Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 1 (1926-01).djvu/8

behind the gray rock walls of the state's prison. His life!

He swayed a moment before the judge. There came to him one second of terrific, vivid introspection. Someone has said that one who is dying thinks back over his whole life in just a few seconds. And surely something is dying in a man during that awful instant before he is sentenced to a living death. Memories came to the hunchback . . . . bitter memories. . . .

Rolf Jaeke had not been a cripple at birth, in fact for twenty-two years he had led a perfectly normal life save for the fact that he was an amateur thief. For some reason he could not keep his hands from those things which belonged to others, but which he coveted. He had distinctly a bad reputation and before he was twenty had been in jail several times for petty thefts.

Then came the accident which made him the hopeless cripple he would always be. That had been his own fault, the result of the freakish daring which always characterized his exploits; but he stopped only to think of the cruelty of the world against him; he gave little credit to the people who gave much that he might have the best of care; he only cursed them because they could not do more for him.

And so the years passed by, twelve of them, and bitter became the growing canker in the heart of Rolf the hunchback. Little by little, because of his mean and despicable nature, the people who might have helped him drew away. Little by little he killed the pity in the hearts of his fellow citizens, till they passed him by as they might a loathsome serpent.

Left much to himself he turned to the things of which the world as a whole knows little. He became a student of psychology; a follower of the movements of the stars; and it was whispered about that he was a believer in the theory of reincarnation—the transmigration of the soul. Too, it was whispered that the house in which he lived had witnessed many tragedies—that it was haunted by the ghosts of dead animals, perhaps dead persons.

His first imprisonment came as the result of his study of souls. They found him in his place one day very calmly chiseling the skull from the head of a living dog while the animal howled in agony. He was bent over the little table to which the dog was strapped, very intent on his operation. Later he told them he was waiting for the dog's soul to leave; that he had a glass container in which to catch the soul when it should leave. What he was going to do with it he never told; but he was a raging demon when they took him away to jail. Thereafter for many months he spent his days in the gray prison and had time only to think of souls.

When he returned to Caledonia he had changed but little, though his hair was a bit more gray, his face more lined. He went back to the haunted cabin at the edge of town and lived there. The place had been occupied only once since his departure, then by a family of four. They had lived there a week, and when they left were on the verge of nervous prostration. Of course some of the things they told were discounted; for who could believe that each night at 10 a tiny little figure of a man who would shriek in a wailing voice that he was the soul of Rolf Jaeke would leap grotesquely up and down on the mantelpiece? And who could believe that at the same hour there would come over the head of the family a terrible desire to mutilate the dog; or that one night he prepared to cut open his daughter's head to find her soul? That is too improbable to believe; but nevertheless the family left the house, and it got the