Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/40

54 another lie. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt. Not for death, anyway.

I was in that state of bodily exhaustion that gives a curiously deceptive sense of brightness of mind as I walked down the corridor from B-19. Nine years could make a lot of changes, but at the end I'd recognized Lieutenant Thomas Ten Eyck as surely as if I'd known him always. As I glanced through the grimy window to the cheerless courtyard where the February wind was busy chasing little whirls of snow across the red-brick tiles it seemed to me that I could look clear down the vista of the years and straight across the ocean to a sun-washed summer afternoon in Fairmount Park where a boy and girl were idling by the monkey cage and he was telling her, "I bet you couldn't do it," as a little monkey fed itself from its hind foot.

She'd almost fainted at his none too witty sally. Why? Did it bring up tragic thoughts of her mother? Hardly. She'd not been fearful of the monkey'smonkeys [sic]. Seeing them had raised no phobia. Not until he called attention to the monkey's feeding, and expressed doubt she could duplicate it, did she wilt. Why? The question rose again, insistently, but found no answer.

Funny thing about life, I reflected. I had seen them for a possible three minutes on that day nine years ago. Then our lives had crossed again in Germany. She was somewhere in the city now, unmindful of his presence; he was lying in his bed back there with a sheet across his face, past all hopes and all defeats, quits with destiny before his manhood fairly started.

, for Gawd's sake, give me a snort!" Weinberg came stamping into my quarters, flakes of February snow adhering to the collar of his sheepskin, a drawn and almost haunted look on his face.

"Surest thing in Germany," I returned as I broke out brandy, soda water and glasses. "Been wishin' I had someone here to drink with me."

He splashed about three ounces of raw cognac in the tumbler and drained it almost at a gulp. His hand had trembled when it put the drink to his lips, but in a moment it grew steady, which to anyone who knows drinking and drinking men, is a bad sign.

"Easy on, old top," I cautioned as he poured a second, even larger, drink. "You know you're welcome to it, but—"

I stopped my protest as I looked into his eyes.

There was no trace of the brilliant, carefree, wise-cracking young medico whose steadiness of hand and eye and uncanny ability as an orthopedist were the talk of all who knew him. Instead, his countenance was serious with what Carlyle once called "the awful, deadly earnestness of the Hebrew."

"I saw it again tonight," he told me, and despite the warming glow of the brandy he shivered.

"Saw what?"

"Remember the lividities on that bloke's neck—the one we found dead on the train from Paris?"

"The one you said looked as if he'd been throttled by a gorilla?"

He nodded, taking a long sip of brandy. "Check."

"Where?"

"Over at the mortuary. I'd come off duty and was washing up in the basement when young Himiston—you know him, Cornell '16; came over with the last replacement from the draft—called me over to a wheel-cot standing by the entrance to the autopsy room. 'Ever see anything like this. Captain?' he asked, drawing back the sheet from a body. 'Nobody can figure it; they found him in the hall outside N-l8, the women's ward, dead as a herring with his head turned almost all the