A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

THE SMOKING LAND 21 expectation, with disaster embracing his death. And that was what I really thought had happened. But one’s real thought, and one’s sneaking inward suspicion may be quite different, and the suspicion which some- times nudged me and waked me in the middle of the night was that Darrell had been done away with by. murderers. Nevertheless, I went on with my work, while my ranch prospered hand over fist. Then, at the end of six months came the mild newspaper sensation of the piece of wood that was picked up in the moun- tains of British Columbia by a tourist. No real prospector or old-timer would have paid any attention to it, but tourists are always opening their eyes and finding things out that afterward astonish the natives. For there were odd things about that piece of wood. In the first place, drawn on it with a sharp point, were certain words, which said: Bound north of Alaska for the Smok- ing Land and The writing stopped, there, at the end of the piece of wood, as though more words had followed when the stick was whole. But the writing was not what had caught the attention of the wise men; it was not the writing that lodged that piece of wood in a special glass ‘case at the Smithsonian. No, it was the nature of the wood itself, because it turned out not to be wood at all! It looked like wood, and it had the grain of wood, and about the same specific SEEK POPULAR TAKE A TIP -- - BUY POPULAR! All of your fictional tastes will be satisfied with POPULAR’S glittering, array of Western, Detective, Mystery, Love, Sports, Adventure, Fantasy Magazines TAKE THE POPULAR TRAIL! gravity. But it was tougher than steel, and almost as hard as corundum. In fact, the wise men decided that the writing on it must have been scratched by a diamond point! It was, it appeared, wood impregnated with some mysterious substance, hitherto never discovered upon this planet. That takes the breath, doesn’t it? No, it was not petrified pitch, or any- thing else that the scientists knew about. It was simply wood into which something else had been injected. The wise men rubbed off little fractions of that singular bit of pseudo-wood and put the particles in their test tubes, and incanted long theories about atoms with electrons added, or subtracted, or some such rot, or the interstices of space being filled with—well, I don’t know what. You'll find all the theories in the newspapers and the maga- zines of the time; and it was in one Of those magazines that I found the thing which blasted me free from the dude ranch and started me north. It was simply a good, clear picture of the strange piece of wood, showing both sides; but the face that interested me was that which bore the writing. For, when I looked at it, something jumped in my brain, like a jack rabbit in the middle of a desert, and the idea kept running and running in circles around me, until sud- denly it came home to me with a bang. That writing belonged to Cleveland Darrell! No: NOT to his grownup hand, but to the sort of scratching that he used to make in his copybooks when we were youngsters together, and when I used to