Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/44

58 in Relation to Eugenics states clearly that—"

"Sure," he broke in sarcastically, "and you can find plenty o' people who believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and just as many others who'll tell you that Bacon laid an egg, but let me tell you something, Pat Carmichael:

Fedocia Watrous killed that German spy and saved us all from asphyxiation. She must have wakened when he got his gas-kit out and saw that he was up to—remember you told me how her eyes seemed to glow in the dark? She was probably better able to see in dim lights than we are, just as animals can. So she whipped her shoe and puttee off and killed him with a single grasp of her foot, but the gas got her before she'd quite finished redressing, so—"

"Al, you're drunk or crazy; maybe both!" I interrupted. "How in blazes could she have throttled him with her foot? I suppose you'll tell me next she killed that crazy miner and saved those nurses—"

"Of course, she did," he broke in almost savagely. "Come here—" Seizing me by the cuff he led me up the stairs and down the almost lightless corridor to the room where they had laid her.

She was so peaceful, so lovely, lying in her white cot with the blankets drawn up cozily about her throat that though I'd seen her die I had to look a second time to make sure that I did not see the flutter of her bosom underneath the coverlet. The rain had stopped some time before, and now an early-morning beam of sunshine slanted through the window. But for Fedocia, as for the boy who'd loved her since their childhood, the night had come.

"Look here, Pat," commanded Weinberg, "look and tell me if those 'old wives' tales' have been completely discredited." He drew the covers almost reverently from the foot of the cot.

Her lovely legs were shaped as graciously as any ever sculptured by the master-craftsmen of old Greece, her ankles were as sharply turned and clean-cut as a thoroughbred race horse's, but her feet—"Good heavens! I ejaculated as I looked.

They were like hands; like powerfully-sinewed hands with scarcely any palms, but with fingers of abnormal length and thickness. The thumbs—or great toes—were mere vestigial stumps, and over all was thick, lead-colored hide, coarse and tough and callous as the skin that covers a gorilla's foot.