A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

26 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY proper care and precaution, he never failed me—never! - Until then. And it looked to be the last moment that anything on earth could be of interest to me. It was not quick thinking that gave me a moment of respite, but by a natural gesture, I threw up my gun hand to ward away that devilish knife. There I had my first touch of luck, for the long, heavy barrel of the gun whanged the knife-hand of the Esquimau right across his mittened fingers. He brought his hand down, and it thumped me on the breast where he had intended to drive the knife home. But there was no steel in his grip; the knife had slipped out of his nerveless fingers and dropped into the crusted snow, where it stuck upright, trembling, and gleaming. In the meantime, I grabbed him, only to find that I had embraced a round of boiler plate, so to speak. I understood, in the same flash, why neither of my bullets had gone home. Bullets are intended to bump their soft lead noses into still softer flesh, and this rascal from nowhere was wearing armor of some sort under his furs. I might as well have embraced a bar- rel; but his first hug nearly broke my back. It sent a bursting rush of blood up behind my eyes so that I saw everything through a red swirl, and leaping through the crimson haze came the man-hunting dog. Oh, he meant business, let me tell you, with his beady little eyes almost blotted out by a wolfish grin, and his fangs looking almost as. long as his master’s knife. I struck at him with a half-arm stroke and whacked him right between those beady eyes; the weight of his charge crashed blindly against his master and me, and sent us toppling over in the snow. I was underneath the man, and the Esquimau got my throat in one hand and picked his knife out of the snow with the other, as calmly as any lady would pick a needle out of a big white pin cushion. All. of his teeth were showing through his beard, too. And then I smashed him in the face with the barrel of my gun. A Colt is the handiest short club in the world. The Esquimau turned into jelly and I crawled out from under the quiver- ing, jerking mass of it to find the white dog running in short circles, holding his. head down and trying to shake the cob- webs out of it. I drew a bead on him, but I didn’t shoot. Something came between my trig- ger finger and the trigger to stop me, be- cause I remembered that a dog is only what training makes it, and that this fel- low’s savagery wasn’t really anything he was responsible for. I was glad that some- thing had stopped me. The dog’s wits cleared, almost at the same instant, and he sat down and canted his head to one side, and looked at me and at the gun in the canniest way imaginable, as though he were saying, “This is‘not in the book. I have to study this lesson be- fore I can recite.” When I turned my. back on him, he failed to budge, so I gathered that I was free from danger from him, at least; and a mighty weight it was off my mind, for I would rather have faced another pair of men in armor than that swerving, pon- derous, lightning-fast body, with its knife- like, jagged teeth ready to snap and tear at me. I gave my attention, now, to the out- lander, and since he was still muttering and groaning, quite unconscious, I opened his furs at the chest and my fingers rubbed against wood, or something that felt like it, However, wood does not turn-a bullet fired pointblank from a Colt .45. So I opened his furs wider and saw something that was a thunderclap in my brain; it made me feel a little dizzy. For I was looking down on the same stuff upon which the message had been scratched—* Bound north of Alaska to the Smoking Land and...” Yes, the same texture of wood, the look of woad, the brownish-gray color of wood —and the substance of the hardest steel! I rapped the butt of the gun as hard as I could on the face of that cuirass, and a- hollow sound came back at me, but I could not see that it made the smallest dent on the surface! But, hard as the stuff was, totally im- penetrable as it seemed, I saw that small holes had been bored in it and through these holes passed a lacing of strong gut by which the armor could be taken on and off. icomicbooks:com Sh ee Peg PS