Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/106

490 open without any subterfuge. The knife, incidentally, was the better of Old Chauncey's two. Shep had borrowed it, knowing that in communism there can be no Indian giving.

On one occasion Chauncey accosted Old Shep behind the kitchen with a crumpled letter in his fingers.

"Shep," he suggested casually, "I wish you'd slit my letters open at the top instead of an end. It wouldn't bunch the writing up so much when you shove it back inside."

"Chauncey," Old Shep replied tremblingly, "you're not serious with me, are you? If you want to keep secrets from your old crony, why, you just tell me seriously not to open those letters any more and I won't."

It used to give Chauncey a funny feeling when Old Shep talked like that.

somnolent summer morning while Chauncey was scrubbing his long yellow teeth he glimpsed blurred movement through the starched white bathroom curtain. Tweaking the curtain somewhat aside he witnessed Old Shep scampering down the side hill to the ice-house with a load of kindling in his arms.

"I'll be dog-goned," swore Old Chauncey with toothpaste foam dribbling down his chin. "He complains he can't do his chopping on account of his rheumatism, and look at the old turkey go! I see where I chop kindling for both of us from now on."

When Old Shep showed up to get in a few licks of whittling before breakfast, Chauncey inquired, "How's that rheumatism?"

"Fierce, Chauncey. I'm getting mighty creaky."

"Well, help yourself to my kindling, Shep. Long as I know where it's disappearing to, I don't give a durn."

"Thanks, Chauncey; thanks! I knew you'd feel that way."

The bacon, eggs, and delicately crusty fried potatoes hit the palate so ambrosially that, after breakfast, Chauncey was seduced into the disastrous error of mentioning to Shep the chances of marrying Miss Lilleoden: error, for it was only human nature to covet the goods which another man prized most.

Thenceforward Old Shep neglected his whittling or idled awkwardly with it in the kitchen, where a housekeeper spends most of her time. Chauncey observed blackly that Old Shep had a cunning way with him, too.

"Durn it," Chauncey ruminated dismally, "everything I want, he gets. If I tell him to stay away from her he won't take me seriously. The old hoodoo always has his way. Anyhow, his durned whittling is out of my sight."

a morning when Old Shep didn't appear, and Chauncey found him stretched out stiff half-way down the side hill. In Shep's vulturine right fist was clenched a small crumple of bills. This pilfering had occurred with such regularity that the companion of Chauncey's childhood had accumulated just about enough to get started with Celia Lilleoden.

Chauncey asked the coroner, a glistening little round man like a wet dumpling, "Is he dead?"

"Of course he's dead," said the coroner. "Obviously."

"He has no kin," Celia reminded Old Chauncey in her slow, soft contralto.

"I'll do him one more favor," Chauncey offered unblinkingly. "He can have my lot in the cemet'ry."