The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “A Knife Between Brothers” was originally published in the February 1947 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  MANLY WADE WELLMAN

  STRIPPED TO TROUSERS and moccasins, young David Return needed only a feather jutting from his black hair to reincarnate the most picturesque of his warrior-chief ancestors of the Tsichah. Sweat and sunlight conferred to his brown back and shoulders a sheen like that of a well-used, well-kept saddle. His hands were as knowledgeable with spanner and screwdriver as they might have been, two generations ago, with warclub or scalping knife. Rather incongruously for one who so well fitted the ideal picture of a savage, he was tinkering successfully with the ignition system of an old Plymouth sedan behind the whitewashed police shack of the Tsichah Agency.

  Tightening a last connection, David Return slipped into the driver’s seat, stepped on the starter, and listened intently to the response of the engine. Satisfied, he snapped off the ignition, wiped his hands and face on a morsel of ancient towelling, then caught up and put on his flannel shirt with its silver-plated star badge of the agency police. Tucking in his shirt tails, he entered the shack.

  “Ahi, that car will run now,” he announced to the Indian, much older and more picturesque than himself, who sat behind the desk with his hands full of papers. “The whole automotive industry ought to come and watch the things I did to it. And I’m dried out like jerked beef.” From a hook by the window he lifted a canvas water bag and drank gratefully from it. “Are we running a police detail or a garage?”

  Tough Feather, David’s grandsire and senior agency policeman, reached for a pen and signed his name to a report. His profile was almost exactly similar to that of the noble old chief on the buffalo nickel. Had he not been so good a police officer, he might have been notable as an artists’ model or a character actor. Tough Feather grinned, his teeth startlingly white in the seamed duskiness of his face.

  “We run both those things, and ten or twenty more, David. Here,” and he held up the paper, “is our monthly report to the agent. Here,” and he turned his chin to indicate a high piled wire basket, “is unanswered correspondence—on almost every subject but law enforcement. By day after tomorrow, for instance, we must have something definite on the survey of how many dogs are kept on this reservation—”

  “How many dogs!” David almost whooped. “Who’s going to count all the dogs of all the Tsichah?”

  “Two policemen are going to count them,” Tough Feather informed him. “They’re at it now. And there’s a request for a police escort to accompany the school children visiting the historical exhibit over at Smith City,” continued Tough Feather, “and an advance man’s coming to look this reservation over for a travel newsreel company. He needs a guide and interpreter.”

  “Don’t give me either of those assignments,” begged David. “Police college taught me to gather evidence and disarm violent lawbreakers, but not to be a governess or a public relations expert.”

  “Your education is incomplete,” Tough Feather told him. “Indian police have to be everything—almost. You’ve started well, son of my son, but you still think the job begins and ends in trailing criminals and locking them up. If that’s all you do, what will the Tsichah call you? A white man’s Indian.”

  David winced at that.

  “I’m an Indian’s Indian,” he said harshly, “and they’d better realize it. I believe in being a good citizen and a good policeman, but I was born a chief of the Tsichah, and that’s a priority. I don’t want to do anything but help my tribe, which is what police are for.”

  “Because police must do other things than make arrests,” amplified Tough Feather gravely. “We have to explain the law as well as enforce it. We must uphold the government with the Indians, and uphold the Indians with the government.” He filled his ancient stone pipe and lighted it. “We Indians might still be masters of this hemisphere if we’d been able to stop fighting each other.”

  David’s broad young brow creased, as if troubled by thoughts evoked by his grandfather’s words. “I’m still a rookie policeman,” he said. “What I need is experience. How about assigning me to gather some?”

  “I was waiting for you to finish fixing the car,” said Tough Feather, and held out a scribbled card. “Drive out the Squaw Hill trail to the cabin of Yellow Bird and Stone Wolf. They have a dispute. Judge between them.”

  David’s brow-crease became a frown. He was young, and well-reared young Indians are shy about giving advice to old ones. “I’ve not been trained as a judge,” he demurred.

