Chapter XIII: Part 13

“‘It eats out der stuff in der sand, but not der silica, und starves and dies. It is a miracle. If der sand vas not here—_ach, Gott!_—it vould keep on going until—vell—I do not know! I haf nefer seen dot before. I am intrigued, und I am going to take dot stuff—oh, only a liddle bit—und I shall not rest until I haf learned something about it. Und, because I haf seen it does not lige sand, I vill make for it a cage—a liddle box of glass, und study it lige it vas a bug. Not?’

“We returned to where our natives still stood with our packs. We quickly fitted together some microscopic slides into a rough box and bound it about with string. With it, we returned to the edge of the gray patch. Von Housmann knelt down and carefully scooped up a bit of the fungus with a glass spatula he had brought along. He dumped this into his box and waited. In five minutes it had disappeared. He looked up blankly.

“‘You forget, Sigmund,’ I said, smiling at his woeful expression. ‘It starves on silicon. It won’t live in glass.’

“‘_Ach. Dumkopf!_ Of course! I haf forgot dot. But, ve vill fool dot hell-plant. He goes yet on hunger-strike—no? Ve try now dot forcible feeding.’

“He took out his knife and cut from a near-by tree several small splinters.

“Ve vill feed him, so. Dot vood, it vill be for him a greadt feast, und he shall eat und eat, und we vill study him und see vot we vill see.’

“Laughing, he bent over and shook out the tiny gray residue which was in the box. He dropped in a sliver of wood and was bending over to refill his box when I felt a sting on my foot. I looked down, and my heart stood still.

“On my shoe, just in between the laces, was a spot of gray. I could not move. I was cold. I can not describe how I felt, but I seemed turned to stone. My flesh quivered and shrank and I was sick—very sick. Sigmund looked up, startled, and then he looked at my feet.

“The next thing I knew I was on my back, my foot in his hand. One slash of his knife across the thongs which laced my boot, and he jerked it off.

“The biting grew worse. I heard him gasp, and then I felt a sharp pain. My head swam and I must have fainted. I regained consciousness—I don’t know how soon after—and I found myself back under the trees. I looked at my foot, which was throbbing and burning like fire. It was swathed in a bandage that Von Housmann had taken from his emergency kit and was wrapping around the instep. It was deeply stained with blood. I moved, and he looked up. He smiled when he saw I was conscious.

“‘Dot was a close shave—yes? It had just eaten into der shoe as I pulled it off und one spot—lige a bencil dot—on your skin vas gray. So I cut it out and all around it, und so you haf a hole in your foot, but—you haf your foot. Now so! You lie here, und I get der niggers and ve take you to bed.’

“A tent was soon erected and I was carried into it. For two days I lay there, delirious half the time. Sigmund never left my side. He even slept there. He was insistent that it was his fault. He said one of the apparently dead fungi had dropped on my shoe and had revived there. That is, the plant, instead of dying, had shriveled up, but the life-nucleus was still strong. I shudder even now when I think of what might have been.

“At the end of the third day I was able to hobble about a little with the aid of a cane. That afternoon Sigmund came to me and asked if I would care to go with him to fill his little glass box. I refused, and he laughed. It was the last time I ever heard him laugh. I begged him to leave that stuff alone.

“Still laughing, he made some light reply and left me. I lay in my cot. I was filled with forebodings. The heat was intense, and I must have dropped off to sleep. I dreamed horrible, troublesome, weird dreams. I awoke, bathed in a cold sweat. I felt sure something was wrong, that some one was calling for me. I got to my feet and left my tent. No one was in sight. I tried to laugh at my premonition. I bitterly regretted that I had allowed my friend to override my persuasions.

“Hurrying as much as was possible, I started toward the clearing. My wound throbbed and ached. It tortured me. I seemed weighed down. Once I stumbled in my eagerness. It was horrible. Like a nightmare.

“I must have covered half the distance when I heard a scream. What a shriek it was! I wake up nights even now hearing it. It was unrecognizable. Like some unearthly animal. Just that one scream. My stick hindered me. I threw it away and ran.

“My blood was cold in my veins, but I felt not one twinge of pain in my _foot_. At last I came to the edge of the clearing. And there—God, it makes me sick even now to think of it.”

* * * * *

The speaker paused; his face was chalky, and he shuddered and buried his face in his hands. I think he was crying.

Outside, the wind still howled, dully, monotonously, eerily. Sometimes it would shriek and scream. Then my friend’s voice again—level, dead, cold.

“I looked out; I saw Sigmund standing on the sand. I can see him as plainly as though he were here now. His face was ashen. He was looking down. At his feet were the fragments of the glass box he had made.

“He was holding out his hands, looking at them. They were gray. And they writhed and twisted, but his arms were still. He was not even trembling. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and my throat was dry—but at last I called to him.

“‘Sigmund—Sigmund!’ I cried. ‘For God’s sake—’

“He looked up, and, I tell you, I never want to see such a face again! I can never forget it. The face of a soul in torture. He looked at me and held out his arms. His hands were gone—flaked off in large, gray, writhing drops to the sand at his feet!

“He tried to smile, but couldn’t.

“Another gray—Thing—dropped off. I was dizzy with sickness. It was unbelievable. And then he spoke. His voice was well-nigh unrecognizable. It croaked and broke:

“‘Done for, my friendt. I feel it eating to my heart. Be merciful and help me. _Shoot_—quick, through the foreheadt!’

“His words beat through the stupor clouding my brain, I started toward him—hands out-stretched. I could not speak.

“‘_Um Gottes Willen, bleibt da!_ Stop! Stop!’

“The words brought me up to a stop.

“‘Sigmund! My friend! What—?’

