noble word once) wrap him round. Let me stretch up my mind and give thanks for an intelligence which is so clean and clear and lovely in its instruments.”

  The outburst did touch me. After all, the real detective, I realized, how often he must despair as to whether in all this coil and riddle, cross-hatched and double-crossed, there can be any sense, any drift, any goal.

  “I see you relent. Will you go a step further? Will you be British with me and have some real China tea?” He drew from his pocket a small pouch. “I carry always a little Ichang with me. Tri-methylxanthine—that is the tonic for detective minds. Alcohol for obvious action; caffeine for common council; theine for thought.”

  I boiled some water and soon we were more at our ease than any other drink can make the high-strung.

  As he sipped his cup Mr. Mycroft went on, “You’ll see quite soon why all this has to do with Intil and why we can, in consequence, let him have a little rope. As I’ve said, there’s an instrument so sensitive that it has discovered something about which we only know that this instrument records it! So superfine that it will only work at night (seeking the nights screening out of the day’s magnetic disturbances), it won’t work even all night. In the middle, generally somewhere about the witching hour of one A.M. it just gives a series of, at present, indecipherable signals. Why? We don’t know. All we can think is that at that hour in the unseen world around us, some force or tide goes by. This may be a wave from the new ocean of discovery, breaking on the narrow, land-locked beaches of our senses. Its bearing on Intil and us”—I own I looked my relief over my cup—“is that such instruments, I need hardly tell you after that, have to be learnt. Beside some of them a violin is obvious.

  “Salesmanship in this department has to be scholarship. In brief, that instrument store, as you must have gathered, stocks all geological prospecting instruments. This great state of California is a state founded on minerals, from gold to oil. The ordinary gear can be sold straight away without directions. But the latest scientific instruments must be demonstrated. When I came here to track Intil, the first thing I did, of course, was to find the first and finest geological detector instrument store. I discovered that they had had an inquiry for a very peculiar instrument, one which has only of late been on the geological market, a detector specifically for radioactive ores. Fortunately, they had not as yet received one from the scientific instrument manufacturers. But they had that week received an advice, from what is here called the East, that it was about to be dispatched. At the same time I discovered, to my relief on your behalf, that the only man who could demonstrate the finest instruments they stocked attended only for a couple of hours every morning. They pay him to be on duty for a few ‘advanced’ customers who will want this advanced stuff. His own principal job is in a natural history museum.

  “I was therefore as certain as I needed to be that Intil would go to that shop at that hour. He did; he took delivery of the instrument and had it demonstrated to him the day we saw him. Further, I trailed him to the railway depot, saw him take ticket and where to, and that he did get on the train. Then I went back to the instrument store and had a friendly word with the manager, who asked me to call in three days’ time, for he hoped to have another example of the ‘balance’ in stock by then. It was kind of him to wish to show me the instrument, but I had to say that I’d have to come in later. For in three days’ time you and I, Mr. Silchester, should leave the city behind. With your leave, we are bound for the wilderness—the trackless desert.”

  “To find a man when you only know the station he’s getting off at, or, maybe, only changing trains?” I protested.

  “No, no, I have my clues and have made some plans. Will you come?”

  I felt none too sure, but I did say yes and we parted.

  Chapter III

  “The train doesn’t go till two P.M.,” said Mr. Mycroft as he came into my office when I was cleaning up things preparatory, as he warned me, to perhaps a fortnight’s absence. “But we have some shopping to do. And do you mind if I still behave with a certain secrecy? Do you mind putting yourself in my hands to that degree—so as not to ask questions?”

  A slight cloud of irritation, I know, crossed my mind. Was the old man just putting it on, putting me in my place, or was it really necessary? Well, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He handed me a list of things he wanted bought—the usual stuff for a hiking trip—sleeping sacks, camp-cooking kit, some food purchases, etc.

  “Meet me,” he said, “in the railway waiting hall at one forty-five,” and I trotted off obediently enough.

  His bundle, when we met, was smaller than mine. I felt I had done the major labor. When we were in the train, which was largely empty, he unpacked and rearranged part of it. I remember that I caught sight of very heavy waterproof gloves.

  “I thought,” I said, “we were going to the desert? It’s cold often at night, but this isn’t the season when we’ll have even a shower, or find a hole with any water in it.”

  He looked up. “A shower?” he said. “A gusher, then, maybe?”

  I felt the remark might be aimed at my talkativeness. It hurt me and I resolved I would ask the old man no questions, not even when we should arrive, wherever it might be.