  “You were born a chief,” his grandfather reminded him. “Now you’re a grown warrior, and a qualified police officer of this agency. Yellow Bird and Stone Wolf sent me a message last night, asking for my help, but this paperwork will keep me busy today and tomorrow.” He thrust the card into David’s hesitating hand. “Go and act in my place. Because of your blood, they’ll accept your word as though it were mine.”

  David felt better for that assurance. He studied the names on the card. “Yellow Bird and Stone Wolf—I haven’t seen those old brothers since I was a boy. They never come here to the agency. Aren’t they old, old Tsichah, remembering nothing but wars and hunts? How do they stay alive?”

  “They have lands on the reservation,” replied Tough Feather. “Between their two head rights there are about eighty acres worth cultivating; but they never learned to farm, and they live among the hills and speak only to each other. Not even that now, since they quarreled. They rent their land to a step-kinsman.”

  “Step-kinsman?” echoed David.

  “It was he who brought me their message last night. Both of them were married when they were young warriors, before their last fight with the white men.” Tough Feather’s face grew momentarily harder, for the bloody finish of that conflict was the most vivid and least pleasant memory of his own boyhood. “There was cannon-fire at the Tsichah camp, and it killed both their families, except for Stone Wolf’s little daughter.”

  “She went to Chicago,” David remembered.

  “And married a white man. Now she’s dead, too, without children of her own; but her husband had a son by a first marriage, and that son farms for Stone Wolf and Yellow Bird. He began while you were away at the police college. His name’s Avery Packer—a good farmer.”

  “He brought the message, you say. Can he help me?”

  “He’s a good farmer,” repeated Tough Feather, “but no white man can decide the private quarrels of old Tsichah. They must have a chief’s word.”

  Tough Feather’s sinewy old hand shook the ashes from the stone pipe. “Any more questions?”

  David brought his moccasined heels together and whipped his brown hand to his brown temple in salute.

  “No questions. I’ll get a bite of lunch at the trader’s and go. My report will be on your desk before evening.”

  The afternoon was hotter than the morning had been. David drove up the trail with the car windows open, but the breeze he stirred was dry and heavy. Flat red-brown dryness stretched away to right and left, with occasional dimples where buffaloes had wallowed long ago, and more distant clumps and stragglings of brushy willow or cottonwood scrub to mark scanty watercourses. Now and then the hot air danced and blurred, as though a ghost had dared come out in broad daylight and shake his robe.

  It was weary country, conquered country, mused David. His people, the Tsichah, had been almost the last Indian tribe to admit the mastery of the white men. This, their reservation, was the worst and driest portion of their vast ancient roaming-grounds. If Avery Packer, Stone Wolf’s step-grandson, actually paid rent on eighty acres of it, he must be a spendthrift fool. But as David decided that, his car topped a knoll and he saw the land of the disputing brothers.

  It was all welcome, restful green, a smooth expanse of it to the very trailside and reaching ahead and beyond to a confining curve of knolls and bluffs. The only break in the pleasant expanse was a patch in the center, a patch as silver-bright in the sun as David�
�s new star. It was quiet water, a whole pondful, as rare on Tsichah acres as the rich, sturdy grass itself. David’s moccasin pushed down the brake and he leaned back in the driver’s seat to gaze in admiration.

  Toward him walked a figure, a burly white man in rough clothes, carefully parting the grass to avoid trampling too much of it.

  “Looking for me?”

  “If you’re Avery Packer, I am,” said David, his eyes still in the field. “Nice hay crop you’ve got here. Must have worked hard on it.”

  Packer nodded. “I did. That pond of mine’s the secret.” He glanced back toward the still surface of water, and his profile showed a short, straight nose and a jutting brow. “It catches rain and soaks it out through the loose earth. Otherwise whatever I planted would die out in the first hot spell.”

  “Lucky break having it,” David congratulated him, and Packer grinned.

  “Lucky back-break, you ought to say. When I first rented, it was just a mud-puddle. I dredged and scooped out for days to make it worthwhile. This year I’ll make a dollar or two on this hay, and next year I may go in for corn.” Packer’s eye caught the glint of the star on David’s flannel shirt. “Agency policeman, aren’t you?”

