The Spook Hills Mystery/Chapter 12

Vida sidled around Burney at a distance of two rods, and so came up to Spider. She was shaking with nervousness, and she was white and full of wrath.

"What are those men thinking of?" she demanded resentfully. "Why don't they fix Burney so he can't git away? Poppy says he ain't even under arrest."

Spider lifted his head. "I know he ain't. The thing's all balled up and there don't nobody know where they're at. Burney come up from Pocatello this morning with the sheriff. He was there yesterday and las' night. The sheriff says Burney hunted him up and come along with him."

"But how could he? He was trying to git in the wagon last night. I seen him—and I'd swear to that on a stack of Bibles ten feet high. How could he be in Pocatello when he was here?"

"Search me," said Spider glumly.

"What are they fooling around about, doing nothing?" Vida sat down beside him and watched the group as though they were all her enemies.

"Gitting ready for the inquest, I guess. That's the cor'ner monkeying around the body now. And all them other fellows are the jury. You and me and your dad and the herder'll have to testify, I reckon. Maybe they'll want Shep, too—but I guess they can git along without him; there's Spooky and Jim—they'll make out enough."

"I wish to goodness they'd get busy," said Vida peevishly. "I'll break loose and scream if somebody don't do something pretty quick. Say, even yet I can't realize it. It's just like a nightmare. I can't make myself believe it's Uncle Jake under that tarp"

"You don't have to. Just slide through this deal as easy as you can—if you want my advice. It's pretty tough at that. I can't believe it, either. I can't believe Burney would stand there like that with his hands in his pockets if he—done it."

"Nobody else could do it," Vida pointed out insistently. "And it was done, all right enough."

The coroner raised himself from where he had been kneeling, beckoned to the sheriff, and conferred with him briefly. Informal though it was, the inquest that followed had an atmosphere of grim dignity that served to comfort Vida and reassure her as nothing else had done. The law had taken charge of the matter. She drew a long breath and lifted her shoulders as if the weight of responsibility had been a tangible burden. The sheriff and the coroner and all those other men—they would deal with Burney as he deserved. She no longer felt that hot desire to shoot him down into a heap of inert flesh like her uncle. Though he stood free, a little apart from the others, with his pipe in his mouth and his great hands in his pockets, he was still in the grip of the law. The sheriff would not let him get away. He would shoot him first.

And then, as the inquest proceeded and her father testified, and Pete and Spooky and Spider and Jim, Vida began to feel a vague discomfort. The jury went solemnly down into the little gully to look at the tracks Burney had left, and returned a nonplused group of men. There were tracks enough, but there were no tracks that could possibly have been made by Burney's feet. Vida could not understand that. And then the sheriff was sworn, just like any common man, and declared that Burney had been in Pocatello when the murder was committed. Vida could not understand that, either. Her father told of the sheep that had been killed and of Burney's visit on the morning when he had ordered them off the range. But that did not offset the sheriff's amazing statement nor the mystery of the tracks that had disappeared.

There was a minute or two of whispered consultation and a question which the foreman asked the coroner concerning the manner of death.

"I find," replied the coroner, "that the deceased undoubtedly came to his death by having his neck broken by twisting. Four ribs were broken also, evidently by crushing. There are no bullet wounds—the only other marks of violence on the body being some scratches on the scalp behind the ear. These, I judge, were made by finger nails, in gripping the head to twist it."

Vida shivered. And then came the most amazing thing of all in her opinion. The jury whispered, and gave their verdict. And the verdict was that her Uncle Jake had met death at the hands of some person unknown to them—with Aleck Burney standing there within twenty feet of them, his great, murderous hands hidden in his pockets!

She sprang to her feet to denounce them all as cowards and fools and liars. But when she stood up and had gone as far as "Oh, you" things went black, and the whole scene was blotted out of existence as far as she was concerned.

When she came to herself again she was on her bed in the sheep wagon, with a wet towel wadded on her forehead and trickling water down her neck. Her father was scorching the bacon outside, and the coroner was talking to him about free wool.

Vida lay there trying to piece things together and trying also to muster enough energy to call to poppy that the bacon was burning. But neither seemed worth any effort, so presently she went to sleep.

When she awoke it was night, and a cool wind was stirring the sage and flapping a loose bit of canvas in the doorway. She did not know where her father was, but she supposed he was asleep under the wagon where he made up his bed always when they were together. She wondered if they had buried Uncle Jake—or would they have a funeral to-morrow? Not much of a funeral, with no coffin and no preacher or anything. How could Burney be in Pocatello when he was here in the hills? How could he make tracks where he hadn't been?

