Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/96

Rh the third time, I began to put a few questions:

"'What's your name?'

"'Jake.'

"'Jake what?' The length of the pause which followed my question warned me that the answer was likely to be a lie.

"'Jake Thomas Smith.'

"'Have you any more names?' I queried sarcastically, and to my surprize he nodded.

"'The blokes in my platoon call me "Crazy Jake",' he informed me solemnly.

"I looked hard at him, suspecting that I was being paid back in my own coin. But he went on unconcernedly finishing up the remaining scraps of food, cracking the bones with his strong teeth, the canines of which were unusually long and pointed. When he licked up every scrap of gravy off his plate, just like a dog, I began to glimpse something of the truth. He was one of those rare examples of extreme atavism, a throw-back to primitive types, an unlucky being who had been cursed with more than his fair share of the thin streak of animalism which is the compulsory legacy of the human race. Later on, when I had the opportunity of examining him more closely, I found that he was able to exercise those muscles (represented in the normal man as mere rudimentary survivals) which move the ears; his sense of smell was unusually keen; his eyes possessed the power of reflecting the light in exactly the same manner as the eyes of certain species of carnivores. It came as something of a shock to think that such a man had been accepted for military service, but, after all, there was nothing wrong with him in a physical sense. On the contrary, as is so often the case with these reversions, the man was exceptionally strong and active, and his peculiar mental traits might well have passed unnoticed in the perfunctory examination to which recruits were subjected in the latter days of the war.

"By degrees I got his story from him. Of course he was a deserter, though to do him bare justice he seemed quite unconscious of the gravity of his offense—or, indeed, that he had committed any offense at all. He had simply got tired of his surroundings, and the irksome restraints on his liberty, and had wandered off, his instinct drawing him to the great open moors, living on herbs and roots, and scraps that he could find or steal, until the intense cold had beaten him.

"'And what do you intend to do?' I asked him when he had finished his vague and rambling tale.

"He gave me a vacant stare. 'I dunno,' was the extent of his future plans.

"'Do you know what they'll do to you if they catch you, Jake?'

"'Make me slope arms by numbers?' His accompanying grimace was eloquent of his distaste for that form of exercise.

"'They'll do more than that, my poor lad. They will shoot you.'

"'Me?' he cried with a sort of simple wonder. 'Shoot me dead?'

"'Dead as mutton,' I had to tell him.

"'Why?' he demanded in an aggrieved tone. 'I never hurt 'em—I never hurt a fly.'

"'That's just the trouble, Jake. You became a soldier in order to hurt people. That's what a soldier is for in time of war—to hurt soldiers wearing another sort of uniform—or to get hurt by them.' I tried to explain the matter as best I could, but after I had finished I very much doubted whether the enormity of his offense had penetrated his intelligence. Not that he was an idiot in the ordinary sense of the word; I classed him as a 'mattoid,' a man whose brain could not be gaged by comparison with ordinary