by Ruskin Bond
The next day he spoke to Mrs Chase.
‘Between your news and your lies you’ve turned your mistress’s head. Good God! she is like a maniac with your parcel of follies!’
But Goody Chase protested that she had told her nothing.
‘She told me that story, esquire, and said she had found it in an old book. What did I know of Florence Flannery? Many a time you’ve asked me about her when you were a child and I’ve had no answer to give you—what did I know save she was a hussy who disgraced Shute Court?’
At this Daniel Shute vehemently demanded of his wife where she had got the tales which she babbled about, but the woman was sullen and heavy and would tell him nothing; all the day she remained thus, but when the few hours of wintry light were over she fell again into unbridled terror, gibbering like a creature deprived of reason, beating her breast, kissing the rosary, and muttering, ‘Mea culpâ, mea culpâ, mea maximá culpâ!’
Mr Shute was not himself in any state to endure this; he left his wife to herself and made Tregaskis sleep with him for company in another room.
Winter froze the bleak countryside; Paley kept guard by the pond and the Shutes somehow dragged on an intolerable existence in the deserted house.
In the daytime Mrs Shute revived a little and would even prink herself out in her finery and gossip with Mrs Chase over the vast log fire, but the nights always found her smitten with terror, shivering with cowardly apprehension; and the object of all her nightmare dread was the fish she had seen in the pond.
‘It can’t leave the water,’ they told her, and she always answered:
‘The first night I was here I saw wet on the stairs.’
‘My God, my God!’ Daniel Shute would say, ‘this is like living with some one sentenced to death.’
‘Get a doctor over from Plymouth,’ suggested Mr Tregaskis.
But Mr Shute would not, for fear of being betrayed to his creditors.
‘Better rot here than in the Fleet,’ he swore.
‘Then take her away—and keep her from the bottle.’
The wretched husband could do neither of these things; he had no money and no influence over Mrs Shute. He was indeed indifferent to her sufferings save in so far as they reacted on him and ever accustomed him to the spectacle of her breakdown; he knew it was not really strange that a woman such as she was should collapse under conditions such as these, and his life was already so wretched that he cared little for added horrors.
He began to find a strange comfort in the man Paley, who, taciturn, slow and queer, yet did his work and watched the pond with an admirable diligence.
One night in the blackest time of the year, the bitter dark nights before Christmas, the shrieks of Mrs Shute brought her husband cursing up the stairs.
Her door was unbolted and she sat up in bed, displaying, in the light of his snatched-up taper, some red marks on her arm.
‘Let him kill me and done with it,’ she jabbered.
Mr Tregaskis came pushing in and caught rudely hold of her arm.
‘She’s done it herself,’ he cried; ‘those are the marks of her own teeth.’
But Mrs Shute cried piteously:
‘He came flopping up the stairs, he broke the bolts; he jumped on the bed! Oh! oh! oh! Isn’t this the bed, the very bed I slept in then—and didn’t he used to creep into this room when John Shute was away?’
‘Still thinking of that damned fish,’ said Mr Tregaskis, ‘and it’s my belief you neither of you saw it at all, esquire—that man Paley has been watching, and he’s seen nothing.’
Mr Shute bit his finger-nails, looking down on the writhing figure of his wife.
‘Light all the candles, can’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with the poor fool tonight.’
While Mr Tregaskis obeyed he went to the door and looked out, holding his taper high.
There were pools of wet and a long trail of slime down the dusty, neglected stairs.
He called Mr Tregaskis.
‘Ugh!’ cried the Cornishman, then. ‘It’s from Goody Chase’s water crock.’
On the following windy morning Mr Shute went out, shivering in the nipping air, to the carp pond.
‘I don’t want another night like last,’ he said. ‘You’ll sleep across my wife’s door—she thinks that cursed carp is after her—’
Then, at the gross absurdity of what he said, he laughed miserably.
‘This is a pretty pantomime I’m playing,’ he muttered.
A horrid curiosity drove him up to look at his wife.
