Black Mask (Vol. 7, No. 5 — April 1950), British Edition

Eric Fabian entered the pen and squatted down beside the dead man and the dog. He peered closely at Harry and then he looked up toward the windows that faced down on the back yard. With the fog, he couldn’t see anybody, but I guess he knew we were there, looking out, watching this. He said, “He got Harry, all right. He really got him.”

I turned from the window and yanked trousers and a sweater over my pajamas and went out into the hall. I almost bumped into Pete Saterlee, running toward the stairs. He shouted something incoherent. I saw Lee Marlow pop out of her room.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“You’d better stay in your room,” I told her. “Something’s happened to Harry Wenzel. It’s pretty messy. You’d better stay up here for awhile.”

She turned from me and darted across the hall to the opened door of another room. She reached in and flicked on the light switch, peered inside. She turned back to me. “Where’s Pops?” she said. “He’s not in his room. The bed hasn’t been slept in.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If I run into him downstairs, I’ll send him up.”

“No,” she said. “Maybe something’s happened to him, too. I’m going down.”

Chapter Three I.O.U. Death

The lights were on in the big bar-room and Gus Berkaw was just going out the back door in his shirt sleeves. We followed him outside, and almost bumped into him, where he had stopped to talk to Eric Fabian. Eric was still holding the nickle-plated .32. He looked quickly at Lee Marlow and stuck out his hand in a warning gesture. “He’s a mess. You’d better take her back inside, Hoyle.”

“It is Mr. Wenzel, isn’t it?” she said, tightly. “It... it’s not my father?”

“Your father?” Eric said. “Of course not, child. It’s Harry. That damned dog finally got him. I shot the dog, afterward. You’d better go back inside. It’s not something you’d want to see.” Suddenly, he clapped his hand to his forehead. “Irma!” he said. “We can’t let her come out here and see him. Somebody’s got to take care of her.”

I reached and took the flashlight from his hand. “You go on inside and take care of Irma. Take Miss Marlow with you. I want to take a look. I’ll be in a minute.”

He and Berkaw started back up the steps and I told Lee, “Go ahead, please. Go on back in with them. Maybe you can help take care of Mrs. Wenzel.”

“All right,” she said. “If you see Pops, tell him to come in, please. I’m worried about him. Please, Matty!”

“Sure,” I said. I watched her leave and then swung toward the dog pen. I found Pete Saterlee standing in the doorway of the pen, looking over the flame of his cigarette lighter at what was left of Harry Wenzel and his pet. I shot the light of the flash over them, quickly and then ran it around the pen.

“The poor fool!” Saterlee said. “He wasn’t a bad guy — rough as hell — but all right. He was an idiot to mess with that dog, though.”

“Yeah,” I said. I remembered, dazedly, the first day I’d seen Satan and the way Harry Wenzel had whipped the animal into submission. I remembered that Irma Wenzel had made a prophecy: “Some day that dog will kill you, Harry!”

I said, “What in the world did he come out here to the dog for at this time of night?” I glanced at my wrist watch. It was after 4 o’clock. “And in the dark and fog on top of that. He must have been crazy.”

“Or drunk as a coot,” Pete Saterlee said.

The flash beam, at that moment, spotted something caught on the barbed wire that topped the pen. I walked toward it and looked at it closely. It was a piece of cloth about an inch square, blue material of some kind. I switched the light back to the corpse of Harry Wenzel, lying beside the dead dog. I saw that he was wearing a blue workshirt and that it was ripped and torn. The piece caught on that barbed wire might have come from Harry’s shirt and it might not. I left it where it was.

Pete Saterlee and I walked back to the door and went into the lodge. Eric Fabian, Lee Marlow and Irma Wenzel were sitting at the bar. Gus Berkaw was behind it, fixing the others drinks. As Pete and I walked in, he set shot glasses on the bar for us, too. I sat down and gulped the double shot that Gus poured. I needed it. The shock of this thing had fogged my mind. I couldn’t seem to think.

In the back bar mirror, I watched the others. Both women had a thinly covered expression of fright in their eyes and finely etched tight lines about their mouths. Eric Fabian was poker-faced, but his hands gave him away. When he raised a drink to his mouth, he had to pause and steady his hand for a moment. Gus Berkaw kept polishing the same glass over and over.

“I can’t understand what happened to Pops,” Lee Marlow said, breaking a short silence. “Where could he be?”

“That’s a good question,” Gus Berkaw told her. “If he’d come back, maybe we could find out what made Harry go out to Satan’s pen at this time of night.”

“Why should old man Marlow know that?” Eric Fabian said.