“‘Do not come near me! Vould you also be so tormented? Vat dot Gray touches it consumes. Do not argue, I say, but _shoot!_ _Heilige Mütter!_ Vy do you not shoot?’

“His voice rose into a shriek of agony. What was left of one arm had sloughed off—the other was almost gone. A little mound of gray grew larger at his feet. His flesh was consumed; skin, blood and bone, absorbed by that vile gray Thing, and he shrieked in agony and prayer. Both arms were gone, and the stuff at his feet had already begun to cut through his boots.

“I shot him—between his eyes. I saw him fall, and I fainted. When I came to, there was only a mound of tiny gray fungi, greedily reaching their hellish tentacles for sustenance and slowly shriveling up into tiny light gray specks of dust on a glossy patch of sand.”

Savants No Longer Know All Things

“Men in the business of knowing things have taken a tip from the plumbers, carpenters and plasterers,” announced Friar McCollister, one of the University of Chicago literati. “No longer is it possible to go to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’ in Sanscrit, and get an answer. The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: ‘That is not in my department.’ I found this out the other day when I tried to get some information on the discovery of a human skull three million years old.

“First, I went to the information office of the University. There I encountered a sprightly young man who turned out to be a professor of sociology. But he didn’t know anything about men three million years old. He only studied living men, he said. ‘Better go over to Haskell Museum,’ he told me. ‘They have some skulls and mummies over there.’

“I ran up three flights of stairs and into a dusty old room where I saw a Dr. Edgerton. He was copying strange characters out of a book yellow with age. When I put my question he replied that the only ancients he knew were Egyptian mummies. He said I should see an anthropologist. Back to the information office to see where they kept the anthropologists.

“They sent me up to Walker Museum, where a bland young man said, ‘Freddie Starr is not in, but you don’t want an anthropologist, anyway. You want to see an ethnologist.’

“When I found one, after dogging him all over the campus, he told me that the matter really belonged in the department of geology. From there they sent me to see the department of paleontology. At last I located it in a cubby-hole of a museum which I didn’t even know was there, although I have been on the campus three years.

“‘But, my dear sir,’ replied the head of the department to my question, ‘that is not in my department. What you want is a vertebrate paleontologist, and I am only a plain paleontologist. At present we have no vertebrate paleontologist at the University. The last one died a few years ago.’

“Well, I gave up my search,” said Mr. McCollister. “This age of specialization is too much for me.”

Ancient Legend Recalled When Misfortune Attends Tut’s Discoverers

There is an old legend to the effect that whoever molests the final resting-place of a Pharaoh will be afflicted with the curse of the ancient rulers; and recent events have revived this superstition.

After thirty-three years of patient, ceaseless toil, Howard Carter, the now famous Egyptologist, discovered the tomb of a powerful Pharaoh. He was a very sincere man, and devoted to his life work all of his energy. Just when success and reward for his labor was within his grasp, he was stricken down with a baffling disease. His condition became very serious and physicians said that if he lived he would probably be an invalid for a long time. Shortly before Carter’s illness, Lord Carnarvon, who was financing the expedition, and who was personally supervising the work, suddenly died.

Nobody seems to know just what killed him. Some attribute his death to the effects of an insect bite, some say that he was poisoned by some ancient death-potion with which he came in contact while in the tomb, and others declare that his death was the vengeance of King Tut-Ankh-Amen.

If such a legend could be credited anywhere, the Theban valley would be that place. By day nothing disturbs the place except the sound of the pick-axes and shovels of the native workmen. By night the stillness is broken only by the hooting of owls and the cries of jackals and wild-cats. The spectator is awed by the solemnity of the great, precipitous sandstone cliffs that stand sentinel on either side of the valley. In the midst of the silence and solitude one feels himself standing on the brink of two worlds, gazing into a vista of the unknown.

_The Author of “Whispering Wires” Offers Another Thriller to WEIRD TALES Readers_—

The Voice in the Fog

_By_ HENRY LEVERAGE

The _Seriphus_ was a ten thousand ton, straight bow ocean tanker, and her history was the common one of Clyde-built ships—a voyage here and a passage there, charters by strange oil companies, petrol for Brazil, crude petroleum that went to Asia (for anointment purposes among the heathen) and once there was a hurried call to some unpronounceable Aegean port where the _Seriphus_ acted against the Turks in their flare-up after the Great War.

The ordinary and usual—the up and down the trade routes—passed away from the _Seriphus_ when Ezra Morgan, senior captain in the service of William Henningay and Son, took over the tanker and drove her bow into strange Eastern seas, loading with oil at California and discharging cargo in a hundred unknown ports.

Of Ezra Morgan it was said that he had the daring of a Norseman and the thrift of a Maine Yankee; he worked the _Seriphus_ for everything the tanker could give William Henningay and Son; he ranted against the outlandish people of the Orient and traded with them, on the side, for all that he could gain for his own personal benefit.

Trading skippers and engineers with an inclination toward increasing wage by rum-running and smuggling were common in the Eastern service. Ezra Morgan’s rival in that direction aboard the _Seriphus_ ruled the engine-room and took pride in declaring that every passage was a gold mine for the skipper and himself.

The chief engineer of the _Seriphus_ saw no glory in steam, save dollars; he mopped up oil to save money. His name was Paul Richter—a brutal-featured man given to boasting about his daughter, ashore, and what a lady he was making of her.

Paul Richter—whom Morgan hated and watched—was far too skilled in anything pertaining to steam and its ramifications to be removed from his position aboard the _Seriphus_. Henningay, Senior, believed in opposing forces on his many tankers—it led to rivalry and efficiency, instead of closeheadedness and scheming against owners.

The _Seriphus_, after a round passage to Laichau Bay, which is in the Gulf of Pechili, returned to San Francisco and was dry-docked near Oakland, for general overhauling.

