The Grim 13 by Edited by Frederick Stuart Greene

Author:Edited by Frederick Stuart Greene
Format: epub
Publisher: Munsey's

The Razor of Pedro Dutel

By Richard Matthews Hallet

At the time the man, Pedro Dutel, discovered that my partner, Frank Hyde, was a competent barber, we were cracking granite on top of a blazing mountain, in whose purple shadow Dutel had built his house, close by the river-bed. I can still feel the cold air of that wide, shining hall of his, the yield of those wicker chairs to my sore ribs; I can still see the great prospect of plain and mountain to the north, as we sat, all three of us, on the veranda. And I can still see my partner, pausing, with the razor held away from the chin of our host, to glance somewhat wistfully at the river.

“You think it will rise?”

“It has a frog in its throat,” murmured Dutel, again submitting his cheek to that resplendent leaf of steel which stroked the skin lightly as a feather fallen from the wings of sleep.

Our boat was moored just around the bend; but although we knew that our host, in this suave opinion of his, had an eye to his shaves, we knew also, that somewhere back among those dim, round-shouldered mountains lay a sack of rain. Yet the river, only half asleep in its bed, enticed, haunted us with its many-voiced dream-tale of the south, lying under twilight haze, like a mistress too languorous to rise, but willing to be won. It lay still, with scarcely a ripple, between its mysteriously figured walls of half-baked clay.

“It is too early to pick grapes there,” Dutel let fall, waving his arm southward.

“I and Dick have got money,” said old Frank. He wiped the razor on a clean towel, and added:

“We have heard about a lady a day's run down the creek. And we are drawn that way. We are ladies' men.”

At these words our immaculate Dutel came upright in his chair with a light in his dark eyes.

“Ah, you have heard,” he said. “The wife of Amberg. My friends, yes, a devoted lady. But it is a bad family.”

Lying back in his long chair, with eyes half shut again, he burst into the liquid speech characteristic of him. Amberg, he said, was a queer man, certainly a queer man, coming of a bad family, one of these bad families made bad by solitude and hard luck. Mad, poor devils, rather than bad. Their badness had a necessary quality in it, like the inexorable processes of indifferent nature. These people were numbed by their sequestering fate, indifferent to toil, as to the mournful fact of life itself, conducted in the thick of an unforgiving wilderness. They struck as the blind lightning strikes, from the pressure of invisible tormenting forces.

For his part, Pedro Dutel knew nothing authentic of Amberg; and in the bush one never inquired. Never inquired. One assumed, one understood. Nevertheless, it was said that Amberg had brought his wife from the towns, from Melbourne probably, where she had been a bar-maid. He had retreated here to discuss her, like a dog with a bone.

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