Two hours later, seated at his own desk with a cigar between his teeth, Sheriff Parker squinted through his glasses at Doctor Morse, who sat opposite.
"I tell you, Horace," the sheriff was saying, "it is such a thing as never has been known before. If I had not been studying the results of this creature's work for the past six weeks, I could not believe that such a thing could be. Still, it must be so! Poor Jack Moore, he was the first victim; we were morally certain that the thing got him; then that strange waving of the alfalfa in Pollard's meadow, and now this. I tell you, it's awful, Horace!"
"It is; it's more than that, Bert; it's unnatural." Doctor Morse puffed jerkily at his cigar. "And yet, science tells us that there are sounds the ear cannot detect, why not colors the eye cannot see? Take the only time the beast, or the 'plague,' as we have begun to call it, appeared in daylight. I mean that uncanny agitation in Pollard's hayfield that afternoon, when some heavy creature thrashed about there. It could be heard, and the alfalfa moved, but the thing itself could not be seen, though three different people stood watching."
"You are quite right, Horace; and I have already spent a great many sleepless nights milling over that 'neutral color' theory. Recently I have read that at the end of the solar spectrum there are things known as actinic rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern with the naked eye. The human eye is, after all, an imperfect instrument. Undoubtedly there are colors which we cannot see, and this beast, this scourge of the neighborhood, is of some such color."
"Aside from its color," the coroner mused, "the creature is tangible enough. It leaves a track in the ground larger by far than that of a full-grown timber wolf, and it certainly can fight. Benson says his hounds were soundly thrashed by it last week, you know, and there is Smith. He was a very powerful man, and armed, but, so far as we know, the thing killed him and got away unscathed. The man's body looked as if it had been struck by a train. The chest and sides might have been beaten in with a sledge, his clothes were torn to shreds, and as for his throat—well, the less said about that the better."
Sheriff Parker said nothing for several minutes. Getting to his feet, he began to pace slowly back and forth across the room, fingers interlaced behind his back and head bowed in the way he sometimes affected when in deep thought.
He was struggling with a problem the like of which he had never before tackled; and as he watched him, the coroner, in his turn, strove to devise some method of wiping out the creature which was terrorizing the entire valley.
ALMOST SIX weeks before, Jack Moore, a stock inspector, whose duties often carried him far out into the thinly settled portions of the country, had been found dead under circumstances similar in every way to those surrounding Smith's end.
At first, the authorities and general public had attributed the death to timber wolves, for the sole reason that they could attribute it to nothing else. The tracks about the body, though exceedingly large, were shaped like a wolf's, and the body itself had been torn and mangled as by some carniverous animal.
Soon after Moore's death came the killing of a dozen sheep in their pasture, and, on the heels of this, Judson Pollard, a prosperous farmer whose word was beyond dispute, with two of his hired men, had seen something rush through an alfalfa meadow—something that they could not make out, though it was broad daylight, and they could see the tall hay wave and shake, and could even hear the creature as it thrashed about there.
Then Jess Benson's hounds, a pack of fourteen, which had never met its match in numerous encounters with wolves and coyotes, had been soundly whipped, and three of its number killed outright in a fight with some animal which their owner could not see, although he had witnessed the fight from a distance.
Now, as a climax to the whole business, had come Nathan Smith's horrible death; and no man could say who or what would be the next victim. No wonder the entire county could talk of little else, and that the creature, whatever it was, had been named the "plague"!
As he thought over all these things for the hundredth: time, Sheriff Parker cudgeled his brain in an effort to form some plan for trapping and killing the beast. He knew that there must be a way, somehow, to make an end of the terror, even though the most skillful trappers and hunters in the district had failed to discover it. The animal's range was known. It seemed, for the most part, to frequent the country between Slater Creek and White Horse Mountain, probably because this region contained plenty of timber and natural shelter; and it was in this region that it must be cornered. For many years the little sheriff had studied the crimes of men, and few criminals had ever had just cause to boast of outwitting him; but this was a different task.
"Horace," the sheriff burst out finally, coming to an abrupt halt in front of his friend, "this butchery has gone far enough. We must put an end to it. What do you say to trying this very night? The beast seems to roam mostly at night, and tonight will be moonlight. We'll try to trap it at the Black Pool."
Doctor Morse stared at the speaker in surprise.
"The Black Pool?" he repeated. "Are you crazy, Bert? To be sure, we have discovered, so far as possible as any rate, that the beast seems to frequent the pool more than any other one spot; but how can we trap it? That has already been tried more than once."
"True, Horace; but we shall try in a different way. This thing, whatever it is, though it can't be seen, can be felt and heard; therefore it must have a solid body, so to speak. It leaves a distinct trail, you know, and its victims are proof enough that it is a creature of flesh and blood. My scheme is to make it visible—then, if we are lucky, we can shoot it."
The coroner jumped to his feet in his excitement.
"I see what you mean!" he cried. "Why haven't we thought of that before? But how, Bert—how will you do it?"
"That remains to be seen." Sheriff Parker smiled oddly as he looked at his companion. "If you are willing to risk the thing with me, I think I have a plan that will work. We'll leave here in the car about four this afternoon; that will get us to the pool in plenty of time to set our trap before dark. Bring along your repeating shotgun—a heavy charge of buckshot is far more certain after dark than a rifle ball, and we can't afford to miss."
Doctor Morse nodded understandingly.
"I shall not fail you, Bert," he said.
EARLY DUSK found the two men in the sheriff's car slowly picking their way over the stony trail which led to the Black Pool. In the bottom of the tonneau was a ten-gallon keg, three or four short boards, and something wrapped in burlap, while the back seat held a pair of repeating shot guns and a box of cartridges. A hundred yards from the pool, at the foot of a little hill, Sheriff Parker killed his engine and stepped out onto the ground.
"We'd better leave the car here," he remarked. "It is best not to make any
