A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Screaming Laugh

A call came into constabulary headquarters, at the county seat, about seven one morning. It was from Milford Junction, a local doctor named Johnson reporting the death of one Eleazar Hunt sometime during the night. Just a routine report, as required by law.

“And have you ascertained the causes?” asked the sheriff.

“Yes, I just got through examining him. I find he had burst a blood vessel — laughing too hard. Nothing out of the usual about it, but of course that’s for you to decide.”

“Well, I’ll send a man over to check.” The sheriff turned to Al Traynor, one of the members of his constabulary, who had just come in. “Drive down Milford Junction way, Al. Local resident near there, name of Eleazar Hunt, died from laughing too hard. Look things over just for the record.”

“Laughing too hard?” Traynor looked at him when he heard that. Then he shrugged. “Well, I suppose if you’ve got to go, it’s better to go laughing than crying.”

He returned to his car and started off for Milford Junction. It was about three quarters of an hour’s drive by the new State highway that had been completed only two or three years before, although the hamlet itself wasn’t directly on this, had to be reached by a dirt feeder road that branched off it. The Hunt place was about half a mile on the other side of it, near a point where the highway curved back again to rejoin the short cut, cutting a corner off the late Mr. Hunt’s acreage.

The white painted farmhouse with its green shutters gleamed dazzlingly in the early morning sunshine. Peach trees, bursting into bloom before it, hid the roof and cast blue shade on the ground. A wire fence at the back enclosed a poultry yard, and beyond that were hen houses, a stall from which a black and white cow looked plaintively forth, a toolshed, a roofed well, a vegetable garden. It was an infinitely pleasant-looking little property, and if death had struck there at all, there was no outward sign.

There was a coupé standing in the road before the house, belonging to the doctor who had reported the death, presumably. Traynor coasted up behind it, braked, got out, and went in through the gate. He had to crouch to pass under some of the low hanging peach boughs. There was a cat sunning itself on the lower doorstep. He reached down to tickle it and a man came around the corner of the house just then, stood looking at him.

He was sunburned, husky, and about thirty. He wore overalls and was carrying an empty millet sack in his hand. Judging by the commotion audible at the back, he had just finished feeding the poultry. His eyes were shrewd and lidded in a perpetual squint that had nothing to do with the sun.

“You the undertaker already?” he wanted to know.

“Sheriff’s office,” snapped Traynor, none too pleased at the comparison. “You work here?”

“Yep. Hired man.”

“How long?”

“ ’Bout six months.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dan Fears.”

“He keep anybody else on?”

Fears answered indirectly, with a scornful gesture toward the back. “Not enough to keep one man busy as it is. Tend one cow and pick up a few eggs.”

It occurred to Traynor if there was that little to do, why hadn’t the cow been led out to pasture by now and the poultry fed earlier? He went on in, stepping high over the cat. She looked indolently upward at his heel as it passed over her.

A shaggy, slow moving man was coming toward the screen door to meet Traynor as he pushed through it with a single cursory knock at its frame. Johnson was a typical country doctor, of a type growing scarcer by the year. You could tell by looking at him that he’d never hurried or got excited in his life. You could surmise that he’d never refused a middle-of-the-night call from miles away in the dead of winter either. He was probably highly competent, in spite of his misleading rusticity.

“Hello, son.” He nodded benignly. “You from the sheriff’s office? I was just going back to my own place to make out the death certificate.”

“Can I see him?”

“Why, shore. Right in here.” The doctor parted a pair of old-fashioned sliding doors and revealed the “front parlor” of the house. Across the top of each window was stretched a valance of faded red plush, ending in a row of little plush balls. On a table stood an oil lamp-there was no electricity this far out — with a frosted glass dome and a lot of little glass prisms dangling from it.

There was an old-fashioned reclining chair with an adjustable back near the table and lamp. Just now it was tilted only slightly, at a comfortable reading position. It was partly covered over with an ordinary bed sheet, like some furniture is in summertime, only the sheet bulged in places and a clawlike hand hung down from under it, over the arm of the chair. Traynor reached down, turned back the upper edge of the sheet. It was hard not to be jolted. The face was a cartoon of frozen hilarity. It wasn’t just that death’s-head grimace that so often, because of bared teeth, faintly suggests a grin. It was the real thing. It was Laughter, permanently photographed in death. The eyes were creased into slits; you could see the dried but still faintly glistening saline traces of the tears that had overflowed their ducts down alongside his nose. The mouth was a vast upturned crescent full of yellowish horse teeth. The whole head was thrown stiffly back at an angle of uncontrollable risibility. It was uncanny only because it was so motionless, so silent, so permanent.

“You found him just like this?”

“Shore. Had to examine him, of course, but rigor had already set in, so I figger nothing I did disturbed him much.” Johnson chuckled inside himself, gave Traynor a humorously reproachful look. “Why, son, you don’t think this is one of those things? Shame on you!”

