Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1952

by Wild Dogs of Drowning Creek (v1. 1)

  “If he wanders out at night and those wild dogs rally round him, he may lose some of his love of nature,” replied Jebs. “And speaking of wild dogs, here comes one that isn’t wild. Hey, Rebel!”

  As on the previous day, Rebel had come part way to meet them. He elected himself an escort party of one to convoy them back to New Chimney Pot House.

  They saw that Driscoll had brought the jeep back for it stood in the front yard. Driscoll was down by the brook, helping Sam Cohill to put the final touches on a small shed, just below the newly installed water wheel. The shed had a foundation of stones, and its peaked roof was sheathed with stout cypress shingles left over from the work on the house. The whole structure was no larger than a big packing case, but neatly and strongly made.

  “So that’s where the electric plant will live,” said Jebs, trotting down to look.

  “We’ve got it inside now,” replied Driscoll, “and here’s the belt, ready to run from pulley to plant.” He twiddled heavy-duty wires protruding from a small hole in the shed’s wall. “And here are what will light us up like a Christmas tree.”

  Jebs and Randy helped string the wires to the house. Inside, Sam and Jebs secured the ends to a wiring system that was already connected to fixtures.

  “Now all we need is water to get things running,” announced Jebs. “Let’s go outside and holler for the rain to come down.”

  “You won’t have to holler very loud,” said Sam.

  Just as he spoke, there came the brisk patter of drops on the roof.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  RANDY HUNTS ALONE

  The rain fell heavily all evening. Sam Cohill directed a relaxation of sentry duty, saying that no dogs, wild or otherwise, would willingly hunt in such a downpour. At night, the drumming of the storm on the roof and windows lulled everyone into a deep sleep.

  Sam’s guess was right. Not even the vigilant Rebel sensed anything like stealthy menace outside in the rush of rain. By morning, the torrent had slackened to a shower. While they dressed, the shower slackened to a drizzle. As Sam Cohill summoned the boys to breakfast, the last drops fell. The drained clouds shredded apart, and sunlight came through.

  “Give a hand with this dish-washing,” urged Driscoll, elbow-deep in a pan of steaming hot water. “Let’s get out and see what’s happening.”

  “At least we got our roof on in time,” said Randy, glancing up at the dry rafters and sheathing.

  The dishes done, all three boys hurried into the soggy yard. Jebs, first in the open, stopped suddenly just beyond the doorway and flung up his hand in a signal for quiet.

  “Hark at that!” he said.

  Randy and Driscoll listened. “Something’s roaring,” commented Randy. “It sounds like a big wind.”

  “Or like Niagara Falls,” suggested Sam Cohill, lounging to the doorway like a mighty statue that had stepped down from its pedestal.

  “Falls—that’s it!” cried Jebs. “Come on, let’s take a look at our dam!”

  And he was off, like a sprinter at the starting gun. Swift Randy barely overhauled him at the very stream’s edge.

  The night’s heavy rain had filled the stream and brought it to the very top of the dam. Water gushed over the spillway and down the flume, and the water wheel turned nimbly and smoothly in its solidly wedged hubs. Over and over turned the wheel, the buckets in its outer rim scooping themselves full from the descending rush of water and emptying as they trundled around and down, then rising for more.

  “How do you stop that thing to moor on the belt to the generator?” asked Randy.

  “Easily enough,” said Sam, stalking up from behind.

  He bent down like a living derrick and fitted a gate of planks, rather like a big lid for a chest, into the rear of the flume. The spouting rush of water ceased, the wheel’s turning subsided, and Sam braked it to a halt with a quick snatch of his strong hand.

  “All right, get the belt adjusted,” he said, and Jebs and Driscoll hurried to do so. Rapidly they tested it for smoothness of progress over the pulleys, for tightness and for strength.

  “Let’s try it now,” called Driscoll.

  Sam hoisted the water gate from the flume. The returning gush of water smote the buckets of the wheel, forcing them down and turning both wheel and pulley. Inside the snug little shed rose the hum of machinery.

