Case greeted me as usual, as if my presence there were a matter of course and he were engaged upon nothing out of the common.
‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘I judge those are about dripped out. Pour it all into the big pail.’
He took the brush from Rastus, who followed him to the gate.
There Case dipped the brush into the blood and painted a broad band across the gravel of the drive and the flagstones of the footpath. He proceeded as if he were using lime white-wash to mark off a lawn-tennis court in the early days of the game, when wet markers were not yet invented and dry markers were still undreamed of. He continued the stripe of blood all round his place, just inside the hedge. He made it about three inches wide and took great pains to make it plain and heavy.
When he had come round to the entrance again he went over the stripe on the path and drive a second time. Then he straightened up and handed the brush to Rastus.
‘Just enough,’ he remarked. ‘I calculated nicely.’
I had so far held my tongue. But his air of self-approval, as if in some feat of logic led me to blurt out:
‘What is it for?’
‘The Chinese,’ said Case, ‘esteem dogs’ blood a defense against sorcery. I doubt its efficacy, but I know of no better fortification.’
No reply seemed expected and I made none.
That evening I was at Case’s, with some six or seven others. We sat indoors, for the cloudy day had led up to a rainy evening. Nothing unusual occurred.
Next day the town was plastered with posters of the circus company offering five hundred dollars reward for the capture of an escaped leopard.
Cato came to my office just as I was going out to lunch.
‘Mahs’r Cash done gone cunjuhin’ agin,’ he announced.
I found out that a second batch of dogs had been brought in by uncle Rastus in his covered wagon behind his unfailing mules, had been butchered like the former convoy and the band of blood gone over a second time. Case had not gone outside that line since he first made it, no drive to Shelby Manor that morning.
The day was perfect after the rain of the day before, and the bright sunlight dried everything. The evening was clear and windless with a nearly full moon intensely bright and very high. Practically the whole population went to the circus.
Beverly and I dined at Case’s. He had no other guests, but such was his skill as a host that our dinner was delightfully genial. After dinner the three of us sat on the veranda.
The brilliance of the moonlight on and through the unstirred trees made a glorious spectacle and the mild, cool atmosphere put us in just the humor to enjoy it and each other. Case talked quietly, mostly of art galleries in Europe, and his talk was quite as charming and entertaining as usual. He seemed a man entirely sane and altogether at his ease.
We had been on the veranda about half an hour and in that time neither team nor pedestrian had passed. Then we saw the figure of a woman approaching down the middle of the roadway from the direction of the country. Beverly and I caught sight of her at about the same instant and I saw him watching her as I did, for she had the carriage and bearing of a lady and it seemed strange that she should be walking, stranger that she should be alone, and strangest that she should choose the road instead of the footpath which was broad and good for half a mile.
Case, who had been describing a carved set of ivory chessmen he had seen in Egypt, stopped speaking and stared as we did. I began to feel as if I ought to recognize the advancing figure, it seemed unfamiliar and yet familiar too in outline and carriage, when Beverly exclaimed:
‘By Jove, that is Mary Kenton.’
‘No,’ said Colonel Case in a combative, resonant tone like the slow boom of a big bell. ‘No, it is not Mary Kenton.’
I was astonished at the animus of his contradiction and we intensified our scrutiny. The nearing girl really suggested Mary Kenton and yet, I felt sure, was not she. Her bearing made me certain that she was young, and she had that indefinable something about her which leads a man to expect that a woman will turn out to be good looking. She walked with a sort of insolent, high-stepping swing.
When she was nearly opposite us Case exclaimed in a sort of chopped-off, guttural bark:
‘Nay, not even in that shape, foul fiend, not even in that.’
The tall, shapely young woman turned just in front of the gateway and walked towards us.
‘I think,’ said Beverly, ‘the lady is coming in.’
‘No,’ said Colonel Case, again with that deep, baying reverberation behind his voice. ‘No, not coming in.’
