Read Online Reply Paid by H. F. Heard - Free Book Online Page A

the need to be friendly with the only living man in this desert of death, which here, for us, centered in a dead man, a man turned into a desert thing—more desiccated than the desert holly, his flesh drier than well-cured parchment.
    â€œWhy did you say ‘careless?’” I asked, conciliatingly.
    â€œWell,” he replied, not looking up from his final task of taking the last stones off the dead man’s feet, “it is careless not to bury more carefully when you have murdered.”
    â€œYou’re sure?” I asked.
    â€œLook at the skin. It’s perfectly unbroken anywhere else. But there is a tear in the chest and I think that darker color on the piece of shirt is pretty certainly blood.”
    It was hard to deny the unpleasant deduction. But still, this was not at all my notion of a murdered man. I’d never seen such an object and now it lay before me. The skin was stretched to the tautness of a drum over the sinews and bones. The whole creature was the barest outline of a man. I had never imagined anything could be so withered, desiccated. But save for that hole in the chest, the skin was unbroken.
    â€œIt’s horrible and unbelievable,” I said.
    â€œYes,” he replied. “Whoever killed that man who once filled out this shell at our feet didn’t know enough about the desert. It’slife that abolishes history and records and traces. Death is the preserver—the Keeper of the Records. This man was killed. We’ll go into the how and the why later. Let’s now try and understand why he was let signal to us searchers. He’s shot,” went on Mr. Mycroft, evidently reconstructing the conditions in his mind and so working back from what was present to what had happened, “he’s shot probably by someone who followed him, by someone who perhaps relieved him of his burros and of other things and then a considerable time after, when what has been taken off him has been studied (for even the desert takes some time to do as fine a piece of tanning and curing as this), the burros with their new master pass again near by, seeking their old master’s trail and goal. But here we are only at the day of the murder. The dead must be buried. Well, as we are agreed, burial here is a difficulty: cover him, then, with stones. But desiccation here is quite unusual. A body, our bodies are some 68 per cent water. If you can dehydrate such a sponge—well, it goes as hard and springy as a well-cured sponge. That is what this desert did. It put the evidence immediately into its perfect preservative—air, super-thirsty for any drop of damp. Our killer goes off, having packed his limp victim, with arms huddled across the breast, under the heap of small stones. Then the desert got to work and, as it carried out its embalming, limp and soggy muscles coiled and shrank like wet rope; lax sinews twisted like spring wire. The arm on the upper side curled itself round—the pebbles rolled off—the springy limb waved its macabre au revoir to its enemy, its summons to us.”
    â€œYou know who killed this man!” I interrupted.
    â€œNo, I don’t, for certain.”
    â€œWhy, it must be—”
    â€œMr. Silchester, you know now as well as I that it is just as important never to run ahead of one’s actual evidence, never to make a leap, as it is never to miss a single signpost that it offers us. I have said it is certain that this man was not killed by the last man who passed this way.”
    â€œAll right,” I said, vexed that he should still be the old master when, after all, I had now graduated. “If guessing is out, what does your detective deduction give us?”
    â€œThis man, we agree, has been shot; murder probably, manslaughter certainly. The next thing we can settle before we attempt the why and ‘by whom,’ is the fairly simple question of ‘when.’ The desert works quickly hereabouts, but, as