Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/69

A Short and Terrible Tale of Murder

For the sixth time Slater looked at the clock on the shelf. He took the ax from his knees and tip-toed across the rough floor of the cabin to a door of an adjoining room. Listening intently he heard the deep breathing of a drunken man sleeping within.

Twenty minutes had passed now, since his son Drayton and old Settler Hurt had tottered across the big messroom of the hut and each gone, dead drunk, to his own room to sleep off the hootch they had guzzled. The three men had celebrated the lordly haul of pan gold they had washed from the river that winter.

In little cloth sacks the dust and pebbles of the precious metal were stacked under the boards of the messroom floor.

Slater had put up to his son the proposition of removing old Hurt, but the son had refused to kill, had even winced at being an accomplice to any such affair. So old man Slater gathered the three of them that night in a drinking bout.

Himself sipping tea from a bottle, Slater had watched his son Drayton, who was unaware of his father's murderous plan, drink the hootch with Settler Hurt from the big jug until the two men were beyond their senses and had reeled to their separate bunk chambers.

And now, the ax in his hands, Slater stood before old Hurt's door, listening.

Why should Hurt have one third of the gold when Slater and his own boy could have each one half of it?

What if Drayton was afraid to kill Hurt? A shot—a gun accidentally discharged—a razor-lipped ax falling from a bracket—and old Slater had chosen the ax.

Twenty minutes was ample time for a boozed man to be fast asleep.

Slater was now inside of Hurt's room, closing the door behind him as cautiously and soundlessly as he had opened it. The room was inky black with the darkness, but a bit of good fortune was with Slater.

Through a tear in the window-shade of heavy paper a single strip of moonlight shone, and this fell straight across the sleeping bunk. The sleeper's face was turned from Slater, and the moon lay appropriately on the sun-browned nape of the drunken man's neck, just below the unkempt fringe of hair on his head.

Slater raised the keen ax to his shoulder and stepped toward the snoring man on the rough wooden bunk, to within a full swing of the weapon. Like a huge chalk mark the moon drew its white death-line across the sleeping man's neck, and the next second a purplish froth bubbled in that line of light.