Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  What all that rhetoric meant I was at a loss to say. But I felt that the old man felt he had a goal worth getting at and saw his way to get there. And certainly I began to feel rapidly that nothing now could be better than sleep. I slipped into my sack and was gone before I could turn over.

  The other two had already begun to get breakfast ready before I woke—woke with an appetite that saw no reason for not eating everything it was offered, however fine the view. Mr. Mycroft and Kerson had evidently already made their plans. They had assembled the baggage we were to take with us. So, when I had eaten heartily, I sat outside admiring the view which was, in the early morning light and cool, not so fine as the evening before but perhaps even more attractive. I began to feel that the desert and myself might get along. There was a light air moving; the sun was low enough to cast plenty of shadows which brought into relief all the scarps and colored rocks. The place was more a fantastic garden, hereabouts, than a desert. In the crannies of the colored and carved stones grew, I now noticed, queer little plants which almost seemed stone, carved into stout leaves and stalks. I thought, “It only needs an animal or two to make a perfect composition of its sort,” and at that moment out scampered a lithe gray creature rather like an elongated squirrel. With a quick scurry it was over a boulder and onto the ground again. I waited still, watching its easy movements. It was making for a small piece of crust I had thrown down a couple of yards away. It darted out and caught hold of the bread, then looked round, giving the food a relishing bite or two—and was knocked into a small bundle of bleeding fur. My left ear was singing as though it had been boxed. I swung round. Kerson was standing a few feet back, his automatic in his hand.

  “You brute!” I exclaimed hotly. I was startled, and shocked, too, at this cool killing. I turned and bent over the poor little corpse, the bread still in its teeth.

  “Don’t touch it,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; “otherwise its blood may be literally and mortally on your hands. We’re not so far from Tulare County, now sadly famous as the spot where tularemia was first noted, though it’s spread now for thousands of miles. If you have a small cut on your hand and the animal’s blood meets yours you’re in for it.”

  I shrank back. In the desert, the sterile desert, still deadly infection dogging one!

  Kerson added carelessly, “Don’t want those little brutes all over our stuff. Tularemia’s not so bad, for it’s only in the blood. But a ranger told me other day the gophers and ground squirrels have plague now through them. Get bitten by one of their fleas and you’re worse off than if a rattler bit you.”

  I drew back even farther—already I could see with disgust a little procession of brown dots moving off the still gray fur.

  “They won’t settle on you,” said Kerson offhandedly, “unless they have to. But if those fleas were all over the cave, like as not one would bite you casually like, and whatever his notion for doing so, you’d be a casualty.” He chuckled at his unpleasant pun. “No, if one kills ’em at sight and leaves ’em to dry, one’s fairly safe. The mischief would be if ever anthrax got among ’em. A ranger did tell me, not long back, he thought he’d seen a case of that among these damned rodents. But of course he just poured gasoline on the body and cremated it. He wasn’t going to risk a postmortem.”

  We finished our final arrangements and went off in silence. I was upset and sat without speaking a word. We followed the edge of the next dried lake floor and could go at a fair pace, for always, like a neat stitching in the selvage of hard level sand, just before it broke into a fringe of pebbles and rocks, ran a precisely indented pattern. When we first sighted it, Mr. Mycroft and Kerson got down. I followed.

  I heard Kerson say, “They’ll remain sometimes for years.” Mr. Mycroft replied, “In the Bactrian desert Aurel Stein, the explorer, visiting a site he’d gone to a few years before, saw a track of a man and dog going in front of him. It was his own years-old trail.”

  “These are fresh, though; look at the edges. Bet Blue Feather meant this chap.”

  We climbed into the car again and purred along while the tracks went uncoiling ahead of us. Round headland after headland we went, where once, I suppose, tree-crowned knolls had been reflected in still cool water—a painful thought to some pioneer. Then suddenly my reflections and perhaps, I thought, Mr. Mycroft’s hopes were cut short. The lake floor of hard sand ended—we had reached its upper shore.

