Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  He pointed to where the ground became progressively smoother and seemed to dip down.

  “Well,” I said, I must say with considerable relief, “now we are going to clear up the cache mystery for good. We have followed the indications given by the code to the letter and the minute. Though why you should think this odd little geological puzzle we have blundered on here, will help us in the human mystery, heaven only knows!”

  His reply was, “In a way, heaven has taken a hand; indeed, it made the deal which started the game and it left its print to guide us.”

  With that piece of rhetoric, what should he do but go back, unpack the parcel we had lugged so far, take out the huge black rubber gloves and proceed to put them on.

  “If you are coming with me,” he said, “I’d advise you to do the same.”

  I wasn’t going to be left out now, at the last. “I’m coming,” I said resolutely.

  “Then if you are going to accompany me, I am obliged to see that you are protected from every risk that it is possible to guard against. Please do me the favor of donning these gauntlets.”

  It was still hot, quite hot. The rubber gloves when I put my hands in them were clammy—“fuggy,” that nasty schoolboy word, alone describes them. I hate damp hot hands.

  “What’s the need of all this dressing up?” I asked crossly. “Are we going to find a ring of rattlers guarding the hidden treasure of a desiccated Scotchman?”

  “I beg you to act as I ask or to stay behind.” He said it so earnestly that I paused. “There’s just ahead of us a danger which may be much more ‘striking,’ if ignorantly handled,” he continued, “than a thousand rattlers or Python himself.”

  He was evidently serious enough. Here we were at the trail’s end. I might as well humor him this once and last. I pulled on the beastly things and we trudged off, down what had now become a slight slope. Indeed, as I looked about over the clearer ground we were covering, it seemed that we were in a sort of saucer-like depression which now appeared to be perhaps as much as a quarter of a mile across, a circular arena ringed with the rocks normal in this desolation. And this arena’s surface seemed to get increasingly smooth as it centered down. The actual center, though, I couldn’t see. Why, a few minutes’ walk made clear. For the ground which had been gently sloping, now began to rise again. We were, in fact, it soon became clear, going over a series of concentric rings or what might be called huge ripples in the ground itself. These grew increasingly marked until we found ourselves on one as steep as those mounds running round a primitive earth fortress.

  As I puffed up it, I asked Mr. Mycroft, “Don’t you think this may be the crater of a small extinct volcano?” His “No,” didn’t invite me to waste more breath on making helpful suggestions. But he turned as he crested the rim, a few yards ahead of me, and modified his flat contradiction with, “That might account for the sand’s being melted. But here’s been an even bigger force.”

  “Bigger?” I asked as I struggled up beside him. We were looking into a crater, there could be no doubt. It was steep and cupshaped. And right in the middle was a hole, the beginning of a shaft, a digging. There were tools also, I could see—coils of rope, pickaxes, buckets.

  “Now will you, please, follow me carefully,” said Mr. Mycroft, and began sidling down the steep slope. Certainly the place was eerie enough, already in shadow and with the signs, in this utter desolation, of a secret activity which had already led to three deaths and to which my own life had nearly yielded a fourth. I therefore followed the old man pretty closely and looked to my steps as we scrambled and almost slid down toward the bottom of the cup. So I nearly bumped into him as he had come to an abrupt halt when we reached where the slope flattened, but were still some distance from the center itself.

  “Still another life,” were the words I heard him saying to himself. He was looking at something now nearly at our feet. I’d seen it from the top of the slope, as one piece of the abandoned and scattered gear round the central hole or shaft. It looked like a piece of tarpaulin which, maybe, had been meant to cover drilling machinery from the weather. But now, looking at it, I saw under the edge a boot sticking out. I drew back, but Mr. Mycroft went on a step or two, bent down, pulled back the stiff black cover and exposed, stiff and brown, lying on the sand, a corpse. Peering over his shoulder, I saw that the body was nothing like so desiccated as our last desert death-find. The face, though, was turned to the ground. It was, however, with hardly any surprise that I heard Mr. Mycroft’s voice saying, “So Kerson’s curiosity was also awakened.”