He saw that he hadn’t convinced the younger man by his raillery. “Why, I examined him thoroughly, son,” he protested gently. “I know my business as well as the next man. I tell you not a finger was laid on this man. Nothing’s happened to him but what I said. He burst a blood vessel from laughing too hard. Course, if you want me to perform a complete autopsy, send his innards and the contents of his stomach down to the State laboratory—” It was said with an air of paternal patience, as if he were humoring a headstrong boy.

“I’m not discrediting your competence, doctor. What’s this?” Traynor picked up a little booklet, lying open tent-shaped on the table. “Joe Miller’s Joke Book,” it said on the cover, and the copyright was 1892.

“That’s what he was reading. That’s what got him, I reckon. Found it lying on the floor under his right hand. Fell from his fingers at the moment of death, I guess.”

“Same page?”

“Same one it’s open at now. You want to find the exact joke he was reading when he passed away, that what you’re aiming at, son?” More of that paternal condescension.

Traynor evidently did, or at least an approximation of what type of killing humor this was. He stopped doing anything else and stood there stock-still for five minutes, conscientiously reading every joke on the two open pages, about a dozen altogether. The first one read:

Pat: Were you calm and collected when the explosion occurred?

Mike: I wuz calm and Murphy wuz collected.

The others were just about as bad, some even staler.

“Do me a favor, doc,” he said abruptly, passing the booklet over. “Read these for yourself.”

“Oh, now, here—” protested Johnson, with a rueful glance at the still form in the chair, but he went ahead and did what Traynor requested.

Traynor watched his expression closely. He’d only just met the man, but he could already tell he was full of a dry sort of humor. But not a gleam showed, his face never changed from first to last; it became, if anything, sort of mournful.

“D’you see what I mean?” was all Traynor said, taking the booklet back and tossing it aside.

Johnson shook his head. “No two people have the same sense of humor, remember that, son. What’s excruciatingly funny to one man goes right over another’s head. Likely, these jokes were new to him, not mossbacked like they are to you and me.”

“Did you know him at all, doc?”

“Just to say howdy to on the road.”

“Ever see him smile much?”

“Can’t say I did. But there’s nothing funny about saying howdy. What is it you’re driving at, son?”

Traynor didn’t answer. He went over to the corpse, unbuttoned its shirt, and scrutinized the under arms and ribs with exhaustive intentness.

The doctor just stood looking on. “You won’t find any marks of violence, son. I’ve been all over that.”

Next Traynor squatted down by the feet, drew up one trousers leg to the knees, then the other. Johnson by this time, it was plain to see, considered him a bad case of dementia detectives. Traynor seemed to see something at last; he smiled grimly. All Johnson could see were a pair of shanks encased in wool socks, supported by garters. Patent garters, sold by the million, worn by the million.

“Found something suspicious?” he asked, but without conviction, it was easy to see.

“Suspicious isn’t the word,” Traynor murmured low. “Damning.

“Damning whom — and of what?” said Johnson dryly.

Again Traynor didn’t answer.

He hurriedly unlaced both of Hunt’s shoes, dropped them off. Then he unfastened one garter and stripped the sock off his foot. Turned it inside out and peered at the sole. Peered at the sole of the foot itself too. He stripped the other one off and went through the same proceeding. Johnson, meanwhile, was shaking his head disapprovingly, as if his patience were being overtaxed.

“You are the most pee-culiar young fellow I ever hope to meet,” he sighed.

Traynor balled up the two socks, and thrust one into each pocket of his coat, garter and all. They were black — fortunately. He flipped the sheet back over the bared feet, concealing them. A little wisp of something rose in the air as he did so, disturbed by the draft of his doing that, fluttered, winged downward again. A little bit of fluff, it seemed to be. He went after it, nevertheless, retrieved it, took an envelope out of his pocket, and thrust it in.

Johnson was past even questioning his actions by now; he was convinced they were unaccountable by all rational standards, anyway. “Would you care to talk to Mrs. Hunt?” he asked.

“Yes, I sure would,” Traynor said curtly.

Johnson went out to the hall, called respectfully up the stairs:

“Mrs. Hunt, honey.”

She was very ready to come down, Traynor noticed. Her footsteps began to descend almost before the words were out of the doctor’s mouth. As though she’d been poised right up above at the head of the staircase, waiting for the summons.

He couldn’t help a slight start of surprise as she came into sight; he had expected someone near Hunt’s own age. She was about twenty-eight, the buxom blond type. “Second wife,” Traynor thought.

She had reached the bottom by now, and the doctor introduced them.

“This is Mr. Traynor of the sheriff’s office.”

“How do you do?” she said mournfully. But her eyes were clear, so she must have stopped crying some time before. “Did you want to talk to me?”

“Just to ask you the main facts, that’s all.”

“Oh. Well, let’s go outdoors, huh? It — it sort of weighs you down in here.” She glanced toward the partly open parlor doors, glanced hurriedly away again.

