THE WHITE WOLF (7 page)

PIERRE tramped over to Manning Trent’s house that night. The way led along the old Post Road through the north end of his own land, around to the back of the high hill, down into a gully and then up a rising slope. It was through woods until he reached the wide lawn of Trent's house.

It was a moonless night, but the stars were out and by their light Pierre could see the big stone Norman house which Trent’s father had built in the ’80's as a country seat. It was solid and substantial and its wide front porch, running the length of the house, faced the State Highway a quarter of a mile distant. You could see the lights of automobiles on the road. Some of the cars turned into the narrower country road leading east to the village; and when they did, from the porch you saw only the occasional flicker of a red tail-light.

Mrs. Trent, a lean wooden-faced woman who never let her husband forget that her own family arrived in Philadelphia early enough to attend the first Assembly, came to the door herself. Pierre considered with malicious amusement that that, in itself was quite a com-promise for her.

Pierre and Julia Trent had never been great friends. They passed amenities, but beneath the surface lay a certain antagonism. It had served him right, she thought, when Angelica left him. Pierre was too democratic; didn't keep enough servants around. Julia Trent could not be accused of that.

Manning was at his desk in his study. He had a batch of proofs before him and was going over them with a thick pencil.

“Monday’s editorials,” he said. “Have to watch everything down there like a hawk. Those fools would sell the presses from under me if I didn’t look out.” He put them aside. “What’s on your mind?”

Pierre settled into a chair.

“Mandel’s a tenant of yours, isn’t he?” “Mandel?’ Yes. Has that ten acres down this side of the village. Why?”

“His dog tore up one of my ducks.”

Trent picked up his burning cigar.

“Oh. So you’re getting it now?”

Pierre’s left eyelid drooped lower, and his right eye blinked.

“What do you mean?”

Manning explained.

“Dave lost one of those Angora nannies he brought up from Texas and he’s hopping mad. Night before last.”

“I don’t see what that's got to do with my duck,” Pierre said. He added quickly, “It’s not the duck I mind, but if Bryn is loose again. . . .”

Trent leaned back and sent a cloud of smoke reeling toward the ceiling.

“Maybe Bryn’s loose. Maybe he isn’t. I don’t know. But the talk is there's a wolf around.”

Pierre said, “Nonsense.” But only then did he recognize what it was Freda had said, what he hadn’t caught at first: “—die wolf.” He said:

“I thought it was Fritz at first. That’s Heinrich’s Newfoundland. But the footprints didn’t match. What’s this about a wolf?”

“So far,” explained Trent, “just talk. You know how those things get around. This goat —Dave was trying to use ’em for a Northern cross-breed—was killed in its pen over on the west forty. That’s down near the creek. David’s man found the body in one corner when he went down to feed ’em yesterday morning. It was badly chewed up. Over in the opposite end of the pen the other goats were huddled together like scared—”sheep,” Pierre finished with a grin.

“All right. Marie, that’s Julia's maid, sleeps over the, garage. She said about midnight she heard a commotion down that way. She said the night before she heard a wolf howl. Well, if anybody’s ever heard a wolf, you can’t mistake it.”

Pierre suggested, “Maybe she never heard one before.” He sat back and crossed his pudgy legs and tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. He said, “Hell, there haven't been any wolves in Pennsylvania since I was a boy.”

“That’s wrong,” Trent said. “There was one trapped near Kane a year ago.”

Pierre fingered his mole reflectively. “H’m-m. I remember. It was a lobo. Probably hiked down from Canada.”

“It was not a lobo. It was a Pennsylvania timber wolf.”

“Anyway,” Pierre observed, “it was the last one. The story said so. I read it in your paper.”

“You don't always believe everything you set there, do you?”

“If I didn’t, how could I believe there was any wolf at all?”

Trent, nettled, fell silent. But finally he remarked:

“That so-called ‘last one’ of anything doesn’t mean much. Why, over in England they kept killing off the last wolf every' year right up to the year eighteen hundred.”

“I’d rather believe Heinrich’s theory,” Pierre said. “He was down at Mandel’s.”

