10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

80-10 -STORY DETECTIVE mail. He made the trip everv week- day of the year, rain or shine. And every day he returned home just half an hour after the one o’clock train first whistled for the village. Ten minutes for sorting the mail at the little post-office, then twenty min- utes for Jed’s leisurely homeward trip. Dave had timed him often enough to be sure of his unvarying schedule. ARON was sitting in his wheel- chair out on the big sunny front porch. For over a year now he had been unable to leave that chair with- out assistance. Yet once he was in the wheel-chair he was able to propel himself easily enough about the lower floor of the house, out on the porches, and even on down into the yard. A long, easily sloping board incline from one end of the front porch’s low floor made the yard trip possible. Dave went to the open front door and stood there looking out. Though Aaron must have heard him, the in- valid never even turned his head. The brothers Fenton never spoke to each other unnecessarily. Days often passed without a word between them. The clear, soft blue of the sky held not even a threat of a cloud. Dave again smiled to himself: in satisfac- tion. There would be no rain that afternoon to hamper his smoothly worked-out plan. He walked to the western end of the porch and briefly made a final calculating study of the terrain. The house, located at the top of a sharp little rise, was nearly surrounded with thick-foliaged evergreens. The little-used dirt road passed within thirty yards of the place, yet not until it was directly in front of the house did it give any view of the front porch. Even then, the high railing and solidly boarded space under it barred anything but a head-and- shoulders view of anyone sitting on the porch. Over the wooded hills to the west was the village. It was from that direction that Jed Turner would come - driving. And Jed, as he always did, would stop for an instant down there on the road for a word of greeting to Aaron huddled in his wheel-chair up on the porch. ° Dave, from his position at the west end of the porch, looked down an easy smooth slope to the old well. The deep, rock-lined pit had been dry for years. There was no cover of any kind over it, and only a few scattered boulders guarded its sheer edge. On sunshiny days Aaron liked to wheel his chair down that smooth, grassless slope. Stopping at the very edge of the pit, the invalid would spend hours peering down into it, idly watching the lizards that scurried and flickered from crevice to crevice in its rock walls. Old Eli was forever moaning that Aaron would some day lean over a little too far and go pitching -head- first to his death at the bottom of the pit fifty feet below. But the invalid always sneered alike at the solicitous fear in old Eli’s eyes and the unholy hope in Dave’s, and went ahead with his trips to the abandoned well when- ever the spirit moved him. Dave entered the house and went to his own room. There he unlocked his trunk and took out the stage proper- ties for the last act of the tragic drama in the house of hate—the masque, the shawl, the cord, the chair-back “wings,” and the weighted tin box. He carried them into the front room and, sitting down, waited patiently for the whistle of the train as it approached the village. Aaron was still sitting there in the sun on the porch. It would simplify matters if he should decide volun- tarily to wheel himself down to the well. But it was immaterial. Dave had that phase of it well covered in his plans. Then there finally came from the west the mellow whistle of the train, the whistle that was to be the death knell of the unwitting figure wrapped COMMICLOOOKS (C@