  We rumbled on. I read. Night came. We slept. He read too. Well, I could keep up silence quite as well as he. The next day also began to wear. I was then idly looking out over a landscape which now had become no
thing but a huge-scale chart of geology. The train had paused—it was a pausing train, falling into meditations in places which seemed made for that and nothing else. This pause place was precisely like the last half-dozen. But Mr. Mycroft got up.

  “We are getting out here,” he said.

  True to my resolve not to ask questions, if he wished to be noncommittal, I looked out and down from the carriage window. A small shack was standing quite close to the line. Already my packages were being unloaded. Outside we stepped into a heat which made me for a moment cease to look and only feel. The huge landscape, with its unsealed perspectives, seemed much more like a close, suffocating room, than the air-conditioned train we had just left. This large black cylinder of civilization, within which we had been introduced into this inhuman desert world, now snorted, jerked itself violently out of its temporary torpor, gave a sad wail and drew off. We might have been marooned on the moon, at full-moon midday. I’d tried to give Mr. Mycroft the impression that I knew this country. But in fact I had never been actually dipped into the full desert before. I had just passed through it in the train, which is really like taking a short trip in a submarine—you peer out into another element but you are never actually in touch with it. And of course I had made a trip or two in favorable weather to one or two of the desert parks. Now, I felt I was far from home.

  Mr. Mycroft was, however, in careful conversation with a man who had emerged from the shadow of the shack. As I, having pulled myself together, came up to him, he turned to me.

  “Mr. Silchester, this is Mr. Kerson,” and, the introduction over, “Step one is taken, and, as far as I can judge, in the right direction. Now for step two.”

  He, Kerson, and I, when I saw their drift, lugged our parcels in the heat and glare to the other side of the shack. There a car was waiting. By now the train had diminished to a black spot with a dark blur above it, both shrinking as you watched. How one used to hate soot and smoke and soot-stained iron. Yet now that I was surrounded by a world of hard clear color—an earth of fawn-yellow, framed by mountains of amethyst and lapis and shut in by a sky of unflawed sapphire—I looked longingly after the one rapidly shrinking stain on the whole vast landscape. Now nothing was left but the frail parallels of the tracks stretching away until they became a fine black thread—all that united us with anything human.

  “Everything’s in,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; and, irritatedly ashamed that I hadn’t helped, and at my own misgivings toward the desert. I followed him into the car.

  “Where are we going?” I could not help asking. For now I noticed that there was no road and we were pointed away from the railway line.

  “Mr. Kerson is right,” Mr. Mycroft replied. “The surface is excellent and he tells me that it is so for many miles. We shall be running along the edges and floors of a chain of dried-up lakes.”

  The heat was terrific, but after the first shock of it—like standing in front of an open oven—I found that I began to adapt. It was absolutely dry and that, I understand, keeps you going, though, I must say, after a while, I began to feel round the nose and lips rather like a lizard. I don’t know how far we drove; pretty fast going it was, on those flat floors of hard sand. At last I noticed the shadows rimming hills or mountains (you couldn’t judge their scale without a living thing to help the eye form a judgment) beginning to make big bays of blue cut out of the fawn-yellow. As we crossed the next rib of rougher ground, which separated these fossil lakes, I heard Kerson say to Mr. Mycroft, “Back of that tumble of stone to the left I’ve made a dump.”

  We drove up to it. He switched off the engine, and a silence, which one guessed had hung above our little buzz of self-made sound, suddenly swooped. I suppose it wasn’t more than a few seconds, for neither Mr. Mycroft nor Kerson—a man who looked as desiccated as the desert itself—seemed to pause. They got out and I followed. It seemed a second step out and down—the first out of the train, and now out into something more distant and deeper. After a few steps Kerson turned sharp to the left and disappeared. So clear was the air in that place that he might have stepped right through the flat painted sheet of scenery which seemed to have no depth. When I came up I saw that there was quite a fair-sized ravine at one’s feet; but, though it was some fifty yards across, one had, till one stood on the brink, no idea that there was this gap in the earth. Under some huge boulders which crested the rim was a cave into which Kerson had gone. Inside were set out some stores and it looked as comfortable as a log cabin—more so, for it was cool and spacious. Our guide set about getting supper ready.

  “Come with me, Mr. Silchester,” said Mr. Mycroft. “We’ll cover up the car and bring in the luggage.” I followed him out. While we carried out these details he said, “Kerson is one of my trade, gone eremite. The tracker, of course, is the prehistoric detective. This man has a small trading-post some fifty miles from here for serving the Indians—we’re not far from a big reservation. As soon as I had made my preliminary studies for this case—with which I need not bother you now—I knew that I would have to keep an eye on the desert. You could tell me, I soon learned, of Mr. Intil himself; but someone else I should need to tell me of his goal.”