Richter, after making an exact and detailed report to Henningay, Jr., visited the opera, banked certain money he had made on the round-passage, then went south to his daughter’s home. He found trouble in the house; Hylda, his daughter, had a heart affair with a marine electrician, Gathright by name, a young man with a meager wage and unbounded ambition.

Through the Seven Seas, from the time of his Bavarian wife’s death, from cancer of the breast, Richter, chief engineer of the _Seriphus_, had sweated, slaved, saved and smuggled contraband from port in order to say:

“This is my daughter! _Look at her!_”

Now, as Richter discovered, Hylda, twenty-seven years of age, somewhat prim and musical, had given her promise to an electrician whom the engineer believed was not fit to dust her shoes. Richter, used to breaking and thrashing coolie oilers, ordered Gathright from the house and locked up his daughter.

She cried for seven days. Gathright was seen in town. Richter’s rage gave way to an engineer’s calculation.

“What for I study in University and college? Why do I hold certificates? I fix Gathright!”

No oil was smoother than Richter’s well-laid plan; he sent Hylda away and met Gathright.

“All right about my daughter,” he told the electrician. “You go one voyage with me—we’ll see Henningay—I’ll fix you up so that you can draw one hundred and fifty dollars in wage, with a rating as electrician aboard the _Seriphus_.”

Gathright went with Richter to San Francisco. They recrossed the Bay, without seeing Henningay, Jr., and, at dusk, climbed over the shoring timbers and went aboard the _Seriphus_. Richter’s voice awoke echoes in the deserted ship and dry-dock:

“Come, I show you my dynamo and motors. We go to the boiler-room first, where the pumps are.”

The boiler-room, forward the engine-room of the tanker, was a place of many snakelike pipes, valves, sea-plates and oily seepage from the feedtanks. The _Seriphus_ was a converted oil-burner, having been built before crude petroleum was used for steaming purposes. Three double-end Scotch boilers made the steam that drove the tanker’s triple-expansion engine.

Richter knew the way down to the boiler-room, blindfolded. He struck matches, however, to guide Gathright, and remarked that the newer ships of Henningay’s fleet had a storage-battery reserve for lighting purposes when the dynamo ceased running.

Gathright, somewhat suspicious of Hylda’s father, took care to keep two steps behind the chief-engineer. They reached and ducked under the bulkhead beam where the door connected the engine-room with the boiler-room. Richter found a flashlamp, snapped it on, swung its rays around and about as if showing Gathright his new duties.

“There’s a motor-driven feed-pump,” he said. “Something’s the matter with the motor’s commutator. It sparks under load—can you fix it up?”

There was a professional challenge in the chief engineer’s voice; Gathright forgot caution, got down on his knees, leaned toward the motor and ran one finger over the commutator bars. They seemed polished and free from carbon.

Richter reversed his grip on the flashlamp, swung once, twice, and smashed the battery-end of the lamp down on Gathright’s head, just over the top of the electrician’s right ear.

Gathright fell as if pole-axed and dropped with his hands twitching on a metal plate.

Striking a match, Richter surveyed the electrical engineer.

“Good!” he grunted. “Now I put you where nobody’ll ever look—unless I give the order.”

* * * * *

A stump of candle, stuck by wax to a feed-pipe, allowed Richter illumination sufficient to work by. Swearing, sweating, listening once, he fitted a spanner to bolt-heads on a man-plate in the spare boiler and removed the stubborn bolts until the plate clanged at his feet.

Gathright was a slender man, easy to insert through the man-hole; Richter had no trouble at all lifting the electrician and thrusting him out of sight.

It seemed to the engineer, as he hesitated, that Hylda’s lover moaned once and filled the boiler with a hollow sound.

Hesitation passed; and Richter swallowed his superstitious fears, put back the man-hole plate, bolted it tighter than it ever was before, almost stripping the threads, and stepped back, mopping his brow with the sleeve of a shore-coat.

There was nothing very unusual in Richter’s further actions that evening. The ship-keeper, who came aboard at daylight, long before the dry-dock men began work, noticed a wet shore-hose, a thin plume of steam aft the tanker’s squat funnel, and there was a trailing line of smoke drifting aslant the _Seriphus’_ littered deck.

“Been testing that spare boiler,” explained Richter, when the ship-keeper ducked through the bulkhead door. “I think it’s tight an’ unscaled, but th’ starboard one will need new tubes and general cleaning. Get me some soap—I want to wash up.”

Richter dried his hands on a towel, tossed it toward the motor-driven feed-pump, then, when he left the boiler-room, his glance ranged from the tightly-bolted man-hole cover up to a gauge on a steam-pipe. The gauge read seventy-pounds—sufficient to parboil a heavier man than Hylda’s lover.

“I think that was a good job,” concluded the first engineer of the _Seriphus_.

The second engineer of the tanker, a Scot with a burr on his voice like a file rasping the edge of a plate, stood watching Richter balance himself as the stout chief came along a shoring-beam.

“I mark ye ha’ steam up,” commented the Scotchman, when Richter climbed over the dry dock’s wall.

“Yes, in the spareboiler.”

Mr. S. V. Fergerson tapped a pipe on his heel.

“I made an inspection, myself, of that, not later than yesterday forenoon. She was tight as a drum an’ free from scale. I left th’ man-hole—”

“Damn badly gasketed!” growled Richter.

Fergerson started to explain something; but the chief was in a hurry to get away from sight of the _Seriphus_. There was a memory on the tanker that required a drink or two in order to bring forgetfulness. Richter gave the Scot an order that admitted of no answering back.

“Go aboard an’ blow off steam! That boiler’s all right!”

A roar, when Richter strode past the dry-dock’s sheds, caused him to wheel around and listen. Fergerson, according to orders, was blowing off the steam from the spare boiler.