They went outside, began to stroll aimlessly along the front of the house, then around the corner and along the side. He could see Fears out there in the sun, beyond the poultry yard, hoeing the vegetable patch. Fears turned his head, looked over his shoulder at them as they came into sight, then looked down again. Hunt’s widow seemed unaware of his existence.

“Well,” she was saying, “all I can tell you is, I went upstairs to bed about ten o’clock last night, left him down there reading by the lamp. I’m a sound sleeper, and before I knew it, it was daybreak and the roosters woke me up. I saw he’d never come up to bed. I hurried down, and there he was just like I’d left him, lamp still lit and all, only the book had fallen out of his hand. He had this broad grin on his face and—”

“He did?” he interrupted.

“Yes. Isn’t it spooky?” She shuddered. “Did you see it?”

“I did. And spooky,” he said slowly, “is a very good word for it.”

If he meant anything by that, she seemed to miss it completely.

She wound up the little there was left of her story. “I tried to wake him, and when I couldn’t, I knew what it was. I called to Fears, but he was out back some place, so I ran all the way down the road to Doctor Johnson’s house myself and brought him back.”

“Did he usually stay down alone like that, nights, and read?”

“Yes. Only in the beginning, when I first married him, he used to read things like mail order catalogues and such. Well, I’d tried to liven him up a little lately. I bought that joke book for him and left it lying around, tried to coax him to read it. He wouldn’t have any part of it at first, pretended not to be interested, but I think on the sly he began to dip into it after I’d go upstairs at nights. He wasn’t used to laughing and he got a stitch or something, I guess. Maybe he was ashamed to have me catch him at it and tried to hold it in — and that’s what happened to him.”

They were lingering under the parlor windows. He’d stopped unnoticeably, so she had too, perforce. He was gazing blankly around, eyes on the treetops, the fleecy clouds skimming by, everywhere but the right place. He’d seen something on the ground, and the job was to retrieve it right under her eyes without letting her see him do it.

“Do you mind?” he said, and took out a package of cigarettes. It was crumpled from being carried around on his person for days, and in trying to shake one out, he lost nearly the whole contents. He bent down and picked them up again one by one, with a fine disregard for hygiene, and each time something else as well. It was very neatly done. It went over her head completely.

They turned around and went slowly back to the front of the house again. As they were rounding the corner once more, Traynor looked back. He saw Fears raise his head and look after them at that moment. “Very allergic to my being here,” Traynor thought to himself.

Johnson came out of the door.

“The undertaker’s here.”

And he looked questioningly at Traynor; the latter nodded his permission for removal.

She said, “Oh, I’d better get upstairs; I don’t want to — see him go,” and hurriedly ran inside.

Traynor didn’t hang around to watch, either. He drifted back around the side of the house again. He let himself through the poultry yard, and out at the far side of it, where Fears was puttering around. He approached him with a fine aimlessness, like a man who has nothing to do with himself and gravitates toward the nearest person in sight to kill time chatting.

“He had a nice place here,” he remarked.

Fears straightened, leaned on his hoe, drew his sleeve across his forehead. “No money in it, though.” He was looking the other way, off from Traynor.

“What do you figure she’ll do, keep on running it herself now that he’s gone?”

The question should have brought the other’s head around toward him, at least. It didn’t. Fears spat reflectively, still kept looking stubbornly away from him.

“I don’t think she’s cut out for it, don’t think she’d make a go of it.”

There’s something in this direction, away from where he’s looking, that he doesn’t want me to notice, Traynor told himself. He subtly jockeyed himself around so that he could look behind him without turning his entire head.

There was a toolshed there. Implements were stacked up against the wall at the back of it. The door was open and the sun shone sufficiently far in to reveal them. It glinted from the working edges of shovels, rakes, spades. But he noted a trowel with moist clayey soil drying out along its wedge; it was drying to a dirty gray white color.

“That looks like the well,” he thought. Aloud he said: “Sun’s getting hotter by the minute. Think I’ll have a drink.”

Fears dropped the hoe handle, stooped and got it again.

“I’d advise you to get it from the kitchen,” he said tautly. “Well’s all stirred up and muddy, ’pears like part of the sides must have crumbled. Have to ’low it to settle.”

“Oh, I’m not choosy,” Traynor remarked, strolling toward it. It hadn’t rained in weeks. He shifted around to the far side of the structure, where he could face Fears while he pretended to dabble with the chained drinking cup.

There could be no mistaking it, the man was suddenly tense, rigid, out there in the sun, even while he went ahead stiffly hoeing. Every play of his shoulders and arms was forced. He wasn’t even watching what he was doing, his hoe was damaging some tender young shoots. Traynor didn’t bother getting his drink after all. He knew all he needed to know now. What’s Fears been up to down there that he don’t want me to find out about? — Traynor wondered. And more important still, did it have anything to do with Eleazar Hunt’s death? He couldn’t answer the first — yet — but he already had more than a sneaking suspicion that the answer to the second was yes.

