Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/50

560 he did cook is a mystery to me. And yet I never saw him stagger greatly, and his speech, though thick, was always rational.

"Through that time the jug remained in the woodbox in his living-room. Every time I came into his house I looked at it, but it always appeared pretty inanimate to me. I mentioned this several times.

He's gone back to sleep,' Fothergill, on these occasions, told me impatiently. 'The only thing that really seems to wake him up is a good scorching. Then he jigs around for five or six hours before he quiets down. I've been leaving him alone.'

You'd better leave him alone for good,' I suggested. "You'd better bury him out in the lot and forget about him.'

Yes, I guess I'll do just that,' Fothergill assented. But the days passed, and the jug still remained where it was.

one day—it was the tenth of August—he abruptly announced that he'd decided to return immediately to England. 'If I stay around here any longer I'll degenerate into a common drunkard,' he told me, and I agreed with him. 'Now, look,' he proposed, 'I'm sailing at midnight on the twelfth. I've a case of champagne home—no bootleg stuff; you come over around seven tomorrow night and we'll have a real bang-up farewell party.'

"I accepted, with genuine pleasure and considerable relief. I couldn't resist asking him, though, 'What are you going to do with that jug of yours?'

"He laughed. 'I've already dug a six-foot hole out behind the barn, and tomorrow morning I'm going to plant the damned thing and forget about it.'

"After a little while he went home.

"I never saw him alive again

"I puttered around until after midnight that night, and after I finally did get to bed I slept like a log. It seemed as though I'd only been asleep an instant when the telephone's ringing woke me. I switched on the bed-lamp and looked at the clock. It was almost half-past two. I came wide awake at once; I was certain that it was New York calling.

"But it wasn't New York; it was Fothergill, drunker than a lord, so drunk that his voice kept alternately roaring in my ears and then fading away as he fumbled with the telephone. He was in a mood of crazy exuberance.

Hups!—you old sawbones!' he bellowed—'did I wake y'up? Shorry—Hip!—Hip!—get your clothes on an' come over an' see th' show! I've got ol' typhoon in his jug wired up—urrupp!—Pardon me—in the fireplace, an' I'm toastin' the livin' daylights out of him! I'll show him who's king! Right now the plug's drippin' out of his jug like maple syrup out of a spigot!'

You crazy drunk!' I yelled into the phone—and I was so angry at him that I was practically inarticulate. 'You cut out your monkey business and get into bed before you have an embolism and maybe die right there!"

"The telephone was silent for a moment, and I could picture Fothergill in my mind's eye—sitting swaying back and forth in his big chair before his fireplace (the fire blazing there before his liquor-inflamed eyes) with the telephone held loosely in his fumbling hands. Then he chuckled drunkenly.

drippin' out of his jug like—aahhnnnnn!'

"That sob—his sob—came totally