Something, perhaps water or waste, clogged the pipe; and the escaping vapor whistled, sputtered, and rose to a high piercing note that sounded to the chief’s irritated nerves like the cry of a soul in agony. The note died, resumed its piercing screeching. Richter’s arm and hand shook when he mopped his brow and drew a wet sleeve down with an angry motion.

In fancy the noise that came from the _Seriphus’_ starboard side, echoed and deflated by the hollow dock, was Gathright calling for Hylda. Richter covered his ears and staggered away.

* * * * *

Ezra Morgan hastened such repairs as were required for making the _Seriphus_ ready for sea; the tanker left the dry-dock, steamed out the Golden Gate, and took aboard oil at a Southern California port.

All tanks, a well-lashed deck load of cased-lubricant—consigned to a railroad in Manchuri—petroleum for the furnaces, brought the _Seriphus_ down to the Plimsoll Mark; she drove from shore and crossed the Pacific where, at three God-forsaken Eastern roadsteads, she unloaded and made agents for the oil-purchasers happy with shipments delivered on time.

The romance of caravan routes, and pale kerosene lamps burning in Tartar tents, escaped both Ezra Morgan and Richter; they went about their business of changing American and English minted gold for certain contrabands much wanted in the States. The chief engineer favored gum-opium as a road to riches; Ezra dealt in liquors and silks, uncut gems and rare laces.

Fortunately for the chief engineer’s peace of mind, the spare, double-end Scotch boiler was not used on the Russian voyage. Gathright was forgotten and Hylda, safe in an eastern music school, was not likely to take up with another objectionable lover. Richter, relieved of a weight, went about the engine-room and boiler-room humming a score of tunes, all set to purring dynamos, clanking pumps, and musical cross-heads.

At mid-Pacific, on a second voyage—this time to an oilless country, if ever there were one, Mindanao—a frightened water-tender came through the bulkhead door propelled by scalding steam, and there was much to do aboard the _Seriphus_. The port boiler had blown out a tube; the spare, midship boiler was filled with fresh water and the oil-jets started.

Richter, stripped to the waist, it being one hundred and seventeen degrees hot on deck, drove his force to superhuman effort. Ezra Morgan, seven hours after the accident, had the steam and speed he ordered, in no uncertain tones, through the bridge speaking-tube.

Fergerson, a quiet man always, had occasion, the next day, to enter the chief’s cabin, where Richter sat writing a letter to Hylda, which he expected to post via a homeward bound ship. Richter glared at the second engineer.

“That spare boiler—” began Fergerson.

“What of it?”

“Well, mon, it’s been foamin’ an’ a gauge-glass broke, an’ there’s something wrong wi’ it.”

“We can’t repair th’ port boiler until we reach Mindanao.”

Fergerson turned to go.

“Ye have m’ report,” he said acidly. “That boiler’s bewitched, or somethin’.”

“Go aft!” snarled Richter, who resumed writing his letter.

He hesitated once, chewed on the end of the pen, tried to frame the words he wanted to say to Hylda. Then he went on:

“—_expect to return to San Francisco within thirty-five days.
Keep up your music—forget Gathright—I’ll get you a good man,
with straight shoulders and a big fortune, when I come back and
have time to look around._”

Richter succeeded in posting the letter, along with the Captain’s mail, when the _Seriphus_ spoke a Government collier that afternoon and sheered close enough to toss a package aboard. Ezra Morgan leaned over the bridge-rail and eyed the smudge of smoke and plume of steam that came from the tanker’s squat funnel. He called for Richter, who climbed the bridge-ladder to the captain’s side.

“We’re only logging nine, point five knots,” said Ezra Morgan. “Your steam is low—it’s getting lower. What’s th’ matter? Saving oil?”

“That spare boiler is foaming,” the chief explained.

“Damn you and your spare boiler! What business had you leaving San Francisco with a defective boiler? Your report to Mr. Henningay stated that everything was all right in engine-room and boiler-room.”

“Foam comes from soap or—something else in the water.”

“Something else—”

Richter got away from Ezra Morgan on a pretense of going below to the boiler-room. Instead of going below, however, he went aft and leaned over the taffrail. Somehow or other, he feared that spare boiler and the consequence of conscience.

Limping, with three-quarters of the necessary steam pressure, the _Seriphus_ reached Mindanao and was forced to return to California without repairs to the port boiler. While repairs, new tubes and tube-sheet were put in place by boilersmiths, Richter saw his daughter, who had come west from music school.

The change in her was pronounced; she spoke not at all of Gathright, whose disappearance she could not understand; and Richter, keen where his daughter was concerned, realized that her thinness and preoccupation was on account of the missing electrician.

“I get you a fine fellow,” he promised Hylda.

He brought several eligible marine engineers to the house. Hylda snubbed them and cried in secret.

An urgent telegram called Richter back to the _Seriphus_. He made two long voyages, one down Chili-way, the other half around the world, before the tanker’s bow was turned toward California. Much time had elapsed from the night he had thrust Gathright into the spare boiler and turned on the oil-jets beneath its many tubes. Once, in Valparaiso, an under engineer pointed out red rust leaking from the gauge-glass of the spare boiler.

“Looks like blood,” commented this engineer.

Richter scoffed, but that afternoon he drank himself stupid on kummel, obtained from an engineer’s club ashore. Another time, just after the tanker left the port of Aden on her homebound passage, a stowaway crawled out from beneath the cold boiler and gave Richter the fright of his life.

“Why, mon,” said Fergerson, who was present in the boiler-room, “that’s only a poor wisp o’ an Arab.”

“I thought it was a ghost,” blabbered Richter.

Barometer pressure rose when the _Seriphus_ neared mid-Pacific. Ezra Morgan predicted a typhoon before the tanker was on the longitude of Guam. Long rollers came slicing across the _Seriphus’_ bow, drenched the forecastle, filled the ventilators and flooded the boiler-room.