  Now Sam and Jebs lifted a traplike section of the roof, gazed calculatingly inside, and gingerly made adjustments here and there. Randy and Driscoll walked back to the house. The two amateur electricians joined them as they reached the door.

  “Snap that switch,” said Sam, pointing, and Randy did so. A light dangling on its cord from the rafters glowed obediently.

  “We’ve got it!” cried Jebs happily. “Sam, you and I ought to get honorary degrees as electrical engineers. Now you can flip on your refrigerator.” “And maybe we can borrow young Lee Martin’s electric railroad for Jebs to play with,” said Driscoll. “To be right honest with you, Jebs, I didn’t think you and Sam would get away with it.”

  “Neither did I,” confessed Randy.

  “Go ahead, lay it on us,” urged Jebs, bowing to left and right as though to gales of applause. “That sounds good, that wrong-guess stuff. You’re like the folks in Spain, just after Columbus stopped the show with his famous egg trick. It was Sam and I who had to show the world what’s what, and which side up it ought to lie.” He stood on tiptoe to clap Sam Cohill’s great shelf of shoulder. “Hark at the hurrahs, Sam. We’ll go down in history with Edison and Steinmetz.” “Who was Steinmetz?” asked Driscoll. “It sounds like the name of a big-time football player.”

  “No, it’s the name of a big-time electrical genius,” Jebs informed him. “Edison and Steinmetz, Cohill and Markum—we all belong in the hall of fame.”

  “I’ll get Hobert Tasman to model busts of you to set up there,” suggested Randy. “And speaking of Mr. Tasman, I wonder how the trail is, leading to his cabin. I halfway promised him to come back today and read him some more of Lives of the Hunted”

  “I’m afraid you’ll find the walking pretty sloppy after this big rain,” said Sam. “The swamps come in pretty closely about the Chimney Pot estate, you know, and there’s a low stretch between here and Tasman’s. Every rain fills it up for a few hours, and then the soil soaks it up and drains it off.”

  “Come with me to Martin’s,” Driscoll invited Randy. “I want to tell him how our own private electrification program worked out.”

  “Thanks, I’ll stay here,” demurred Randy. “I’ve got a few things I want to think about.”

  “Don’t mess with Randy when he’s thinking,” Jebs advised Driscoll. “That’s a full-time job with him. Sometimes, when he’s thinking away full blast, he just about thinks his head clear off. Look, I’ll ride with you to Martin’s. Maybe I’ll just have a gander at that electric railroad Mr. Martin’s boy has.”

  The jeep left, with Driscoll cocking his gray cap above the steering wheel and Jebs beside him. Sam Cohill moved ponderously through the wet front yard, down to the waterside to observe again the workings of wheel and light plant, then back to where a great mass of flat rocks were stacked. With spade and grubbing hoe, the giant scraped a shallow hole before the very doorstep, carefully fitted a rock into it, then a second rock in front of that, then another. He was making a stone walk, rough but workmanlike.

  Meanwhile, Randy visited the animals beyond the back yard. The two calves gazed at him with the mild curiosity of their kind. The chickens in their run made a sort of excited squawking fuss. The pigs, with white-banded black bodies, were friendly, too. Randy tested the strength of the stockade slab that Sam had nailed back after the wild dog adventure two nights before. He studied the places where the traps had been set and sprung.

  Jebs, Sam and Driscoll had been so jubilant over the coming of electricity to New Chimney Pot House that they had forgotten, almost, the mystery and menace of the wild dog pack. But with Randy, as Jebs had said, thinking was a full-time job. />
  Nobody had believed his story of a two-legged monster among the dogs. Indeed, he was almost ready to admit that it had been a trick of his excited imagination. Hobert Tasman’s mention of the werewolf superstition had made Randy ashamed of momentarily believing a fantasy, of being like Willie Dubbin in belief of something besides just dog-nature in the pack. Yes, he had almost rejected the notion.

  Almost—but not quite.

  At the well behind the house, Randy drew a bucket of fresh water and carried it into the kitchen. Then he went to join Sam Cohill. The giant had already set half a dozen broad flat stones as the beginning of the paved walkway, and was prying big morsels of green moss from around nearby tree roots to set around and between these stones. Randy helped him for a while.

