A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

106 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY think he’s going? Has the fool gone mad ?” “It's that mountain ahead,’ McCoy pointed to a rain-swept peak looming high above distant escarpments, “He thinks the Arawaks are somewhere up in there. That’s where he found the mummy.” “He'll find something worse if he bumps into Charlemagne’s batch. They’d like nothing better than to get their knives into a white man.” 22 He kill the dirty sons,” McCoy swore. “They butcher little Wilf, and Pll murder every one of them. Mrs. Peabody once in Africa nursed me through appendicitis, an’ if she wants Wilf back T’ll get him if I have to go to hell for it. Don’t forget my name’s McCoy.” His face was white and he had a bleak glint to his eye that convinced me he’d be plenty good with his rifle. He was one tough Irishman. I’d have turned back a couple of times that afternoon if it hadn’t been for McCoy. That was the devil of a trail. In the muck our horses slipped, floundered, fell. The downpour battered us; the jungle clawed us, and the nerve-strain was brutal. Every turn of the path I expected to run into a fusillade of Caco bullets. Only there was no stopping Terrence McCoy. Wrapped in the white rain-cape Pea- body’s wife had lent him, hunched in sad- die over his gun, his eyes snapping from side to side, he forged ahead refusing to let me go in the lead. “Sure I tracked gorillas in Tanganyika ; it’s a poor gossoon I’d be if I couldn’t trail little Peabody.” He was a good tracker, too, and he picked up the trail where it was like a needle in a haystack. He taunted the snipers to nail him by galloping up on some exposed ridge for a look-see where I wouldn’t have dared to show my head. He gave an exhibition of nerve and recklessness second only to Peabody’s; and the wonder is that all three of us—Peabody, McCoy and I— weren’t murdered that afternoon. Because murder was loose in that Hai- tian wilderness, mister. I’m here to tell you it was. We came to a wild valley where the path forked in two detours around the valley rim, and at that path- fork McCoy dismounted with a yell. I couldn’t see anything. The valley was blurred with fog and rain, and the steam- ing, green jungle below looked like a vast bowl of cooking spinach. But McCoy’s sharp eye had spotted something. “Look!” He pointed. “See how that mud’s churned up? Looks like a herd of donkies stampeded here.” He stooped and picked something out of the weeds. “Pea- body’s note book! Holy Saint Patrick! He was here not half an hour ago. And he’s been ambushed !” McCoy fired a scared stare across the valley, and my hair bristled. No sound save the water bucketing down. The rain made a gray twilight that was like the dim- ness at the bottom of the pond; I could imagine Cacos lurking in the jungle like sharks in a cover of seaweed. “Maybe he escaped ’em. Maybe he’s out there alone.” McCoy swung up into the saddle with an oath. “Come on, Captain. T’ll take the north side an’ you take the south. We'll meet at the other end of th’ valley.” Splitting forces was a dangerous ma- neuver in that place, but McCoy was off in a shower of mud and water before I could halt him. It was a foolhardy busi- ness, but there wasn’t any chance to argue. I set my teeth and started along the south- ern circuit, cursing McCoy and Peabody and the colonel who had wished them off on me as if there weren’t enough trouble for the Marines. Somebody was going to get killed in all this nonsense, and I didn’t like the possi- bility that it might be me. All right. I hadn’t gone half a mile down that south- ern valley-rim before I heard the deadly crackle of gunfire. I counted three shots, then a slew of them strung together in a volley. You couldn’t tell where they were coming from—cliff walls bounced the echoes around—and in the rain I couldn’t see the other side of the valley. I did a Paul. Re- vere back to the path-fork, expecting any- thing. Brother, I got it! The trail McCoy had barged off on led along the edge of a cliff where a goat wouldn’t have wanted to walk. Whew! That was a nasty road. The edge sheared down into a chasm that dropped a mile; I glimpsed a dark lake comicbooks.co