She sat between the draggled muslin curtains hugging her knees in the tumbled bed; a wretched fire flickered wanly in the chill depths of the vast room; a wind blew swift and remote round the window on which was scratched the name of Florence Flannery.
Mr Shute shivered.
‘I must get you away,’ he said, stirred above his fears for himself; ‘this is a damned place—the Fleet would be better, after all.’
She turned lustreless eyes on him.
‘I can’t get away,’ she said dully. ‘ I’ve come here to die — don’t you see it on that window—”Died 1800?”
He crossed the floor and peered at the scratching on the glass. Some one had indeed added the word ‘died’ before the last date.
‘These are the tricks of a Bedlamite,’ he said nervously. ‘Do you think there was only one Florence Flannery?’
‘And do you think,’ she returned harshly, ‘that there were two?’
She looked so awful crouched up in bed with her hanging hair, her once plump face fallen in the cheeks, her soiled satin gown open over her labouring breast, her whole air and expression so agonised, so malevolent, so dreadful, that Daniel Shute passed his hand over his eyes as if to brush away a vision of unsubstantial horror.
He was shaken by an hallucination of light-headedness; he appeared to enter another world, in which many queer things were possible.
‘What are you?’ he asked uneasily. ‘He’s been after you for nearly three hundred years? Aren’t you punished enough?’
‘Oh, oh!’ moaned the woman. ‘Keep him out! Keep him out!’
‘I’ll put Paley at the door tonight,’ muttered Mr Shute.
He crept out of the horrible chamber; he now detested his wife beyond all reason, yet somehow he felt impelled to save her from the invincible furies who were pursuing her in so gruesome a fashion.
‘She’s a lunatic,’ said Mr Tregaskis brusquely. ‘You’ll have to keep her shut up in that room—it’s not difficult to account for—with the life she’s led and this place and the coincidence of the names.’
The first snow of the year began to fall that night, sullen flakes struggling in the coils of the leaping wind that circled round Shute Court.
In the last glimmer of daylight Paley came to take up his post.
Drab, silent, with his sloping shoulders and nondescript clothes, he went slowly upstairs and sat down outside Mrs Shute’s door.
‘He seems to know the way,’ remarked Daniel Shute.
‘Don’t you know he works in the house?’ retorted Mr Tregaskis.
The two men slept, as usual, in the parlour, on stiff horsehair couches bundled up with pillows and blankets; the litter of their supper was left on the table and they piled the fire up with logs before going to sleep. Mr Shute’s nerves were in no state to permit him to risk waking up in the dark.
The wind dropped and the steady downdrift of the soft snow filled the blackness of the bitter night.
As the grandfather clock struck three Daniel Shute sat up and called to his companion.
‘I’ve been thinking in my dreams,’ he said, with chattering teeth. ‘Is it Paley, or Daley? You know the name was D’Ailey.’
‘Shut up, you fool,’ returned the agent fiercely; but he then raised himself on his elbow for a hoarse, bitter scream, followed by some yelled words in a foreign language tore through the stillness.
‘The mad woman,’ said Mr Tregaskis; but Daniel Shute dragged the clot
hes up to his chattering teeth.
‘I’m not going up,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not going up!’
Mr Tregaskis dragged on his trousers and flung a blanket over his shoulders and so, lighting a taper at the big fire, went up the gaunt stairs to Mrs Shute’s room. The glimmering reams of the rushlight showed him tracks of wet again on the dirty boards.
‘Goody Chase with her crocks and possets,’ he murmured; then louder, ‘Paley! Paley!’
There was no one outside Mrs Shute’s door, which hung open. Mr Tregaskis entered.
She who had been Florence Flannery lay prone on her tawdry couch; the deep wounds that had slain her appeared to have been torn by savage teeth: she looked infinitely old, shrivelled and detestable.
Mr Tregaskis backed on to the stairs, the light lurching round him from the shaking of his taper, when Mr Shute came bustling up out of the darkness.
‘Paley’s gone,’ whispered Mr Tregaskis dully.
‘I saw him go,’ gibbered Mr Shute, ‘as I ventured to the door—by the firelight; a great fish slithering away with blood on his jaws.’