The young woman laid her hand on the pathway gate and pushed it open. She stepped inside and then stopped, stopped suddenly, abruptly, with an awkward half-stride, as if she had run into an obstacle in the path, a low obstruction like a wheel-barrow. She stood an instant, looked irresolutely right and left, and then stepped back and shut the gate. She turned and started across the street, fairly striding in a sort of incensed, wrathful haste.
My eyes, like Beverly’s, were on the figure in the road. It was only with a sort of sidelong vision that I felt rather than saw Case whip a rifle from the door jamb to his shoulder and fire. Almost before the explosion rent my ear drums I saw the figure in the roadway crumple and collapse vertically. Petrifled with amazement I was frozen with my stare upon the huddle on the macadam. Beverly had not moved and was as dazed as I. My gaze still fixed as Case threw up a second cartridge from the magazine and fired again, I saw the wretched heap on the piking leap under the impact of the bullet with the yielding quiver of totally dead flesh and bone. A third time he fired and we saw the like. Then the spell of our horror broke and we leapt up, roaring at the murderer.
With a single incredibly rapid movement the madman disembarrassed himself of his rifle and held us off, a revolver at each of our heads.
‘Do you know what you have done?’ we yelled together.
‘I am quite sure of what I have done,’ Case replied in a big calm voice, the barrels of his pistols steady as the pillars of the veranda. ‘But I am not quite so clear whether I have earned five hundred dollars reward. Will you gentlemen be kind enough to step out into the street and examine that carcass?’
Woodenly, at the muzzles of those unwavering revolvers, we went down the flagged walk side by side, moving in a nightmare dream.
I had never seen a woman killed before and this woman was presumably a lady, young and handsome. I felt the piking of the roadway under my feet, and looked everywhere, except downward in front of me.
I heard Beverly give a coughing exclamation:
‘The leopard!’
Then I looked, and I too shouted:
‘The leopard!’
She lay tangible, unquestionable, in plain sight under the silver moonrays with the clear black shadows of the maple leaves sharp on her sleek hide.
Gabbling our excited astonishment we pulled at her and turned her over. She had six wounds, three where the bullets entered and three where they came out, one through spine and breast-bone and two through the ribs.
We dropped the carcass and stood up.
‘But I thought . . .’ I exclaimed.
‘But I saw . . .’ Beverly cried.
‘You gentlemen,’ thundered Colonel Case, ‘had best not say what you saw or what you thought you saw.’
We stood mute, looking at him, at each other, and up and down the street. No one was in sight. Apparently the circus had so completely drained the neighborhood that no one had heard the shots.
Case addressed me in his natural voice:
‘If you will be so good Radford, would you oblige me by stepping into my house and telling Jeff to fetch the wheelbarrow. I must keep watch over this carrion.’
There I left him, the two crooked revolvers pointed at the dead animal.
Jeff, and Cato with him, brought the wheelbarrow. Upon it the two negroes loaded the warm, inert mass of spotted hide and what it contained. Then Jeff lifted the handles and taking turns they wheeled
their burden all the way to uncle Rastus’, Case walking on one side of the barrow with his cocked revolvers, we on the other, quite as a matter of course.
Jeff trundled the barrow out to the hay barrack on the knoll. He and Cato and uncle Rastus carried out cord-wood until they had an enormous pile well out in the field. Then they dug up a barrel of kerosene from near one corner of the barrack. When the leopard had been placed on the top of the firewood they broached the barrel and poured its contents over the carcass and its pyre. When it was set on fire Case gave an order to Jeff, who went off. We stood and watched the pyre burn down to red coals. By that time Jeff had returned from Shelby Manor with a double team.
Case let down the hammers of his revolvers, holstered them, unbuckled his belt and threw it into the dayton.
Never had we suspected he could sing a note. Now he started ‘Dixie’ in a fine, deep baritone and we sang that and other rousing songs all the way home. When we got out of the dayton he walked loungingly up the veranda steps, his belt hanging over his arm. He took the rifles from the door jamb.
‘I have no further use for these trusty friends,’ he said. ‘If you like, you may each have one as a souvenir of the occasion. My defunct pistols and otiose belt I’ll even keep myself.’
