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

I’ve said, it needs a certain time. I’ve used dehydration several times for preserving specimens, severed limbs, and the like,” he said casually. “I know the rate. The air here is peculiarly favorable”—that detachment, as arid as this forbidding wilderness, calling this fatal desolation “peculiarly favorable”!—“a steady hot wind all the daylight hours and practically zero humidity. And there is a final and peculiar feature in the air of this place. If we had approached from the other side, I should have been puzzled. But those dried lakes gave me the clue, as we came along, though I did not know that we should be needing it. Those sand beds are so well caked because they are dense with natron salts, so common in these desert lakes. When at night there is a slight humidity and this salt-laden air rises and is borne over this ridge, then this drying body would take up these salts and so become, as it is, literally pickled—a natural tanning process. The same sort of thing can take place under a number of circumstances, wherever the same balance, though in different proportions, is preserved. In the vaults of the old church of St. Michan’s in Dublin, there the bodies exposed simply to the right mixture of air impregnated with the gases from an old, marsh-engulfed oak forest are just like this, pickled, tanned, quite cured and flexible. Yes, the process would be quick here, quicker than there, quicker perhaps in this one spot than anywhere. Therefore a most unwise place to commit homicide and hope that nature would clear up your traces.
    â€œYet even here,” he bent down and touched the springy limb which wheezed gently as it swung, “even here, I feel sure, there must be quite a considerable time before the weather-curing required for this extreme of dehydration could be attained. So this man met his end by shooting some months, perhaps half a year ago. Now, who is he? Well, he is someone that someone wanted to murder or at least to rob. I suspect what clothes he had, beyond this shirt and trousers, were taken and, after searching, burnt. You see, a search, a hasty one, was made. The trouser pockets have been pulled out, so as not to miss an inner pocket, and not put back.” Mr. Mycroft was kneeling close beside the shriveled cadaver. “Um,” he said, “hurried but not unthorough. That nip out of the shirt was to remove the sales tag, I suspect.”
    â€œWell,” I put in at that point, “we can’t find out anything more. Hadn’t we better get back and notify a sheriff or someone?”
    The whole thing was rather too gruesome for my liking, and the longer we hung over this really horrible twist of what had been a man, the more Mr. Mycroft seemed to become absorbed by it. He positively brooded over it like some huge bat. The situation had become positively eerie for me and I was just trying to raise my spirits by reflecting that, after all, a vampire could not have chosen a less productive victim than this sorry bundle of sinews and shriveled skin, when, looking down, I was—well, horrified and disgusted. For Mr. Mycroft had taken hold of the object. He had raised it so that his lean, hard, white face looked into its face, dun-colored and chapfallen. But that was not the shock. It was what he did with it as it lay on his knee. He had slipped his left hand round the back of its scrawny neck until I could see his long fingers squeezing its jaws. He was manipulating it like a hideous ventriloquist’s dummy. And, sure enough, to my alarmed disgust, the mouth did open. I saw the withered tongue come forward as the muscles at its base were squeezed in the neck.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I cried.
    He made no reply, so absorbed was he in his beastly task, whatever its purpose. For a moment my fear made me think he might have gone mad—too much heat and exertion and, no doubt, shock—all that coolness was only