Richter went below, braced himself in the rolling engine-room, listened to his engines clanking their sturdy song, then waddled over the gratings and ducked below the beam that marked the bulkhead door. An oiler in high rubber-boots lunged toward the chief engineer.

“There’s something inside th’ spare boiler!” shouted the man. “Th’ boiler-room crew won’t work, sir.”

Richter waded toward a frightened group all of whom were staring at the spare boiler. A hollow rattling sounded when the tanker heaved and pitched—as if some one were knocking bony knuckles against the stubborn iron plates.

“A loose bolt,” whispered Richter. “Keep th’ steam to th’ mark, or I’ll wipe a Stillson across th’ backs of all of you,” he added in a voice that they could hear and understand.

Superstition, due to the menacing storm and high barometer, the uncanny noises in the racked boiler-room, Richter’s bullying manner, put fear in the hearts of the deck crew. Oil-pipes clogged, pumps refused to work, valves stuck and could scarcely be moved.

“I’ve noo doot,” Fergerson told his Chief, “there’s a ghost taken up its abode wi’ us.”

Richter drank quart after quart of trade-gin.

* * * * *

The barometer became unsteady, the sky hazy, the air melting hot, and a low, rugged cloud bank appeared over the _Seriphus’_ port bow.

Down fell the barometer, a half-inch, almost, and the avalanche of rain and wind that struck the freighter was as if Thor was hammering her iron plates.

Ezra Morgan, unable to escape from the typhoon’s center, prepared to ride out the storm by bringing the _Seriphus_ up until she had the sea on the bow, and he had held her there by going half speed ahead. A night of terror ruled the tanker; the decks were awash, stays snapped, spume rose and dashed over the squat funnel aft the bridge.

Morning, red-hued, with greenish patches, revealed a harrowed ocean, waves of tidal height, and astern lay a battered hulk—a freighter, dismasted, smashed, going down slowly by the bow.

“A Japanese tramp,” said Ezra Morgan. “Some _Marau_ or other, out of the Carolines bound for Yokohama.”

Richter, stupid from trade-gin, was on the bridge with the Yankee skipper.

“We can’t help her,” the engineer said heavily. “I think we got all we can do to save ourselves.”

Ezra Morgan entertained another opinion. The storm had somewhat subsided, and the wind was lighter, but the waves were higher than ever he had known them. They broke over the doomed freighter like surf on a reef.

“Yon’s a distress signal flying,” said Ezra Morgan. “There’s a few seamen aft that look like drowned rats. We’ll go before th’ sea—I’ll put th’ sea abart th’ beam, an’ we’ll outboard oil enough to lower a small-boat an’ take those men off that freighter.”

The maneuver was executed, the screw turned slowly, oil was poured through the waste-pipes and spread magically down the wind until the freighter’s deck, from aft the forehouse, could be seen above the waves.

Over the patch of comparative calm oars dipped, and a mate, in charge of the small boat lowered from the _Seriphus_, succeeded in getting off the survivors who were clinging to the freighter’s taffrail.

The small boat lived in a sea that had foundered big ships. It returned to the tanker’s bow; and the four men, bruised, broken, all half-dead from immersion, were hoisted to the forepeak and taken aft. Two were Japanese sailors and two were Americans—a wireless operator and an engineer. The engineer had a broken leg which required setting, and the wireless operator was in a bad fix; wreckage had stove in his features, and twisted his limbs.

Ezra Morgan was a rough and ready surgeon-doctor; he turned the _Seriphus_ over to the first-mate and made a sick room out of Richter’s cabin. The chief protested.

“Get below to your damn steam!” roared Ezra Morgan. “You hated to see me bring aboard these poor seamen; you said I wasted fuel oil; your breath smells like a gin-mill. Below with you, sir!”

The engine-room and boiler-room of the tanker, she being in water ballast, was not unlike an inferno; the first-mate, acting on Ezra Morgan’s instructions, drove the _Seriphus_ at three-quarter speed into a series of head-on waves; the ship rolled and yawed, tossed, settled down astern, then her screw raced in mingled foam and brine.

Richter’s stomach belched gas; he became sea-sick, climbed into a foul-smelling “ditty-box” of a cabin, aft the engine-room, and attempted to sleep off the effect of the gin. Picture-post-cards, mostly of actresses, a glaring electric over the bunk, oil and water swishing the metal deck below, and the irritating clank of irregular-running engines drove sleep away from him.

Fergerson, the silent second-engineer, came into the “ditty-box” at eight bells, or four o’clock. Fergerson’s thumb jerked forward.

“I’ll have t’ use that spare boiler,” said he.

“What’s th’ matter, now?”

“Feed-pipes clogged in starb’ard one, sir.”

“Use it,” said Richter.

Steam was gotten up on the spare, double-end Scotch boiler; the starboard boiler was allowed to cool; Fergerson, despite the tanker’s rolling motion, succeeded in satisfying Ezra Morgan by keeping up the three-quarter speed set by the skipper.

Richter sobered when the last of the trade-gin was gone; the _Seriphus_ was between Guam and ’Frisco; the heavy seas encountered were the afterkick of the simoon.

Rolling drunkenly, from habit, the chief went on the bridge and asked about getting back his comfortable cabin aft. Ezra Morgan gave him no satisfaction.

“Better stay near your boilers,” advised the captain. “Everything’s gone to hell, sir, since you changed from kummel to gin!”

“Are not th’ injured seamen well yet?”

“Th’ wireless chap’s doing all right—but th’ engineer of that Japanese freighter is hurt internally. You can’t have that cabin, this side of San Francisco.”

“What were two Americans doing in that cheap service?”

