Weird Tales volume 31 number 03 (19 page)

WEIRD TALES

tion. But the face of the bearded defender, the man whose life was forfeit to these vicious assassins, would not come clear to him. Finally he grew tired of searching, undressed and went to bed. Tomorrow, he said to himself, when I am fresher, I shall be able to think the thing out better.

HE went to sleep at once and slept soundly. But in the course of the night—he had no idea how long he had. been asleep—he started up in bed with the definite impression that he had heard something, a call, a cry, or voices talking together. He listened. Complete silence. If he had heard anything, it must have been in his dream. It did seem to him as if he had had a dream, and that he had dreamed about something disturbing, something alarming. But he could not remember what the dream had been about. He was in the act of lying down again, when he glanced into his studio, which lay bathed in the moonlight from the great window. He saw his dog standing erect in the center of the room, his head thrust forward and turned toward the window, watching and listening intently, without barking. He had never seen the animal act like that before. The painter called softly. The dog gave no sign of hearing him. He did not change in the slightest his attitude of absorbed interest. Then the painter raised his eyes to the window.

At first it seemed to him as if he must be dreaming still. He threw the bedclothes aside, stared at the window, brushed his hands across his eyes and gazed again. There was no doubt about it. The painter's eyes were looking into the eyes of the bearded man whose conduct had puzzled him the night before. It looked as if the man had climbed up and stood on something that lifted him

breast-high before the second-story window. The rough-boned, carelessly kept face with the tangled hair and beard was unmistakably the face he had caught a glimpse of on his way home a few hours before. It was frightfully distorted. The eyes were wide open and staring, the lips were open and drawn back from the teeth—it seemed almost as if the man were uttering a terrified cry for help, but not a sound was audible. On the left temple there was an ugly wound, with the hair matted over it but with the blood still trickling down over the face. There was no sign of the hands; the arms fell straight down from the shoulders. It almost seemed to the painter, as he studied the figure and its attitude a little more calmly, as if someone had pushed a dead man up into the window from below. Then, all at once, the horrible apparition disappeared, noiselessly, and the painter saw the trees and the quiet sky behind and above them.

At that moment the dog's muscles relaxed from his position of tense watchfulness. He ran to his master, cowered against him as if he were seeking protection, turned his head back toward the window. Then he sat down expectantly before the painter, exactly as he was in the habit of doing when he saw the artist take down his hat and his caped cloak to go out.

For a moment the distracted artist could do nothing but stare at the rectangle of moonlight where the ghastly figure had been. Then he realized the changed attitude of the dog, and spoke to the animal. When the little creature saw that he had his master's attention, he stood up, wagged his tail, and looked around expectantly toward the stairway. The artist took his revolver and went to the window. The moonlit landscape was calm and silent. Not a sight or a sound.

THE HEAD IN THE WINDOW

365

If a gang of assassins had held a murdered man up to his window, a minute or two before, they could scarcely have made so complete a get-away in so short a time. The shutters on the window below were closed and locked. There was nothing to climb up by. And except for the feeling that he had heard something in his dream, the painter was sure that not a sound had reached him from outside the building.

The dog ran back and forth between the artist and the stairway. Animals have remarkable leadings, and the painter thought seriously of making the round of the garden. But it seemed to him, as he thought it over, that such a procedure would be useless at best, and that at worst it would be courting trouble. If bandits were about, what could one timid citizen, armed with an old revolver that had never been fired in its life, do against them? All that could be expected of him, certainly, was to watch from inside his house till morning. He closed his window, and ordered the dog back to his cushion.

Just before he drew the window down, he had had the impression that he heard steps run rapidly along the stone pavement that lay just below it. He raised it again, and looked down. No one was in sight, and not a sound was to be heard. He stood by the window; struggling to get a grip on himself. He wondered if he could be ill. He knew that various delusions come from physical causes within the one who experiences them. He had tried so desperately hard to visualize the head which he needed for his picture, that his effort, combined with the effect of the heavy Falerno wine he had drunk, might easily have produced a psychic effect which caused him to see visions and hear sounds that had transpired only in his imagination. He had almost con-

vinced himself that he had found the key to the enigma, when his glance fell on his dog, obediently crouching on his cushion, but still wide-eyed and excited.- It seemed to him exactly as if someone spoke out from right behind him: "But what about the dog? Does your psychopathic theory explain the way the dog is acting?"

Suddenly the painter's mood of anxiety and puzzlement gave way to one of impatience. He was tired and nervous. He was disgusted with the whole annoying affair. He dropped on his bed again, and in a mood of something like defiance, he flung off the perplexity and dropped into a heavy sleep.

Nothing happened till morning. When the bright sun shone into the window instead of the ghostly moon, he was ready to laugh the whole matter ofiE as a half-tipsy dream, and to class the dog's strange conduct with various other evidences of unaccountable nervousness which that animal had shown at various times. He sat down at his easel and went seriously to work at his new sketch. He discovered that lie knew the bearded face now, feature by feature, and the task went smoothly. It was marvelous how vividly the face and form of the heavy fellow came out under the artist's eager fingers. This would be his best picture, he was sure of that.

As he was working, he heard somebody knock at the door downstairs. He made a few rapid strokes still, hastily kicked off his slippers and pulled on his shoes, and went down. It was doubtless the peasant woman, he thought, who brought him his milk every morning, but who brought it at the most unaccountably irregular hours. If she wasn't willing to follow a fairly even schedule, there was no reason why he should discommode himself to keep her from waiting a minute or two.