It’s unusual to find the supernatural element playing a part in a tale of the Wild West. But here’s a gunfight with a difference....
THE MAN ON THE GROUND
BY ROBERT E. HOWARD
Cal Reynolds shifted his tobacco quid to the other side of his mouth as he squinted down the dull blue barrel of his Winchester. His jaws worked methodically, their movement ceasing as he found his bead. He froze into rigid immobility; then his finger hooked on the trigger. The crack of the shot sent the echoes rattling among the hills, and like a louder echo came an answering shot. Reynolds flinched down, flattening his rangy body against the earth, swearing softly. A grey flake jumped from one of the rocks near his head, the ricocheting bullet whining off into space. Reynolds involuntarily shivered. The sound was as deadly as the singing of an unseen rattler.
He raised himself gingerly high enough to peer out between the rocks in front of him. Separated from his refuge by a broad level grown with mesquite-grass and prickly-pear, rose a tangle of boulders similar to that behind which he crouched. From among these boulders floated a thin wisp of whitish smoke. Reynolds’s keen eyes, trained to sun-scorched distances, detected a small circle of dully gleaming blue steel among the rocks. That ring was the muzzle of a rifle, and Reynolds well knew who lay behind that muzzle.
The feud between Cal Reynolds and Esau Brill had been long, for a Texas feud. Up in the Kentucky mountains family wars may straggle on for generations, but the geographical conditions and human temperament of the South-west were not conducive to long-drawn-out hostilities. There feuds were generally concluded with appalling suddenness and finality. The stage was a saloon, the streets of a little cow-town, or the open range. Sniping from the laurel was exchanged for the close-range thundering of six-shooters and sawed-off shotguns which decided matters quickly, one way or the other.
The case of Cal Reynolds and Esau Brill was somewhat out of the ordinary. In the first place, the feud concerned only themselves. Neither friends nor relatives were drawn into it. No one, including the participants, knew just how it started. Cal Reynolds merely knew that he had hated Esau Brill most of his life, and that Brill reciprocated. Once as youths they had clashed with the violence and intensity of rival young catamounts. From that encounter Reynolds carried away a knife scar across the edge of his ribs, and Brill a permanently impaired eye. It had decided nothing. They had fought to a bloody gasping deadlock, and neither had felt any desire to ‘shake hands and make up’. That is a hypocrisy developed in civilization, where men have no stomach for fighting to the death. After a man has felt his adversary’s knife grate against his bones, his adversary’s thumb gouging at his eyes, his adversary’s boot-heels stamped into his mouth, he is scarcely inclined to forgive and forget, regardless of the original merits of the argument.
So Reynolds and Brill carried their mutual hatred into manhood, and as cowpunchers riding for rival ranches, it followed that they found opportunities to carry on their private war. Reynolds rustled cattle from Brill’s boss, and Brill returned the compliment. Each raged at the other’s tactics, and considered himself justified in eliminating his enemy in any way that he could. Brill caught Reynolds without his gun one night in a saloon at Cow Wells, and only an ignominious flight out the back way, with bullets barking at his heels, saved the Reynolds scalp!
Again Reynolds, lying in the chaparral, neatly knocked his enemy out of his saddle at five hundred yards with a .30-30 slug, and, but for the inopportune appearance of a line-rider, the feud would have ended there, Reynolds deciding, in the face of this witness, to forgo his original intention of leaving his covert and hammering out the wounded man’s brains with his rifle butt.
Brill recovered from his wound, having the vitality of a longhorn bull, in common with all his sun-leathered iron-thewed breed, and as soon as he was on his feet, he came gunning for the man who had waylaid him.
Now after these onsets and skirmishes, the enemies faced each other at good rifle range, among the lonely hills where interruption was unlikely.
For more than an hour they had lain among the rocks, shooting at each hint of movement. Neither had scored a hit, though the .30-30’s whistled perilously close.
