A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

é THE SMOKING LAND 19 “Not going in?” exclaimed the doc- tor. He paused on his way across the floor and stared at me. Then he laughed. “Oh, I see,” said he. “You're being the good watchdog, eh? Well, that’s all right, but don’t bother me about it. Darrell is used to having me slip in and out at all times of day and night.” He went on to the door, and I sat back in my chair, relieved, but when I saw him reaching his hand towards the open- ing key, I shouted out, studdenly—a twinge of suspicion pushing my voice out. Dr. Franklin jerked around. He was a pale but definite green, and the drowned look was on his face again. I covered him with my Colt, and I don’t mind saying that the gun shook. How would you like to have your favorite dog jump for your throat, for instance? Well, he stood there plastered against the wall, his hands pressed out flat against it beside him, while I got up and walked over to him. He did not shrink away, but merely watched me, blinking rapidly, gagged with horror, ee Ow I knew exactly where to find it. I simply dipped a hand into his right dressing-gown pocket and fished out the thing. It was one of those bull- dog affairs, short-nosed, but loaded with full-sized forty-five caliber slugs. I'd rather be hit by the regular bullet from the regular gun. A Colt smashed the pellet clear through you. The dirty bulldog re- volver is too apt to just curl its slug around a bone and leave it there some- where inside you.: I put the gun in my own pocket. I could hardly look at the doctor. I just watched his feet on the floor as he went back towards the outer door, and a very waver- ing line they followed, you may be sure! Not until the door slammed did I really look up. Then I got across to my chair and slid into it, dizzy, and cold, and thoroughly sick, It had been shocking enough to hear Franklin admit, on the ride over, that he nearly had been bought up by the people “outside.” I had thought that, and still think it, the most heroically honest con- fession I have ever heard. But now the same man, having been tempted, having confessed, had returned to the poison. Oh, any other man, but not that little, large-brained mathematical giant, with his international reputation, and all. But I had seen with my own eyes. I could still finger in my pocket the gun with which he had walked to the forbidden door ready to shoot Cleve Darrell dead! What did he intend to do afterward? How did he intend to get back past my long-barreled, professional Colt? It simply meant that the price had been so frightfully high that he was prepared to commit the crime, and die for it the next second. I was glad he was out of it, poor Dr. *Franklin, No, I didn’t despise him, or feel any particular loathing. I simply thanked God that whatever price had been offered to him had not been used to tempt me, Would some grave professor with the eye of a priest and a pocketful of wisdom and diamonds, come to buy me off from in front of that door? I told myself that no matter who stepped inside the waiting room, I would give him five seconds to step out again before I started shooting. It would be a quick count, too. But nothing of the sort happened. Per- haps they read my brutish mind from a distance, or perhaps the look of poor Franklin’s green face as he went out was enough to settle their minds about Smoky Cassidy. At any rate, I was allowed to sit through long, cold hours, while the moon rose, ‘and the haze of it met the electric light that streamed out the win- dow. I wanted very much to lean out that window and drag in a few breaths of honest, Rocky Mountain, unscientific air, but all through those nightmare hours I did not dare to budge my eyes from the outer door of the waiting room. But nothing came through it. No, the disaster came from the other direction, behind the thick steel of the door that guarded poor Cleve Darrell. A thousand times I have tried to order and solidify my memory of the instant. It seems to me to have lasted a full minute, though I know that it must have been only a fraction of a second; but it was the + Ae © MGA T AST oe ee pels la) A tila it a ads