  Without a word more he drew back again the black stiff covering over the stiff body and went on slowly—almost gingerly, I thought, as I followed, skirting the black pall on the ground. I came up with him as he stopped at the very center of the crater. There was a windlass hoisted over a small shaft; some considerable heaps of sand speckled with the “desert candy” lay about. We peered down the shaft. It was not very deep, I judged twenty or thirty feet perhaps. But I couldn’t properly see to the bottom. The sides seemed, at some point, suddenly to open out.

  “It looks,” I said, to get an opinion out of my silent companion, “as though whoever dug this shaft struck on an underground cavern?”

  Mr. Mycroft said nothing, but took from the remnants of the parcel which had yielded our black gauntlets, and had been stuffed in his capacious coat pocket, a line, an electric torch, and a small recording instrument of some sort. This and the torch, which he switched on, he then tied to the line and let down the shaft. I followed the slowly revolving light as it ran down the shaft until its beams shone in the cavern itself. I leaned forward to see what it would show and to prevent the daylight from getting in my eyes. It looked all black as far as I could see. Then I thought I could detect where there must be a floor of some sort, for on it I was pretty certain, though the waving light was very poor, I could see something lying that might have been a pickax. As I was straining further, Mr. Mycroft’s voice said warningly, “I’d keep back as far as possible. This is rather a disappointment as far as danger and developments are concerned. Still, it wasn’t not to be expected, and, on the other hand, we can’t be sure there’s not some considerable risk still. Wait till I haul up my line and then we’ll know a little more.”

  He brought up his queer tackle; the torch he switched off and at once slipped into his pocket. “We’re not looking for what we can see,” was his enigmatic comment. The instrument he scanned carefully; he made a note of some readings it apparently gave him and then said definitely, “Yes, we’d better not stay here.”

  “And, and,” I hesitated, “what about him?”

  “He’s past any help for himself and I must be sure he’s past any harm to others before we handle him, or what’s left of him.”

  Though the drift of this was lost on me, I was quite scared enough of the whole place to wish to be out of it. Already in the deep hollow the clear air of the fall day was getting dusk. As we climbed the slope I looked back at that desolate pit. It seemed, where the shadow was deepest, as though an infernal glow was hovering over the pit. I felt that my nerves were getting the better of me and hurried down the outer rim of the escarpment after the old man.

  “I may take off my gloves now?” That seemed a good, dutiful, childlike question with which to break the silence which had become worse than the most boring talk.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and began to pull off his, which he had evidently forgotten, and, as absently, handed them to me. I felt like the page to Good King Wenceslaus, as I trotted along in the wake of the old fellow, hoping that if I kept in his footsteps the cold of fear would be less. For somehow I was quite severely frightened by the whole thing—the awful silence, the loneliness, the emptiness, that wretched dead trader, that vacant sinister hole.

  My reflections, milling round that scene, broke out into a question, “Who killed Kerson?”

  The reply shut me up completely: “As far as anyone, you.”

  We reached the great natural
Stonehenge, picked up our flasks, and worked our way through the forest of geological obelisks back to the bend in the main trail. It was dusk, and the stars were out already, but our guide was waiting for us patiently enough. We saw the glow of his pipe. It looked no different from the glow of a red star which had appeared on the rock-crest of the canyon-cliff above. A thousand yards, a thousand light-years, I thought, unless we have a scale we just can’t say how far anything is, just by looking at it. The guide said nothing as he untethered the horses; Mr. Mycroft said nothing as we mounted. I said nothing. We creaked and jingled along.

  As we alighted at our cabin Mr. Mycroft remarked to the man, “We’ve had an interesting time up here; we’ll be going back tomorrow.”

  “O.K.,” like the croak of a frog, the “reflex of assent” told us in the dark that he heard.

  When we were alone and, following Mr. Mycroft, I had begun to get ready our evening meal, I said in rather a beaten way, I own, “Will you explain?”

  “If you will confess,” was the rather grim retort.

  “Well,” I said, trying to show that at least I had something to contribute, “I can explain all I know. But it isn’t much, and I don’t see how I can have done really any harm.”