  “Sam,” he said at length, “just how much ground does the old Chimney Pot estate cover?”

  “We’ve had a preliminary survey made, and a few corner stakes driven,” said Sam. “Later on, we’ll have to clear some sort of line through the trees to mark the property limits. You came in from the county road about three miles on your first night here, and for fully two miles of the way you were on Driscoll’s land. Drowning Creek itself is the border-line one way, and the other runs approximately to a point out there.”

  Sam pointed with his spade, lifting it like a pancake turner.

  “On beyond, it’s a good two miles. I can’t tell you until the final survey’s finished, but there must be six or seven square miles of land, mostly timber.”

  “You’re pointing almost to where Mr. Tasman lives,” remarked Randy, but Sam shook his head.

  “No, you don’t realize how the trail winds from here to Tasman’s. There’s a branch off from that trail to the property line, marked by blazes on the trees, and the property line’s blazed, too. Tasman’s shack is a mile behind here, and he’s almost a mile from the property line.”

  “And what’s on the other side of the property line?” pursued Randy. “How close do other farms come to us?”

  Another shake of Sam’s great head. “Not close. The woods are pretty swampy, you know. And about twenty years back there bobbed up a dispute over ownership that hasn’t been settled by law as yet. Things like that have kept Chimney Pot sort of unvisited for three generations or so. But when we blazed the trees along the line, just about opposite Tasman’s place, a couple of the workmen said they spotted an old abandoned place of some sort on the other property. No signs of anybody living there, though. Probably it’s been deserted for a good twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!” echoed Randy eagerly. “In other words, it was a lot more recent settlement than the old Chimney Pot House—that stood empty since the end of the War Between the States. I’d like to look at the abandoned place, and see if it’s really abandoned.”

  “Maybe we can all go, later on,” said Sam.

  “Well, I’m going to try to see Mr. Tasman and read him some more of Ernest Thompson Seton.”

  Randy returned to the house, took Lives of the Hunted from the shelf, and headed away for Tasman’s. At the wood pile he possessed himself of a stout stick, as long as his leg and as thick as his wrist. Rebel, strolling around the yard, came and sniffed at the stick as though to approve Randy’s decision to carry it. But when Randy tried to call him to come along on the walk, Rebel sat down and gave Randy a gaze of courteous refusal. Plainly the bull terrier knew his duty as a guardian of the house and yard.

  Away strode Randy among the trees, but he had not walked for more than five minutes before he found the trail to Tasman’s clearing blocked by a wide, dank puddle of rain water, that filled a low place for some yards and lay among the tree roots to both sides. There would be no visit to Tasman’s for some hours, at least. He turned to go, and then paused and examined a tree beside the path.

  On that tree showed a big raw axe-notch. He remembered Sam’s mention of blazes showing the property line. It could not be far from here, Randy judged, though from Tasman’s the distance would be a mile—almost the same distance as from here, close to Chimney Pot, to Tasman’s.

  Into Randy’s head came recollection of a formula learned in high school mathematics class.

  It was a mile from here to Tasman’s, and a mile from Tasman’s to the property line at approximately a right angle, then those two mile-long distances would make the short sides of a right-angled triangle. The length of the property line between the point where this trail was joined to it and the point back of Tasman’s would be what geometry books called the hypotenuse. Of course, none of these three sides of the triangle would be straight, but he could consider them straight enough for the sake of working his problem. And you measured the length of a rightangled triangle’s hypotenuse by remembering that the sum of the squares of the two smaller sides equalled the square of the hypotenuse.

  It would be something to do, for a morning’s adventure, was Randy’s decision. If he could come to the point on the property line back of Tasman’s, he ought to be able to see the signs of former habitation on the adjoining property.

  He wedged the book he carried into a low forking branch of the blazed tree, and started away.

  As he walked, he worked the problem in his mind.

  He could divide each of those mile-long smaller sides into units of a thousand feet each. Five units to each side—the square of five was twenty-five. Twenty-five plus twenty-five was fifty, the square of the hypotenuse. Now then, the square root of fifty would be seven and a trifle over; he wouldn’t be far off if he figured that, when he had traversed the property line for nearly a mile and a half, he would be more or less directly back of Hobert Tasman’s home.

