Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 12, 1927 — page 113: what you’re looking at

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

THE MARK OF She was silent a long time. Then quietly she made a-very surprising admission. “ I don’t know how much faith I put in Dr. Zobel when he is sodden with our aman- zanilla sherry.” I gasped. I could scarcely believe my ears. The very idea of her losing faith in her one friend, the aristocratic old gentle- man, Dr. Zobel, was abhorrent to me. It was unpleasant because I could not help reflecting on what a terrible quandary the poor girl was in. Here in the maelstrom of these nerve- racking events she had nothing to cling to except one straw, the hard-drinking old country doctor. And he was no longer a help, for her faith in him was gone. “Just what happened that made you doubt him?” I asked. “The fact that you and your friend, Cronk, saw the judge alive.” “That may have been an apparition,” I said doubtfully. “ T don’t think it was.” “ You really think it was the judge him- self—and not his spirit!” ec I da.’’ “ But Dr. Zobel’s verdict as coroner.” “ That’s just it. The doctor came that night after spending many hours on a ma- ternity case. He had bolstered up his strength with prodigal drinks of whatever liquor he could get his hands on. “He came here—I remember now—in a very maudlin state. I thought in my stupidity that he was weeping because of the death of his old friend, the judge. He was weeping because of his drunken con- dition. “They say he made a mistake in deliver- ing the child at that maternity case; it was all the midwife and others could do to save it. Then he came here—” “« And made another mistake, you mean!” T exclaimed. She nodded. A whole new vista of the case, terrifying in its revelations, opened up before me. I considered from every angle the remote but terrible possibility: what if a man were pronounced dead by some coroner who was “hot ee of his — ama: and mee THE MOCCASIN. 107 the living, and wreaked vengeance on whomsoever he chose? What if he had been able, let us say, by the use of some strange drug, to put him- self into a cataleptic trance? That was not beyond credibility. Suppose he could re- peat the process, putting himself in the trance whenever he so wished, and when awakening arise and wander about, killing with impunity, terrifying the poor mortals who had remained on this side of the thresh- old of death. Perhaps he might kill just through some malignant desire inspired by the drug— without motive. But still my mind refused to believe this hideous thing. “ How could he have got out of his coffin —how could he have unlocked his tomb?” I asked. Shirley looked at me and saw the despair I was in as I tried desperately to believe this enormity. Then she made one more revelation, which in some ways was the most import- ant that had yet come from her lips. “He was with that Negro Pythagoras Awls during long conversations on life and death,” she said. “TI believe the Negro snake doctor put some queer ideas in his head. A day or so before the judge died he told me he might not die, but that he might seem as dead. “The old fakir had got him into this ob- session. At any rate, he begged me as his one dying wish to see that in the event of his coming into a ‘ second life,’ as the fakir termed it, he would have air. » After this conversation I felt that I would not have a very good night’s sleep. Imagine trying to sleep when you’re convinced that there is a man, crazed with some infernal sort of drug, wandering about ready to pounce on the first victim he could find and kill him! T was right in my prophecy of a sleepless night. I did not sleep a wink. It was the most harrowing night that had ever hap- pened to me, and I hope against hope that I will never spend another like it. things look now, we’ll all have to go through at such bepantiene A essed to-night. For a But as PCOmicbools com