A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

98 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY Some of the natives were friendly, but all blacks look the same after dark. You - never could tell when you might be am- bushed on the trail, back-stabbed in the village or sniped from behind a palm tree. We weren't there a week before one of my scouts was chopped to mince meat in the jungle. Charlemagne prowled the mountains like a spook; the peasants were drunk on fear and voodoo; human sacrifices were rumored in the neighborhood; the eternal drumming after sundown was a night- mare; and every minute we had to be ready for a Caco attack. Throw in fever, bad water, heat, in- sects and other tropical devilments and you have an idea of the white man’s bur- den. I was told that no reinforcements might reach me for days or even months. I built a stockade on the edge of the vil- lage; tried to drill some miserable Hai- tian soldiers; then everything bogged down in the rainy season, and I sat down to wait. It was hell and it was Haiti. In the middle of that, civilization ar- rived. Mark that! Civilization in the per- sons of Mr. and Mrs. Peabody and one Terrence McCoy. There was a triangle for you. I’ve seen some odd fish in Caribbean waters, but I think this Peabody was the oddest. He should’ve been in a museum instead of rep- resenting one. You know the sort of bird who gets a Ph.D. at the ripe old age of twenty and looks like an astronomer at thirty-five? Peabody was that type. Brains. A dome-shaped head bulgy with brains and windowed by owlish spectacles and roofed by a thatch of white-yellow hair. A little pipe-stem, insignificant body round-shoul- dered from too much learning. Nearsight- ed from midnight study. Weaned on the encyclopedia. Picture that in a sun helmet with a bird cage in one hand and a notebook in the other, riding into town on a donkey, and you've got my introduction to Wilfred Peabody. I guess I gaped, open-mouthed, from my headquarters window. Then I gagged an inch wider. On the heels of this pixie came Mrs. Peabody. Don’t ask me how a girl like Jennie Louise could’ve married that absent-mind- ed professor. I wondered at that time. She was as opposite as a canary from a big- headed little hoot owl; pink and frilly and fuzzy blond—you know. Plenty good looking, too. But the kind that likes lace and fudge and romanti¢ novels. Gazes at the world through big, round, starry blue eyes and is apt to sigh over movie fade- outs or get a little cute. “It’s just too thrilling to- be here in Haiti,” were her first words to me, “Oh, Captain, it’s so adventurous.” That was the tip-off on pretty Jenny Louise. I into camp and popeyed at the sight when the last of the party appeared. Mc- Coy the [rishman. You've seen green paint? He was Irish as that. Lots of grin- ning white teeth and fine Irish black hair. Lots of jaw, lots of chest, lots of twinkling blue eye: He was built like an athlete, and he could look like a horseman on a Haitian donkey and there was a quality to his voice that got things done. J could see from the first that the man in charge of that out- fit was McCoy. Only Peabody called himself the leader of the expedition ; he was in my headquar- ters house announcing his arrival before I could think to summon a guard to learn how he’d gotten there alive. Well, he was a naturalist. Also he was an archeologist, a paleontologist and a lot of other high-sounding names that he reeled off by way of introduction. It seemed that he and his wife and McCoy, backed by some Institute of Something or Other, had come to Haiti to investigate the history, geology, flora and fauna of the island. They had a load of baggage and a big collection of rare animals, butter- flies, fossils and that sort of thing. They’d been in the interior acquiring this stuff when the Caco War broke out. Our scouts had come on them in the moun- tains; advised them to leave. Peabody didn’t want to leave. His work, he said, was too important. He was a scientist in ‘the midst of most valuable research. No picayune native rumpus was going to di- vert him from his work. He had a letter from the district com- mandant—I’d like to give you the colonel’s name, but I won’t speak ill of the dead— wishing him off on my protection, How WAS watching her follow her husband | Eomicboo ‘s-CO