Weird Tales January 1938 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp, Fantastique
Publisher: Popular Fiction Publishing
Published: 1938-05-01T23:00:00+00:00

5. “They Want to Take the Law into Their Own Hands”

T

HE cell was an upper room of the town hall, with a heavy wooden door and a single tiny window. The walls were of bare, unplastered brick, the floor of concrete and the ceiling of white-washed planks. An oil lamp burned in a bracket. The only furniture was an iron bunk hinged to the wall just below the window, a wire-bound straight chair and an unpainted table. On top of this last stood a bowl and pitcher, with playing-cards scattered around them.

Constable O’Bryant locked me in and peered through a small grating in the door. He was all nose and eyes and wide lips, like a sardonic Punchinello.

“Look here,” I addressed him suddenly, for the first time controlling my frayed nerves; “I want a lawyer.”

“There ain’t no lawyer in town,” he boomed sourly.

“Isn’t there a Judge Pursuivant in the neighborhood?” I asked, remembering something that Susan had told me.

“He don’t practise law,” O’Bryant grumbled, and his beaked face slid out of sight.

I turned to the table, idly gathered up the cards into a pack and shuffled them. To steady my still shaky fingers, I produced a few simple sleight-of-hand effects, palming of aces, making a king rise to the top, and springing the pack accordion-wise from one hand to the other.

“I’d sure hate to play poker with you,” volunteered O’Bryant, who had come again to gaze at me.

I crossed to the grating and looked through at him. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said once more. “Even if I were guilty, you couldn’t keep me from talking to a lawyer.”

“Well, I’m doing it, ain’t I?” he taunted me. “You wait until tomorrow and we’ll go to the county seat. The sheriff can do whatever he wants to about a lawyer for you.”

He ceased talking and listened. I heard the sound, too—a hoarse, dull murmur as of coal in a chute, or a distant, lowing herd of troubled cattle.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

O’Bryant, better able to hear in the corridor, cocked his lean head for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Sounds like a lot of people talking, out in the square,” he replied. “I wonder—”

He broke off quickly and walked away. The murmur was growing. I, pressing close to the grating to follow the constable with my eyes, saw that his shoulders were squared and his hanging fists doubled, as though he were suddenly aware of a lurking danger.

He reached the head of the stairs and dumped down, out of my sight. I turned back to the cell, walked to the bunk and, stepping upon it, raised the window. To the outside of the wooden frame two fiat straps of iron had been securely bolted to act as bars. To these I clung as I peered out.

I was looking from the rear of the hall toward the center of the square, with the war memorial and the far line of shops and houses seen dimly through a thick curtain of falling snow.

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