THE WHITE WOLF (8 page)

There was no answer.

Mrs. Tilson's eyes sought the shadows of the shrubbery. Her voice rose:

“Leroy!”

She waited a moment. Then:

“Now where’s that little dickens gone?”

She descended the steps and began touring the yard. She walked around to the front of the house, where the floodlight from the barn did not penetrate. She stood a moment, listening.

“Leroy!”

Her voice was tired. A car rolled out from the village and sped west. It passed the Marcus place and slowed down for the bridge in front of the Tilson house. The headlights glared on the lawn, erasing shadows of shrubbery and trees, and then replanting the shadows at bizarre and shifting angles. Mamie Tilson took the opportunity to glance all ways at once about the lawn.

Seeing her there in the white blaze of the lamps, you would have said she looked careworn and tired. She was not a large woman: she was not strongly built. Work or a farm is hard—and Mamie Tilson had borne six children.

“Leroy!” she called once more, and then continued on around the other side of the house where the lawn ended at the creek's bank.

She walked slowly to the bam and stood at the wide doorway. Tilson and Frank, seated on little one-legged stools, were milking the two Guernseys. The milk purred in rhythmic jets into the pails.

“I can’t find Leroy,” Mrs. Tilson said wearily. She passed the back of a thin, blue- veined hand across her forehead.

“Just about through,” Tilson said. “Help you look, Mama.”

He got up. He poured the milk into another pail. He walked into the tool room and returned with a flashlight.

“I thought he was with you,” Mrs. Tilson said. “I wouldn’t worry—but that thing and all”

“Now, now, Mama. . . .”

But Hank Tilson couldn’t find Leroy either. And so he returned for Frank, who lit a lantern. They began searching along the creek.

“Little cuss, always wanderin’ around,” Frank said impatiently. He was eighteen and he had a date that night with the Potts girl.

They searched down the creek and through the woods till they came to the fence between their land and the Waterman’s.

“Don’t seem’s he coulda gone this fur,” Hank Tilson said. He stood in a clearing of the wood and swung the beam of his flashlight from one clump of bushes to another. He called out:

“Leroy!”

An echo replied. Then Frank exclaimed:

“Listen!”

He held his lantern higher and its circle of light widened. He looked downstream into the Waterman land. Hank Tilson sent the beam of his flashlight in that direction.

“Thought I heard a rustle,” Frank explained. “Like. . . .”

“Pheasants maybe,” Hank Tilson said. “Lots of ’em down here.”

Margaret Potts didn’t have her date that night. Hank Tilson went back to the house and he called two of his neighbors. And they told neighbors, and within two hours a score of men were beating through the woods and fields.

They spread out. Some, just on a hunch, went upstream till they reached Lacey’s Lane. And some went as far west as the State Highway. But since Trent’s land on the other side was enclosed by a dose-barred iron fence, they didn’t figure it necessary to go farther.

From the county road, night motorists could see in all directions lanterns and flashlights bobbing. And in the back lanes automobiles, loaded with men staring ahead and with spotlights swinging slowly in arcs, rolled in low gear.

The news reached the Well, where Klonsterman and Adolf Mandel were locked in a beery debate. Mandel left to join the search, and a few minutes later Klonsterman staggered out and was next seen weaving his uncertain way toward the Tilson farm.

But Leroy was not found that night.

It was ten o’clock the next morning when Tip Farney, who worked for the Watermans across from Fountain Head, left the neat, white stone Waterman house and tramped across the east pasture. He had a cross saw with him and he figured on looking over some fallen trees. He came to the woods along Bowling Creek south of the Tilson land and he followed the stream down to its confluence with the Neshaminy in the southeast parcel of the Waterman farm.

There, by the light of day, lay the mangled blood-coated body of a little child.

STATE troopers came. Reporters and photographers followed. The State Troopers gathered at the spot.

“My God!” one exclaimed. “Look at that flesh!”