  “I didn’t ask for a defense; I asked for facts,” he replied quite harshly.

  It was no use. I must get him to tell me where we stood, what we had been up against—were up against. I just couldn’t—however much I hated being treated as a combination of a criminal and a silly schoolboy—I couldn’t be left, as I was, completely in the dark. And this old man alone knew.

  “I suppose you’ve guessed,” I began, as we sat down to a meal I hardly relished, “Kerson came to see me. He had a copy of the code and, as you know, I find it hard for an ignoramus to treat me as one and, as you and I had not complete confidence in each other, I thought I could at least show him I wasn’t a complete fool.”

  “And how was that proof established?” he asked cuttingly.

  “Well, Kerson had a strip, like the strip you burgled out of Sanderson’s desk. I only showed him, at first and after he had provoked me, how it should be wound up in order to make the words appear.”

  “And when you had shown him this piece of plagiarized intelligence, and had established, no doubt without acknowledgment, that you were ‘knowing,’ then you made your well-known wholly mistaken reading of the script?”

  I let the point pass—that the first part of the reading, about the time, was mine and was right. I was now, under his cross-examining pressure, hopelessly on the defensive. I just made the feeble parry, “If it was quite wrong, then it could have done no harm? Anyhow, you can’t say I sent the wretched man to his death! I didn’t know the place or the way to it, and even now I have no idea how he was killed—perhaps he died a natural death—heart or something.”

  “No,” said the inflexible voice of my judge. “He was killed; there’s no doubt, and, but for you, he might well be alive.”

  I pushed back my plate. I had eaten all I could swallow. I drank a little coffee. It was dim in the cabin and the light was behind Mr. Mycroft’s head. I turned with a sort of servile gesture and began to clear the bench on which we had eaten. I washed the dishes in the pail, cleansed the knives and forks, rinsed the cups and put them on a rack, and poured out the soiled water. I felt as though I were already doing time in a penal settlement. There was only one streak of relief in the dull gloom of my mind: Miss Delamere need never know anything of this. The old figure sat silent. If only he had smoked, but he didn’t, and somehow, though I don’t know why, if a person stays still smoking or just holding a cigarette, they aren’t quite so unpleasantly still and waiting as if they just sit. Finally there was nothing more to tidy up. I hovered. Should I sit down, or should I say shortly, “I’m turning in,” and prepare to get into my bunk.

  “Now will you come outside?” said a voice, which though it may have had no welcome in it, at least had no rebuke. Almost like a spaniel petted after it has been smacked, I said, “Certainly.”

  We settled on the plank just outside the door. The sky looked more solid than the earth, and more active, more alive. We were in a little cup of congealed dark. That was all the earth had shrunk to; that was all our senses recorded. The hard bit of wood of the bench, the hard bit of ground under one’s heels, this was all one felt. One saw only the black curve of the rock-rim opposite one, dead black and vacant as Chaos itself, and then sharp above it the dense, glittering heaven. There seemed hardly a millimeter of that embracing expanse that wasn’t crammed with stars, flares that sparkled and flashed in all colors, like lighthouses and ships in a thick lane of shipping, and all the interstices filled with the wide-weltering phosphorescence of the Galaxy: stars like great cut jewels and stars like tons of diamond dust poured out in an inexhaustible cascade. And, as if that were not enough, every now and then across the glittering parade, the gala display made on a scale which makes the mind dizzy, cruised long-tailed meteors, leaving, even when they had gone, a dusty trail of brightness showing their path. Then down the sky sailed one so bright that for a moment its flash of fire almost made sufficient illumination for me to see that the earth we rested on was not merely congealed blackness.

  As it faded, the voice beside me said, “Literally, we have been following a star. There’s been enough mystery, too, in our search, for us little creatures not to quarrel and blame each other. ‘What is man,’ asked a desert poet, as, early in our history, he looked at that same ocean of light and dark which now hangs above us, hangs above us completely unchanged, while here in our dark little dell we have run through our civilizations—but never found the answer to that first question.”