  “This is the last of the chain,” said Kerson. “It’s no use trailing like this any further. There isn’t any more sand, only rocks and scree.”

  Mr. Mycroft didn’t seem much downcast. “We’ve been lucky, with your aid, to have made such a good start. I think we’ll reconnoiter a little further on foot and look round the countryside. If you will leave some of the provisions here I don’t think we’ll need anything else, and if you come back for us to this spot in the evening we will plan our walk to meet you at this spot.”

  “O.K.” was the only answer, and in a few minutes even the sound of the car was lost as it rounded one of the rock promontories. We were sounding a new deep of solitude.

  “Now for some real detection,” was, however, Mr. Mycroft’s reaction. “That breast-high scent is all right for those who want only a morning gallop but not for true hunting.” He went to where the eight little indentions and the two broader prints left the sand and passed up onto the shingle. Once or twice he cast his eye, turning his head on one side. “It’s fortunate,” he said, “that the sun isn’t yet very high. Look, you can just see in the shingle the hint of a trail.”

  So, stooping and starting, we covered, I suppose, the best part of a mile. The lake, evidently, long before it dried up, had had a shallow end of pebble beach on which the waves broke on rough days, making a rough foreshore. It was exhausting going, for the sun was getting up, the surface was unpleasant walking, and we were at an altitude which already made me feel more out of condition than perhaps I actually was. All this made, perhaps I need hardly say, little, if any, impression on my companion. The trail was everything. He made two concessions only to climate and environment: strong leather boots and a light, big-brimmed hat.

  “Why,” I asked, mainly to break the silence and gain a pause in our scurry forward, “why didn’t we bring the baggage?” Besides, then we would have had to have a burro, and being able to hold onto one then, seemed to me, would be a great relief.

  “We won’t want our gear yet,” he said. “This is a trial cast.” After another half-dozen quizzes and scurries forward, he stopped. “The sun’s getting to be no use.”

  “You mean it’s getting to be a confounded nuisance!”

  “Oh, this isn’t heat,” he smiled. “We’d have to go on if it were only that. There’s not enough oblique shadow to show the tracks in the shingle now.”

  He looked round him and then, very much like an old but lively goat, began to scramble up a huge boulder which lay in the shingle, thrown there, I suppose, by some earthquake. He saw handholds and footings in it as shrewdly as he had seen in the shingle the faint blurred traces of the ten footsteps which we were pursuing. Gently and without strain, he worked his way up until he stood on the top, some twenty feet above my head. Taking small binoculars from his pocket, he swept the desolation ahead. In a couple of minutes more he was beside me again.

  “You sometimes can find a lost track again if you can get a little above it. Fifty feet above water you’ll see much deeper and clearer than when looking down immediately above the surface. I think I can see how the trail goes over the further shingle and I’m pretty certain that on beyond, on another sand stretch, I can see marks going forward as before.”

  Another panting, stumbling advance and we were at the sand. Sure enough, the trail went on clearly once more. It was only a short spell, however, and this time it ended not in shingle but in hard ground on which not a shadow of a trace remained.

  I must say that it was with relief I remarked, “Now we shall have to stop.”

  “Well, you wait behind
this rock out of the sun while I scout around.” I lay down and watched the indefatigable old figure turning and dipping just like some great stork looking for small frogs under stones. After some ten minutes of this he paused for a little at one spot, bent down, then turned and called me. Unwillingly I got up on my feet and went over.

  “You see”—that familiar opening, but I was quicker now.

  “Yes, a small bush of desert holly,” I answered, “and it’s been pulled about quite lately.”

  “Right; one of the burros took a bite at it. Hardly a refreshing leaf, that ghostly prickle. But look, he took it in his mouth and it acted as a kind of chewing gum. He turned it over and then”—all the while we were again scudding along in the intense heat—“bit by bit he let the chewed fiber fall from his lips.”

  That desert holly trail took us much farther than I had feared, but at last it, too, gave out.

