A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 107: what you’re looking at

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

THE LITTLE DOLL DIED 107 — far below, and there weren't any guard rails at the sharp turns. : At the third turn I had my hat shot off—clean as a whistle, and I never even saw where the bullet came from. At the fourth turn I crept around the shoulder of a big gray boulder, figuring I night as well die then as later, and saw McCoy. His horse had been shot, and the poor brute was lying dead across the trail like a barricade, and McCoy was down behind the horse in a welter of blood, mud and. rain. He’d been shot through the left hand and there was a bullet in the calf of his left leg, but most of the blood was from the horse although at first glance | thought the Irishman had been riddled. He was writhing in pain, though, and full of plenty of fight. Sprawled down be- hind the horse, his back toward~ me, he was, aiming his rifle at the jungle above the path, snapping shots at the rainfogged undergrowth. “Come down an’ get me, ya dirty scuts! Murderers! Hellions! Kill my best friend, will ya? Come out in the open and. fight !”’ His oaths came faint through the gun- explosions; | legged it around the boulder and dropped flat beside him. He sobbed, “They won’t come out an’ fight the Mc- Coy. They've gone. There was a couple of them. They got Peabody.” About fifty yards ahead the trail made a hair-pin bend around another jutting boulder. Peabody’s little donkey was dead there in the path, one hind leg sticking out over the cliff-edge. There was no sign of Peabody. It made me sick. McCoy stopped snap-shooting and doubled up over his bleeding hand. No shots came back. We waited about twenty minutes, then crawled up to Peabody’s donkey and looked over. The cliff sloped down there like the side of a'steep roof before it dropped off sheer. Peabody’s sun helmet, knapsack, compass and other gear were strewn down through the bushes to the overhang. Then there was a thousand-foot drop through rain and mist to the lake at valley-bottom. McCoy sobbed, “He’s gone. I saw it happen. | was just overtakin’ him and he turned in his saddle to wave at me. Them ‘dirty scuts popped up in the bushes up there and let him have it. Then they fired at me. Poor little Wilf!” He put.his face in his blood-smeared hands. “It was aw- ful, seein’ him go over!” Just as we were leaving the scene I picked up that Arawak mummy out of the - mud. That miserable thing, too, had been riddled. I counted three bullet holes through its lousy little chest, and there was blood all over it as if it had still had life instead of sawdust in its veins. I took it along with me, grimly thinking it might make a nice memento for Mrs. Peabody. If I’d suspected how this Peabody af- fair was going to end, maybe I wouldn't have been so smart. | CHAPTER 5 The Corpse Doesn’t Bite ID you think that shooting in the 1) mountains was going to be the end of it? Then you don’t know Haiti. And you don’t know Mrs. Pea- body. I put McCoy to bed with his hand bandaged, his leg tied up and a shot of anti-tetanus in his arm; then I went around and gave Jenny Lou her husband’s sun helmet, knapsack, compass, spectacles and other belongs including the miniature mummy. She took them stunned. “Tm sorry,” I said. As decently as possible I described what had happened, playing up McCoy’s reckless heroism to make her feel a little better. at me with pale eyes like empty holes. , — “You—you didn’t. bring back Wilfred’s — body ?” m I described the treacherous mountain path with the slope and the jumping-off place and the lake a thousand feet below. “McCoy saw him fall from the donkey,” I said. ““When we looked over—he wasn’t there.” | She shivered. She said queerly, “I sup- pose that mountain lake was awfully cold.” Shock showed starchy on her face and I backed out hastily as I could, leaving her there in her tent with her husband’s belongings and empty cot. McCoy was a sick. man and needed tending—-he’d bled pretty badly on the return trip to Morne Noir—and I’d rather expected Jenny Lou to look after him; but I couldn’t ask her when she didn’t offer to. ; : So I had other things to worry about besides a widow. Charlemagne was still comicbooks.com She stared — d