Ezra Morgan glanced sharply at Richter.

“Everybody isn’t money mad—like you. There’s many a good engineer, and mate, too, in th’ Japanese Merchant Marine. Nippon can teach us a thing or two—particularly about keeping Scotch boilers up to th’ steaming point.”

This cut direct sent Richter off the bridge; he encountered a bandaged and goggled survivor of the freighter’s wreck at the head of the engine-room ladder. The wireless operator, leaning on a crutch whittled by a bo’sain, avoided Richter, who pushed him roughly aside and descended the ladder, backward.

White steam, lurid oaths, Scotch anathema from the direction of the boiler-room, indicated more trouble. Fergerson came from forward and bumped into Richter, so thick was the escaping vapor.

“Out o’ my way, mon,” the second engineer started to say, then clamped his teeth on his tongue.

“What’s happened, now!” queried Richter.

“It’s that wicked spare boiler—she’s aleak an’ foamin’, an’ there’s water in th’ fire-boxes.”

Richter inclined his bullet shaped head; he heard steam hissing and oilers cursing the day they had signed on the _Seriphus_. A blast when a gasket gave way, hurtled scorched men between Richter and Fergerson; a whine sounded from the direction of the boiler-room, the whine rose to an unearthly roar: Richter saw a blanket of white vapor floating about the engine’s cylinders. This vapor, to his muddled fancy, seemed to contain the figure of a man wrapped in a winding shroud.

He clapped both hands over his eyes, hearing above the noise of escaping steam a call so distinct it chilled his blood.

“_Hylda!_”

* * * * *

Now there was that in the ghostly voice that brought Richter’s gin-swollen brain to the realization of the thing he had done in disposing of Gathright by bolting him in the spare boiler.

No good luck had followed that action; Hylda was still disconsolate; trade and smuggling was at a low ebb; there was talk, aboard and ashore, of reducing engineers’ and skippers’ wage to the bone.

Richter had a Teutonic stubbornness; Ezra Morgan had certainly turned against his chief engineer; the thing to do was to lay the ghostly voice, make what repairs were necessary in the boiler-room, and give the tanker’s engines the steam they needed in order to make a quick return passage to San Francisco and please the Henningays.

An insane rage mastered Richter—the same red-vision he had experienced when he threw Gathright out of his daughter’s house. He lowered his bullet head, brushed the curling vapors from his eyes, and plunged through the bulkhead door, bringing up in scalding steam before the after end of the midship, or spare boiler.

Grotesquely loomed all three boilers. They resembled humped-camels kneeling in a narrow shed by some misty river. Steam in quantity came hissing from the central camel; out of the furnace-doors, from a feed-pipe’s packing, around a flange where the gauge-glass was riveted.

The _Seriphus_ climbed a long Pacific roller, steadied, then rocked in the trough between seas; iron plates, gratings, flue-cleaners, scrapers, clattered around Richter who felt the flesh on neck and wrist rising into water blisters.

No one had thought to close the globe-valve in the oil supply line, or to extinguish the fires beneath the spare and leaking boiler. Richter groped through a steam cloud, searching for the hand-wheel on the pipe line. All the metal he touched was simmering hot.

A breath of sea air came down a ventilator; Richter gulped this air and tried to locate the globe-valve with the iron wheel. Vision cleared, he saw the red and open mouth of the central camel—the flannel-like flames and he heard through toothed-bars a voice calling, “Hylda!”

Fergerson and a water tender dragged their chief from the boiler room by the heels; blistered, with the skin peeled from his features, Richter’s eyes resembled hot coals in their madness. Blabbering nonsense, the engineer gave one understandable order:

“Put out th’ fire, draw th’ water, search inside th’ spare boiler—there’s something there, damit!”

Ezra Morgan came below, while the spare boiler was cooling, and entered Richter’s temporary cabin—the “ditty-box” with the play actresses’ pictures glued everywhere. Fergerson had applied rude doctoring—gauze bandages soaked in petroleum—on face and arms.

“What’s th’ matter, man?” asked Ezra Morgan. “Have you gone mad?”

“I heard some one calling my daughter, Hylda.”

“Where do you keep your gin?”

“It’s gone! Th’ voice was there inside th’ spare boiler. Did Fergerson look; did he find a skeleton, or—”

Ezra Morgan pinched Richter’s left arm, jabbed home a hypodermic containing morphine, and left the chief engineer to sleep out his delusions. Fergerson came to the “ditty-box” some watches later. Richter sat up.

“What was in th’ spare boiler?” asked the chief.

“Scale, soda, a soapy substance.”

“Nothing else?”

“Why, mon, that’s enough to make her foam.”

Richter dropped back on the bunk and closed his lashless eyes.

“Suppose a man, a stowaway, had crawled through th’ aft man-hole, an’ died inside th’ boiler? Would that make it foam—make th’ soapy substance?”

“When could any stowaway do that?”

Richter framed his answer craftily: “Say it was done when th’ _Seriphus_ was at Oakland that time th’ boilers were repaired in dry-dock.”

Fergerson drew on his memory. “Th’ time, mon, ye went aboard an’ tested th’ spare boiler? Th’ occasion when ye took th’ trouble to rig up a shore-hose in order to fill th’ boiler wi’ water?”

“Yes.”

“Did ye ha’ a man-hole plate off th’ boiler?”

“I removed th’ after-end plate, then went for th’ hose. We had no steam up, you remember, and our feed-pumps are motor-driven.”

“Ye think a mon might ha’ crawled through to th’ boiler during your absence?”

“Yes!”

“Ye may b’ right—but if one did he could ha’ escaped by th’ fore man-hole plate. I had that off, an’ wondered who put it back again so carelessly. Ye know th’ boiler is a double-ender—wi’ twa man-holes.”

