Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/73

spoke there was sinister significance in his tone.

"This, Mr. Blondin, is the worst mankiller that grows in the forest: the Destroying Angel, the Deadly Amanita. Scientifically and technically, the Amanita Verna. There are others of the same family, the Muscaria and the Phalloides, and so on. But the Deadly Amanita is the worst of them all. It is absolutely fatal. There is no antidote known. The poisons in this mushroom are so deadly that they can be neutralized only by hours of boiling in powerful acids.

"Within a short time after eating it—the time varies according to the amount taken into the system—one is attacked with a horrible pain at the pit of the stomach . . . the face becomes drawn . . . there is a severe retching and a continuous craving for large quantities of water . . . the victim becomes weaker as the pain abates . . . at last he enters a state of coma in which he dies without regaining consciousness."

He looked at me steadily, and I hope I shall never again see on any man's face the look I saw on his as he realized that I had begun to comprehend the full significance of what he said.

"You see? Very well." His voice was strained and jerky. "You're too much the author to go back down the mountain with such a story in your possession and not make use of it. And I'm too much the sensitive-souled poet to face the world after it knows. Perhaps, after all, God's answer to me was a thing of Godlike subtlety. I must stay here. And some day—who knows? I nearly live on mushrooms" . . . He held up the lovely lethal thing in his hand.

It will always be a source of inner thanksgiving to me that I wasn't even tempted. Not for an instant. On the contrary I was swept by a wave of nausea. God! We don't climb to heights over the grave of another man's hopes! I snatched the thing from his hand, flinging it to the earth and grinding it savagely under my heel, obliterating it in a panic of haste, as if the very touch of it might make away with him then and there.

"You're wrong!" I cried, gripping his arm in a frenzy. "Wytten, old chap—you're wrong! I've known ever since I came up that I'd never take your story down the mountain. Now I know why. You may be right in your estimate of the author's attitude toward a great story. But there's a point beyond. I'm too much a disciple of the larger good to quarrel with any man's conception of a self-imposed penance for—for an error in scientific judgment of fungi. My lips are sealed, Wytten. Get that manuscript!"

So there you are. I did not go down Old Baldy alone. And the story I dared not write dominated my thoughts for nearly a year. During that time I helped Wytten to readjust himself and get a new start in life. I lost out with Madden and it was a couple of years before I caught up again. But I had the greatest reward that ever comes to any of us. I saw the maturing and flowering of another man's hopes.

Blondin ceased speaking and his eyes were fixed upon the California sunshine pouring through the window.

Ah—the nigger in the woodpile! Another man's hopes! My thoughts tied my tongue. And it had cost him Madden. Two years of work to get back what he'd lost. Another man's hopes! I looked at Blondin with new eyes. As long as I'd known him I'd never really seen the man before . . .

But this is Henry Wytten's story.