Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/45

Rh. And after we'd run into each other a couple of times I found out, to my surprise, that I liked him. We gradually struck up a friendship.

think I saw him more than a dozen times that summer. I hadn't seen him before because he'd been away for ten months with some expedition to some gosh-awful place—Mesopotamia, I think. He told me that they had a hole out there in the desert; it was over forty feet deep in some places, and they'd already unearthed the ruins of nine distinct civilizations, city piled upon city like the layers of a cake. And they weren't to the bottom yet; they were going back and dig some more. Fothergill sailed for England around the end of August, and that was the last I saw of him that year.

"He was in New Hartford for about two months the next summer. We picked up where we'd left off, without any fuss or feathers; we were both bachelors, remember, up there to rest and get away for a time from the pressure of living. We each did our own cooking, and we got into the habit of taking our evening meals together; he'd come over and have supper with me one night, and I'd return the visit the next. It saved labor.

"He showed me a lot of pictures, that summer, of their camp, their excavations and what-not. They'd done a large amount of digging; they'd plowed up a piece of desert you couldn't put into a forty-acre lot, and, as I told you, in some places they'd gone down pretty deep, forty feet or more. He showed me a lot of photographs of brick walls—those old cities over in Asia Minor were mostly built of brick, you know—and pieces of pottery, and inscribed tiles, and statuary; oh, they were digging up a tremendous quantity of stuff, all prehistoric; the city down at the bottom of those forty-foot holes was forgotten before the Pyramids were built.

"Well, he went away again that year at along about the same time, around the end of August. And he showed up in New Hartford again around the middle of the following July—July, 1928. He was later than, usual in getting home that year; he'd had to stop in London and catch up on a lot of desk work.

"He telephoned me on the day he arrived (as much as I disliked the idea of having a telephone at the farm I'd had one installed so that I'd always be accessible in emergency; that's part of the hell of being a doctor) and asked me to come over. I had just finished lunch; it was about one o'clock in the afternoon, and I had planned to get in three or four hours' work on a case history I was writing up, so I suggested meeting for dinner. He was insistent, in a voice so thick and strange that I thought he must be ill. Too, he hadn't dropped in, casually; he had telephoned. That was odd. I went to his house at once.

"Obviously he had called me at almost the moment he'd set foot inside the house. He had not changed from the trousers of the blue serge suit he had worn up from New York; the coat and vest and a battleship-gray necktie lay on the hall table. The place was a mess; he'd had the house opened and cleaned and everything turned on, but the hall was still jammed with trunks and boxes of books and crates of God-knows-what. I noticed that he had already opened one of the crates, and removed its contents—

Come into the living-room,' he