She went to sleep again, and dreamed that she was tracking Burney and that the tracks came and went in the sand without any human aid or explanation. Then she dreamed that she was in a blind cañon with no way out except through the mouth where she had entered. She had gone in there looking for Burney. But her dream shifted, as dreams have a fashion of doing: Burney was looking for her, and she was hiding in there. And she saw him creeping up the cañon, a gigantic figure in the deep shadows of the high walls. And suddenly there was no place to hide. And Burney was coming closer and closer, peering this way and that with his little, deep-set, twinkling eyes. He had not yet discovered her where she cowered against the bare wall of the cañon, but he would see her presently. He was so close that she could hear his footsteps crunching—

The wagon tilted six inches, upheaved from below, and woke Vida. She found herself sitting up on the hard bunk, and her heart was not beating at all; then it gave a heavy flop at the base of her neck. She screamed automatically, without any conscious volition; shrilly, without any articulateness.

The wagon heaved again so that she clung to the boarded edge of the bunk. Like a rabbit scared out of its hiding, she darted suddenly away from the bed and down the lurching length of the wagon box to the narrow doorway, jerked the door open, and looked out. She knew then what it was she feared. And she knew that she was afraid for her father, whose bed was always made up under the wagon and who slept heavily, as tired, slow-thinking men do sleep when their lives are spent in the open. The wagon settled down suddenly on its four wheels. There was a scurrying rush of some large object—but it was behind the wagon, where Vida could not see because of the canvas top. She did not know where her gun had been put.

"Poppy!" she called in a perfect frenzy of terror. "Poppy! Where are you, poppy? Oh, poppy!"

From behind the wagon—out in the whispering sage, a hoarse scream answered her. Human—and yet not human—mocking, maniacal, horrible. The most awful sound that Vida had ever heard in her life; a squall, a cry—a shriek she could not find a name for. Her memory flew back to the tales of ghosts and demons that an old Scotch woman had told her years ago. Warlock—that was it! A warlock, such as Maggie MacDonald had told about, that haunted the heath behind the village where strange deaths occurred periodically in the dark of the moon. When men and women were found strangled—and none knew how or why.

Vida crouched down in the wagon box, back in the shadow where the moon—a little later in its dip behind the high peak to-night—could not betray her to the devil that roamed without. She had laughed at those old tales of the warlock—except when she shivered over the actual telling. But now, to-night, the thing seemed real—a tangible menace. She felt its uncanny presence bounding away over the sage; a horrible thing; blue, with horns and a long tail; taking what shape it would; leaving what trail it would for men to puzzle their wits over.

She hid her face in her circling arms and shivered. She saw now why it was that Burney had seemed to be in two places at once; why it was that Shelton and Spider and Spooky had felt some eerie thing following them. They might have been killed! No one was safe from a warlock. No one.

She could not have spent more than a minute crouching there in the grip of superstitious fear, but it seemed to her that she must have cowered in that corner, against the grub box, at least an hour. She heard a stir beneath the wagon, a sound between a grunt and a groan.

"Poppy!" she cried again, and lifted her head. "What was it, poppy? Are you hurt?" The sound of her own voice steadied her wonderfully. She went back, and, in the dim light of the moon shining faintly on the canvas, groped with her fingers along a rough shelf over the bed where she thought her father might have laid her revolver. Her hand struck against the cool barrel of it. She caught it up eagerly and went hurrying back to the door that was open and swung slowly back and forth in the breeze like the pendulum of a clock almost run down for lack of winding. She climbed down over the front of the wagon box—if you are familiar with sheep wagons, you know that they are not very convenient as to getting in and out—and crept between the front wheels, where her father always put the head of his bed.

It was dark there, and the moon had set a black shadow of the wagon top down upon the eastern side. Vida groped with one hand—the other held her revolver. "Poppy! Why don't you answer me? Where are you?" she called sharply.

The vague outline of his squat figure detached itself from the shadow of the wagon, and he stood plainly revealed in the moonlight. "'F I could git a sight of 'im, I'd shoot 'em down like I would a ki-oty," he snarled. "Where be yuh, Vida? Tore m' shirt half off'n me, tryin' to git his hands on m' throat! All saved me was the bigness of him. He got hung up between the wagon wheels, and he didn't know jest how I was layin'. 'F I'd 'a' had m' bed out'n the open he'd 'a' killed me, sure. Man like that'd oughta be hung up by the heels—over a slow fire! Killin's too good f'r 'im. D'you hear 'm holler, Vida? Tried to sound like a mount'n lion, so's to fool me—but it didn't work worth a cent. He can't fool me! I seen him when he raised up 'n' turned tail 'n' run. I seen 'im plain as day."

"And was it—Burney, poppy?" Vida had crawled back from under the wagon, and the two stood together just within the shadow, staring off into the moonlit, whispering sage which the breeze moved so that it seemed alive.