Richter was too numbed to show surprise. Fergerson left the “ditty-box” and pulled shut the door. The tanker, under reduced steam, made slow headway toward San Francisco.

One morning, a day out from soundings, the chief engineer awoke, felt around in the gloom, and attempted to switch on the electric light.

He got up and threw his legs over the edge of the bunk. A man sat leaning against the after plate. Richter blinked; the man, from the goggles on him and the crutch that lay across his knees, was the wireless operator who had been rescued from a sea grave.

“No need for light,” said the visitor in a familiar voice. “You can guess who I am, Richter.”

“A ghost!” said the chief. “Gathright’s ghost! Come to haunt me!”

“Not exactly to haunt you. I assure you I am living flesh—somewhat twisted, but living. I got out of that midship boiler, while you were bolting me in so securely. I waited until you went on deck for a hose, and replaced the after man-hole cover. I was stunned and lay hidden aboard for two days. Then I looked for Hylda. She was gone. I shipped as electrician for a port in Japan. I knocked around a bit—at radio work for the Japanese. It was chance that the _Seriphus_ should have picked me up from the _Nippon Maru_.”

“That voice calling for Hylda,” cried Richter.

“Was a little reminder that I sent through the boiler-room ventilator; I knew you were down there, Richter.”

The marine engineer switched on the electric light.

“What do you want?” he whined to Gathright.

“Hylda—your daughter!”

Paul Richter covered his eyes.

“If she will atone for the harm I have done you, Gathright, she is yours with her father’s blessing.”

The Invisible Terror

_An Uncanny Tale of the Jungle_

_By_ HUGH THOMASON

Old man Jess Benson, cattleman and mine owner, rode across the high plateau, which divided the rich grazing lands between Rock Valley and Slater Canyon, and let his horse pick its way down the steep slope to Slater Creek. Here, as the sorrel slaked its thirst, the big man in the saddle filled and lighted his pipe, while his eyes roved slowly through the sprinkle of cottonwoods which fringed the creek.

About fifty feet upstream, close to a large bowlder and partly behind a clump of stunted plum bushes, half a dozen magpies were quarreling over something that the rider could not clearly distinguish. He could merely see a dark blotch behind the bushes—the carcass of a cow or steer probably—and he watched the beautiful black-and-white birds speculatively as they uttered their shrill, raucous cries, and fluttered about the thicket.

Since there was a possibility, however, that the dead animal might be carrying his own brand, Benson finally turned his horse in the direction of the birds. Half a minute later, having reached a spot from which he could command a clear view of the thing that lay behind the bushes, his tanned cheeks went ashen, and he swung himself to the ground with an exclamation of horrified surprise.

Close to the thicket, and five or six feet from the rock, the body of a man was huddled in the horrible posture of one who has met a violent end.

He was lying partly on his side, one leg drawn up, the other outstretched, while both arms were bent under him. His face and neck were terribly torn and mangled, and his flannel shirt had been ripped half off his body, which was bruised and covered with wounds. Several paces away was a trampled felt hat, and the muzzle of a revolver peeped from beneath the body, its butt evidently clutched in the stiffened fingers of one hand. For a dozen feet the ground was torn and trampled, as though a terrible struggle had taken place.

For several minutes Benson stood still and eyed the ghastly thing in horrified fascination. Long experience as a range rider told him that the body and the signs of conflict about it could not be more than forty-eight hours old—the thing had happened since a heavy rain of two days before—and it slowly dawned on the cattleman that the dead man was Nathan Smith, a neighbor of his, who owned a small farm some five or six miles away.

For some time he studied the body and the surrounding soil very carefully, noting especially that the soft earth was covered with large, doglike tracks; then he went to his horse and untied his slicker from the back of the saddle. With this garment he managed to cover the body so that the magpies could no longer reach it. Then he mounted his horse and rode off toward Elktooth, ten miles away.

Sheriff Parker and Doctor Morse, the coroner, happened to be together in the latter’s office when Benson entered and told his story. Both men listened without any particular comment, and at the end the sheriff got to his feet.

“I’ll run you out in the car, Horace,” he informed the coroner. “We can reach the spot easily enough by following the old road up the creek. From what Benson says, the thing does not look like a crime exactly—it seems more like the work of wolves, though I never heard of any attacking a man in this region; but you can never tell. At any rate, we’d better look into it as soon as we can.”

It was about an hour later when the three men got out of the machine and walked the few feet which separated them from the scene of the tragedy. Lifting the slicker, Doctor Morse stooped over the gruesome object beneath it, while Sheriff Parker gazed at the trodden ground with interest. While the coroner made his examination, the little officer paced around the thicket, eying the tracks thoughtfully; more than once he stooped to apply a pocket rule to some especially distinct impression, and twice he whistled softly to himself. By the time the doctor’s examination had ended, he was turning a speculative eye toward a dim trail which led off at right angles through the cottonwoods.

Returning from washing his hands at the edge of the stream, Doctor Morse looked at his friend in contemplative silence, as he lighted a cigar and puffed at it nervously.

“Well?” the sheriff questioned, at length. “What was it? What killed him, Horace?”

“Bless me if I know, Bert. I never saw anything like this before in all my experience. It was an animal of some kind, I should say; a wolf, perhaps, although, as you said, the few wolves we have hereabouts have never been known to attack humans. But the man is frightfully mangled, his jugular vein is quite torn out of him. Had his gun in his hand, too. It’s empty. He must have fought the thing hard, whatever it was. I wonder—could it have been the ‘plague’?”

Sheriff Parker nodded in an absent way, his eyes still fixed on the faint trail through the trees and weeds.

“I think it was,” he said. “This spot is only a little way removed from where the creature has been in the habit of roaming, and poor Smith, I suppose, was caught here after dark. These tracks match those we found near Moore, and they look pretty fresh. How long should you say he has been dead?”