He sauntered back toward the tiller.

“You’re right,” he admitted; “it’s all soupy.”

With every step that took him farther away from the well rim, he could see more and more of the apprehension lift from Fears. It was almost physical, the way he seemed to straighten out, loosen up there under his eyes, until he was all relaxed again.

“Told you so,” Fears muttered, and once again he wiped his forehead with a great wide sweep of the arm. But it looked more like relief this time than sweat.

“Well, take it easy.” Traynor drifted lethargically back toward the front of the house once more. He knew Fears’s eyes were following him every step of the way; he could almost feel them boring into the back of his skull. But he knew that if he turned and looked, the other would lower his head too quickly for him to catch him at it, so he didn’t bother.

Hunt’s body had been removed now and Doctor Johnson was on the point of leaving. They walked out to the roadway together toward their cars.

“Well, son,” the doctor wanted to know, “still looking for something ornery in this or are you satisfied?”

“Perfectly satisfied now,” Traynor assured him grimly, but he didn’t say in which way he meant it. “Tell the truth, doc,” he added. “Did you ever see a corpse grin that broadly before?”

“There you go again,” sighed Johnson. “Well, no, can’t say I have. But there is such a thing as cadaveric spasm, you know.”

“There is,” Traynor agreed. “And this isn’t it. In fact this is so remarkable I’m going to have it photographed before I let the undertaker put a finger to him. I’d like to keep a record of it.”

“Shucks,” the doctor scoffed as he got in his coupé. “Why, I bet there never was a normal decease yet that couldn’t be made to ’pear onnatural if you tried hard enough.”

“And there never was an unnatural one yet,” Traynor answered softly, “that couldn’t be made to appear normal — if you were willing to take things for granted.”

After he had arranged for the photographs to be taken, he dropped in at the general store. A place like that, he knew, was the nerve center, the telephone exchange, of the village, so to speak. The news of Eleazar Hunt’s death had spread by now, and the cracker barrel brigade were holding a post-mortem. Traynor, who was not known by sight to anyone present, for his duties had not brought him over this way much, did not identify himself for fear of making them self-conscious in the presence of the law. He hung around, trying to make up his mind between two brands of plug tobacco, neither of which he intended buying, meanwhile getting an earful.

“Waal,” said one individual, chewing a straw, “guess we’ll never know now whether he actually did git all that money from the highway commission folks claim he did, for slicin’ off a corner of his propitty to run that new road through.”

“He always claimed he didn’t. Not a penny of it ever showed up in the bank. My cousin works there and he’d be the first one to know it if it did.”

“They say he tuck and hid it out at his place, that’s why. Too mean to trust the bank, and he didn’t want people thinking he was rich.”

An ancient of eighty stepped forth, right angled over a hickory stick, and tapped it commandingly to gain the floor. “Shows ye it don’t pay to teach an old dog new tricks! I’ve knowed Eleazar Hunt since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and this is the first time I ever heard tell of him even smiling, let alone laughing fit to kill like they claim he done. Exceptin’ just once, but that were beyond his control and didn’t count.”

“When was that?” asked Traynor, chiming in carefully casual. He knew by experience the best way to bring out these villagers’ full narrative powers was to act bored stiff.

The old man fastened on him eagerly, glad of an audience. “Why, right in here where we’re standing now, ’bout two years ago. Him and me was both standing up to the counter to git waited on, and Andy took me first and asked me what I wanted. So I raised this here stick of mine to point up at the shelf and without meaning to, I grazed Eleazar’s side with the tip of it — I can’t see so good any more, you know. Well, sir, for a minute I couldn’t believe my ears. Here he was, not only laughing, but giggling like a girl, clutching at his ribs and shying away from me. Then the minute he got free of the stick, he changed right back to his usual self, mouth turned down like a horseshoe, snapped, ‘Careful what you’re doing, will you!’ Ticklish, that’s all it was. Some’s more so than others.”

“Anyone else see that but you?”

“I saw it,” said the storekeeper. “I was standing right behind the counter when it happened. I never knew that about him until then myself. Funny mixture, to be ticklish with a glum disposition like he had.”

“And outside of that, you say you never saw him smile?”

“Not even as a boy!” declared the old man vehemently.

“She was livening him up, though, lately,” qualified the storekeeper. “Heard she was making right smart progress too.”

“Who told you?” asked Traynor, lidding his eyes.

“Why, she did herself.”

Traynor just nodded to himself. Buildup beforehand, he was thinking.

“Yes, and that’s what killed him!” insisted the garrulous old man. “Way I figger it, he’d never used them muscles around the mouth that you shape smiles with and so they’d gone useless on him from lack of practice. Just like, if you don’t use your right arm for fifty years, it withers on you. Then she comes along and starts him to laughing at joke books and whatnot, and the strain was too much for him. Like I said before, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks! These old codgers that marry young chickens!”