  It was not far to where the string of blazed trees he followed joined another, running both ways. Taking the trail of the boundary, he used his wrist watch and counted paces to help himself figure the distance. Half an hour’s walking brought him to where, as he estimated, he was nearly opposite the blind man’s shanty.

  There he chose a tall oak tree, as big around at the roots as the arms of three men could span, and towering up in a great profusion of stout branches and waving foliage. The first fork was within reach. He scrambled into it, then mounted higher and higher. A squirrel went dancing away, loudly complaining of this invasion of its domain. Randy climbed actively to the upper branches, gaining a point from which he could look out over treetops as over a great field of leafy bushes.

  But he could see nothing of New Chimney Pot House on his back track, or of the little retreat of Hobert Tasman. Both were lost in the woods. From where he sat in the high branches of the great oak, he might be looking over an endless world of forest. No sign of houses or roads—

  Wait!

  He had turned to look toward the woods beyond the blazed line of the Chimney Pot property. Up ahead, and not far, was a sort of dimpled depression among the foliage, as though the trees sank away there to a stretch of smaller, younger growth. Randy’s curiosity impelled him to find out what that was, and why it was there.

  Swiftly he lowered himself from branch to branch, picked up his stick from between two roots of the oak, and continued his way along the blazed trail. His eyes he kept fixed in the direction of that curious depression. Finally he stopped, took a pace or two away from the property line, and peered fixedly beyond.

  It wasn’t a clearing, but it wasn’t full of big trees, either. Randy walked toward it, careful to remember the way back to the blazed line of trunks that would lead him again to New Chimney Pot House.

  The clearing held an orchard, of trees in straight rows, marshalled like ranks of soldiers on parade. Randy moved more swiftly. He reached the nearest tree. What fruit was grown here? Peaches, plums, apples?

  It was an orchard, but not of fruit trees.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MANY MYSTERIES

  Randy’s frown, the crinkle that always marked his brown forehead when he was perplexed or intent, grew deep and tight. He looked at the lines of trees, as regular and straight as though laid out with a huge ruler. T
hey were an orchard, all right. But who— what—wanted such an orchard? What could be gathered here?

  He examined the tree on which he had laid his hand. It was no larger than many fruit trees, and its age was hard to decide. The bark of its stem was thick, dark, reddish-brown and deeply furrowed, as though it were many years old; yet the twigs that sprouted from the branches looked as bright, fresh green as water-grass, and their leaves were big and plentiful. He transferred his hand from the trunk to a twig, pulling it down to examine.

  Three big leaves grew on that twig, no two of them alike.

  One leaf, about four inches long, made a smooth oval shape, its outer edges curving into two arcs to the point at the free end. But directly beside that oval leaf grew another, from one edge of which jutted out a smaller lobe. It looked like a green mitten with a separate thumb. And the third leaf was divided into three points, like a vegetable paw. The mitten-leaf and the paw-leaf looked almost alive, almost ready to clutch and squeeze. Randy let go of the twig, and it snapped upward from his fingers.

  “Sassafras!” he said aloud. “What’s the use of an orchard of sassafras?”

  He stood there and remembered all that he had ever heard about sassafras. There seemed to be plenty to remember, for sassafras had always stuck in his mind as a plant with strange characteristics and equally strange folklore.

  No other growth had leaves of different shapes on the same branch, sometimes in the same cluster. To even an expert botanist, if he had never seen or heard about sassafras, those three different shapes of leaves would signify different kinds of tree or bush. No wonder both the Indians and the white settlers had thought of it as a magic plant, had believed that it could be brewed for a curse or a spell . . .

  Anyway, here was a carefully planted orchard of it. Randy started to walk between the rows of sassafras trees, then drew back. He argued with himself that he wasn’t superstitious. Maybe he’d just heard too many strange stories from Willie Dubbin and Hobert Tasman. It must be that fact that made the strange orchard seem somehow menacing. He decided to skirt it on his way to find out whatever might be beyond.