_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.”
The coroner jumped to his feet in his excitement.
“I see what you mean!” he cried. “Why haven’t we thought of that before?
But how, Bert—how will you do it?”
“That remains to be seen.” Sheriff Parker smiled oddly as he looked at
his companion. “If you are willing to risk the thing with me, I think I
have a plan that will work. We’ll leave here in the car about four this
afternoon; that will get us to the pool in plenty of time to set our
trap before dark. Bring along your repeating shotgun—a heavy charge of
buckshot is far more certain after dark than a rifle ball, and we can’t
afford to miss.”
Doctor Morse nodded understandingly.
“I shall not fail you, Bert,” he said.
* * * * *
Early dusk found the two men in the sheriff’s car slowly picking their
way over the stony trail which led to the Black Pool. In the bottom
of the tonneau was a ten-gallon keg, three or four short boards, and
something wrapped in burlap, while the back seat held a pair of repeating
shot guns and a box of cartridges. A hundred yards from the pool, at the
foot of a little hill, Sheriff Parker killed his engine and stepped out
onto the ground.
“We’d better leave the car here,” he remarked. “It is best not to make
any more disturbance in the immediate vicinity of the pool than we can
help, and we can easily carry what we need from here. But let’s look
around a bit first.”
Together, carrying their loaded guns in the manner of men who wish to
be prepared against any sudden emergency, they made their way through a
fringe of trees to the edge of the black, still water, which gave the
pool its name. Even by daylight the place was far from cheerful. The
pool, about seventy feet in diameter, was entirely surrounded by trees
which grew to within a few feet of its oily surface.
There was no sign of life about the place, not even a frog croaked, and
the muddy banks bore mute testimony that none of the many cattle which
roamed that region had been there to drink for many days. In one place
only was the mud broken by fresh tracks; and when his eyes fell on this
spot, the sheriff smiled grimly.
“You see them, Horace,” he said, pointing. “The thing has been here
recently—its trail is as plain as day; this must be its drinking place.
Now for our little trap.”
Returning to the car, the two men first carried the keg to the foot of
a large tree which stood only a few yards from where the “plague” had
approached the pool; then they got the boards and the other articles,
which, on being unwrapped, proved to be a brass hand pump, with a long
spray nozzle, and about a dozen feet of hose.
Doctor Morse regarded this contrivance with considerable perplexity. He
could not see of what use it could be in the task that lay ahead of them;
but when he expressed his puzzlement, his companion laughed softly.
“It’s really very simple,” he explained, “although it is merely an
experiment of my own, and may not work as I hope it will. The keg is full
of whitewash, and this pump will throw a steady stream for over thirty
feet. If we can get the brute within range, my idea is to spray him with
whitewash until we can see enough of him to shoot at. White always shows
up fairly well in the dark. Catch the idea?”
Doctor Morse gazed at his friend in surprised admiration for an instant;
then he impulsively caught his hand in a hard grip.
“You’re a wonder, Bert!” he exclaimed. “I don’t see how you ever thought
of it, but the scheme looks good to me. I am honestly beginning to think
we have a chance. But what are those boards for?”
“For a platform on the tree yonder,” replied the sheriff, nodding toward
a cotton wood. “For obvious reasons I thought it would be safer to do
our watching from above ground, and with these boards we can construct
a support that will enable us to stay in the tree with some degree of
safety. Of course, the thing may be able to climb, for all we know, but
we must chance that. The tree is within easy range of the water, and
those tall ferns and weeds, if we watch them closely, should give us
warning of the beast’s approach. Now let’s get busy, for it will be dark
before we know it.”
At the end of half an hour, just as it was actually growing dark within
the shadows of the trees, the two men had built a substantial platform in
a fork of the cottonwood, some ten feet from the ground, and established
themselves upon it. Sheriff Parker’s gun lay beside him, while he grasped
the nozzle of the high-pressure pump in his hands; but the coroner’s
weapon was ready for instant use.
