10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 84: what you’re looking at

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

§2 powerful arms he was as helpless as a child. With firm, unhurried steps Dave bore his writhing, squirming burden across the porch, down the grassless slope, and to the very edge of the old well. There he tore the shawl from about Aaron and dropped it to the ground. He held the weakly struggling figure of the invalid head-down over the yawning pit for an instant, fiercely exulting in the rasping, choking sounds of utter terror that came from Aaron’s lips. Then Dave hurled his writhing burden headfirst down into the pit. There was a terrible instant of si- lence, then a sickening thud as the body crashed on the stone floor fifty feet below. No need to investigate the result—that fall would have killed the Devil himself. Dave picked up the gray shawl at his feet and carefully arranged it on the edge of the well, just as it might have caught there, had Aaron fallen forward from his chair while sitting in his favorite place at the brink of the pit. Then Dave quickly returned to the house, taking long, careful strides so as to disturb the bare surface of the’ slope as little as possible. He returned a minute later with a broom, There had been no prints on the slope before he had carried Aaron down to the well, for the meticulous Eli swept the space as regularly as he did the house itself. Beginning at the edge of the well, Dave quickly swept the sandy surface smooth again, leav- ing it clean and unmarked as he worked back to the porch’s edge. When he had finished, every trace of his footprints had been obliterated. Returning the broom to its place, Dave hurried back to the front porch, and fastened a large barbless hook into an opening in the wheel-chair’s back. Its own weight carried the wheel-chair down the easy slope to the well while Dave stood at the porch’s western edge slowly paying out the light strong cord to which the hook was attached. 10-STORY DETECTIVE———-————- He halted the chair against a boul- der at the well’s very edge. Its posi- tion was perfect. With the shawl caught on the rocks just in front of it, the scene was exactly what would have been left had Aaron toppled for- ward to his death on one of his usual trips to the well. HE surface of the slope, though easily marked, was hard enough so that Dave knew there was no dan- ger of anyone noting from the wheel- prints of the chair that it was empty when it went down the slope. He dexterously flipped the hook free and wound the line in. Then he brought a heavy straight- backed chair from the house and, placing it where the wheel-chair had been on the porch, he fastened the falsework ‘“wings’”—distinguishing marks of the real wheel-chair—into place on either side of its top. He then slipped the masque over his face, wrapped the huge gray shawl closely around his head and shoulders, and huddled down in the chair in Aaron’s usual posture. As seen over the porch’s high railing from the road below he knew that the view must be an almost photo- graphic likeness of Aaron sitting there as usual in his wheel chair. He had just one other little bit of acting in mind, a bit that would not only add a final touch of realism but would establish the time element indelibly in Jed Turner’s mind as well. Dave waited motionless and tense for the sound of buggy wheels on the road to the west that would herald Turner’s approach. His only thought now was one of fierce anxiety lest something might go wrong and Jed would not come. Slow, dragging minutes passed— minutes that seemed hours. Then at last there came the welcome sound of buggy wheels. A minute later Jed Turner’s rig came into view down the road. Jed looked up and, as he saw the solitary figure sitting there on the porch, he CORNICLOOKS (C@)