The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

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СКАЧАТЬ moccasins, and—in the crook of his right arm—a long squirrel-rifle.

      “Huh? What now?” he muttered, listening acutely. “All-fired sing’lar, I must say!”

      Through the thicket he broke, just below the big rock, and for a moment stood peering about him. Then all at once his plinking eye caught sight of the clothes laid there to dry.

      He started forward, lips parted under the sweep of his grizzled mustache, eyes narrowed amid a pucker of myriad wrinkles. In a moment he had reached the clothes. His hand advanced to take them up—but touched them not. Instead, with a grunt of astonishment, the old man froze to motionless attention.

      “Huh? What’s this? Hers?”

      Dazed for a moment, he stared about him. He blinked, trying to understand.

      “Her duds? My gal’s duds here?”

      A splash, as of rapid swimming, struck his ear. With the instinct of the woodsman, he dropped silently to his knees, peered over the rough shoulder of the rock—and saw the head of a man in the pool—a close-shaven, bullet-shaped head, cutting a rapid V as it drew near the bank.

      “Cuss me if I understand!” muttered the old ferryman, recoiling. “But it’s mighty cur’us. It’s wrong, some’res; all wrong. I—I gotta see what this here means, I cal’late!”

      More silently than he had come, he slid back through the undergrowth and knelt there, watching. On a high branch above a chipmunk made oration as it threw down bits of bark, but the old man’s eyes held steady. And the long rifle, laid through a moose-wood crotch, “covered” the rock with grim and deadly menace.

      On, on swam the outlaw, his body gleaming with ivory flashes through the waters of the pool. Now he had reached the shelving bottom; now, clambering ashore, he was crawling up the boulder.

      He gained its crest, and turned and stood there, wet and glistening in the first rays of the sun. A moment he peered, as though to see some object floating on the bosom of the whirlpool. Then all at once he laughed.

      “Ha, ha! Fool me!” he exclaimed. “What for I be afraid of dat? It is gone—gone down de riviêre, forever! And I live. I live an’ I am free!”

      On his splendid body, tall, lithe, muscular, the sun struck out prismatic color-glints from the crystal drops that trickled slowly down.

      And as he stood there, he raised both sinewy arms on high, and laughed again—laughed toward the sky, the river and the forest, laughed toward the wilderness, laughed in the very joy of life untrammeled.

      “Bon Dieu! he cried. “Free, free! Dey pas capab’ for keep me. She—she could not hold me! She say, in life I belong to dem, in eternity I belong to her. Ha, a lie! I have escape dem all. Dey have lose me—and she, she is gone. Liberté, liberté!”

      Back in the thicket the old father cuddled the rifle to his leathery cheek, unshaven, wrinkled, wan. Lovingly he patted its stock; and as he sighted down the barrel he smiled.

      “The heart,” he muttered. “Nothin’ but the heart will do for me!” Then he cried: “’Polyte!”

      Round swung the naked brute, magnificent in his virility, a sudden terror on his face. The rifle spat.

      Blotched on the left breast, vivid on that gleaming skin, the wound blossomed.

      No outcry made the felon, but crumpled silently forward, fell like an empty sack and slid down the grim flank of the rock. On his supple body, the ridges of the granite creased long lines. The old man, still kneeling in the thicket, heard the slither of the body as it vanished—then a sullen plash.

      He stood up, as though arising from prayer, his face beatified; and once more thrust his way through to the boulder.

      Already the undercurrent in the cove had borne the body off and away toward the larger swirling of the pools outside. It wallowed onward, onward, sank, rose, turned, and ever drifted toward the river.

      The father, standing motionless on the rock beside the garments of his daughter, leaned crossed arms on the muzzle of the long rifle, and watched in perfect silence. Silence held the whole wood. Even the chipmunk, far aloft, was still.

      Two minutes he looked, then three, and neither moved nor spoke.

      All at once, as the body swung out, out by the wooded point where rippled the strong current of the whirlpool, he saw another form—a white, dead face—and black hair that weltered wide upon the foam.

      A little eddy sucked the outlaw under for a moment. When he reappeared, he was close beside the body of the girl who had so loved him that life and death and the dark gates themselves had not prevailed against that love.

      A minute, the two seemed hesitant. Then the whirlpool took them—took them, together; and, hidden by the wooded point, they vanished from the old man’s peering eyes.

      He stood there yet a little space, his lips curved by a strange and silent smile. Then, kneeling by the clothes, he kissed the rifle with deep reverence.

      And with his old, old face hidden in both hands that trembled only now when all their work was done, he knelt there on the rock in the fresh October sunlight of the coming day.

FIRE FIGHT FIRE

      Originally published in Munsey’s Magazine, Vol. 35 (1906).

      I.

      Hardly had Dr. Deane Miller landed at the Dorian Club’s boathouse to take on more supplies for the rest of his hunting-trip, when Merle, the pop-eyed negro boy, thrust into his hand a telegram marked Rush.

      Dr. Miller ripped open the envelope with a large, well-tanned forefinger, and this message flashed into his brain: Come at once; stop for nothing; urgent operation; must have you. Benedict.

      The doctor pursed his lips into a “Whee-e-ew!” of annoyed surprise, and shoved back his canvas hunting cap. His curly hair—he hated it—lay heavily clustered on his forehead; his eyes ached with the sunlight and the glare of the Lower Bay; he was dog-tired all over. Decidedly this message did not please him. He turned it over meditatively, as if he might find on the other side some solution to the difficulties of a twenty-mile train-ride and a delicate operation at the other end, without even so much as a change of raiment; but the blank yellow paper offered him no counsel.

      “Hang this!” he grumbled, striking the paper with his big left hand. “Hang it! Can’t a fellow clear out for a couple of weeks to shoot ducks and try to for­get a girl”—he groaned at certain memories—“without this sort of thing yanking him back to work again? If I was what she called me—a coward—I’d fake up some excuse, or say I never got the message; Merle, here, isn’t above money and without price—but no, guess I’ll have to cut for town.”

      Out came his watch. Twelve minutes to train-time—no, the electrics couldn’t possibly do it.

      “Here, Merle, you blackbird!” he commanded, weighing a half-dollar suggestively in his broad palm. “You bring me a telegraph-blank and rustle me up a cab the quickest you ever did in your life! While it’s coming, fix me a basket with sandwiches and a bottle of—no, I can’t even have that if I’m to operate! Well, make it, Pollinaris! Scoot, now, you calcined charcoal!”

      II.

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