The Flying Death - Samuel Hopkins Adams (story reading .txt) 📗

“Professor,” interrupted Haynes, “the only thing that approached Serdholm within striking distance walked on a foot armed with five great claws. You can see the trail on this map.” He produced a large sheet of paper on which was a crude but careful drawing. “And there is its sign-manual, life-size,” he added, pushing a second sheet across the table to the scientist.

Imagination could hardly picture a more precise, unemotional and conventially scientific man than Professor Ravenden. Yet, at sight of the paper his eyes sparkled, he half started from his chair, a flush rose in his cheeks, he looked keenly from the sketch to the artist, and spoke in a voice that rang with a deep under-thrill of excitement:

“Are you sure, Mr. Haynes—are you quite sure that this is substantially correct?”

“Minor details may be inexact. In all essentials that will correspond to the marks made by something that walked from the mouth of the gully to the spot where we found the body and back again.”

Before he had fairly finished the professor was out of the room. He returned almost immediately with a flat slab of considerable weight. This he laid on the table, and taking the drawing, sedulously compared it with an impression, deep-sunken into the slab. For Haynes a single glance was enough. That impression, stamped as it was on his brain, he would have identified as far as the eye could see it.

“That’s it!” he cried with the eagerness of triumphant discovery. “The bird from whose foot that cast was made is the thing that killed Serdholm.”

“Mr. Haynes,” said the entomologist dryly, “this is not a cast.”

“Not a cast?” said the reporter in bewilderment. “What is it, then?”

“It is a rock of the cretaceous period.”

“A rock?” he repeated dully. “Of what period?”

“The cretaceous. The creature whose footprint you see there trod that rock when it was soft ooze. That may have been one hundred million years ago. It was at least ten million.”

Haynes looked again at the rock, and superfluous emotions stirred among the roots of his hair.

“Where did you find it?” he asked presently.

“It formed a part of Mr. Johnston’s stone fence. Probably he picked it up in his pasture yonder. The maker of the mark inhabited the island where we now are this land then was distinct from Long Island—in the incalculably ancient ages.”

“What did this bird thing call itself?” Haynes demanded. A sense of the ghastly ridiculousness of the affair was jostling, in the core of his brain, a strong shudder of mental nausea born of the void into which he was gazing.

“It was not a bird. It was a reptile. Science knows it as the pteranodon.”

“Could it kill a man with its beak?”

“The first man came millions of years later—or so science thinks,” said the professor. “However, primeval man, unarmed, would have fallen a helpless victim to so formidable a brute as this. The pteranodon was a creature of prey,” he continued, with an attempt at pedantry which was obviously a ruse to conquer his own excitement. “From what we can reconstruct, a reptile stands forth spreading more than twenty feet of bat-like wings, and bearing a four-foot beak as terrible as a bayonet. This monster was the undisputed lord of the air; as dreadful as his cousins of the earth, the dinosaurs, whose very name carries the significance of terror.”

“And you mean to tell us that this billion-years-dead flying swordfish has flitted out of the darkness of eternity to kill a miserable coastguard within a hundred miles of New York, in the year 1902?” broke in Everard Colton.

“I have not said so,” replied the entomologist quickly. “Rut if your diagram is correct, Mr. Haynes, if it is reasonably accurate, I can tell you that no living bird ever made the prints which it reproduces, that science knows no five-toed bird, and no bird whatsoever of sufficiently formidable beak to kill a man; furthermore, that the one creature known to science which could make that print, and could slay a man or a creature far more powerful than man, is the tiger of the air, the pteranodon.”

“Evidence wanted from the doctor!” cried Haynes. “Colton, can you add anything to this theory that Serdholm was killed by a bayonet-beaked ghoul that lived ten or a hundred or a thousand million years ago?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the doctor: “The wound isn’t unlike what a heavy, sharp beak would make.”

“And that would explain the sailor being killed while he was coming in on the buoy!” exclaimed Everard Colton. “But—but this pteranodon—is that it? Oh, the deuce! I thought all those pterano-things were dead and buried long before Adam’s great-grandfather was a protoplasm.”

“My own belief is that Mr. Haynes’ diagram is faulty,” said Professor Ravenden, to whom he had turned.

“Will you come and see?” challenged Haynes.

“Willingly. Would it not be well to take the rock along for comparison?”

“Then we’d better all go,” said Everard Colton, “and carry the rock in shifts. It doesn’t look as if it had lost any weight with age.”

As the party reached the large living-room, Helga Johnston sprang up from the long cushioned rest near the fireplace. Her face was flushed with sleep. In the glow of the firelight an expression of affright lent her beauty an uncanny aspect. Her breath came in little gasps, and her hands groped and trembled.

“What is it, Miss Helga?” cried Everard, running eagerly forward.

Unconsciously her fingers closed on his outstretched hand, and clung there.

“A dream!” she said breathlessly. “A horrid dream!” Then turning to Haynes: “Petit P�re, you aren’t going out tonight?” she said, glancing at the lanterns which her foster-father had brought.

“Yes, Princess, we’re all going.”

“Into danger?” asked the girl. She had freed herself from Colton’s grasp, but now her eyes fell on his again.