All Traynor did, after the old man had stumped out with an accurate shot at the brass receptacle inside the door, was get his name from the storekeeper and jot it down in his notebook, without letting anyone see him do it. The ancient one just might come in handy as a witness, if a murder trial was to come up — provided of course that he lasted that long.

“Well, how does it look?” the sheriff asked Traynor when he finally got back to headquarters.

“It doesn’t look good,” was the grim answer. “It was murder.”

The sheriff drew in his breath involuntarily. “Got any evidence?” he said finally.

His eyes opened wide in astonishment as a small joke book, a handful of chicken feathers, and a pair of black socks with garters still attached, descended upon his desk. “What’ve these got to do with it?” he asked in stupefaction. “You don’t mean to tell me — this is your evidence, do you?”

“It certainly is,” said Traynor gloomily. “It’s all the evidence there is or ever will be. This, and photographs I’ve had taken of his face. It’s the cleverest thing that was ever committed under the sun. But not quite clever enough.”

“Well, don’t you think you’d better at least tell me what makes you so sure? What did you see?”

“All right,” said Traynor irritably, “here’s what I saw — and I know you’re going to say right away it didn’t amount to a row of pins. I saw a dead man with a broad grin on his face, too broad to be natural. I saw chicken feathers lying scattered around the ground—”

“It’s a poultry farm, after all; they raise chickens there.”

“But their tips are all bent over at right angles to the quill; show me the chicken that can do that to itself. And they were lying outside the wired enclosure, under the window of the room in which the dead man was.”

“And?” said the sheriff, pointing to the socks.

“A few fibers of the same chicken feathers, adhering to the soles. The socks are black, luckily! I could see them with my naked eye.”

“But isn’t it likely that this Hunt might potter around in his stocking feet, even outdoors — where there are chicken feathers lying around?”

“Yes. But these fibers are on the linings of the socks, not the outsides of the soles. I reversed them pulling them off his feet.”

“Anything else?”

“Not directly bearing on the commission of the murder itself, but involved in it. I saw a trowel with white clay drying on its edges, and a pair of thick gauntlets, used for spraying something on the peach trees, hanging up in the toolshed. Now tell me all this is no good to us.”

“It certainly isn’t!” declared the sheriff emphatically. “Why, I’d be laughed out of office if I moved against anyone on the strength of evidence such as this! You’re talking in riddles, man! I can’t make anything out of this. You not only haven’t told me whom you suspect, but you haven’t even given me the method used, or the motive.”

Traynor drummed his finger tips on the desk. “And yet I’m dead sure. I’m as sure of it right now as if I’d seen it with my own eyes. I can give you the method right now, but what’s the use? You’d only laugh at me, I can tell by the look on your face. I could name the motive and the suspects too, but until I’ve got the one, there’s no use bringing in the others; there wouldn’t be enough to hold them on.”

“Well,” — his superior shrugged, turning up his palms — “what do you want me to do?”

“Very little,” muttered Traynor, “except lend me a waterproof pocket flashlight, if you’ve got one. And stick around till I come back; I’ve got an idea I won’t be coming alone. There might be matters discussed that you’d be interested in.”

“Where’ll you be in the meantime?” the sheriff called after him as he pocketed the light and headed for the door.

“Down in Eleazar Hunt’s well,” was the cryptic answer. “And not because I’m thirsty, either.”

Traynor coasted to a noiseless stop, well down the road from the Hunt place and out of sight of it, at about ten thirty that night. He snapped off his headlights, got out, examined the torch the sheriff had lent him to make sure it was in good working order, then cut across into the trees on foot, and made his way along under them parallel to the road but hidden from it.

There were no lights showing by the time he’d come in sight of the house. Death or no death, people in the country retire early. He knew there was no dog on the place so he didn’t hesitate in breaking cover and skirting the house around to the back. The story was Hunt had been too stingy to keep one, begrudging the scraps it would have required to feed it. His sour face, was the general verdict, was enough to frighten away any trespasser.

He found the poultry yard locked, but his business wasn’t with that; he detoured around the outside of it in the pale moonlight, treading warily in order not to make his presence known. He played his light briefly on the toolshed door; it was closed but not locked, fortunately. He eased it open, caught up the trowel and rope ladder he had noticed yesterday morning, and hurried over to the well with them. He mightn’t need the trowel, but he took it with him to make sure. The clay, incidentally, had been carefully scraped off it now — but too late to do Fears any good; the damage had already been done.

Traynor clamped the iron hooks on the end of the ladder firmly to the rim of the well, paid it out all the way down the shaft until he heard it go in with a muffled splash. It sounded deeper than he enjoyed contemplating, but if Fears had gone down in there, dredging, then he could do it too.