“Killed early last night, I should judge,” was the doctor’s answer. “He died hard, too, poor chap. Look at that ground.”

Jess Benson, with horror written all over his honest features, had been staring at the two men as they talked. Big, burly, outdoor giant that he was, he seemed to be in the grip of a kind of terror—or was it awe?—that made him incapable of speech.

“Heavens, what an end!” he burst out at length. “What are we going to do, sheriff? How’ll we ever get the thing that killed him?”

Sheriff Parker made no answer. He merely continued to search the ground around the body for a few minutes longer, as though he wished to make doubly sure that his suspicions were correct; then he helped the others wrap the body in a blanket and stow it in the car. Five minutes later, save for the trampled ground and some dull-brown, ominous stains on the grass, there was no sign of the tragedy apparent.

Two hours later, seated at his own desk with a cigar between his teeth, Sheriff Parker squinted through his glasses at Doctor Morse, who sat opposite.

“I tell you, Horace,” the sheriff was saying, “it is such a thing as never has been known before. If I had not been studying the results of this creature’s work for the past six weeks, I could not believe that such a thing could be. Still, it _must_ be so! Poor Jack Moore, he was the first victim; we were morally certain that the thing got him; then that strange waving of the alfalfa in Pollard’s meadow, and now this. I tell you, it’s awful, Horace!”

“It is; it’s more than that, Bert; it’s unnatural.” Doctor Morse puffed jerkily at his cigar. “And yet, science tells us that there are sounds the ear cannot detect, why not colors the eye cannot see? Take the only time the beast, or the ‘plague,’ as we have begun to call it, appeared in daylight. I mean that uncanny agitation in Pollard’s hayfield that afternoon, when some heavy creature thrashed about there. It could be heard, and the alfalfa moved, but the thing itself could not be _seen_, though three different people stood watching.”

“You are quite right, Horace; and I have already spent a great many sleepless nights milling over that ‘neutral color’ theory. Recently I have read that at the end of the solar spectrum there are things known as actinic rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern with the naked eye. The human eye is, after all, an imperfect instrument. Undoubtedly there are colors which we cannot see, and this beast, this scourge of the neighborhood, is of some such color.”

“Aside from its color,” the coroner mused, “the creature is tangible enough. It leaves a track in the ground larger by far than that of a full-grown timber wolf, and it certainly can fight. Benson says his hounds were soundly thrashed by it last week, you know, and there is Smith. He was a very powerful man, and armed, but, so far as we know, the thing killed him and got away unscathed. The man’s body looked as if it had been struck by a train. The chest and sides might have been beaten in with a sledge, his clothes were torn to shreds, and as for his throat—well, the less said about that the better.”

Sheriff Parker said nothing for several minutes. Getting to his feet, he began to pace slowly back and forth across the room, fingers interlaced behind his back and head bowed in the way he sometimes affected when in deep thought.

He was struggling with a problem the like of which he had never before tackled; and as he watched him, the coroner, in his turn, strove to devise some method of wiping out the creature which was terrorizing the entire valley.

* * * * *

Almost six weeks before, Jack Moore, a stock inspector, whose duties often carried him far out into the thinly settled portions of the country, had been found dead under circumstances similar in every way to those surrounding Smith’s end.

At first, the authorities and general public had attributed the death to timber wolves, for the sole reason that they could attribute it to nothing else. The tracks about the body, though exceedingly large, were shaped like a wolf’s, and the body itself had been torn and mangled as by some carniverous animal.

Soon after Moore’s death came the killing of a dozen sheep in their pasture, and, on the heels of this, Judson Pollard, a prosperous farmer whose word was beyond dispute, with two of his hired men, had seen something rush through an alfalfa meadow—something that they could not make out, though it was broad daylight, and they could see the tall hay wave and shake, and could even hear the creature as it thrashed about there.

Then Jess Benson’s hounds, a pack of fourteen, which had never met its match in numerous encounters with wolves and coyotes, had been soundly whipped, and three of its number killed outright in a fight with some animal which their owner could not see, although he had witnessed the fight from a distance.

Now, as a climax to the whole business, had come Nathan Smith’s horrible death; and no man could say who or what would be the next victim. No wonder the entire county could talk of little else, and that the creature, whatever it was, had been named the “plague”!

As he thought over all these things for the hundredth time, Sheriff Parker cudgeled his brain in an effort to form some plan for trapping and killing the beast. He knew that there must be a way, somehow, to make an end of the terror, even though the most skillful trappers and hunters in the district had failed to discover it. The animal’s range was known. It seemed, for the most part, to frequent the country between Slater Creek and White Horse Mountain, probably because this region contained plenty of timber and natural shelter; and it was in this region that it must be cornered. For many years the little sheriff had studied the crimes of men, and few criminals had ever had just cause to boast of outwitting him; but this was a different task.

“Horace,” the sheriff burst out finally, coming to an abrupt halt in front of his friend, “this butchery has gone far enough. We must put an end to it. What do you say to trying this very night? The beast seems to roam mostly at night, and tonight will be moonlight. We’ll try to trap it at the Black Pool.”

Doctor Morse stared at the speaker in surprise.

“The Black Pool?” he repeated. “Are you crazy, Bert? To be sure, we have discovered, so far as possible at any rate, that the beast seems to frequent the pool more than any other one spot; but how can we trap it? That has already been tried more than once.”

“True, Horace; but we shall try in a different way. This thing, whatever it is, though it can’t be seen, can be felt and heard; therefore it must have a solid body, so to speak. It leaves a distinct trail, you know, and its victims are proof enough that it is a creature of flesh and blood. My scheme is to _make_ it visible—then, if we are lucky, we can shoot it.”