WEIRD TALES

When he opened the door, there was no woman there, and no milk-can. He strolled down the walk toward the fountain at which the milk-woman often stopped to water her donkey. As he came near the fountain he heard voices. When he passed the clump of bushes that had hidden the place from his sight, he discovered an excited group arguing and gesticulating about some object which lay on the ground. There were two policemen in the group.

"Has something happened?" he inquired as he joined the circle.

"They killed a man last night," said one of the bystanders. One of the policemen asked the painter if he had seen or heard anything that might throw any light on the mystery. He was about to tell his ghost-story, when it occurred to him how improbable it w'as, and he contented himself with replying that as he had walked home late at night a man in front of him had turned into the little side path, and that before he had left the street-car, a man had asked the way to the Valle San Giorgio.

"Would you know the man in front of you if you saw him again?"

The painter was not sure. But he thought he remembered certain things about him. For example, he remembered very distinctly that the man had a beard.

The policeman looked up quickly. "Is this the man?" he asked, and drew off the sack which had covered the head of the prostrate form.

The painter started back in terror, and for a moment his voice failed him completely. There was the head he had seen in the window, the eyes still staring wide, the matted hair clinging about the wound over the left temple, the wild, scraggly beard. The look of anguish and appeal was still in the eyes that gazed up into the eyes of the painter, as if the deed

were not yet committed and the man were begging him to come to his aid. And as the living man gazed with fascinated horror into the eyes of the dead man, the expression of the eyes seemed to change to one of reproach. The little dog had been ready and anxious to dash out and help defend the victim of a band of assassins, but his master had been too stupid, too selfish, too cowardly to come to the succor of a fellow-being in distress.

The painter recovered his self-control and said dully to the policeman:

"Yes, I think that was the man."

"Did you know him?" asked one of the neighbors with whom the German painter had a bowing acquaintance. And when the painter shook his head, the voluble Italian prattled on:

"It is much better that the bandits made away with this man than if they had killed a gentleman like you. He was "

And he touched his finger compassionately to his forehead.

From the general discussion that followed, the artist learned that the dead man, who for a good part of his life had been a shepherd in the Alban Hills, was a strange dreamer of a fellow who claimed to have the gift of second sight, to be able to foretell the future, and to have the power to cure disease by prayer. Members of the group told various stories of strange proofs of his psychic powers, notably of one instance in which he had described in great detail a fire which was raging-at that same moment in a town a hundred miles away, and of which he had no possible means of knowledge.

"It is strange," said one of the neighbors thoughtfully, "that he didn't foresee what would happen to him when he came out here last night!"

"Perhaps he did foresee it," said one

THE HEAD IN THE WINDOW

367

of the policemen, who had been looking through a handful of papers which had come from one of the dead man's pockets. Among these papers, many of them old and worn from long friction in the pocket, was a dean sheet on which was printed out very carefully: "I AM GOING A HARD WAY. PERHAPS I SHALL NOT COME BACK. BUT I AM SAVING ANOTHER MAN'S LIFE."

THE murderers were caught a few days later. They were two vagabonds of known evil habits, both of whom had already served prison sentences. When they were examined, they

confessed that they had intended to kill the painter and plunder his isolated house at their leisure, but that in their excitement they had mistaken one man for another who was dressed very similarly. They had intended, they said, to break into the studio that same night, but had been so frightened when the dying shepherd had called their attention to their blunder and had warned them solemnly never to carry out their murderous plan against the painter, that they had taken to their heels in a panic.

And so it comes that the picture of the half-crazy Italian shepherd who saved the life of die young German painter is hanging today in a German art gallery.

V>irl From SamarcancT

By E. HOFFMANN PRICE

AS HER guest set the dainty bone r\ china cup on the onyx-topped, teak tabouret and sank back among the embroidered cushions, Diane knew to the syllable the words which were to filter forth with the next breath of smoke; for three years as Hammer-

»Fran WHRD TALES for Hit, 1929.

smith Clarke's wife had convinced her that that remark was inevitable.

"My dear, where did you ever get those perfectly gorgeous rugs?"

And Diane, true to form, smiled ever so faintly, and luxuriated in the suspicion of a yawn: the ennui of an odalisk hardened to the magnificence of a seraglio

WEIRD TALES

carpeted with an ancient Feraghan rug, and hung with silken witcheries from the looms of Kashan. Diane saw the wonder permeate her friend's soul and heard it surge into words.

"The rugs? Why—well, I married them along with Ham, you might say. Yes, they are rather pretty, aren't they? But they're an awful pest at times "

"Naturally," agreed Louise, who lived in a loft in the Pontalba Building, where she could look down into the Plaza where Jackson reins in his brazen horse and lifts his brazen hat in salutation to the French Quarter of New Orleans. "You simply couldn't let the maid clean "

"Maid? Lord help us, but I daren't touch them myself! I tried it, once. That heaven-sent prayer-rug" — Diane indicated an ancient Ghiordcs, a sea-green splendor worth more than his right eye to any collector—"looked a bit dingy. And Ham caught me at it, What was left of my hair just fell short of a close shingle. Do you know, one day I caught him filling the bathtub with milk "

"What?"

"Precisely. Seems some expert claimed a milk bath improves the luster. So the little Bokhara—that blood-red creature beneath your feet—got a treatment fit for a Circassian beauty. I'm just waiting for him to bring home a duster of bird-of-paradise plumes for this venerable wreck."