Another trooper gasped. And a third, eyes studying the ground said: .

“God! See them tracks? Looks like the kid was dragged here!”

“Dog tracks, they look,” said the first trooper.

“That’s Bryn,” Farney said with conviction.

“Bryn? Who's Bryn?” one of the troopers demanded.

“Adolf Mandel’s police clog,” Farney muttered with growing anger. ‘ Lives up next to the Tilsons; dog’s a bad'n.”

They found a trail of broken twigs and brushed leaves leading uncertainly from the edge of the Tilson yard a mile and a half south to the confluence of the two streams. Hank Tilson looked on in stupor.

“But why—” he croaked. “Why didn’t we see that last night?”

“Be hard,” a trooper said, “at night even with a lantern. And maybe you weren't looking for—this.”

“No, no,” sobbed Hank. “My God, not this!”

The trooper added, “And some of the men tramped over it. You can see where they obliterated the trail. Now—see there. Here the tracks come out again and that’s where the kid's body was dragged, breaking those twigs.”

And then, after Hank Tilson went home to break as best as he could the tragic news to Mamie, the coroner arrived from Doylestown.

“Good Lordl” he cried. “Looks like the kid's been eaten. See those teeth marks. What’s been going on ’round here?”

Slowly, the troopers absorbed the story: David’s prize Angora goat, Pierre's duck, Nellie’s alarm.

A trooper who specialized in such things made plaster casts of the animal's prints. They measured the distance between each imprint of each pad.

“Got a long stride for a dog,” the trooper said.

“Bryn's a big dog,” Farney said viciously.

“Were there any prints like this where this girl saw this thing?”

“Some of the men went down,” Farney replied. “They said they found prints. I dunno. I wasn't there.”

“We’ll match ’em,” the trooper said with decision. “How about those others?”

“You’ll have to ask Dave Trent an’ ol’ d’Wigney.”

There was evidence, from the confusion of prints, that the animal had remained for some time at the confluence of the streams. Then the trail led up the Neshaminy on the north bank. Here the prints in the soft earth were not so deep.

“Wasn’t carrying the kid’s weight any more,” a trooper said.

The trail led for perhaps a hundred yards until, in the ooze of the creek’s bank, it disappeared.

“Smart dog,” a trooper observed.

“The tracks'll be on the other side,” another said.

But when the troopers waded across the creek and began to examine the ground with minute care, they were puzzled. There were no tracks.

“Maybe waded downstream?”

“Dogs aren't that smart.”

“Or came back on the side it left on?”

Two troopers on each side of the creek, they made their way upstream. They progressed another hundred yards. Finally: “Found something,” said a man on the south bank.

He pointed down to a point between the stream and a path that led west to the State Highway.

“H’m-m. It’s smudged. Here’s a better one over near the path. Hell! That isn’t what we’re looking for.”

The other troopers gathered around, looked down. They saw a faint print of a small shoe. Then another and another.

“Like a kid’s shoe—or a woman’s,” a trooper said.

Farney announced, “Might be. Kids come down here to play sometimes.’’

They searched for an hour for a reappearance of the beast’s marks. They found none. So they went to Adolf Mandel’s house. A crowd of angry neighbors stood in the yard.

Adolf Mandel stood at the front door of his house, facing the crowd.

He held a shotgun loosely under his arms and he shouted:

“One step more’n I’ll shoot. I’ll shoot, damn you! I’ll shoot!”

“We want to see Bryn!” one of the crowd screamed.

“Bryn’s been in all night, I tell you. I keep him penned up like the commissioners said! An’ you get offa this place.”

“Get the dog!” a farmer shouted. “Kill the dog!”

“Thinka that poor Tilson kid!” shrieked an angry voice.

“Ha. There's Jim, gonna round to the back. He’ll get at him.”

Red-faced, burning with rage, Mandel glanced to his left. One of the men had detoured and was sneaking toward the rear.

