by Whit Burnett
its worst he tried to make it up to her for refusing the poison.
He kept a tittle pad soaked with Florida Water, and he patted
it on her forehead. She wondered whether she should tell him
about the white quail. He wouldn't believe it. But maybe if he
knew how important it was, he might poison the cat. She waited
until her nerves were calm before she told him. "Dear. there
was a white qu�il in the garden."
"A white quail? Are you sure it wasn't a pigeon?"
There it was. Right from the first he S!'oiled it. "I know
quail." she cried. "It was quite close to me. A white hen quail."
"That would be a thing to see," he said. "I never heard of
one."
"But I tell you I saw it."
24 • Nineteen Tales of Terror
He dabbed at her forehead. "Well, I suppose it was an albino. No pigment in the feathers, something like that."
She was growing hysterical again. "You don't understand.
That white quail was me, the secret me that no one can ever
get at, the me that's way inside." Harry's face was contorted
with the struggle to understand. "Can't you see, dear? The cat
was after me. It was going to kill me. That's why I want to
poison it." Slie studied his face. No, he didn't understand, he
couldn't. Why had she told him? If she hadn't been so upset she
never would have told him.
"I'll set my alarm clock," he assured her. "Tomorrow mom·
ing I'll give that cat something to remember."
At ten o'clock he left her alone. And when he had gone Mary
got up and locked the door.
His alarm-clock bell awakened Mary in the morning. It was
still dark in her room, but she could see the gray light of morning through the window. She heard Harry dressing quietly. He tiptoed past her door and went outside, closing the door silently
for fear of awakening her. He carried the new shining air gun
in his hand. The fresh gray morning air made him throw back
his shoulders and step lightly over the damp lawn. He walked to
the comer of the garden and lay down on his stomach in the
wet grass.
The garden grew lighter. Already the quail were twittering
metallically. The little brown band came to the edge of the
brush and cocked their heads. Then the big leader called, "All's
well," and his charges ran with quick steps to the pool. A moment later the white quail followed them. She went to the other side of the pool and dipped her beak and threw back her head.
Harry raised the gun. The white quail tipped her head and
looked toward him. The air gun spat with a vicious whisper.
The quail flew off into the brush. But the white quail fell over
and shuddered a moment, and lay still on the lawn.
Harry walked slowly over to her and picked her up. "I didn't
mean to kill it," he said to himself. "I just wanted to scare it
away." He looked at the white bird in his hand. Right in the
head, right under the eye the BB shot had gone. Harry stepped
to the line of fuchsias and threw the quail up into the brush.
The next moment he put down the gun and crashed up through
the undergrowth. He found the white quail, carried her far up
the hill and buried her under a pile of leaves.
Mary heard him pass her door. "Harry, did you shoot the
cat?"
"It won't ever come back," he said through the door.
"Well, I hope you killed it, but I don't want to hear the
details."
Harry walked on into the living-room and sat down in a big
The White Quail • 21
chair. The room was still dusky, but through the big dormer
window the garden glowed and the tops of the lawn oaks were
afire with sunshine.
"What a skunk I am," Harry said to himself. "What a dirty
skunk, to kill a thing she loved so much." He dropped his head
and looked at the floor. "I'm lonely," he said. "Oh, Lord, I'm so
lonely!"
LORD DUNSANY
THE TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH
SMITHERS is my name. I'm what you might
call a small man, and in a small way of business. I travel for
Num-numo, a relish for meats and savories; the world famous
relish I ought to say. It's really quite good, no deleterious acids
in it, and does not affect the heart; so it is quite easy to push. I
wouldn't have got the job if it weren't. But I hope some day to
get something that's harder to push, as of course the harder
they are to push, the better the pay. At present I can just make
my way, with nothing at all over; but then I live in a very expensive flat. It happened like this, and that brings me to my story. And it isn't the story you'd expect from a small man like
me, yet there's nobody else to tell it. Those that know anything
of it besides me, are all for hushing it up.
Well, I was looking for a room to live in in London when first
I got my job; it had to be in London, to be central; and I went to
a block of buildings, very gloomy they looked, and saw the
man that ran them and asked him for what I wanted; flats they
called them; just a bedroom and a sort of a cupboard. Well he
was showing a man round at the time who was a gent, in fact
more than that, so he didn't take much notice of me, the man
that ran all those flats didn't, I mean. So I just ran behind for a
bit, seeing all sorts of rooms, and waiting till I could be shown
my class of thing. We came to a very nice flat, a sitting room,
bedroom and bathroom, and a sort of little place that they
called a hall. And that's how I came to know Linley. He was the
bloke that was being shown round.