  We had reached a sort of low saddle. Behind us we could look back, for the ground I now noticed had been gently rising all the while, along the whole chain of dried lakes. In the next wide and shallow depression, I suppose, once had gathered the streams, torrents, and headwaters whose overflows filled the areas below. The opening in our forward view gave us a welcome pause, for Mr. Mycroft again swept the area with his glasses. He had climbed another boulder and, at last convinced that there was nothing ahead, was taking a last sweep of the landscape well away from our direction, far out to the right. I was watching him with some impatience, for I felt that he was just refusing to give up, trying to find excuses for not going back and so looking in directions where there could be nothing, just to waste time.

  I was, indeed, about to call to him that obviously nothing could be expected in that direction, the rocks sloped right up and ended in a mountain wall, when as I rose to catch his attention I saw that his sweeping gaze had become fixed. He was, through his glasses, attentively studying something. A breeze quite strong, but anything but refreshing—rather like a draught from an oven—was now blowing up from behind us. Through it he called down to me, “From here I can see, I’m sure, something fluttering.” He took his bearings carefully. Then he scrambled down and set off in the direction he had sighted.

  Of course it was farther than I had imagined. I’d thought, I’d hoped he’d seen some clue comparatively close. In the end, though, after dips in which we lost sight of the place where he said it lay and rises in which the rocks to which he pointed looked no nearer, we saw clearly across a small canyon. It couldn’t be, now I caught a clear look of it, withered leaves on an old branch—but it was that color. It dipped and wavered in the wind, which now was unpleasantly strong. Mr. Mycroft stopped and looked. He didn’t raise his binoculars.

  “Careless,” was his only description of what he made out. He then looked carefully onto the ground from where we stood toward the waving branch. “No clues here” he remarked. “Walk carefully and notice anything on the ground that might be a trace.”

  As I was trying to do this and following him, I did not notice that we had reached the foot of the canyon and had come some distance up the other side. Mr. Mycroft had stopped, we had evidently reached our objective. Even now, looking down on it, I couldn’t for a moment see exactly what it was. It wasn’t a branch. It stuck out from under some stones. A second look and I glanced up to see Mr. Mycroft watching me.

  “I said ‘careless,’ didn’t I?”

  It didn’t seem to me the time to draw attention to one’s “dicta.”

  “That,” I said, drawing back as I said it, “That’s—that has been a human hand and arm!”

  He was already kneeling down. I gingerly approached again.

  “It was said of a desolate land, ‘In that place there is not water to drown a man, a tree to hang him on, or earth to bury him in,’” he remarked over his shoulder. “Well, it’s even harder here to dispose of your dead. And here, you see, death is an embalmer.”

  He took the poor withered limb. After the first shock of recognizing what it was, I saw that there was nothing really repugnant in it. It was beautiful almost, this bone, wound about with shrunken sinew and perfectly desiccated flesh. To and fro it waved in the wind, a gesture attractive in a growing tree. It was as flexible as a spring. Mr. Mycroft had already removed the greater part of what, it was now clear, was a hastily made low cairn. I helped, and as we uncovered what it had almost hidden, I felt strongly the need to be friendly with the only living man in this desert of death, which here, for us, centered in a dead man, a man turned into a desert thing—more desiccated than the desert holly, his flesh drier than well-cured parchment.

  “Why did you say ‘careless?’” I asked, conciliatingly.

  “Well,” he replied, not looking up from his final task of taking the last stones off the dead man’s feet, “it is careless not to bury more carefully when you have murdered.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Look at the skin. It’s perfectly unbroken anywhere else. But there is a tear in the chest and I think that darker color on the piece of shirt is pretty certainly blood.”

  It was hard to deny the unpleasant deduction. But still, this was not at all my notion of a murdered man. I’d never seen such an object and now it lay before me. The skin was stretched to the tautness of a drum over the sinews and bones. The whole creature was the barest outline of a man. I had never imagined anything could be so withered, desiccated. But save for that hole in the chest, the skin was unbroken.

