A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 32: what you’re looking at

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

32 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY wasted any time on me in the beginning, for he was a fellow who never threw away his time on strangers. But the look of the white dog interested him, and he wanted to know where I had got Murder from. It was a thing about which I did not like to ' talk. I naturally did not want to tell about the death of a man whose hands I had tied behind his back; so I just touched lightly on the story and said that I’d traded the dog for two of my own. As I say, it was Murder that first gained me the wise ear of Scanderov; and it was Murder again who finally made Scanderov open the book of his mind to me. It happened in this. way. I kept the white dog muzzled while I was about the Point. There was some- thing about him—either his look or bulk, or the fishy scent of him, perhaps, that made the rest of his kind steer clear of him. Scanderoy even suggested that he was not really a dog at all, but a new vul- pine species that closely resembled a dog. He went on talking about the teeth, but got into such a language about molars, dentals, canines, and such that I could not follow him. But one day the strap of the muzzle broke while Murder was at my heel5, and before I knew what he was up to, he was a good fifty yards off, attacking the pet dog of a half-breed Indian. The breed emptied his rifle at Murder, and I more than half hoped that he would lull him, but shooting at Murder in flight, was like shooting at a snipe in full flight down the wind. The breed missed every shot, gave his dead dog a look, and then decided to take it out on me. He made a swift dash at me, his knife out and descending just as I was getting ready to use my fists. I grabbed the knife and forked it out, but the breed’s blade struck swiftly down at my breast. Except for a thing, I had forgotten, I was a dead man. I felt death with my eyes, I tell you, when I saw the blurred flash of the steel driving home. But it crashed to bits with a shivering sound like . breaking glass, and there stood the breed - with the useless hilt of the knife in his hand. It had burst to bits against the cuirass I was still wearing—wearing not - for protection, but to keep it out of idle, envious hands, and from the path of gos- sip. That was really a very lucky break. So I tickled the hollow of the breed’s throat with the point of my knife, and told him to quiet down and behave. There were two things about this that interested Scanderov, who happened to be standing by. He watched desperately to know what I was wearing that had turned the tempered point of that breed’s knife; and he wanted to know something about the origin of my own weapon—the one I had taken from the white Esquimau. When he came at me with the ques- tions, I said, ““Here’s the knife. Take a look for yourself.” His eye fairly devoured it. “Where did you get it?” “Look here, Scanderov,” said I, “you want to know why I wear a charmed life, and—” “I don’t give a rap about your life.” “You want to know what’l’m wearing under my furs, and about the dog, and about the knife. Well, Scanderov, I want to learn everything that you know about the Ice Pole, and how to get there.” E STARED at me with a sort of fierce contempt in his eyes; as though I had asked a poet to teach me how to write the most beautiful lyric in the world, or the greatest epic. Finally he said, “All right, Dll exchange information with you.” “You'll owe me some boot, then. Buy me dinner and a bottle of whiskey, and I'll do most of the talking.” : We talked until long after midnight. I told him the whole incredible story, be- ginning with Cleveland Darrell, and the explosion .. There is a sort of blood relationship among scientists, and I can’t tell you how Scanderov’s ears pricked up when he heard Darrell’s name. I carried straight through with the weird night in the laboratory and I wound ‘up with the halfbreed Esquimau—if that was what he was—lying frozen, face down in the snow, and that mark on his chest. Scanderov gave me his undivided at- tention. He picked up the knife, for the fortieth time, and turned from that to the cuirass, which I had unbuckled and laid on the table before him. Then he said, as he flicked the thin, ‘eb ~ % PES ht oe 2 Bib ae 3 ooks.com ~