Swiftly the day turned into night, and for an hour it was as dark as
pitch at the edge of the pool; then the moon, surrounded by myriads of
stars, slowly climbed up over the hill-tops beyond the water. With eyes
riveted upon the ferns, from the movements of which they expected to be
warned of the beast’s approach, the two men waited tensely.
For a long time nothing happened. From the blank darkness around them
came merely the familiar noises of night in the wilderness—the long,
wailing howl of a distant coyote; the chirping drone of the tireless
insects in the trees; strange cries of night birds, so different from
those of the birds of the day; the “plop” of muskrats diving in the still
water, and all the mysterious chorus of small sounds that one never
notices until after night has fallen.
Seated on their narrow platform, the watchers were soon very
uncomfortable, for the mosquitoes were numerous and hungry, and the men
dared not smoke for fear the smell of tobacco would give warning to the
thing they sought. Doctor Morse, eyes fixed on the top of a ridge which
could be seen through a break in the trees, and beyond which the stars
and the moon seemed to be grouped, was half dozing, when suddenly he
straightened up with a little start.
A curious thing had taken place! The stars, rising above the crest of the
ridge, _had successively disappeared from right to left_!
Each was blotted out for but an instant, and not more than two or three
at the same time, but along half the length of the ridge, all that were
within a few degrees of the crest were eclipsed. Something had passed
along between them and the coroner’s line of vision; but he could not see
it, and the stars were not close enough together to define its shape.
After a second of tense watching, Doctor Morse reached out and gripped
the sheriff by the arm.
“Did you see it?” he whispered. “It’s coming, I think.”
“Yes; but be quiet, for your life!” Sheriff Parker leaned forward and
shifted his grip on the hose nozzle.
For several minutes all was silent, then came a faint patter of stealthy
feet, and something like the sniffing of a hound sounded below them,
while the ferns waved violently, although there was no breeze. Almost
immediately came the sounds of lapping in the water—sounds exactly like
those made by a thirsty dog when drinking.
Taking careful aim with the nozzle, Sheriff Parker suddenly pumped out
a steady stream of whitewash which began to splash and spatter on the
edge of the pool and surface of the water. And, as the milky liquid
began to fall, the two watchers saw a strange and wonderful thing. In
a spot, which ten seconds before had been merely opaque darkness, _an
outline grew up and took shape out of the ground_; a strange, monstrous,
misshapen thing, squat and hairy, not unlike a huge wolf in general
appearance, but broader and more powerful than any wolf either man had
ever seen.
For an instant after the whitewash began to fall upon it, the thing
turned a big-jawed, hairy face in the direction of the tree; then, with a
horrible snarl of fury, which both men plainly heard, it charged toward
them.
“Shoot! _Shoot_, Horace!” Sheriff Parker yelled, dropping the useless
nozzle and grabbing his gun.
The two heavy guns, charged with double loads of buckshot, roared out
almost together. There was a coughing snarl from the thing on the ground,
which save for a white patch or two, was almost invisible again, and the
sound of convulsive struggling; then the sheriff fired a second time.
Almost immediately there was a heavy splash in the water; then absolute
silence.
Doctor Morse wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand.
“Did we get it?” he asked in a low tone.
“Yes, I’m almost sure of it.” Sheriff Parker, though tremendously
excited, began to lower himself to the ground. “No animal of the wolf
type could stand up against three charges of buckshot at less than a
dozen yards,” he declared. “I believe it is dead, Horace.”
When they warily approached the edge of the pool, however, the two
men could find no sign of the thing they had shot at, beyond a number
of footprints in the soft ground, and, in one spot, very close to the
water, a large splotch of crimson, which made the little sheriff chuckle
exultantly.
“He was hard hit, and he’s sunk in the pool,” he declared positively,
“sunk in water that no man has ever yet found the bottom of—a fitting
end for such a beast, although I won’t deny that I should have enjoyed
a close look at the body. But it’s too late now, and, at any rate, the
brute is dead. Let’s be getting home, Horace.”