  “It’s horrible and unbelievable,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Whoever killed that man who once filled out this shell at our feet didn’t know enough about the desert. It’s life that abolishes history and records and traces. Death is the preserver—the Keeper of the Records. This man was killed. We’ll go into the how and the why later. Let’s now try and understand why he was let signal to us searchers. He’s shot,” went on Mr. Mycroft, evidently reconstructing the conditions in his mind and so working back from what was present to what had happened, “he’s shot probably by someone who followed him, by someone who perhaps relieved him of his burros and of other things and then a considerable time after, when what has been taken off him has been studied (for even the desert takes some time to do as fine a piece of tanning and curing as this), the burros with their new master pass again near by, seeking their old master’s trail and goal. But here we are only at the day of the murder. The dead must be buried. Well, as we are agreed, burial here is a difficulty: cover him, then, with stones. But desiccation here is quite unusual. A body, our bodies are some 68 per cent water. If you can dehydrate such a sponge—well, it goes as hard and springy as a well-cured sponge. That is what this desert did. It put the evidence immediately into its perfect preservative—air, super-thirsty for any drop of damp. Our killer goes off, having packed his limp victim, with arms huddled across the breast, under the heap of small stones. Then the desert got to work and, as it carried out its embalming, limp and soggy muscles coiled and shrank like wet rope; lax sinews twisted like spring wire. The arm on the upper side curled itself round—the pebbles rolled off—the springy limb waved its macabre au revoir to its enemy, its summons to us.”

  “You know who killed this man!” I interrupted.

  “No, I don’t, for certain.”

  “Why, it must be—”

  “Mr. Silchester, you know now as well as I that it is just as important never to run ahead of one’s actual evidence, never to make a leap, as it is never to miss a single signpost that it offers us. I have said it is certain that this man was not killed by the last man who passed this way.”

  “All right,” I said, vexed that he should still be the old master when, after all, I had now graduated. “If guessing is out, what does your detective deduction give us?”

  “This man, we agree, has been shot; murder probably, manslaughter certainly. The next thing we can settle before we attempt the why and ‘by whom,’ is the fairly simple question of ‘when.’ The desert works quickly hereabouts
, but, as I’ve said, it needs a certain time. I’ve used dehydration several times for preserving specimens, severed limbs, and the like,” he said casually. “I know the rate. The air here is peculiarly favorable”—that detachment, as arid as this forbidding wilderness, calling this fatal desolation “peculiarly favorable”!—“a steady hot wind all the daylight hours and practically zero humidity. And there is a final and peculiar feature in the air of this place. If we had approached from the other side, I should have been puzzled. But those dried lakes gave me the clue, as we came along, though I did not know that we should be needing it. Those sand beds are so well caked because they are dense with natron salts, so common in these desert lakes. When at night there is a slight humidity and this salt-laden air rises and is borne over this ridge, then this drying body would take up these salts and so become, as it is, literally pickled—a natural tanning process. The same sort of thing can take place under a number of circumstances, wherever the same balance, though in different proportions, is preserved. In the vaults of the old church of St. Michan’s in Dublin, there the bodies exposed simply to the right mixture of air impregnated with the gases from an old, marsh-engulfed oak forest are just like this, pickled, tanned, quite cured and flexible. Yes, the process would be quick here, quicker than there, quicker perhaps in this one spot than anywhere. Therefore a most unwise place to commit homicide and hope that nature would clear up your traces.

  “Yet even here,” he bent down and touched the springy limb which wheezed gently as it swung, “even here, I feel sure, there must be quite a considerable time before the weather-curing required for this extreme of dehydration could be attained. So this man met his end by shooting some months, perhaps half a year ago. Now, who is he? Well, he is someone that someone wanted to murder or at least to rob. I suspect what clothes he had, beyond this shirt and trousers, were taken and, after searching, burnt. You see, a search, a hasty one, was made. The trouser pockets have been pulled out, so as not to miss an inner pocket, and not put back.” Mr. Mycroft was kneeling close beside the shriveled cadaver. “Um,” he said, “hurried but not unthorough. That nip out of the shirt was to remove the sales tag, I suspect.”