Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“Once Hosea crashed onto the cogs, he was stuck, probably stunned. Seymour shifted his leg between the gears, then watched his rival bleed to death. And having finished an honest day’s work, he donned his disguise and fled back to Carberton, there to await word of the tragedy in Long Valley Screed.”

Robin grinned. “His bad luck, though. He passed my wife, she with the eyes of a hawk.” Marian smiled.

Dusty as any miller, Robin Hood led them upstairs. He closed the sluice gate, clumped back down, tugged the sack from the gears, checked that no teeth were broken, and clumped back up.

Luther paced around the fresh hole. “To think I’d have left it an accident, and given Seymour the mill! Now we’ll hang both of them! So we’ll need another miller... You, uh, wouldn’t want the job?”

“Third time’s the charm, eh?” laughed Robin. “No, I—”

Surprised, he stopped. He’d miss milling. It was safe, sedate, useful, satisfying. He imagined a life tending the millworks and bagging flour, meeting neighbours day in and out, working a lathe or saw in winter, growing fat and bald. No more campfires or smoked venison, no more birdsong, no more, dappled light illuminating his greenwood cathedral...

“No, I’m afraid not, but thank you for the kind offer. I’ll return to what I know.”

“And that is?” smiled the knight. Marian giggled.

Robin scratched his grayed beard. “What did I say I was? Ah, yes! A bowmaker!”

Chuckling, he leaned out the window and jerked open the sluice gate. Slowly, slowly, the millwheel turned. Slowly the millstones began to grind.

But no one spoke. They listened. And heard nothing.

The groaning was gone.

The Walking Stick by Michael Luth

Department of First Stories

Michael Luth is a native Coloradan who currently makes his living as circulation manager for a national financial daily. He tells us that he has been writing fiction almost since he learned to read at the age of four, but has only recently begun to submit his work to magazines. His first published work reflects his interest in the psychology behind a criminal act...

* * *

Gene fingered the cold metal object in his jacket pocket and continued his wait, hunkering his shoulders against the wind. He had been playing with the thing absentmindedly to make the time pass, his index finger tracing the flat edge, following the circumference from the blunt-ended shaft to the narrow, tapering point. When he realized what he was doing, he smiled to himself, recalling the owner of the object. If things went well, it would be returned.

He had to show it to Vicky first. She would see it and it would help his cause. He turned it around and around, thinking what he would tell her when she arrived. He just had to win her back. It had taken so long to get her to meet with him. She would listen, he knew, when she realized how much he loved her and how miserable he was without her. The beginning of the end of that misery had started only yesterday, here by the river.

The day had held the promise of Indian summer with the appearance of a fuzzy, October-like sun, but there was slushy, dirty snow beside the trail and it was January and only forty-five degrees. Gene held the soda bottle by the twist-off cap, swinging it at his side as his feet propelled him along the asphalt trail that ran beside the Cache la Poudre River. When he came to the footbridge, he trudged up the incline and across the span, stopping in the middle. He opened the bottle, took a swig, and looked out over the slowly moving river.

The water was strangely high for January and the only icy patches lay in the shadows from the scruffy, leafless willows on the south bank of the river. Far downstream, in a quiet, wide stretch, he saw several ducks gently rocking with the current. He watched them for a while, sipping his soda, but his mind floated off with the sound of the rushing water and he began to think about Vicky.

He missed her body and wanted to hold her, if only for a moment. She had been so wonderful to touch and hold, and when she touched him back, her learned, gentle way of being sexual was so foreign to anything he’d experienced with any other woman that he felt she had invented it herself. That you could approach ecstasy from a quiet hand-holding place and reach it so easily and completely without the wild tearing and screaming run at it he’d always assumed was necessary, had been a revelation. And now he might never know it again.