He clicked his light on, tucked it firmly under his left armpit, straddled the well guard, and started climbing down, trowel wedged in his coat pocket. The ladder pivoted lightly from side to side under his weight, but so long as it didn’t snarl up altogether, that was all right. He stopped every few rungs to play the light around the shaft in a circle. Nothing showed above the water line, any more than it had yesterday morning, but that trowel hadn’t had clay on it, and the water hadn’t been all muddied up, for nothing.

The water hit him unexpectedly and he jolted at the knifelike cold of it. He knew he couldn’t stay in it very long without numbing, but he kept going down rung by rung. It came up his legs, hit his kidneys, finally rose above the light under his arm. That was waterproof, didn’t go out. He stretched one leg downward off the ladder, feeling for the bottom. No bottom; the shaft seemed to go to China. One sure thing was, he couldn’t — and keep on breathing.

He explored the wall of the well under the water line with his free hand, all around him and down as far as he could reach. The clay was velvet smooth, unmarred. Another rung — they were widely spaced — would take his head under, and he didn’t like to risk it; he was already beginning to get numb all over.

Then suddenly the leg that he was using for a depth finder struck something like a plank. But across the shaft, behind him. He’d attached the ladder to the wrong side of the well rim. Still, it was fairly accessible; the circumference of the bore wasn’t unduly large. He adjusted his leg to its height and got his heel on it. Tested its sustaining powers and it didn’t crumble in spite of the fact that it must have been water-logged for years. It was evidently inserted solidly into the clay, like a sort of shelf, more of it bedded than actually protruding. Still it was a risky thing to trust oneself to; he had an idea it was meant more for a marker than to be used to stand on. He turned his body outward to face it, got across to it without mishap, but bringing the ladder with him over his shoulder as a precaution. He was mostly under water during the whole maneuver, and rapidly chilling to the bone. That Fears before him had been through all this without some good, all powerful reason, he refused to believe.

He found a large cavity on that side of the well almost at once. It was just a few inches above the plank, a large square recess gouged out of the compact clay. It was, as far as his waterlogged finger tips could make out, a large empty biscuit tin wedged in flush with the well wall, open end outward. A sort of handmade but none the less efficient safe deposit box, so to speak.

But the important thing was that he could feel a heavy rubbery bulk resting within it. Flat, pouch shaped. He drew this out, teeth chattering as the water momentarily rose into his nostrils, and finding it was too bulky to wedge into his pocket, tucked it into his submerged waistband, not caring to run the risk of bringing it up under his arm and perhaps dropping it to the bottom of the well just as he neared the top. The trowel, which he found he had not needed after all, he tossed over his shoulder into watery oblivion. The light, though it hampered him the way he kept it pinned against his side, he retained because it was not his but the sheriff’s.

He renewed his grip on the transported ladder, took his feet off the scaffolding, and let the ladder swing back with him to its original side of the well. He didn’t feel the slight collision at all, showing how thoroughly numbed he was by now, and showing what a risk he was running every moment of having his hold on it automatically relax and drop him into the depths. Nor could he tell the difference when his body was finally clear of the water. Meaning he’d better get out of there fast.

But it was twice as slow getting up as it had been getting down. He couldn’t tell, through shoes and all, when each successive rung was firmly fixed under the arches of his feet, he kept making idiotic pawing gestures with his whole leg each time before it would finally catch on. That should have looked very funny, but not down there where he was.

Finally the cloying dampness of the air began to lift a little and he knew he must be nearing the top. Then a whiff of a draft, that he would never have felt if he’d been dry, struck through his drenched clothes like ice cold needles, and that proved it. His teeth were tapping together like typewriter keys.

There was something else, some faint warning that reached him. Not actually heard so much as sensed. As if someone’s breath were coming down the shaft from just over his head, slightly amplified as if by a sounding board. He acted on it instantly, more from instinct than actual realization of danger. Unsheathed the light from under his arm and pointed it upward. He was closer to the top than he’d thought, scarcely a yard below it. The beam illumined Fears’s face, bent low above him, contorted into a maniacal grimace of impending destruction, both arms high over his head wielding something. It looked like the flat of a shovel, but there was no time to find out, do anything but get out of its way. It came hissing down in a big arc against the well shaft. It would have smashed his skull like an egg, ground the fragments into the clay — great whipcords of straining muscle stood out on the arms wielding it — but he swerved his body violently sidewise off the ladder, hanging on just by one hand and one foot, and it cycloned by, missing him by fractions of inches, and battered into the clay with a pulpy whack.

Fears had been in too much of a hurry; if he’d let him get up a single rung higher, so that his head showed above the well rim, nothing could have saved him from being brained by the blow. The torch, of course, went skittering down into oblivion with a distant plink! The shovel followed it a second later; Fears didn’t trouble to bring it up again from striking position, let go of it, perhaps under the mistaken impression that it had served its purpose and the only reason the victim didn’t topple was that his stunned body had become tangled in the ropes.