Next morning as I was about to pass Judge Kenton’s house I heard heavy footsteps rapidly overtaking me. Turning I saw Case, not in his habitual gray clothes and broad-brimmed semi-sombrero, but wearing a soft brown felt hat, a blue serge suit, set off by a red necktie and tan shoes. He was conspicuously beltless.
‘You might as well come with me, Radford,’ he said. ‘You will probably be best man later anyhow.’
We found Judge Kenton on his porch, and Mary, all in pink, with a pink rose in her hair, seated between her father and her pretty step-mother.
‘I sent Jeff with a note,’ Case explained as we approached the steps, ‘to make sure of finding them.’
After the greetings were over Case said:
‘Judge, I am a man of few words. I love your daughter and I ask your permission to win her if I can.’
‘You have my permission, Suh,’ the Judge answered.
Case rose.
‘Mary,’ he said, ‘would you walk with me in the garden, say to the grape arbor?’
When they returned Mary wore a big ruby ring set round with diamonds. Her color was no bad match for the ruby. And, beyond a doubt, Case’s cheeks showed a trace of color too.
‘Father,’ Mary said as she seated herself, ‘I am going to marry Cousin Cassius.’
‘You have my blessing, my dear,’ the Judge responded. ‘I am glad of it.’
‘Everybody will be glad, I believe,’ said Mary. ‘Cassius is glad, of course, and he is glad of two other things. One is that he feels free to dine with us tonight, he has just told me so.
‘The other’ (a roguish light sparkled in her eyes) ‘he has not confessed. But I just know that, next to marrying me, the one thing in all this world that makes him gladdest is that now at last he feels at liberty to see a horse race and go to the races every chance he gets.’
In fact, when they returned from their six-months’ wedding tour, they were conspicuous at every race meeting. Case’s eyes had lost their restlessness and his cheeks showed as healthy a coloring as I ever saw on any human being.
It might be suggested that there should be an explanation to this tale. But I myself decline to expound my own theory. Mary never told what she knew, and her husband, in whose after life there has been nothing remarkable as far as I know, has never uttered a syllable.
The Song of the Sirens
I FIRST caught sight of him as he sat on the wharf. He was seated on a rather large seaman’s chest, painted green and very much battered. He wore gray, his shirt was navy-blue flannel, his necktie a flaring red bandana handkerchief knotted loosely under the ill-fitting lop-sided collar, his hat was soft, gray felt and he held it in his hands on his knees. His hair was fine, straight and lightish, his eyes china-blue, his nose straight, his skin tanned. His features were those of an intelligent face, but there was in it no expression of intelligence, in fact no expression at all. It was this absence of expression that caught my eye. His face was blank, not with the blankness of vacuity, but with the insensibility of abstraction. He sat there amid the voluble negro loafers, the hurrying stevedores, the shouting wharf-hands, the clattering tackles, the creaking shears and all the hurry and bustle of unloading or loading four vessels, as imperturbable as a bronze statue of Buddha in meditation. His gaze was fixed unvaryingly straight before him and he seemed to notice and observe more distant objects; the larger panorama of moving craft in the harbor, the fussy haste of the scuttling tugboats tugging nothing, the sullen reluctance of the urged scows, the outgoing and incoming pungies and schooners, the interwoven pattern they all formed together, the break in it now and again from the dignified passage of a towed bark or ship or from the stately progress of a big steamer. Of all this he seemed aware, but of what went on about him he seemed not only unaware but unconscious, with an impassivity not as if intentionally aloof nor absorbingly preoccupied but as if utterly unconscious or totally insensible to it all. During my long, fidgety wait that first morning I watched him at intervals a good part of the time. Once a pimply, bloated boarding-master, patrolling the wharf, stopped full in front of him, caught his eye and exchanged a few words with him, otherwise no one seemed to notice him, and he scarcely moved, bare-headed all the while in the June sunlight. When I was at last notified that the Medorus would not sail that day, went over her side, and left the pier, I saw him sitting as when I first caught sight of him.
