Hugh Thomason

“ 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." ”

“ It was an animal of some kind, I should say; a wolf, perhaps, although, as you said, the few wolves we have hereabouts have never been known to attack humans. But the man is frightfully mangled, his jugular vein is quite torn out of him. Had his gun in his hand, too. It's empty. He must have fought the thing hard, whatever it was. I wonder—could it have been the 'plague'?"
Sheriff Parker nodded in an absent way, his eyes still fixed on the faint trail through the trees and weeds. ”

“ 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 could merely see a dark blotch behind the bushes—the carcass of a cow or steer probably—and he watched the beautiful black-and-white birds speculatively as they uttered their shrill, raucous cries, and fluttered about the thicket. ”

“ Sheriff Parker and Doctor Morse, the coroner, happened to be together in the latter's office when Benson entered and told his story. Both men listened without any particular comment, and at the end the sheriff got to his feet.
"I'll run you out in the car, Horace," he informed the coroner. "We can reach the spot easily enough by following the old road up the creek. From what Benson says, the thing does not look like a crime exactly—it seems more like the work of wolves, though I never heard of any attacking a man in this region ”

“ For obvious reasons I thought it would be safer to do our watching from above ground, and with these boards we can construct a support that will enable us to stay in the tree with some degree of safety. ”