Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/63

Madden was before your time, so I might mention that he was the editorial genius of that period, and a consignment from him was considered a complimentary ticket to the hall of fame. Of course I was wildly excited over my long-waited-for opportunity, and began casting about in my mind for a suitable man to approach. Several interested friends offered inadequate suggestions. I tried one or two, but either their lives were unthrillingly dull, or they objected to having their intimate histories made the basis of a story. I was beginning to despair when I recollected a chum of old acquaintance who had been condemned with T. B. Hoping to dodge the undertaker with the aid of fresh air and a tomato patch, he had gone off to rough it in the hills. I took the next train for his hill valley with high hopes.

Arriving there I told him immediately of the object of my trip. The poor chap raked his memory obligingly. But either he had nothing of value to give me, or I had grown unwontedly meticulous under the importance of the occasion. The morning after my arrival I was seated on an overturned tomato crate in his garden, watching him pick and sort the choice specimens of his small crop, when he suddenly paused in his work with the air of having hit upon the very thing I sought.

"I've got it, Hugh. Go up and see the hermit! I'll bet a house he's got a story—if you can make him talk. Nobody else has ever been able to pry a word out of him."

"The hermit? Sounds good," I answered politely, but morosely unimpressed. At the word "hermit" a picture had instantly presented itself to my mind. Some long, lean hillbilly. Lantern jaws covered with scraggly whiskers. Little, black, shifty, beady eyes. Endless chews of plug cut. An unwashed, odoriferous person. I'd seen hermits before. But merely for the purpose of furthering conversation, I asked: "Why won't he talk?"

"How should I know?" My friend was both amused and surprized at my question. "I don't suppose hermits ever talk, do they?"

"On the contrary, the most loquacious man I ever knew was a so called hermit," I assured him. I had, you will see, become thoroughly pessimistic. "Men give various reasons for avoiding contact with the world, but they are all actuated by the same fundamental impulse. They're failures. All they can do is rid⟨e⟩ their grouches interminably to whosoever will listen. I wouldn't walk across the street to interview a hermit! Where does this one keep himself?"

"Up yonder, at the edge of that bare patch on Old Baldy. You may be right about hermits in general, Hugh, but I tell you there is some. thing unusual about this fellow." My friend laid a huge red tomato in the crate he was filling, and there was a slight puzzled frown on his forehead as he answered me.

I sat up on my perch with a glimmering of interest to survey the spot he indicated. A high mountain loomed over the nearer foothills, thickly wooded save for an oddly flat bald space on the summit. Old Baldy. Well, I was certain of one thing. A man who chose to live at the timber line on an obscure mountain top the year round was sincere in his desire to isolate himself! He must spend most of the summer storing up fuel and provisions against the winter when he would be snowed in.

"What's unusual about him?" I asked. My interest was increasing rapidly. As I said, I'd seen hermits before—a number of 'em. But none buried alive at the timber line! I couldn't afford to neglect a clue.