  “Right. That’s why I stopped. You rent from Yellow Bird and Stone Wolf, don’t you? I’m going out to settle their squabble.”

  “They were kind of expecting old Tough Feather.”

  “He can’t come. I’m his grandson, handling the case for him. What can you tell me about it?”

  Packer’s grin came back. “Just that it’s over money. A little bit of money I paid ’em a week ago.”

  He paused, as though awaiting a question, but David sat relaxed, watching him and listening. Packer went on:

  “I pay in silver. Paper they don’t savvy. Rent’s two dollars an acre a year, about fifteen bucks each month. They make out on that, buying a little flour and bacon and canned stuff, and sometimes a few cartridges to hunt rabbits and ducks. They keep it, as I hear, under a loose floor board in their cabin. Well, old Stone Wolf was clawing for some of it yesterday, to buy supplies at the agency. There wasn’t none.”

  “They told you this?” prompted David.

  “In about eleven words between the both of ’em. I’m sort of kinfolk—my dad married Stone Wolf’s daughter—but they don’t jaw a lot, not even to me. Anyhow, they wound up accusing each other of stealing. That’s all I know, except I went to the agency for ’em, to ask Tough Feather would he come out and hear their argument.”

  “Thanks,” said David, “that’s a help. Where do they live?”

  “Right yonder, past the bluff.” Packer’s big hand gestured ahead. “Mind if I come along?”

  “Glad to have you.” David opened the door for him.

  Beyond the bluff they came in sight of the cabin, a sagging little structure on a rise above the trail. The open front door was full of darkness.

  “Wait here,” David told Parker, and trotted up the footpath to the flat rock that served as a front stoop.

  “Ahi,” grunted someone inside, and David stepped across the threshold.

  In the hot still darkness inside the front room, squatting on the floor, was a spare old man as brown as leather. Despite the bitter heat, he was wrapped from skinny chin to skinny toes in a blanket that seemed as old and worn as himself. Two braids of gray-salted hair framed his wrinkled face. His licorice eyes looked sunken and sad.

  David glanced quickly around the room. Its two windows were curtained with tattered blankets. In one corner lay a few poor possessions—rolled bedding, a battered coffee pot, a clay water-jar that surely dated back to the days of savage freedom, some other small odds and ends. The only furniture was a rickety old chair with but three legs that leaned against the inner wall beside a closed door.

  “Ahi, uncle,” David greeted the oldster politely. “I am Tough Feather’s grandson.”

  “I am Stone Wolf,” replied the other.

  “You asked for a chief to judge your quarrel,” David reminded him. “Where is your brother Yellow Bird?”

  The gray-black head perked toward the closed inner door. “In the kitchen. We have not spoken or sat together since—”

  “I know something about it, but will speak to both at one time,” announced David with chiefly dignity.

  “Speak to Yellow Bird if you want to,” said Stone Wolf. “He will not hear you. He is out in the kitchen. Dead.”

  Yellow Bird, prone on the floor of the oven-hot kitchen, was a replica of Stone Wolf in all things—gray braids, wrinkled face, meager limbs, seedy old blanket—save the slack immobility of his body and the knife-handle that jutted from between his shoulders.

  David stood over him, and pondered sagely that a policeman must do many right things at once, and must likewise refrain from doing many wrong things. In case of a homicide, first study the surroundings, he remembered from a lecture at police college. Carefully he looked to either side of him, up, down. At his left as he stood just inside the doorway was a single window, both its broken panes mended with flour sacking nailed on. To his right slouched a rusty stove. Straight ahead was the cabin’s back door, with a broken lock and a heavy home-made bar of wood.

  Stone Wolf rose and came to David’s elbow, gazing at his quiet brother. “Who killed him?” asked David.

  Out of the folded blanket crept Stone Wolf’s skinny hand. A thumb like a stub of twig jabbed at Stone Wolf’s chest.

  “I,” rumbled the old man. “I killed him.”