It was then that Klonsterman arrived. He shouldered his apelike self through the crowd. Mandel saw him and cursed:

“You’re the one done this, damn you! You’n Heinrich Darhammer an’ all your dirty lies!” Klonsterman spoke loudly, but he seemed to whine, too.

“ ’Tain’t what I come for. I come to tell what’s true.”

“Git the dog!” a man yelled.

Klonsterman turned to the others.

“Lissen, why don’t ya? I know Bryn was in his pen last night. I seen him!”

Immediate quiet prevailed. Mandel turned amazed eyes toward him.

“Me’n Adolf was in the inn together, wan’t we, Adolf?” Klonsterman bellowed.

Slowly, wonderingly, Mandel nodded.

“We was there when word come the kid was lost, wan’t we?”

Again Mandel nodded.

“An' you went out to jine the search, ain't that so, Adolf?” Klonsterman questioned. “An’ then I follered.”

The restiveness of the crowd was reborn. “Hell!” spat one man. “That don’t mean nothin'. He went home an’ called Bryn in an' then joined the hunt.”

“No, he didn’t.” bellowed Klonsterman. “No, he didn't. I follered him an’ I seen him on the road and he went right smack past here an’ on up the road to Tilson’s.”

And the crowd grew quiet.

“And I come right here myself,” Klonsterman continued, triumphantly, “an' I went ’round in back an’ looked in the pen an' there—by jingo, there was Bryn!”

THAT night Trent dropped in at Fountain Head. The weather had grown suddenly colder, and a wind had risen and rain had begun to fall. The rain on the roof sounded like the endlessly spasmodic roll of a snare drum.

The wind grew and the rain fell in waves. And some of the rain found its way down the chimney and fell sizzling on the log on the irons.

“And they're searching in this!” Trent ex-claimed.

He walked to the French doors and looked out, his cigar gripped between his teeth. Pierre stood beside him. Together they saw lanterns bobbing in the storm—prints of yellow light, moving erratically,

“What else can they do?” asked Pierre. “Can’t have that damned thing around.”

Trent nodded.

“They’re over at my place, too. There must be two hundred men out—besides the troopers.” He paused to look as a light came nearer along the creek and then disappeared toward the back of the house. “Dave’s out too,’’ he said. “Tramping around.” He laughed shortly, without humor. “Don’t think he’s so much worried about that hound as he is about keeping the men out of his rose garden. He’s awfully proud of that garden.”

“Reward up?” asked Pierre.

“Yes,” said Trent, who was a member of the Township Board of Commissioners. “We put a reward up this afternoon when we met. Five hundred dollars. Isn’t much, but the board hasn’t much to spend.”

He turned toward the heavy smoking stand where a siphon bottle of seltzer water and a decanter of Scotch stood. He mixed a highball. Pierre watched him enviously.

Trent sat down, stretched out his long legs and sipped at his tall glass.

“Did you hear it wasn’t Bryn?” he asked.

“Not exactly.”

“It wasn’t. The police matched those prints they found by the body. They found some where David’s goat was killed and they found those near Lacey's Lane. They said they matched up—same animal and all that—but not Bryn.”

“I stayed in town after the concert last night,” Pierre said, “and didn’t see a paper till this evening on the train home. Heinrich did say the troopers were over and wanted to see where the duck was killed.”

Trent got up again and moved to the doors. The rain was slanting into the porch.

“I’ll put up another five hundred,” Pierre said.

“Match it.”

Sara appeared while Pierre and Trent still talked. She shed her raincoat and her rubbers in the hall by the open door. She came into the room quietly, making a wide circuit of the room, keeping her eyes fixed on the fire until she reached a chair in the far corner.

Trent’s eyes filled with admiration. Here, he thought, was a girl after his own liking. He liked her loose walk, her calm detachment. He liked the look of her body, the way she dressed. Not many girls could boast her style.