"Bit expensive," he said.
And the man that ran the flats turned away to the window
and picked his teeth. It's funny how much you can show by a
simple thing like that. What he meant to say was that he'd hundreds of flats like that, and thousands of people looking for 26
Tile Two loHias of Relish • 27
them, and he didn't care who had them or whether they all
went on looking. There was no mistaking him, somehow. And
yet he never said a word, only looked away out of the window
and picked his teeth. And I ventured to speak to Mr. Linley
then; and I said, "How about it, sir, if I paid half, and shared
it? I wouldn't be in the way, and I'm out all day, and whatever
you said would go, and really I wouldn't be no oiore in your
way than a cat."
You may be surprised at my doing it; and you'll be much
more surprised at him accepting it; at least, you would if you
knew me, just a small man in a small way of business; and yet I
could see at once that he was taking to me more than he was
taking to the man at the window.
"But there's only one bedroom," he said.
"I could make up my bed easy in that little room there," I
said.
"The Hall," said the man looking round from the window,
without taking his toothpick out.
"And I'd have the bed out of the wa:y and hid in the cupboard
by any hour you like," I said.
He looked thoughtful, and the other man looked out over
London; and in the end, do you know, he accepted.
"Friend of yours?" said the flat man.
"Yes," answered Mr. Linley.
It was really . very nice of him.
I'll tell you why I did it. Able to afford it? Of course not. But
I heard him tell the fiat man that he had just come down from
Oxford and wanted to live for a few months in London. It
turned out he wanted just to be comfortable and do nothing for
a bit while he looked things over and chose a job, or probably
just as long as he could afford it. Well I said to myself, what's
the Oxford manner worth in business, especially a business like
mine? Why, simply everything you've got. If I picked up only a
quarter of it from this Mr. Linley I'd be able to double my
sales, and that would soon mean I'd be given something a lot
harder to push, with perhaps treble the pay. Worth it every
time. And you can make a quarter of an education go twice as
far again, if you're careful with it. I mean you don't have to
quote the whole of the Inferno to show that you've read Milton;
half a line may do it.
Well, about that story I have to tell. And you mightn't think
that a little man like me could make you shudder. Well, I soon
forgot about the Oxford manner when we settled down in our
fiat. I forgot it in the sheer wonder of the man himself. He had
a mind like an acrobat's body, like a bird's body. It didn't want
education. You didn't notice whether he was educated or not.
28 • Nineteen Tales of Terror
Ideas were always leaping up in him, things you'd never have
thought of. And not only that, but if any ideas were about, he'd
sort of catch them. Time and again I've found him knowing
just what I was going to say. Not thought-reading, but what
they call intuition. I used to try to learn a bit about chess, just
to take my thoughts off Num-numo in the evening, when I'd
done with it. But problems I never could do. Yet he'd come
along and glance at my problem and say, "You probably move
that piece first," and I'd say, "But where?" and he'd say, "Oh,
one of those three squares." And I'd say, "But it will be taken
on all of them." And the piece a queen all the time, mind you.
And he'd say, "Yes, it's doing no good there : you're probably
meant to lose it."
And, do you know, he'd be right.
You see he'd been following out what the other man had
been thinking. That's what he'd been doing.
Well one day there was that ghastly murder at Unge. I don't
know if you remember it. But Seeger had gone down to live
with a girl in a bungalow on the North Downs, and that was
the first we had heard of him.
The girl had £ 200, and he got every penny of it and she utterly disappeared. And Scotland Yard couldn't find her.
Well I'd happened to read that Seeger had bought two bottles
of Num-numo; for the Otherthorpe police had found out everything about him, except what he did with the girl; and that of course attracted my attention or I should have never thought
again about the case or said a word of it to Linley. Num-numo
was always on my mind, as I always spent every day pushing it,
and that kept me from forgetting the other thing. And so one
day I said to Linley, "I wonder with all that knack you have for
seeing through a chess problem, and thinking of one thing and
another, that you don't have a go at that Otherthorpe mystery.
It's a problem as much as chess," I said.
"There's not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one
game of chess," he answered.
"It's beaten Scotland Yard," I said.
"Has it?'' he asked.
"Knocked them end-wise," I said.
"It shouldn't have done that," he said. And almost immediately after he said, "What are the facts?"
We were both sitting at supper and I told him the facts, as I
had them straight from the papers. She was a pretty blonde,
she was small, she was called Nancy Elth, she had £ 200, they
lived at the bungalow for five days. After that he stayed there
for another fortnight, but nobody ever saw her alive again.
