Read Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman for Free Online Page A

up and dragged it in to the bathtub, began running hot water and turned on the exhaust fan.
    Then, carefully, he went through her pack. No clues there, except that practically nothing was used. Extra clothes and extra socks untouched, the little white-gas camp stove still almost full, a bundle of freeze-dried food unopened. Poncho, crampons, rope—all emergency equipment. A dozen other ordinary things.
    A little notebook fell out on the floor, together with a pad of Forest Service citations. He picked up the notebook. Her personal log book, sort of a private diary she kept of odd or unusual things she saw or thought of on her patrol trips. She'd never let him read it. Told him once that her idea of "odd or unusual" might upset his balance. Now he leafed through it quickly, found last Monday's date, began to skim through the day's entry in her tight, cramped hand. Early start from Icicle River, hot morning, three dead ground squirrels . . .
    A chill went up his back and he took the notebook over to a desk, sat down where the light was good, began reading it closely, word for word. Three dead ground squirrels on the trail, one below Nada, one right at the lake, one on the approach to the Snow Lakes. Something weird about a dirty barefoot kid going up the trail; she'd tried to stop him and he vanished. Thought maybe she dreamed him. Dreamed him? Trail work at Upper Snow all day, headache and cough by evening. Nasty crowd across the lake with three camping violations, man armed with a .38 pistol. They started squaring away when she threatened citations, but with ugly grace. But she thought maybe she gave the big guy the flu, at least, with all of her coughing. . . .
    Three dead ground squirrels.
    The next day was a terrible scrawl, he could barely make it out at all. Written at Lancelot—that was where the Super said they'd found her. Sick all day, chills and fever, coughing, violent headache. Four hours to make it up to Vivian, another two to Lancelot—Christ, she must have been sick. The rest of the afternoon making camp. Handwriting even more scribbly. And then, before it all degenerated into delirium, there was something written to him, as surely as if she had been writing him the letter she had never written, and he read the words, and all the held-back grief finally caught up with him, and tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
    After a while it eased up, and he pushed himself back away from the desk and stared stupidly around him. The answer had come while he was weeping. He knew now what had killed Pam Tate.
    The job now was to prove it, and then figure out what to do about it. He went back to her pack again, dug out the little personal bag, found her medicine bottle. He knew what she carried there. Some ampicillin gone, maybe three or four doses, and a few aspirin. He picked up the citation book, found the smudged carbon of a ticket she had written, somebody Comstock from Canon City, Colorado. He dialed for long-distance information, got a number to match the name, direct-dialed it. The distant phone rang and rang, but nobody answered.
    He turned the lights out, sat back in the chair, rubbing his forehead in the darkness for a long while. The question was: what to do now? Call the Super and tell him what he was thinking? Sure, and get treated like you were some kind of nut. A dangerous nut—you don't wave that flag around unless you have solid, inarguable medical proof, and all he had to go on was a gut-deep hunch. And that's not good enough, man. You've got to build a case. All you '11 have is panic and bad trouble if you don't. You need proof. Support of some kind, real support. . .
    Support. He thought about that for a long while. There was something poking up from the bottom of his mind, something down in Oregon months and months ago—what was it? He knew Shel Sieglerdown in Deschutes National Forest; Shel had been his boss for a while up here when he had first.joined