  David turned quickly to meet the gaze of the sunken eyes. “But you wanted your quarrel judged,” he protested.

  “I killed him,” repeated Stone Wolf. “Who else could have struck my brother?”

  Decrepitly he shuffled into the kitchen. The gaunt hand crept further into view, lifting to indicate with its spread palm, Indian-fashion, the back door.

  “The bar is in place—inside. And the window”—Stone Wolf paused, turned and lifted his palm toward it—“could not open far enough to let an enemy in. See for yourself, young chief.”

  David stepped to the window and prodded both sashes. Warped by many hot seasons and by many soaking rains, they were stubbornly wedged in position—the upper closed, the lower raised perhaps two inches. Not even a crowbar could dislodge them, judged David; they would splinter before they would budge. Nor had the sacking over the glass been disturbed; the nails that held it were rusted into their holes. David felt shame. Stone Wolf, in his self-accusation, weighed the evidence far better than he, David.

  “Is it your knife in Yellow Bird’s back?” he demanded.

  “Yuh. It is my knife.” Stone Wolf bent creakily, his hand extending.

  “Don’t touch it!” commanded David sharply, and the old Indian stepped back obediently. David returned to the body—it lay two long strides from the window—and knelt.

  “White men’s police wisdom,” he lectured importantly, “can show what hand held a knife, by things called fingerprints.”

  But not this time, he decided even as he spoke. The weapon, an old butcher knife such as traders have sold Indians for a century, had been driven to the very hilt, and blood had gushed from the wound over the worn brass-studded grip.

  Stone Wolf was speaking again: “Such wisdom is not needed. I said that I killed him. Does a Tsichah lie?”

  Rising, David faced the old man. “Was it self-defense, Stone Wolf?”

  The exposed hand quivered its spread fingers, the universal plains sign for a question, a mystification, a lack of understanding. “I do not know. Maybe I slept squatting, and in my sleep crept upon my brother. Or a djiba, an enemy ghost, put a spell on me to make me do the thing. Or, because I am grown old, I forget at one time what I did another.”

  Stone Wolf’s face was mournful, but calm and stubborn, even a bit disdainful.

  “A man cannot kill and not know,” David half-scolded him.

  “You are the chief,” Stone Wolf replied gravely, turning away. “Use your wisdom to find out.”
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  He shuffled back into the front room and sat down on the floor again. Left alone in the stuffy kitchen, David again gazed thoughtfully at the body, at the stove, at the barred door, at the immovable window, and back at the body.

  Yellow Bird had fallen on his left side, head toward the back door, feet drawn up, knees together. Plainly he had been squatting. Awake, then, or at most dozing lightly; and his right side, not his back, had been nearest to the communicating door. In any case the old floor boards creaked loudly, even under David’s careful moccasins. How could Stone Wolf, asleep or in a trance or even awake and stealthy, have crept upon him?

  Perhaps Stone Wolf had thrown his knife. Many Tsichah could do that—David himself was a fair knife-thrower. But another study of the dead man ruled that out. The knife had struck his back—it had come, not from the direction of the front room, but from the direction of the window.

  David turned his attention to that jammed, sack-cloaked window with its crack of opening. Yellow Bird had been sitting some six feet away, no difficult target. Crossing the creaky floor to the back door, David lifted the wooden bar and walked out and around the cabin. Avery Packer was watching him curiously from the car’s running board, below on the trail. David approached the window from outside.

  Stacked against the wall below the sill was the cabin’s supply of firewood—old broken boxes and planks, branches and roots, a few shingles blown from the ruinous roof, three broken pieces of an old bamboo fishing pole. David smiled thinly. The two old brothers must have ranged far to gather this fuel in an almost timberless country, but meditations on such chores were not part of an investigator’s job. The stacked wood was enough to prevent a knife-thrower from pushing close to the window and inserting his hand. Even if a hand were inserted, it would be too cramped to whip strength behind the cast. David stepped several paces backward. Only the most skillful of thrown blades could sail through that narrow slit, and the dimness beyond would cloak any target.