Seeger said she had gone to South America, but later said he
had never said South America, but South Africa. None of her
The Two Bottles of llellsll • 29
money remained in the bank where she had kept it, and Seeger
was shown to have come by at least £ 1 50 just at that time.
Then Seeger turned out to be a vegetarian, getting all his food
from the greengrocer, and that made the constable in the village of Unge suspicious of him, for a vegetarian was something new to the constable. He watched Seeger after that, and it's
well he did, for there was nothing that Scotland Yard asked
him that he couldn't tell them about him, except of course the
one thing. And he told the police at Otherthorpe five or six
miles away, and they came and took a hand at it too.
They were able to say, for one thing, that he never went outside the bungalow and its tidy garden ever since she disappeared. You see, the more they watched him the more suspicious they got, as you naturally do if you're watc�g a man; so that very soon they were watching every move he made, but if
it hadn't been for his being a vegetarian they'd never have
started to suspect him, and there wouldn't have been enough
evidence even for Linley. Not that they found out anything
much against him, ex·cept that £ 1 50 dropping in from nowhere, and it was Scotland Yard that found that, not the police of Otherthorpe.
No, what the constable of Unge found out was about the
larch trees, and that beat Scotland Yard utterly, and beat Linley up to the very last, and of course it beat me. There were ten larch trees in the bit of a garden, and he'd made some sort of
an arrangement with the landlord, Seeger had, before he took
the bungalow, by which he could do what he liked with the
larch trees. And then from about the time that little Nancy Elth
must have died he cut every one of them down. Three times a
day he went at it for nearly a week, and when they were all
down he cut them all up into logs no more than two feet long
and laid them all in neat heaps. You never saw such work. And
what for? To give an excuse for the axe was one theory. But
the excuse was bigger than the axe: it took him a fortnight,
hard work every day. And he could have- killed a little thing like
Nancy Elth without an axe, and cut her up, too. Another theory
was that he wanted firewood, to make away with the body. But
he never used it. He left it all standing there in those neat
stacks. It fairly beat everybody.
Well, those are the facts I told Linley. Oh yes, and he bought
a big butcher's knife. Funny thing, they all do. And yet it isn't
so funny after all; if you've got to cut a woman up, you've got
to cut her up; and you can't do that without a knife. Then, there
were some negative facts. He hadn't burned her. Only had a fire
in the small stove now and then, and only used it for cooking.
They got on to that pretty smartly, the Unge constable did,
and the men that were lending him a hand from Otherthorpe.
30
Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
There were some little woody places lying round, shaws they
call them in that part of the co
untry, the country people do,
and they could climb a tree handy and unobserved and get a
sniff at the smoke in almost any direction it might be blowing.
They did now and then and there was no smell of flesh burning,
just ordinary cooking. Pretty smart of the Otherthorpe police
that was, though of course it didn't help to hang Seeger. Then
later on the Scotland Yard men went down and got another
fact, negative but narrowing things down all the while. And
that was that the chalk under the bungalow and under the little
garden had none of it been disturbed. And he'd never been outside it since Nancy disappeared. Oh yes, and he had a big file besides the knife. But there was no sign of any ground bones
found on the file, or any blood on the knife. He'd washed them
of course. I told all that to Linley.
Now I ought to warn you before I got any further; I am a
small man myself and you probably don't expect anything horrible from me. But I ought to warn you this man was a murderer, or at any rate somebody was; the woman had been made away with, a nice pretty little girl, too, and the man that had
done that wasn't necessarily going to stop at things you might
think he'd stop 'at. With the mind to do a thing like that, and
with the shadow of the rope to drive him further, you can't say
what he'll stop at. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for
a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder
isn't a nice thing, and when a murderer's desperate and trying
to hide his tracks he isn't even as nice as he was before. I'll ask
you to bear that in mind. Well I've warned you.
So I says to Linley, "And what do you make of it?"
"Drains?" said Linley.
"No," I says, "you're wrong there. Scotland Yard has been
into that. And the Otherthorpe people before them. They've
had a look in the drains, such as they are, 1l little thing running
into a cesspool beyond the garden; and nothing has gone down
it, nothing that ought't to have, I mean."
He made one or two other suggestions, but Scotland Yard
had been before him in every case. That's really the crab of my
story, if you'll excuse the expression. You want a man who sets
out to be a detective to take his magnifying glass and go down
to the spot; to go to the spot before everything; and then to