Traynor could feel the ladder jar under him as his would-be destroyer sought to detach the hooks that clasped the well rim and throw the whole structure snaking down to the bottom. The very weight of his own body, on the inside, pinning it down close to the shaft, defeated the first try, gave him an added second’s grace. To free the hooks, Fears had to raise the climber’s whole weight first, ladder and all, to get enough slack into it.

There wasn’t enough time to finish climbing out. Traynor vaulted up one more rung with the agility of desperation, so that his head cleared the shaft rim; he flung up his arm and caught Fears’s lowered head, bent down to his task, toward him in a riveted headlock that was like a drowning man’s. Fears gave a muffled howl of dismay, tried to arch his slumped back against it. There was a brief equipoise, then gravity and their combined top-heavy positions had their way. Fears came floundering over into the mouth of the well, nearly broke Traynor’s back by the shift of weight to the other side of him, tore him off his own precarious foothold, and they both went plunging sickeningly down off the ladder together. Their two yells of approaching destruction blended hollowly into one.

Numb and half frozen as Traynor already was, the shock of submersion was evidently less for him than for Fears, plunging in with his pores wide open and possibly overheated from hurrying out to the well from a warm bed. Traynor had been in the water once already, felt it less than he would have the first time. The way people condition their bodies to frigid water by wetting themselves before they dive off a board, for instance.

He never touched bottom, even now. He came up alone — the fall must have loosened the bear hug he’d had on the other man — struck out wildly all around him, aware that if he went down again— The radius of the confining wall was luckily narrow. He contacted the ladder, sealed his hands to it in a hold that blow torches couldn’t have pried off, got on it again, and quickly pulled himself up above the water.

He waited there a minute, willing to stretch out a hand, but unable to do more than that. Fears never came up. Not a sound broke the inky black silence around Traynor but the slow heave of the disturbed water itself. The shock had either made the man lose consciousness or he’d struck his head against his own shovel at the bottom. If there was a bottom, which Traynor was beginning to doubt.

Go in again after him and try to find him, he couldn’t. He got the warning from every cramped muscle in his body, and his restricted lungs and pounding heart. It meant his own sure death, inevitably. There are times one can tell. He wasn’t even sure that he could get up any more, unaided.

But he finally did, tottering painfully rung by rung and feeling as if he’d been doing this all night. He flung himself across the well rim, crawled clear of it on his belly like some half drowned thing, then turned over on his back and did nothing else much but just breathe. Gusts of uncontrollable shivering swept over him every once in a while. Finally he sat up, pulled off his soaked coat, shirt, and even undershirt, and began beating himself all over the body with them to bring back the circulation.

It was only when he’d started it going again that he remembered to feel for the rubber pouch that had cost two lives so far, and nearly a third — his own. If he’d lost it down there, he’d had all his trouble for nothing. But instead of falling out, it had slipped down under his waistband and become wedged in the top of one trousers leg, too bulky to go any farther. There wasn’t enough sensation left in his leg to tell him it was there until he’d pried it out with both hands.

“Money,” he murmured, when he’d finally stripped it open and examined it. He turned his head and looked toward that sinister black opening in the ground. “I thought it was that. It almost always is.”

There were seventy-five thousand dollars in it, so well protected they weren’t even damp after three years’ immersion.

He put on his coat and made his way back toward the house. One of the upper story window sashes eased up and a voice whispered cautiously down in the stillness:

“Did you get him, Dan?”

“No, Dan didn’t get him, Mrs. Hunt,” he answered in full speaking tone. “Put on something and come down; I’m taking you in to the sheriff’s office with me. And don’t keep me waiting around down here; I’m chilled to the bone.”

The sheriff awoke with a start when Traynor thrust open his office door and ushered Mrs. Hunt in ahead of him.

“Here’s one,” he said, “and the other one’s at the bottom of the well with the rest of the slimy things where he belongs. Sit down, Mrs. Hunt, while I run through the facts for the benefit of my superior here.

“I’ll begin at the beginning. The State built a spanking fine concrete highway that sliced off a little corner of Eleazar Hunt’s property. He had the good luck — or bad luck, as it now turns out to have been — to collect seventy-five thousand dollars for it. Here it is.” He threw down the waterlogged package. “There’s your motive. First of all, it got him a second wife, almost before he knew it himself. Then, through the wife, it got him a hired man. Then, through the hired man and the wife, it got him — torture to the death.”

He turned to the prisoner, who was sitting nervously shredding her handkerchief. “You want to tell the rest of it, or shall I? I’ve got it on the tip of my tongue, you know — and I’ve got it straight.”

“I’ll tell it,” she said dully. “You seem to know it anyway.”

“How’d you catch on he was hypersensitive to tickling?”

“By accident. I was sitting on the arm of his chair one evening, trying to vamp it out of him — where the money was, you know. I happened to tickle him under the chin, and he jumped a mile. Dan saw it happen and that gave him the idea. He built it up to me for weeks. ‘If he was tied down,’ he said, ‘in one place so he couldn’t get away from it, he couldn’t hold out against it very long, he’d have to tell you. It’d be like torture, but it wouldn’t hurt him.’ It sounded swell, so I gave in.