  “It’s a pretty large target.”

  “But marvelously clear and empty.”

  “Still, here a man could be lost for good and no one know.”

  “Yes, he might be lost; but I’d take a large wager that though all this seems so vast and empty, some eye, though it might not see the moment of his perishing, would have noted him going to his doom. The Indians are natural watchers, onlookers. They won’t interfere, if they can help it. They won’t even tell what they have seen, unless there seems good reason. But one of them will have seen. Of his nature, he cannot help noticing. He doesn’t like strangers, still less trespassers. So he’ll generally leave them alone even when they have got themselves in extremis.”

  “But has Kerson any news of our man?” I asked a little impatiently.

  “I’d have hardly brought us out here, if he hadn’t.”

  We had finished shifting our baggage and as we passed behind the boulders and picked our way into the cave, Mr. Mycroft spoke to Kerson, who was sitting on the smooth earth floor cooking with a pressure stove.

  “Would you please repeat to us two your record of the stranger’s moves three days ago?”

  Without turning from his work and in a flat drawl the trader recited, as though he were reading off a ship’s log, “Blue Feather saw man with two burros—he may have gotten ’em off that old prospector Sanderson. He used to be all over this once. Not been seen for quite a while now—perhaps he’s lying up somewhere. Being Scotch, off and on he takes a rest just on ‘Scotch.’ Blue Feather watched burros and man ’way along this trail. They went on from here quite a bit. ’Course that outfit (if he can keep not too far from water and knows his trails) can go from here to Canada. We’ll be able to follow the start anyhow. Blue Feather says they’re clear a good way on from this.”

  Mr. Mycroft made no comment, but started getting coffee ready on another stove. As I was, I supposed, meant to fit in, I unrolled our bedding and spread it on the broad sill or platform which ran on either side of the cave. When I turned, Kerson was forking out fried bacon and eggs onto battered tin plates and Mr. Mycroft had collected an equally weather-beaten fleet of mugs. The fact that the dinner service looked like the salvage from a refuse heap did not “put me off my victuals.” The smell was excellent and I was hungry in that rare air. What made me feel, if not distaste, at least a slight hesitation over this highly fragrant meal was its main setting. Through the cave’s mouth one saw—as it seemed, almost close enough to be touched—a mountain of solid amethyst. It looked as though it were made of one immense crystal, too smooth and steep ever to be climbed. The sun had sunk on the other side of it, but one felt that one ought to be able to see the level rays, dyed purple, pouring through the wall of rock, so glasslike it appeared to be. Above the knifelike edge of the summit-ridge the sky went up in ban
ds of orange, lemon, green, to blue and purple-violet that was almost indigo. Right down into the green belt the embroidery of first-magnitude constellations was already visible, a stitching of gold. Somehow eating one’s fill—and I was ready for it—and that utterly serene emptiness didn’t seem to go together.

  “The coffee’s ready,” I heard Mr. Mycroft say, however, and once I had started drinking and eating my queer scruple left me.

  Yet when we had cleared up—Kerson had already rolled himself up; Mr. Mycroft was also laid out, only making some notes by an electric torch—I took one more look at our super-surroundings. The sky was now all indigo, but so dense with stars that it seemed hard to believe that there could be much space in that cosmic blizzard of suns. Overhead in a complete arch they had become a belt of luminous mist—one was looking up into the Galaxy, the disk and wheel of our own island universe. There seemed no air. The stars stood right on the edge of the mountain range one fronted, as clearly as they stood right up above one’s head. Every moment, like distant lighthouses, they blinked down behind this sharp western wall, while another watcher flashed up from behind the eastern range. Suddenly starting out of the dark a meteor made a perfect curve of light, left a faint glow for as long, and vanished.

  “That’s one of our clues,” said Mr. Mycroft’s low voice at my shoulder. “Don’t think, Mr. Silchester, because we are after a man and two asses in this immense wilderness—‘All geology by day, all astronomy by night,’ as Mr. Priestley put it succinctly—that we have got things completely out of proportion. Literally, we too follow a star, so real that I’d rather follow it than hitch my wagon to it. Further, and, indeed, more to the point, what we are searching for and what we are attempting to prevent going wrong if we can prevent it, is something which links us with the nature of things. Go to bed, Mr. Silchester, and sleep well. The ‘eternal silences’ need not ‘affright’ us, for, if we choose, we can speak what they would say.”