  It wasn’t very original moralizing. But then I suppose moralizing can never be. “The eternal commonplaces,” weren’t the great truths called? I suppose they are like that because we never really can find an answer to such obvious questions—and yet we can’t get past them—there they stick, as simple and embarrassing as a fish-bone in one’s throat.

  Anyhow, I was sufficiently relieved that my problem and my mistake were being lifted onto a scale where perhaps we could hope, as the matter couldn’t be settled, I might get off with an open verdict. Mr. Mycroft’s next remark really did give me a new kind of interest.

  “There’s been present in this case of ours,” he continued, “an element of which detectives are often aware as lurking somewhere, but which I believe they hope they will never have fully to confront.”

  “An element?” I questioned, for I thought I ought to say something, and I was really interested as well as relieved at the turn things had taken. Even if he were going to start making a partnership between himself and providence, the senior partner of this big firm might put in a word for me with his active “junior.”

  “Perhaps,” he continued, “I may call it—I do to myself—The Element. It is hard to define, as are most elemental things—save by negatives. But, if that is allowed, then one might define, and yet not limit it, by saying, ‘There is no chance or accident.’”

  “What do you mean?” I questioned.

  “I mean that absolutely true reporting of any detection, of the elucidation of any secret, shows unmistakably that there is present some basic factor moving teleologically, or, if you like, purposely, behind what seems to be chance happenings, blind hits and misses, random guessings.”

  “You mean all this extra-sensory perception stuff?” I asked.

  “That’s only the tip of the topmost fin of this vast engulfed Leviathan. For centuries, for millennia, men knew about electricity as a funny little anomaly which made grains of salt leap up and cling to a rod of amber if it had been rubbed. Now we know that electricity is the force which holds everything together, the force which makes everything we call material. Believe me, the anomalies of today are the foundations of tomorrow.”

  “But—” I questioned.

  He completed my question, “What has that to do with us and with you in particular?
All through this case, I have felt, as never before, The Element, the vast submerged drive, as being quite close, uncannily close to the surface on which we have been working. With you, as one might say, it broke through.” Then I could hear that he had turned toward me to emphasize his remark: “You thought you were guessing when you gave your wrong reading, but you were not. Without knowing it, you gave Kerson a clue and that clue sent him to his death.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll deal with his death later. First, to your clue ‘Friar’s Heel’ which you translated ‘Mission Trail.’”

  “Well, it might have been,” I said defensively, making as it were a last stand.

  His reply jiu-jitsued me. “It was! When I was making arrangements with our present laconic friend now acting the part poor Kerson played on our earlier trip, I made all the inquiries I could. The man himself knew little and cared less, but as he, too, runs a store, I talked about the locality’s history with one or two of the Indians and other wanderers. You may recall, as we left the main trail, to start off into the true wilderness, I told you I thought once that we were actually on an abandoned trail. Indeed, I am sure that to eyes more practiced than mine at that kind of tracking, there is a ‘fossil trail’ there, starting off from the spot where the present, used trail bends back from that outer desolation. For my informants told me that even in their time this district has ‘parched out’ increasingly. One also told me that there is a tradition that earlier there were actual drinkable springs in that area which we were stumbling in. The tree-ring records of Douglas show that all through this desert Southwest only some centuries ago the Indians were able in a number of places to have settlements which, later, drought made them abandon. And these great century-spanning droughts come on like glacial ages, in waves, with lulls and recessions in between. This area had such a recession or backwash of almost adequate rains perhaps a century ago. For then some Catholic missionaries, I estimate from the story I was told, actually made a trail up here. There was even a bit of a story that on their trail they reported seeing the ruins of an immense heathen temple. The stones we saw would not suggest a temple to a non-European but any cultured European—and some of the Franciscans were very cultured men—would, of course, know the megalithic ‘temple ruins’ scattered all over Europe from Britain through France to Greece. They would be struck by the geological formation which we have seen and would say it was like a heathen temple, while a native, not having that association in his mind, would pass it unnoticing. So you sent Kerson hunting a mission trail unknown to you and unrecorded save in a very slender local tradition.”