“No; just to clear up a little point. We shall all hang together.”

“Don’t go tonight, Petit P�re!” There was an imploring intonation in the girl’s flute-like voice.

Haynes crossed over to her rapidly. “Princess, you’re tired out and nervous. Go to bed, won’t you?”

“Yes; but promise me—father, you too, all of you—promise me you won’t any of you let yourselves be alone.”

“My dear child,” said Professor Ravenden, “I’ll give you my word for the party, as I am the occasion of the expedition.”

“I—I suppose I am foolish,” Helga said; “but I have dreamed so persistently of some terrible danger overhanging—floating down like a pall.” With a sudden gesture she caught Haynes’ hand to her cheek. “It hung over you, Petit P�re!” she whispered.

“I’ll throw a pebble at your window to let you know I’m back alive and well,” he said gaily. “I’ve never seen you so nervous before, Princess.”

“You’ll hardly need the lantern,” said the girl, walking to the door, and looking up at the splendid moon, sailing in the unflecked sea of the Heavens.

“When you’re looking for footprints on the sands of time,” observed Everard, “you need the light that never was on sea or land.”

He dropped back as the exploring party filed out into the night, and fell into step with Professor Ravenden.

“Isn’t it true,” he asked, “that all these flying monsters are extinct?”

“Science has assumed that they were extinct,” said the Professor. “But a scientific assumption is a mere makeshift, useful only until it is overthrown by new facts. We have prehistoric survivals. The gar of our rivers is unchanged from its ancestors of fifteen million years ago. The creature of the water has endured; why not the creature of the air?”

“But,” said Colton combatively, “where could it live and not have been discovered?”

“Perhaps at the North or South Pole,” said the professor. “Perhaps in the depths of unexplored islands; or possibly inside the globe. Geographers are accustomed to say loosely that the earth is an open book. Setting aside the exceptions which I have noted, there still remains the interior, as unknown and mysterious as the planets. In its possible vast caverns there well may be reproduced the conditions in which the pteranodon and its terrific contemporaries found their suitable environment on the earth’s surface, ages ago.”

“Then how would it get out?”

“The recent violent volcanic disturbances might have opened an exit.”

“Oh, that’s too much!” Haynes broke in. “I was at Martinique myself, and if you expect me to believe that anything came out of that welter of flame and boiling rocks alive—”

“You misinterpret me again,” said the professor blandly. “What I intended to convey was that these eruptions were indicative of great seismic changes, in the course of which vast openings might well have occurred in far parts of the earth. However, I am merely defending the pteranodon’s survival as an interesting possibility. As I stated before, Mr. Haynes, I believe the gist of the matter to lie in some error of your diagram.”

“We’ll see in a moment,” said Haynes; “for here’s the place. Let it down easy, Johnston. Wait, Professor, here’s the light. Now I’ll convince you.”

Holding the lantern with one hand, he uncovered one of the tracks with the other. The mark was perfectly preserved. “Good God! ” said the professor under his breath.

He dropped on his hands and knees beside the print, and as he compared the to-day’s mark on the sand with the rock print of millions of years ago, his breath came hard. Indeed, none of the party breathed as regularly as usual. When the scientist lifted his head, his face was twitching nervously.

“I have to ask your pardon, Mr. Haynes,” he said. “Your drawing was faithful.”

“But what in Heaven’s name does it mean?” cried Dick Colton.

“It means that we are on the verge of the most important discovery of modern times,” said the professor. “Savants have hitherto scouted the suggestions to be deduced from the persistent legend of the roc and from certain almost universal North American Indian lore, notwithstanding that the theory of some monstrous, winged creature widely different from any recognised existing forms is supported by more convincing proofs. In the north of England, in 1844, reputable witnesses found the tracks, after a night’s fall of snow, of a creature with a pendent tail, which made flights over houses and other obstructions, leaving a trail much like this before us. There are other corroborative instances of a similar nature. In view of the present evidence, I would say that this unquestionably was a pteranodon, or a descendant little altered, and a gigantic specimen, for these tracks are distinctly larger than the fossil marks. Gentlemen, I congratulate you both on your part in so epoch-making a discovery.”

“Do you expect a sane man to believe this thing?” Haynes demanded.

“That’s what I feel,” said Everard Colton. “But, on your own showing of the evidence, what else is there to believe?”

“But, see here,” Haynes expostulated, all the time feeling as if he were arguing in and against a dream. “If this is a flying creature, how explain the footprints leading up to Serdholm’s body, as well as away from it?”

“Owing to its structure,” said the professor, “the pteranodon could not rise rapidly from the ground in flight. It either sought an acclivity from which to launch itself, or ran swiftly along the ground, gathering impetus for a leap into the air with outspread wings. Similarly, in alighting, it probably ran along on its hind feet before dropping to its small fore feet. Now, conceive the pteranodon to be on the cliff’s edge, about to start upon its evening flight. Below it appears a man. Its ferocious nature is aroused at the sight of this unknown being. Down it swoops, skims swiftly with pattering feet toward him, impales him on its dreadful beak, then returns to climb the cliff and again