A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 116: what you’re looking at

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

y= : Jj (116 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY clear the village outskirts of chance snip- ers; I snapped the order for pursuit, and while the boys chased out through the ate, we stood on that machine-gun plat- orm, staring at each other. “Terry!” The woman’s eyes filled with tears. She started to say something and broke off. He said huskily, “You didn’t think I’d left you, did you, Jenny? Me—th’ Mc- Coy 0 She said in a whispery voice, “It was brave of you to come back, Terry. You _ saved us.” He shook his head. “It was Wilfred who saved us, Jenny Lou.” “Wilfred !” | I couldn't tell you how she stared at that Irishman, or how he was looking at her. I know I was doing some first-class oggling on my own behalf. Perhaps you ¢an imagine us up on that stockade wall: the village fires dying and the jungle- shadows closing in ; faint shouts, cries, ex- plosions drifting back in the night, and the scenery littered with the shambles of that incredible battle. 66—T WAS Wilfred I was after when J hiked out of camp,’”’ McCoy was say- ing hoarsely. “Y’see, I went up in the mountains to try an’ find him. Six months is a long time gone, but I thought maybe the Cacos—well—had kept it. Or maybe some Haitian peasant up there would know what had happened to the body. Anyhow, I couldn’t stand you eatin’ your heart out like you’d been. I thought I’d try.” She waited, wordless, as the man’s voice stalled. His eyes roamed off to the distant silhouette of mountains. He said thickly, “T had a hunch, Jenny ; I don’t know why. That cave up there, where he’d found that little Arawak mummy. Maybe there’d be some clue. Any way, I went there.” He paused to pull a breath. “Jenny—I found him.” “Vou—you brought him back ?” McCoy couldn’t look at her. His eyes were here, there everywhere. All this time he’d been standing with that something held behind him; now he coughed and shifted his feet, and on his forehead come a shine of sweat. My hair went up, frozen. McCoy’s lips were moving but his voice didn’t seem to want to come out at all. He whispered, “Yes, Jenny Lou, I brought him back.” Then the words came in a blurt, ‘It wasn’t the Cacos that took him outa that lake; it was the Arawaks. Holy Mother! The Arawaks he’d been lookin’ for—they’d found him. An’ they'd took his body up there to that secret cave, an’—But it’s that what scared those mur- derin’ Cacos.” . Judas! It had panicked those super- stitious black men, and I tell you, it all but paralyzed me. McCoy brought it out from behind him, and my insides turned to ice. It wasn’t any chunk of wood, mister. It was one of those shriveled little mummies, brown and_ leathery—twin brother to the one Wilfred Peabody had fetched into camp on that night so long ago. Only it wasn’t exactly a twin. That other had Indian features and the look of something centuries old. This one was newer, fresher looking, not so worn around the edges. And it didn’t have Indian features. No, it had yellowish hair. A dome-shaped little head. Dried-up ears that stuck out like bat-wings. A studious look on its pinched-up, little dead face. Yes, it looked like a little dead gnome. A little dead gnome no bigger than a doll, with a spindly frame and a head too large for the body and raisin-like eyes all squinted up from too much study. I didn’t have to look twice to see it was Wilfred Peabody. Cured and mummified and shrunk by some gosh-awful embalming process. Like one of those pictures in the dictionary ; Wilfred Peabody, reduced to one-tenth natural size. McCoy whispered, “I found him up there in that cave where he found the first one.”’ All the granite went out of Jenny Lou, like gray rock melting ; I saw her start to slump, and I caught her before she could fall. Later that night—with the stockade cleaned up and the jungle-quiet—we went out on burial detail. First there were six Marines to sleep beneath the Stars and Stripes. Then farther off, under a big cottonwood tree, there was that pathetic little grave, hardly deeper than four shovelfuls. We waited until the Marines retired, GComicbooks.com