Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/70

Slater yanked the heavy ax from its dent in the bunk board. With another swing of the chopper he left a blood-weltering slot between the head and body. Then he stepped back to watch the gore from the torso mix with that oozing from the head arteries. A coagulating mass boiled and spurted about in the ribbon of moonlight where Slater had struck and beheaded a man.

Then Slater turned to re-enter the big messroom. He wanted to pull up the floor boards and estimate very carefully the gold which now belonged half to himself and half to his son.

Someone knocked outside on the door to the cabin.

Slater viewed the decapitated body on the bunk, then stepped back to the messroom. He saw the bottle partly filled with a brown liquid next to a fat-bellied jug on the table.

He started to take these away, when the knock on the door was repeated.

"Who's out there?"

"Me, Slater; I just came up from the forks to borrow some of your flour."

Slater opened the door and admitted Yank DuPerret, another prospector in the region, who camped three miles down-stream.

DuPerret walked straight to the table with the jug and bottle, and with a smile of greeting on his weathered face he tipped the bottle to his lips and sucked one big mouthful from the neck, then turned and spouted the liquid from his teeth.

"Dammity, what a swill! Phew!"

Slater saw that DuPerret had taken a swig of the stale tea.

"That's tea, neighbor. Whisky's in the jug."

"Tea?"

"Yeah—I drink it sometimes."

"And do you bottle it?"

"When I make too much at a time, yes."

Slater fidgeted a bit, trying hard to conceal his agitation. In the dim light from the single oil lamp on a bracket near the fireplace, the men looked silently at each other, only as men can look at each other in a country where gold is scratched from the earth and hidden again in rude huts where other men can not find it.

A door was banged shut in the cabin and Slater stole a guarded glance in the direction of his son's bunkroom. Then DuPerret laughed.

"I know you've got a fortune hidden here somewhere, but I'm not after it. Flour is what I want. And I'll test the jug, too."

DuPerret put the nose of the jug to his lips, turned back his head and let a few gulps of the hootch gurgle into his throat.

"That's more like," DuPerret exclaimed as he put down the whisky, satisfied.

Slater shifted uneasily. He tried with his nostrils to smell if there was a trace of gore in the cabin.

"Now, Slater, you let me have some flour and I'll clear for home. My stuff's comin' up from the post in three days and I'll fetch it back to you then. And say, by the way, I dropped my ax into the slough this morning, and I'm out of wood. I see you're supplied for a time. Can you give me your chopper a few days?"

Slater went to a covered box in the messroom and dipped some flour with his hands into an empty cartridge box. He was trying to think of a way to get the ax cleaned in Hurt's room before handing it to DuPerret, when . . . Why, here was opportunity! The devil spawned a scheme in the prospector's brain.

DuPerret, here at Hurt's cabin just after the murder—his wheel tracks in the mud — the ax, red with Hurt's blood, found in DuPerret's wagon . . . They weren't so technical up here in the pan country: everybody knew that DuPerret was