"A-course it was Burney! He can't fool me! He got out in the moonlight f'r a minute, and I seen him, plainer 'n' what I see you. A-course it was Burney! He's a cute one—purtendin' t' be in Pocatello, 'n' at home, 'n' everywheres but where he is. But he can't fool me. He ain't cute enough. He crawled out 'n' stood up in the moonlight. 'F I'd 'a' had m' gun in m' hands, then I'd 'a' fixed him! Tried t' murder me in m' sleep! He woulda, too, 'f he hadn't 'a' been so all-fired big he couldn't git under the wagon."

Away off on the flat, where the sheep were bedded down in the care of a herder, a dog barked hysterically, in the sharp staccato of alarm; yelped once, and was still. A few mother sheep blatted, and a man yelled some shrill command; yelled just once, and did not yell again. Vida shuddered and clung to her father.

"I'll bet he went over there, among the sheep," she whispered terrifiedly. Then she took a fresh grip on her courage and her gun, and started to run toward the disturbance. She had forgotten her conviction that a warlock was abroad working his will upon defenseless humans.

"Come on, poppy!" she called back at the man, who still hesitated and grumbled threats in the shadow of the wagon. "Come on and help me get him! Big as he is, a bullet'll stop him—come on!"

"You c'm on back here!" cried her father, with futile authority in his voice, and stayed where he was. "C'm on back! You can't do nothin' in the dark that-a-way."

"He might be killing Walt Smith!" Vida flung the sentence back at him and ran the faster. But her father stayed by the wagon and shouted commands and imprecations after her as she ran.

She topped the last low ridge that marked the edge of the sage-covered flat where the sheep had been held for safety, and stood still for a minute, panting heavily and trying to see what was taking place out there where the band was huddled. The moon silvered softly the plain. She could see as far as Pillar Butte, even—a vague, dark blur against the star-sprinkled purple which was the sky. Then, quite suddenly, the moonlight darkened so that she could not see ten rods. She turned to see why, and a streak of vivid yellow gashed the night through like a flaming sword.

A thunderstorm, common enough in that country, was sweeping up from the southwest. Already it had swallowed the moon so deeply that Vida, staring upward, could not even see where it had gone. And while she stared with her face turned upward, she heard a cry down there below her on the plain, a man's cry for help. It was not so very far away, either. She swung instantly and faced that way, and wished for the lightning that would cut away the darkness.

"This way! Come this way!" she called, as loudly as she could, and with her thumb pulled back the hammer of her gun. It was Walt Smith, the tow-headed Mormon herder. He was running—she could hear him rustling the sage bushes that came in his way.

And then the lightning came—a bright opening in the clouds like a black velvet curtain drawn aside suddenly to give a glimpse of the brilliance behind. The whole plain was lighted more clearly than by the moon. And Vida, standing there with the lightning behind her, saw Walt Smith running toward her like a scurrying rabbit toward its burrow. Saw behind him the huge figure of a man who came on with giant strides, leaping clean over what bushes came in his way.

The darkness dropped and made the night blacker after the glare, so that she could see nothing. The heavy roll of thunder beat down whatever cry might have come from the quarry. But the lightning came again—and Walt was close—so close that she could see he had no hat on, and that his tow hair was bushy with the wind he faced. And that giant who came behind—he was close, too; quite close. In a minute he would overtake Walt.

Involuntarily Vida raised her hand and fired straight at his middle. The big man swerved sharply, and she fired again, and yet again. She saw him whirl and start back—and then it was black dark again. Walt Smith came puffing up the slope, and Vida waited for him. A little contemptuous she was—a little impatient because men ran from Burney instead of shooting as she had done. Walt had a gun—why didn't he use it instead of running like a scared rabbit? Burney would not have come after him if Walt had used his gun rather than his legs. She was beginning to understand that Burney was afraid of a gun. A gun was the only thing more powerful, more dangerous, than he was. He could not fight and overcome a bullet; he could not catch it on its singing flight and twist the neck of it and kill it. Burney was afraid of a gun. And Vida, once she felt that it was so, lost all her fear of him.

So her lips curled in the darkness while Walt came panting up to where she stood, and told breathlessly how Burney had got among the sheep, and how a dog had run out, and Burney had killed the dog. How he had shouted for the other dog, that was off chasing a coyote from the far side of the band, and how Burney had then come at him like a charging elephant.

"And you didn't have sense enough to shoot," she finished for him coldly. "You and poppy make me tired! I'll bet you dropped your gun when you started to run."

"No, I never!" Walt hastened to deny. "I kep' it—but I never had no chancet to use it. He—he was comin' right at me!"