Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 142: what you’re looking at

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

982 f may atone for the sins of the spirit, he has atoned,” he said. “Pablo killed him?” I not so much asked as heard myself saying. “Pablo?” Dual repeated. “I am in- clined to think so—that he was the agent of his death at least. It is difficult at times to be exact. The probable time of Nep- tune’s dissolution showed plainly. The manner of it was less distinct. It would, in so near as I can read the indications, predicate a poison—”’ “Poison!” said Bryce, his voice a trifle hoarse. Poison! I repeated the word in my brain, “ Poison,” said Semi- Dual. “ There would be an almost sardonic humor about it, would there not, my friends, were the man who has sought for gain by the selling of slow poison, slow death, to his fellows, meet man’s final physical end because of some lethal substance in his veins? It were a subtle parallel indeed. Yet it is written that what a man sows he reapeth, and that he who lives by the sword by the sword shall he perish; and I have read—what I have read.” “ Anyway, the man is dead?” I remarked as he paused. “ Aye, dead.” Once more he inclined his head. Dead—Neptune—Pulfer. No longer po- tent for harm. In a sense I dismissed him in such fashion. The hawk no longer flew. The little pigeon was safe, preserved from what fate none knew as yet, save the man who was dead, and perhaps that other girl he had betrayed—Lolita, the dancer in her red and orange and green and purple shawl. T let my thoughts stray rather to Bernice— the poor little pigeon, who was now a for- tunate little pigeon indeed. I visualized her wide blue eyes when she should know. T could fancy them clouded briefly and then glad—glad at the prospect of a new, free life with an honest love to round it out and make it a complete thing. Bryce got up slowly, crossed to a window and stood there looking out. I think both of us were shaken by what we had heard. Dual, and Dual only of the three of us, seemed undisturbed. by year. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. But neither Jim nor I doubted. Semi had spoken as he had spoken to us before on more than one occasion, with a positive as- surance that mirrored his absolute convic- tion of the facts he voiced. And so neither Bryce nor [| there in that room of our suite in the Moctezuma doubted that somewhere outside its walls, somewhere perhaps in the hills across which the sheriff of Santa Cruz County led his posse to the search, the man we had been discussing—the man for whom Quagley was seeking—lay dead. And so, because we did not doubt, I sat there, and Bryce stood by the window, and at length Semi spoke again in his mellow voice, quoting Omar the Persian, whose quatrains I knew he loved: “*T sent my soul through the Invisible Some secret of that afterlife to spell And presently my soul returned to me And answered I Myself am Heaven and— Hell, ” Heaven—and hell. Man built them for himself, with his own acts, his own thoughts that led to actions, day by day and year In so much his was the choice— that his was the power to choose good or evil, wrong or right. The dead man had chosen evil, and now he lay dead from poison. Dual had said in so far as he could read the astral indications. There was something eerie in the thought. In a way, it balked the imagination. One strug- gled to conceive how it had been brought about. For not once as I sat there—not in the faintest measure—did I then suspect the weirdly, horror-compelling truth. I glanced at Danny. He had pulled a chair to the other window and was strain- ing down at the street. He seemed sub- dued, his usually restless, active spirit tem- porarily muted, as it were, by what he had heard. And then, into the silence that held us, cut the sudden buzz of the telephone on the wall. ss I started, took down the receiver, pressed it to my ear. “ Hello,” I called into the mouthpiece. And I heard Judson’s voice. It was tense with a half-controlled excitement. “* Hello—Glace?”’ oO ComiclbookSs.€©