Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/29

fingernails in his impatience. "She keeled over just after you left the platform in front of the tent. Just fell over, and there you are."

"You're sure?"

"My God! Do you think mistakes can be made on a thing like that? Sure she's dead. Now I want to cremate her. It was always her wish."

"It might be six wishes, and she might be ten times dead. But you can't go off half-cocked like this. You can't go ahead and cremate a person that's only an hour or two dead. There has to be an investigation, a coroner's verdict——"

"I know that. And that's fixed. The doc I got is the coroner. He has made sure that the death was natural, and I can go ahead."

"But jumping cats, Welch——" I began, still too stunned by the news to start feeling sorry for Dor, who was a nice kid and whom I liked.

"Don't you understand?" he snapped. "The quicker I can get Dor cremated the less chance everybody has of being tied up in real trouble. There's been plenty of talk, all along the circuit, about how this constant hypnotizing is bad for people. There'll be busybodies to say that it was the strain of that that killed Dor."

"And did it?" I said bluntly.

"Of course not! She died of a heart-attack. The Scranton coroner is ready to go on the stand and swear to that. Are you going to help me cremate her, or will you see the entire outfit maybe tied up in knots by some long-drawn investigation as to whether Dorothy died from being hypnotized too deeply and too often?"

I said something about meal-tickets before. If you work for a circus and the circus doesn't go along its regulation program, you don't eat.

"Okay,” I said. "I'll be with you,"

We did it pretty fast.

A few of Dor's best friends were at the hasty, short funeral services. Among them was Jim Blaine, alias Bu-Jo, with his dark eyes looking kind of like the eyes of a badly shot deer I had once seen on a hunting-trip. You couldn't find any expression on his face because of the mat of hair over it. But his eyes spoke. How he must have loved the girl Welch hadn't thought enough of to stay true to!

We filed past the coffin, and looked in at Dorothy Welch. She was rouged and lipsticked so that the gray pallor of death didn't show too much. She looked really lovely, lying there, and I came closer to wiping at my eyes than emotion had ever carried me before.

As it was, I blew my nose and went with Welch after the hearse to the crematory. They had the fires ready there. And the metal coffin, like a brazier. They put Dor in the metal casket, wood coffin and all.

It was pretty bad. I kept seeing Dor as she had looked in the chapel a few minutes ago, with red lips and rouged cheeks, as if she was only sleeping instead of dead. It was like putting a sleeping person into the flames instead of a dead one, I thought. And the fact that I kept thinking I heard faint screams as the first smell of burning flesh stole around, didn't help any.

"It's the draft," said the man in charge. "It takes a lot of air up the chimney to handle a fire as hot as we have to have here. You get those moans and things from it."

Maybe so. But I didn't like it. I got out of there fast, and Welch stumbled beside me. His face was green now, instead of white.

"Well, that's done," he said. "Let's get back to the show."

I could have socked him. Looking at