“Did he see Bryn?”

“Naturally not. Bryn wasn’t there. That’s how he knew. You can't see something there when it isn't.”

“Heinrich could. Drinks, doesn’t he?”

“Not if I catch him.” Pierre added: “If it is Bryn, you’ve got to do something. As I said, it isn’t just one duck. Nor one goat. Next time, Bryn might go for some youngster. He's a big ugly brute; biggest police dog I ever saw.”

“What could I do?”

“Either get rid of Mandel or make Mandel get rid of the dog.”

Trent stared absently at the desk.

“He’s a good tenant. I wouldn’t want to run him off. And there's just another possibility. You remember that fool up in the Poconos—McFatish, McFadden, Me. . . .” “McFanahan. Breeds wolves. Peddles 'em to zoos.”

“That’s it. Isn’t there a bare chance some of his might have escaped and come down this way?”

“Might. He’d never admit, though,” Pierre said.

“If he did, he'd lose his breeder’s license.”

“They're lobos, of course. You said so yourself when we stopped off that time we were fishing near there.”

Manning agreed.

“I ought to know a lobo when I see one,” he said. “I used to hunt enough up in Canada. That’s where McFanahan got his first pair.”

Pierre was not satisfied when he took his departure.

ADOLF MANDEL was a widower. He was wiry and tough and red. He lived in the old Marcus place, a narrow, story-and-a- half white frame house set back from the county road just west of the village of Friends Meeting. He lived there alone, if you didn't count his five dogs of all colors and breeds. When people spoke of Mandel’s dog, they weren’t thinking of the other four. They meant Bryn.

Mandel worked the ten acres he rented from Manning Trent. He worked them hard. From early spring to late fall he gardened. He sold the produce. He had chickens and he sold the eggs. He had two fresh cows and he sold the milk. Sometimes he did some odd jobs. He had two loves: the dogs and his beer at night. And on Monday evening, after the frugal supper he cooked for himself, he left the house and went into the county road and turned toward the village.

His goal was always the same—the big barnlike inn owned and operated by John Craven as a clearing house for fact, fiction and alcoholic beverages.

The inn's first owner had built it of brick at about the opening of the nineteenth century. The second owner had plastered over the brick. Now the plaster was falling away in places and showing the brick again. The only exterior evidence of modernity was a blue neon sign:
Beer, Wines, Whiskey
.

There was an atmosphere of permanency about the Well, from which not even the new neon sign (1934) or the new bar (1897) could detract. And men who knew John Craven's father in the '8o’s saw so little difference in the now-aging son that they were not conscious of a break in the continuity of ownership.

John Craven now was in his late sixties, a chunky, deferential man of middle height with thin, gray hair and colorless eyes. He always stood ready to loan a man a dollar or to listen to his troubles.

He was behind the bar when Mandel walked in. And he was agreeing meekly with Klonesterman, the little red-faced carpenter who had a body like an ape and a voice like a bass drum.

“We oughter have a wolf hunt, that’s what we oughter have!” Klonsterman said, nodding his head vigorously.

“Ye-ss,” whispered John Craven.

Farney, the hired man at the Waters, set his drink down on the bar aggressively and said, “But if it
is
Mandel’s Bryn. . . .”

Mandel forced an opening for himself between Farney and Klonsterman and plinked a nickel on the bar.

“Who said it’s Bryn?” he asked angrily. “It ain’t Bryn. I keep him locked up like the commissioners said.”

He held the stein to his lips, blew off the foam, drank. Then he replaced the stein and drew the back of his hand across his lips.

“Look,” he demanded, turning to Craven. “Look. It don’t make sense I’d go agin the commissioners, does it, John?”

John Craven drew thoughtfully on his cigar stub.

“No-o-o,” he said slowly. “No-o-o, it don't.” “See there!” cried Mandel triumphantly. Craven was embarrassed. He said, after a moment:

“Y’know, there was a reporter feller up here from the city today. Came in here, he did.”