“But, honest, I didn’t know Dan meant to kill him. He was the one did it. I didn’t! I thought he only meant for us to take the money and lam, and leave El tied up.”

“Never mind that; go ahead.”

“Dan had it all thought out beautiful. He had me go around the village first building it up that I was getting El to laugh and liven up. He even had me buy the joke book at the general store. Then last night about ten thirty when El was sitting by the lamp reading some seed catalogues, I gave the signal and Dan came up behind him with rope and pillows from the bed and insect spray gauntlets. He held him while I put the gauntlets on him — they’re good thick buckram, you know — so no rope burns would show from his struggles, and then he tied his hands to the arms of the chair, over the gauntlets. The pillows we used over his waist and thighs, for the same reason, to deaden the ropes. Then he let the chair back down nearly flat, and he took off El’s shoes and socks, and brought in a handful of chicken feathers from the yard, and squatted down in front of him like an Indian, and started to slowly stroke the soles of his feet back and forth. It was pretty awful to watch and listen to: I hadn’t thought it would be. But that screaming laugh! Tickling doesn’t sound so bad, you know.

“Every time Dan blunted a feather, he’d throw it away and start in using a new one. And he said in his sleepy way: ‘Care to tell us where it is now? No? Wa-al, mebbe you know best.’ I wanted to bring him water once, but Dan wouldn’t let me, said that would only help him hold out longer.

“El was such a stubborn fool. He didn’t once say he didn’t have the money, he only said he’d see us both in hell before he told us where it was. He fainted away, the first time, about twelve. After that he kept getting weaker all the time, couldn’t laugh any more, just heave his ribs.

“Finally he gave in, whispered it was in a tin box plastered into the well, below the water line. He told us there was a rope ladder he’d made himself to get down there, hidden in the attic. Dan lowered himself down, and got it out, brought it up, and counted it. I wanted to leave right way, but he talked me out of it. He said: ‘We’ll only give ourselves away if we do that. We know where it is now. Let’s leave it there a mite longer; he mayn’t live as long as you’d expect. ‘I see now what he meant; I still didn’t then. Well, I listened to him; he seemed to have the whole thing lined up so cleverly. He climbed back with it and left it down there. Then we went back to the house. I went upstairs, and I no sooner got there than I heard El start up this whimpering and cooing again, like a little newborn baby. I quickly ran down to try and stop him, but it was too late. Just as I got there, El overstrained himself and suddenly went limp. That little added extra bit more killed him, and Dan Fears had known it would, that’s why he did it!

“I got frightened, but he told me there was nothing to worry about, everything was under control, and they’d never tumble in a million years. We took the ropes and pillows and gauntlets off him, of course, and no marks were left. We raised the chair back to reading position, and dropped the joke book by his hand, and I put on his shoes and socks. The only thing was, after he’d been a dead a little while, his face started to relapse to that sour, scowly look he always had all his life, and that didn’t match the joke book. Well, Dan took care of that too. He waited until just before he was starting to stiffen, and then he arranged the lips and mouth with his hands so it looked like he’d been laughing his head off; and they hardened and stayed that way. Then he sent me out to fetch the doctor.” She hung her head. “It seemed so perfect. I don’t know how it is it fell through.”

“How did you catch on so quick, Al?” the sheriff asked Traynor, while they were waiting for a stenographer to come and take down her confession.

“First of all, the smile. You could see his features had been rearranged after death. Before rigor sets in, there’s a relaxation to the habitual expression. Secondly, the jokes were no good. Fears may have thought a sour puss wouldn’t match them, but it would have matched them lots better than the one they gave him. Thirdly, when I hitched up the cuffs of his trousers, I saw that his socks had been put on wrong, as if in a hurry by someone who wasn’t familiar with things like that — therefore presumably it was a woman. The garter clasps were fastened at the insides of the calves, but the original indentations still showed on the outsides. Fourthly, the bent chicken feathers. I still didn’t quite get it, though, until I learned this afternoon at the general store that he was supersensitive to tickling. That gave me the whole picture, intact. I’d already seen the clay on the trowel, and Fears did his level best to keep me away from the well, so it didn’t take much imagination to figure where the money was hidden. The marks of the ropes may not have shown on his hands, but the gauntlets were scarred by their friction, I could see that plainly even by the light of the torch when I went back to the toolshed tonight.

“It was pretty good, I’ll give it that. If they’d only left his face alone. I don’t think my suspicions would have been awakened in the first place. They spoiled it by overdoing it; just a mere inference of how he’d died wasn’t enough — they had guilty consciences, so they wanted to make sure of getting their point across, hitting the onlooker in the eye with it. And that was the one thing he’d never had in life — a sense of humor. The joke wasn’t really in the book after all. The joke was on them.”