Next morning I found him in almost the same spot, in precisely the same attitude, and with the same demeanor. He might have been there all night.
Soon after I reached the Medorus the second morning the bloated boarding-master came on board with that rarity, a native American seaman. I was sitting on the cabin-deck by the saloon-skylight, Griswold on one side of me and Mr Collins on the other. Captain Benson, puffy, pasty-faced and shifty-eyed, was sitting on the booby-hatch, whistling in an exasperatingly monotonous, tuneless and meaningless fashion. As soon as the Yankee came up the companion-ladder he halted, turned to the boarding master who was following him and blurted out.
‘What! Beast Benson! Me ship with Beast Benson!’ And back he went down the ladder and off up the pier.
Benson said never a word, but recommenced his whistling. It was part of his undignified shiftlessness that he aired his shame on deck. Almost any captain, fool or knave or both, would have kept his cabin or sat by his saloon table. Benson advertised his helplessness to crew, loafers and passers-by alike.
The boarding master walked up to Mr Collins and said:
‘You see, Sir. I can’t do anything. You’re lucky enough to be only two hands short for a crew and luckier to have gotten a second mate to sign. Wilson’s the best I can do for first mate. He’s willing and he’s the only man I can get. Not another boarding-master will so much as try for you.’
Mr Collins kept his irritating set smile, his mean little eyes peering out of his narrow face, his stubby scrubbing-brush pepper-and-salt mustache bristling against his nose. He made no reply to the boarding-master but turned to Griswold.
‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’ he queried.
‘Not yet,’ Griswold replied.
‘Well,’ said Mr Collins impatiently, ‘you know pretty much what doctors know?’
‘Pretty much, I trust,’ Griswold answered cheerfully.
‘Can you tell whether a man is deaf or not?’ Mr Collins pursued.
‘I fancy I could,’ Griswold declared, gaily.
‘Would you mind testing that man over there for me?’ Mr Collins jerked his thumb toward the impassive figure on the seaman’s chest.
Griswold stared.
‘He looks deaf enough from here,’ he asserted.
‘Try him nearer,’ Mr Collins insisted.
Griswold swung off the cabin
deck, lounged over to the companion ladder, went down it leisurely and sauntered toward the seated mariner. Griswold had a taking way with him, a jaunty manner, an agreeable smile, a charming demeanor and plenty of self-confidence. He usually got on immediately with strangers. So now you could see him win at once the confidence of the man. He looked up at him with a sentient and interested personal glance. They talked some little time and then Griswold sauntered back. He did not speak but seated himself by me as before, lit a fresh cigarette and smoked reflectively.
‘Is he deaf?’ Mr Collins inquired.
‘Deaf is no word for it,’ Griswold declared, ‘an adder is nothing to him. I’ll bet he has neither tympanum, malleus, incus nor stapes in either ear, and that both cochleas are totally ossified; that the middle ear is annihilated and the inner ear obliterated on both sides of his head. His hearing is not defective, it is abolished, non-existent. I never saw or heard of a man who impressed me as being so totally deaf!’
‘What did I tell you?’ broke in Captain Benson from the booby-hatch.
‘Benson, shut up,’ said Mr Collins. Benson took it without any change of expression or attitude.
‘You seemed to talk to him,’ Mr Collins said to Griswold.
‘He can read lips cleverly,’ Griswold replied. ‘Only once did I have to repeat anything.’
‘Did you ask him if he was deaf?’ Mr Collins inquired.
‘I did,’ said Griswold, ‘and he told the truth instanter.’
Impressed you as truthful, did he?’ Mr Collins queried.
‘Notably,’ Griswold said. ‘There is a gentlemanly something about him. He is the kind of man you respect from the first, and truthful as possible.’
‘You hear that, Benson?’ Mr Collins asked.
‘What’s truthfulness of a pitch-dark night in a gale of wind!’ Benson snorted. ‘The man’s stone deaf.’
The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Page 14