Meade said, “Met him. Old man Trent sent him up. It was Dave’s goat was lost first.” Farney, who was gaunt and white-haired, gulped his whiskey.

“Or d’Wigney los’ a duck, too. Heinrich Derhammer tole me.”

“A duck ain’t nothin’,” Mandel countered. “A fox’r a ferret mighta done that.”

Farney shook his head.

“This weren’t no ferret. Leastways, Heinrich Derhammer said there was tracks about . . . in the mud like. Like a dog’s tracks.” He leered at Mandel, then added hastily: “Or a wolf’s.”

Klonsterman shook his head.

“Ain't been a wolf in these parts close cornin’ to fifty year,” he said. “ ’Member the last’n kilt. I was just a kid. But Pa an’ alia men, they fit to died. They got out an’ they tracked’m down. They spread out fanwise an’ they closed in. Took three-four days. Found’m down the creek back of Miller’s place, near Lacey’s Lane, that’s where.”

The men jabbered. It remained for little Nellie Sage, who was called a bit queer in the head, to create the real excitement—before a bug-eyed audience of women.

The following Saturday night she ran into Pott’s General Store, out of breath, just before dosing time.

“I seen it!” she screamed. “I seen it! I seen it jest now, over on Lacey’s Lane!”

She stood panting, while half a dozen farm wives and village women—there for their last-minute Saturday-night shopping and a bargain of gossip—gazed at her with astonishment.

Nellie was nineteen and pretty in a pale sort of way. She was simple, hadn’t had much schooling, and was maid-of-all-work for the Dawsons, whose farm was divided from the Trent estate by the Caldwell place.

Mrs. Potts, the fat wife of the storekeeper, grabbed Nellie by the shoulders.

‘‘You seen what?” she demanded. She shook the girl.

“I seen it! I seen that thing!” Nellie shrieked.

“That big dog?” asked Mrs. Tilson, shifting her market basket from one arm to the other.

“ 'Tain’t no dog,” Nellie said stubbornly. “I seen it. Never seen nothin’ like it. I was walkin’ nice as you please along the lane an’ I come to the bridge over Bowling Creek near where the Millers used to live. I was walkin’ to one side—the side toward the old dam an’ I crossed the bridge, an’ right there it was, square in the middle of the lane.”

“What was?” demanded Mrs. Potts.

“I keep tellin’ you, don’t I?” Nellie cried. “This thing. Big as life and white as snow it was. An’ it had red eyes an’ sharp teeth an’ it looked at me—goshamighty, I near died!

Near scared out of my wits, I was! It looked like the pictures of wolves!”

Her story went the rounds. It differed in detail, depending on who told it. Truth is a loose commodity, and it wasn't very long before some folks were telling how it was Mrs. Trent, not Nellie, who saw the thing, although nobody explained what the haughty '' Mrs. Trent would be doing walking along Lacey’s Lane at night.

The thing grew in the telling. It became as big as a horse. It had the head of a tiger.

Mrs. Trent was down for a week from fright.

Some of the men visited the spot and followed an old path along the bank of the creek. They found the prints of some sort of an animal, which seemed to bear out Nellie’s story. But the prints were vague and they disappeared at the bank of the creek farther down.

THE rolling, somewhat wooded land of the Tilson farm sprawled on the south side of the county road, midway between the village of Friends Meeting and the Trent estate. Immediately east was the old Marcus place. The west line was the State highway. Bowling Creek, cutting down from north, crossed Lacey’s Lane, a half mile north of the Tilson buildings which fronted the county road. The creek skirted the farmyard, meandering south through the Tilson land and beyond, finally to join with the Neshaminy.

The last evening of November was fair and warm. And Leroy, who was four, was playing in the farmyard near the creek after supper. Near-by in the barns, his father—big, redhaired Henry—and his eldest son, Frank, were at chores.

It was dark, but the lights from the house and the electric bulb atop the barn gable illuminated the yard. And there was more light, too, when Mrs. Tilson threw open the kitchen door and stood, looking to her right, and then to her left.

“Leroy!” she called. “Leroy! Bedtime!”