In each of Reynolds’s temples a tiny pulse hammered maddeningly. The sun beat down on him and his shirt was soaked with sweat. Gnats swarmed about his head, getting into his eyes, and he cursed venomously. His wet hair was plastered to his scalp; his eyes burned with the glare of the sun, and the rifle barrel was hot to his calloused hand. His right leg was growing numb and he shifted it cautiously, cursing at the jingle of the spur, though he knew Brill could not hear. All this discomfort added fuel to the fire of his wrath. Without process of conscious reasoning, he attributed all his suffering to his enemy. The sun beat dazingly on his sombrero, and his thoughts were slightly addled. It was hotter than the hearthstone of hell among those bare rocks. His dry tongue caressed his baked lips.
Through the muddle of his brain burned his hatred of Esau Brill. It had become more than an emotion: it was an obsession, a monstrous incubus. When he flinched from the whipcrack of Brill’s rifle, it was not from fear of death, but because the thought of dying at the hands of his foe was an intolerable horror that made his brain rock with red frenzy. He would have thrown his life away recklessly, if by so doing he could have sent Brill into eternity just three seconds ahead of himself.
He did not analyse these feelings. Men who live by their hands have little time for self-analysis. He was no more aware of the quality of his hate for Esau Brill than he was consciously aware of his hands and feet. It was part of him, and more than part: it enveloped him, engulfed him; his mind and body were no more than its material manifestations. He was the hate; it was the whole soul and spirit of him. Unhampered by the stagnant and enervating shackles of sophistication and intellectuality, his instincts rose sheer from the naked primitive. And from them crystallised an almost tangible abstraction—a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or the necessity of material substance.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour neither rifle had spoken. Instinct with death as rattlesnakes coiled among the rocks soaking up poison from the sun’s rays, the feudists lay each waiting his chance, playing the game of endurance until the taut nerves of one or the other would snap.
It was Esau Brill who broke. Not that his collapse took the form of any wild madness or nervous explosion. The wary instincts of the wild were too strong in him for that. But suddenly, with a screamed curse, he hitched up on his elbow and fired blindly at the tangle of stones which concealed his enemy. Only the upper part of his arm and the corner of his blue-shirted shoulder were for an instant visible. That was enough. In that flash-second Cal Reynolds jerked the trigger, and a frightful yell told him his bullet had found its mark. And at the animal pain in that yell, reason and life-long instincts were swe
pt away by an insane flood of terrible joy. He did not whoop exultantly and spring to his feet; but his teeth bared in a wolfish grin and he involuntarily raised his head. Waking instinct jerked him down again. It was chance that undid him. Even as he ducked back. Brill’s answering shot cracked.
Cal Reynolds did not hear it, because, simultaneously with the sound, something exploded in his skull, plunging him into utter blackness, shot briefly with red sparks.
The blackness was only momentary. Cal Reynolds glared wildly around, realising with a frenzied shock that he was lying in the open. The impact of the shot had sent him rolling from among the rocks, and in that quick instant he realised that it had not been a direct hit. Chance had sent the bullet glancing from a stone, apparently to flick his scalp in passing. That was not so important. What was important was that he was lying out in full view, where Esau Brill could fill him full of lead. A wild glance showed his rifle lying close by. It had fallen across a stone and lay with the stock against the ground, the barrel slanting upward. Another glance showed his enemy standing upright among the stones that had concealed him.
In that one glance Cal Reynolds took in the details of the tall, rangy figure: the stained trousers sagging with the weight of the holstered six-shooter, the legs tucked into the worn leather boots; the streak of crimson on the shoulder of the blue shirt, which was plastered to the wearer’s body with sweat; the tousled black hair, from which perspiration was pouring down the unshaven face. He caught the glint of yellow tobacco-stained teeth shining in a savage grin. Smoke still drifted from the rifle in Brill’s hands.
These familiar and hated details stood out in startling clarity during the fleeting instant while Reynolds struggled madly against the unseen chains which seemed to hold him to the earth. Even as he thought of the paralysis a glancing blow on the head might induce, something seemed to snap and he rolled free. Rolled is hardly the word: he seemed almost to dart to the rifle that lay across the rock, so light his limbs felt.
